Just when she thought the persecution was over, Maria Efimova, the whistleblower who helped expose the corrupt ties between organised crime and Maltas political establishment, found that the nightmare was back. On Monday 17 November, Pantelis Varnava, Efimovas husband, was put under arrest in Crete following a request from Cyprus' authorities.

Maria Efimova is a former employee of Pilatus Bank who in 2017 passed on data to Maltese anti-corruption activist and investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia revealing that a secret Panama-based company Egrant, Inc. belonged to Michelle Muscat, the wife of Maltas former prime minister Joseph Muscat. Caruana Galizia had been investigating an intricate web of corruption and money laundering schemes in Malta based on the information contained in the 2016 Panama Papers scandal. Six months after Caruana Galizia published this information she was killed when a car bomb was detonated inside her vehicle as she drove close to her home.

At first, Efimova acted as an anonymous source for Caruana Galizia, but when the official investigation started, her identity was revealed by the inquiring magistrates assistant.

Efimova, her husband and two children fled the country and sought refuge in Greece soon after Caruana Galizias murder.

Aware of DiEM25s and MeRA25s defence of whistleblowers, Efimova approached the movement founder Yanis Varoufakis earlier this week right after her husbands release. At this point, going public, sharing my story with the world, is all I have left to protect myself and my family. Like an insurance policy in case something was to happen to us, Efimova said.

Varoufakis expressed serious concerns over Efimovas safety. The source which exposed a money laundering and corruption scheme involving Maltas former prime minister is now under fierce attack by Malta, Cyprus and a corporate, murderous establishment willing to do anything to silence her. We will fight to protect her, just as we do with other champions of transparency and freedom of information such as Julian Assange, said Varoufakis.

By going against my husband on made-up charges they are just trying to exert pressure on me, this is another twist in the plot, explained Efimova, who has already won a battle against the Maltese government when it sought her extradition back in 2018 and a Greek court ruled against the arrest warrant and extradition request.

According to Efimova, the charges against her husband are false and stem from the time they were in Cyprus: her husband never worked at the company he is now being accused of stealing from. Varnava was released pending a court hearing that will decide on the extradition request. He is not allowed to leave the country and must check in with the police on a regular basis.

In addition, Efimova has recently been receiving threats via Facebook. Comeback to Malta or else we are going to find you one way or other. You have dues to pay here, you frickin liar!!! is an example of the types of messages she has been targeted with. She filed a police report and reported the posts to Facebook. The social network has not responded to her reports.

Link:
Whistleblower Maria Efimova fears for her safety amid threats and new arrest warrants - Open Democracy

Joe Biden's victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party's longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising U.S. elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.

But imagine if Donald Trump had been re-elected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin's Manchurian candidate?

Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents.The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.

"This is a disgraceful thing that was done in this country," Giuliani said at his recent bad-hair-day press conference. "Probably not much more disgraceful than the things these people did in office, which you didn't and don't bother to cover and you conceal from the American people, but we let this happen, we use largely a Venezuelan voting machine in essence to count our vote. We let this happen. We're going to become Venezuela. We cannot let this happen to us. We cannot allow these crooks, because that's what they are, to steal an election from the American people. They elected Donald Trump. They didn't elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden is in the lead because of the fraudulent ballots, the illegal ballots, that were produced and that were allowed to be used, after the election was over."

Giuliani's rant was topped by those of Sidney Powell,until this weekanother of Trump's lawyers, who blamed software designed for Hugo Chvez, who died in 2013, for Trump's loss, as well as "the massive influence of Communist money." The software "was created so Hugo Chvez would never lose another election, and he did not after that software was created," Powell said. "He won every single election and then they exported it to Argentina and other countries in South America, and then they brought it here."

Compare this to how Hillary Clinton, during the recent primary campaign, warned that the Russians were "grooming" a female candidate, widely assumed to be Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, to run as a third-party candidate to serve Russian interests. Previously, Clinton called the 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein a "Russian asset." She insisted, although special counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors found no evidence to support her charge, that the Trump campaign had worked closely in 2016 with Moscow and WikiLeaks which she insists is a Russian front to defeat her. Clinton's staff put together a "hit list" in the final days of her 2008 campaign, according to the book,"Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign"by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, listing those who were loyal to the Clintons and those who were not. They used a scale of 1 to 7.

"Step back and think about it," Clinton wrote in her book, "What Happened," about the 2016 election. "The Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American."

Never mind that both ruling parties are silent about themassive interference in our elections byIsrael, which uses its lobbying groups to lavishly fund political candidates in both parties and flies members of Congress and their families to Israel for junkets at seaside resorts. Israel's intrusion in our political process, including when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2015, without informing then President Barack Obama, to attack the president's Iran nuclear deal, dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia.

The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings, no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matteror the Green Party.

"The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us black and white rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement," Matt Taibbi writes.

These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post,along with the major tech platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative believes whatever it wants to believe.

I first assumed this job posting from the New York Times for a Moscow correspondentwas a parody posted by the Onion. It wasn't. It speaks volumes about the self-immolation of the New York Timesand the press.

JOB DESCRIPTION:Vladimir Putin's Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.

Of course, every charge leveled here against Russia regarding foreign interference can be leveled in spades against the United States, both in the present and past, and even the implied criticism of its pandemic response seems like a textbook case of projection. More to the point, why should the Times even send someone to Moscow to report on what Russians think, feel and how they view themselves and the world if they have already decided they are a cartoon villain? Why have a Moscow bureau at all?

A parody response circulating on the internet imagined a parallel posting byPravdafor a U.S. correspondent:

JOB DESCRIPTION:Donald Trump's America remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out its armies, its drones, and its agents around the world to kill its enemies. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony, undermining and overthrowing regimes, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out on the golf course. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news. We will have an opening for a new correspondent.

I was a foreign correspondent for 20 years, 15 of them with the New York Times. My job was to become bicultural, which requires hundreds of hours of language classes, to see the world from the perspective of those I covered and reflect it back to an American audience. But this type of reporting is now anachronistic.The paper might as well rehire the con artist Jayson Blair to sit in his apartment and snort coke while filing fictional variants on the preordained narrative the paper demands. Or maybe computer algorithms can do the job.

I guess I should not be surprised. After all, it was the Times that produced a 10-part podcast by its reporter Rukmini Callimachi based on interviews with a Muslim identified as Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi who claimed to have been a member of ISIS in the Middle East. He provided lurid accounts of murders and crucifixions he supposedly carried out. His stories, catering to the rampant Islamophobia that poisons American society, were the audio version of snuff films. They were also a lie. The Canadian "Abu Huzayfah," whose real name was Shehroze Chaudhry, was arrested in September 2020 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Policeand charged under Canadian hoax laws for fabricating his story.

The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the Electoral College, lobbyists, the disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being eviscerated.

Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests.

The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic, which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.

When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as propaganda. They will target, I fearthrough violence, the Democratic Party politicians, mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as Trump and the Republican Party.

The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists that do not spew the approved narrative of the right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a credibility the ruling elite fears. The worse things get and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress the more those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.

Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Actto permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse than those of George W. Bush. Biden's assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those of the Obama administration.

The censorship was heavy-handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the "mistake" they made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. Although the emails were genuine, papers such as the New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as "disinformation." This, no doubt, pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.

Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper largely ignored the plight of the dispossessed working class that supported Trump. When the Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project. The root cause of social disintegration the neoliberal order, austerity and deindustrialization was ignored, since naming it would alienate the paper's corporate advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.

Once the 2020 election started, the New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Biden speaking with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump. Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden's discarded laptop. Twitter locked the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald, whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped found, resigned. He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the collapse of journalistic integrity.

The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks. When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks' domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers. Attempts by WikiLeaks to hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content. Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks' PayPal accounts were disabled to cut off donations. The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December 2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were first. We are next.

Sen.Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media."

This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-fundedRT Americais the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the US-fundedVoice of Americaduring the communist control of Czechoslovakia. I did not choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and the issues they raise, a hearing.

"If the problem is 'American citizens' being cultivated as 'assets' trying to put 'interference' in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course it will continue to be okay to report things like the 'black ledger'),"writes Taibbi, who has done some of the best reporting on the emerging censorship. "FromFoxor theDaily Calleron the right,to left-leaning outlets likeConsortiumor theWorld Socialist Web Site,to writers like me even we're all now clearly in range of new speech restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards."

Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital platforms Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube in a coordinated move blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.

"Liberal America cheered," Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, "On Contact":

They said, "Well, this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone's taking action."What they didn't realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That is all gone now. Now, basically there's a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how people get their media. They've been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically ordered them, "We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and spreading of misinformation."This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable news organization like the New York Post with a 200-year history locked out of its own Twitter account. The story [Hunter Biden's emails] has not been disproven. It's not disinformation or misinformation. It's been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It's a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational system. There's going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get through certain fringe avenues. That's the problem. We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power.

In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in undergroundsamizdatdocuments, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance.

Visit link:
The ruling elite's war on truth: America's leaders are increasingly disconnected from reality - Salon

John Pilger. Defend Wikileaks

IT IS not, I think, humanly possible for any reporter to be completely objective, for we are all to some degree prisoners of our education, travel, reading the sum total of our experience. Thus spoke Edward Murrow, the legendary American journalist who narrated from the European battlefield the horrors of Hitlers Germany for unprepared radio audiences back home.

The assignment over, he went on to fight the menace of McCarthyism dogging American democracy. It was an object lesson in how not to balance the bigotry of states with the frailties of a beleaguered opposition, which journalists often seek to do.

In recent days, in the mould of Murrow, Robert Fisk and John Pilger, from the United Kingdom and Australia respectively, have been the gold standard for discarding nationalist blinkers that journalists are so prone to donning. Both have shouldered the burden of combative reporting that has put Western democracies in the dock with evidence-based charges of shoring up war criminals, overthrowing secular governments and decimating proud civilisations around the world.

Fisk passed away recently, leaving a void in tracking the loot and plunder of the Middle East and Africa. Pilgers probing journalism traversed a wider span, which he crowned with the important TV documentary The Coming War on China. The film provides compelling evidence of a bipartisan American military build-up in the Pacific, replete with dozens of fortified bases rippling with nuclear weapons. India is being lured to join the dangerous game. In the remaining days of Donald Trump, or even after he demits office, the world will be a fraught place. Joe Bidens likely team is tipped to include warmongers. Susan Rice had advocated the destruction of Libya to the Obama administration.

Not all journalists come out unscathed from a pushback by their quarries. Mordechai Vanunu and Julian Assange continue to suffer for exposing the slimy backstage that runs the global show. Edward Snowden, in asylum in Moscow, is reportedly seeking Russian citizenship while keeping his American passport, if the option exists.

As neoliberal systems built on a mealy-mouthed promise of democracy flounder, we are least likely to hear of mea culpa. The spectacular promise of the free world has proved to be a myth as can be seen from the silence on the outrages being perpetrated in Palestine and Kashmir under the banner of democracy.

It is likely the West would blame the global mess on China and Russia. This portends tense prospects ahead. South Asia had an excellent chance of securing itself against the looming mayhem, but India has decided to hitch its wagon to the global chaos on the cards. The logic of India spurning Chinas hand in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, for example, is curious as countries like Japan and Australia suspended their deep differences with Beijing to be part of an economic pact. It seems Indias aloofness springs from a need to use the tensions in Ladakh to beef up narrow nationalism at home.

The untranslatable Urdu metaphor for a very slight difference between two situations or things is unnis-bees ka farq, literally the difference between 19 and 20. Sitar wizard Vilayat Khan would advise his students to play at 19, if their preparedness was for 20. (Unnis bajao, bees ki tayyari hai agar.) A Pakistani human rights defender was visiting Delhi when I asked him to compare the threat to democracy in his country with India. Without demure, he said: Unnis-ikkees ka farq hai. (The approximate difference is of 1921). I asked him to explain the interesting departure from the metaphor. The visitor beamed and said: If we describe the difference between the situations in India and Pakistan as very narrow unnis-bees ka farq our Indian friends would feel offended.

Indeed, both countries have been in and out of trouble with autocrats, initially, on account of Cold War battle lines but currently in their competition to woo support from the West. In the early days of independence, Indias anti-communist slant at home was shaped by Nehrus proximity to the British Commonwealth, an idea promoted by London for post-colonial societies to keep a safe distance from Moscow, relic of Britains favourite bogeyman called Russophobia.

Commonwealth ka daas hai Nehru, maar le saathi jaaney na paae, thundered partisan poet Majrooh Sultanpuri. (Nehru is a slave of the Commonwealth, beat him up.) For his insouciance Majrooh was thrown in jail from where he continued to write his fabled movie songs for Mehboob Khans Andaz. Actor Balraj Sahni, also a member of the communist party, was granted bail to complete his pending movies.

In Pakistan, the crackdown on democracy was led by a military apparatus of which Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a part before he crossed the street to become a populist leader, while still balancing the political left with the cultural right.

In India, support for and resistance to Indira Gandhis authoritarian rule was similarly structured along Cold War battle lines. Pro-Soviet communists supported the Emergency, while pro-China groups threw their weight behind the pro-American Hindutva leaders and socialists inspired by Willy Brandt. It was a curious mix of alignments in both countries with its inevitable outcome.

Indira Gandhi defeated, the Indian left were handed a pacifier that kept them self-absorbed for almost three decades in Tripura and West Bengal. They thus abandoned vast swathes for depredation by the right. Luckily, recent elections in Bihar have shown that the left has retrieved an older reliable script to shore up democratic alliances rather than seeking to lead them. The wafer-thin difference in votes between the right-wing victors and democratic opposition is a reminder that opposition parties can go beyond opportunistic electoral alliances to forge a grounded strategy to defeat fascism. The fractious opposition in Pakistan can also learn a tentative lesson from Bihar. The option to not fight the fight collectively doesnt exist as Edward Murrow told us from the battlefields near and afar.

Dawn.com, November 17. Jawed Naqvi is Dawns correspondent in Delhi.

See the original post here:
Can't be objective on fascism - newagebd.net

Rosemary OConnor: Veterans Day: A personal story of remembrance

This week we mark Veterans Day. My father was one of the crew of a B-29 bomber in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. After one particular mission, heading back to their base on the island of Tinian, my dads airplane was dangerously low on fuel.

Fortunately for my dads crew and plane, just weeks earlier, the Marines had managed to take the island of Iwo Jima. That battle took more than a month of fierce fighting, cost almost 7,000 U.S. Marines their lives, and wounded more than 20,000 more.

If not for their efforts and sacrifice, my fathers plane would have had to ditch in Pacific Ocean and likely none of the crew would have survived. As my dads plane landed safely on Iwo Jima, first one and then another of the planes four engines sputtered and quit for lack of fuel.

So atVeteransDayevery year, while I am grateful to all thevets, I especially think of those Marines who saved my dads life. I can never thank them enough.

Rosemary OConnor

Boulder

Rex Van Gorden: Presidential election: Deep-rooted issues remain

Can Joe Biden heal the divide in our nation? Dont expect it. Trumpism is alive and well!

As is disinformation. Donald Trumps hard core base relied on Trump, Fox News, conservative print and social media and radio for their information. This led to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a type of cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their knowledge. Inside the echo chamber of opinions Trump supporters were ill informed and overestimated their understanding of the issues.

As is xenophobia. Trumps America-first rhetoric had its roots in xenophobia. Trump supporters hatred of Hispanic and Muslim immigrants were dog whistled out into open hostility: Go back to where you came from.

As is homophobia. Homophobic religious leaders attract large followings even though some of them are secretly homosexual, bisexual, or behave in ways contrary to their teachings.

As is misogyny. Trump is the epitome of someone who objectifies and has a low opinion of women. Even some women were drawn to Trumps misogynistic language and behavior.

As is evangelical fervor. Many evangelicals believed Trump would reverse the rising tide of secularism. Some are one issue, pro-life ideologues. Make America Great Again answered their prayers of a return of the good old days.

As is zero-sum thinking. Many Trump supporters believe that the world, their lives, is a zero-sum game where someone elses gain comes at their expense. They live in the delusion that their failure to thrive is the fault of someone less worthy. They hate those who they think are at fault: immigrants, blacks, women, liberals, elitists, globalists

As is hypocrisy. Rural Trump supporters hold Democrats and socialists in the same regard and contempt, yet they lobby for public welfare. Government subsidies make up 40% of farm income.

As is racism. White supremacists are emboldened.

Rex Van Gorden

Boulder

Susan A. Lythgoe: Affordable housing: The needs are still great

Voters have cast their ballots, and now its time for elected officials to come together and work on urgent housing needs in our communities. Flatirons Habitat for Humanity cannot express strongly enough how critical housing protections are that are set to expire, putting families at risk across the area.

Throughout Colorado, the need for a safe and decent home has been critically important during the COVID-19 pandemic. We need our elected officials to take action now to support policies that will ensure safe, decent, and affordable homes now and for years to come.

We areaskingCongress to pass a set of priorities to provide immediate housing relief, including mortgage and rental payment assistance that will help stave off a looming eviction and foreclosure crisisthatwill disproportionatelyimpactcommunitiesof color.

We are alsocalling on newly elected and reelected policymakers at all levels of government to treat housing as infrastructure and economic recovery as they set their 2021 legislative agendas by including robust funding to buildand preserveaffordable homesin our communities and to ensureequitable access to healthy housing and communities of opportunity.

Habitat is committed to continuingourhousing advocacybyworking with elected officials at all levels of government tocreateand implement policy solutions that will enable access to affordable homes for 10 million people in the U.S.and here in our community.

We believe that no one should have to choose between putting food on the table or having a safe place to sleep at night because the cost of housing is too high. It is critical that we get this right. We challenge every lawmaker to acknowledge the individuals and families in our communities who need greater housing stability and do something about it.

Susan A. Lythgoe

Lafayette

David Gurarie: President Trump: He consistently attacks journalists

When Bob Woodward revealed how Trump misled the public about COVID-19, Trump attacked Woodward. When the New York Times broke the story about Trumps tax returns, he labelled it fake news. We all have different political views, but everyone should be concerned about Trumps hostility toward journalists.

Right now, the Trump administration is trying to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and sentence him to 175 years in prison for helping break important stories about war crimes and civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump insults reporters who challenge him. He revokes White House access for those asking tough questions. When he doesnt like the news, he blames the messenger. The Assange case would set a precedent that could easily be applied to any media outlet working with inside sources. Imagine if Trump had the power to prosecute the Times for informing the public about his hidden finances. Thats a scary thought.

David Gurarie

Boulder

Link:
Letters to the editor: Veterans Day; presidential election; affordable housing; President Trump - The Daily Camera

Dave Granlund, PoliticalCartoons.comFree Assange; protect the press

Democracy requires a free press.

We see press freedom in the news when the president attacks the media or when social media platforms restrict open dialogue. And the most important First Amendment case in generations is underway right now as the U.S. government attempts to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange.

Assange has been indicted for his role in publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks, which won awards for exposing potential war crimes, revealing civilian casualties, and changing the public conversation about our endless post-9/11 wars. They also made Manning and Assange targets. Manning spent seven years behind bars, and Assange sought refuge from Ecuador to avoid falling into U.S. hands. Assange was arrested in London last year and faces 175 years in prison on unprecedented Espionage Act charges that have drawn global condemnation from journalists and legal scholars.

In August, an international coalition of lawyers and legal societies called on the United Kingdom to release Assange. They noted that Assange would not receive a fair trial, that the allegations against him were political offenses, and that Assange would likely be subject to inhumane treatmen like solitary confinement.

Neither Trump nor Biden have good records on this issue. Trumps administration is prosecuting Assange. Biden once called Assange a high-tech terrorist. We should pressure both candidates to endorse dropping the extradition request. And we should call on Colorados congressional delegation to support whistleblower protections and the freedom of the press.

Kendra Christian, Denver

Editors note: Christian is a volunteer with Denver Action to Free Assange.

Re: November starts out warm, then a cold snap arrives, Nov. 1 news story

I find it strange and amazing that 10 of the highest temps you show on your chart were all at least 46 years ago, and some date back to the 1800s. Where is global warming?

Steven Petty, Monument

Re: Why Gardner lost Senate seat, Nov. 5 news story

Your sub headline reads Changing electorate, Trump, coronavirus pandemic helped. Maybe its as simple as Hickenlooper is more popular

Joe Pickard, Littleton

Heartbreaking that President Donald Trump declared in his Nov. 2 stump event in Fayetteville, N.C., that Your tobacco growers are in good shape, by the way. Please let them know.

Thankful that President Trump doesnt smoke like my poor Alabama father, a WWII veteran that survived the Philippines Campaign but his emphysema-by-smoking killed him in 1964.

It is so sad that Trump proclaims to be pro-life while tobacco has painfully and slowly killed nearly 2 million people during his administration. Humanity grieves that pro-death tobacco has compromised and controlled all our earthly leaders. Fatherless by tobacco at age 11.

Mike Sawyer, Denver

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Letters: Free Assange; protect the press (11/7/20) - The Denver Post

Categories: Letters to the Editor, Opinion

Holidays loom for St. Clares pensioners. We are all born to help each other. No matter how difficult it isLife is good when you are happy; but much better when others are happy because of you. Pope Francis.As I sit watching the blue moon, I am thinking about this quote and how it applies to the difficult months we have endured due to the coronavirus, limitations on socializing with family, the political bashings, opinionated journalism and horrific bullying.With that being said, life is difficult right now.I was one of over 1,100 employees of St. Clares Hospital that lost my pension. Our goal as healthcare workers made lives better.I have comforted patients and their families. I have produced images that enabled doctors to properly diagnose a patients illness and broken bones. I have assisted in the Operating Room with radiographic images ensuring surgical precision.Now as the holidays are quickly approaching, our money worries are compounded.Many of the pensioners had to give up their homes; abandon retirement dreams, have increasing credit card debt to cover essentials, home repairs and medical expenses; and have drastically curtailed their spending.Many have returned to the workforce to survive.I keep hoping and praying that the Albany Diocese, Catholic Church and New York state find a resolution to our lost pension.We are not asking for anything more than what is due us for service to the Schenectady and surrounding area. Because in the words of Pope Francis: We are born to help each other.Cynthia OBryanEsperance

Reporting in publics interest not a crime

Journalistic publications, including WikiLeaks, exist to tell the people the truth even when the government tries to spin it or hide it.Confronting uncomfortable truths is necessary in a democracy; for this reason, I am deeply concerned with the U.S. governments prosecution of Julian Assange.It is already hard enough to get the truth to the public. Sometimes it takes brave whistleblowers willing to leak secrets, knowing they are putting their careers and freedom on the line.Soon, however, the journalists who help reveal these secrets might be targets of prosecution.If Assange is extradited to the United States to face 175 years in prison for journalism, it would set a dangerous legal precedent that could impact press freedom around the world.If reporting in the public interest becomes a crime simply because the government declares something a secret, we fall deeper into our worst authoritarian tendencies.Elyse GilbertFort Plain

Thanks to all who made voting so easy

I want to share my experience voting on Election Day.I live in Ballston Spa a few blocks from the mid-village county office building, one of the three Saratoga County early voting sites.Each day over the last two weeks through Sunday there were lines of early voters standing in the parking lot, on the sidewalk to Low Street, and often down Low almost to Front Street.They stood buttoned up in coats to keep warm in the autumn chill, they stood under umbrellas when it rained, and they appeared patient and friendly toward their socially distant nearby neighbors.I was determined to vote on Election Day.I admit to experiencing anxiety, given the number of early voters and their determination.In addition to these observations, there was the steady drumbeat of the news media shrilling about the imagined impediments to voting all over the country.Election Day, I went to my polling place, Eagle Matt Lee Firehouse about two blocks from the county office building. I parked, walked in the front door, went to my areas registration desk and signed in on the poll workers electronic pad with the stylus provided.I was handed a ballot to fill out.When I finished, I took my ballot to the voting machine that accepted it.In about 10 minutes, I checked in, voted, had my signature and ballot digitized and walked out.Thank you to everyone who made my voting convenient, easy and a pleasure to complete.Forman PhillipsBallston Spa

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Letters to the Editor Sunday, Nov. 8 - The Daily Gazette

Australia has given the world two influential and disruptive exports in the field of media. One, currently in Londons Belmarsh Prison, is facing the prospect of extradition to the United States for charges that could see him serve a 175 year sentence in a brutal, soul destroying supermax. The other, so the argument goes, should also be facing the prospect of incarceration for what he has done to politics in numerous countries. But media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the gruesome presence behind Fox News and News Corp, is unlikely to spend time in a cell any time soon. The same cannot be said for Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.

Ingratiatingly, politicians have made the journey of pilgrimage to the not-so-holy Murdoch to keep in his good books. Disgracefully, though motivated by perceived necessity, British Labours Tony Blair wooed Murdoch prior to the 1997 UK general election he was to win. The victory for New Labour led to an association between Blair and Murdoch that was, according to former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, almost incestuous.

Blairs kowtowing did its magic. As former deputy editor of The Sun, Neil Wallis, recalls in the first instalment of the documentary series The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, he was flayed by Murdoch for initially running what he called a fairly standard front page on the election. This was the same paper that boastfully declared on April 11, 1992, that, Its The Sun Wot Won It. Labour, then led by Neil Kinnock, was favoured in the polls to defeat John Majors weary, dysfunctional Conservatives. Murdoch, and his paper, would have none of it. On election day, the papers headline bellowed: If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.

By 1997, attitudes had changed. Wallis recalls entering his office after editing the first edition. Murdoch called: Hated your paper this morning, he raged. Two or three minutes later my door opens, Rupert comes up and says youre getting this wrong. Youve got this totally wrong. We are not just backing Tony Blair but we are going to back the Labour party and everything he does in this campaign 200%. Youve got to get that right.

The papers endorsement for Blair followed but came with its pound of tantalising flesh. Blair was required to write a puff piece for the paper promising a referendum should he wish Britain to embrace the Euro currency. Former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, forever associated with the Brexit campaign and Murdoch worship, saw this intervention as crucial. The price of Rupert Murdochs support for Tony Blair was that Blair promised he would not take us into the European currency without a referendum, and if Rupert Murdoch had not done that we would have joined the Euro in 1999 and I doubt Brexit would have happened.

In a 2016 study published in Social Science Research, the authors found that The Suns endorsement for Labour in 1997 led to a boost of support in the order of 7%. In 2010, the same papers return to backing the Conservatives increased support by 15%. Even if these figures were to be scaled back significantly, they would still suggest a degree of staggering influence.

It is precisely such power that has become something of an obsession for former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Rudd has never resiled from the view that Murdoch was directly responsible for his demise. True, his own knife-wielding colleagues in the Australian Labor Party, addled by negative poll ratings, were happy to do the deed, but it was Murdoch who sang the tune of encouragement. At the launch of his second volume of autobiography in 2018, Rudd claimed that Murdoch is ideologically, deeply conservative, deeply protective of his corporations commercial interests and, therefore, prosecutes a direct agenda through his newspapers which Ive been on the receiving end [of].

Another former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, albeit from the conservative side of politics, is also convinced, having become something of a crusader against Murdoch and his foot soldiers. On the ABCs Insidersprogram, he warned of the costs accruing to Australia in permitting the dominance of Murdochs press imperium. We have to work out what price were paying, as a society, for the hyper-partisanship of the media. He cast his eye to the United States and the terribly divided state of affairs that theyre in, exacerbated, as Kevin [Rudd] was saying, by Fox News and other right-wing media.

This had led to an alliance of sorts between the two men on this point, despite Turnbulls previous description of Rudd as one of those miserable ghosts that haunt politics after the fact. A wiser Turnbull understands Rudd that much better after his own party initiated a palace coup, leading to the ascent of Australias current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison.

While an online petition against the dominance of the Murdoch press imperium seems like peashooter stuff, Rudds initiative has gathered momentum. His petition, now tabled in Australias Parliament, specifically calls for a royal commission to ensure the strength and diversity of Australian news media. Having received 501,876 signatures, it notes concern that Australias print media is overwhelmingly controlled by News Corporation, founded by Fox News billionaire Rupert Murdoch, with around two-thirds of daily newspaper readership. Australians holding views contrary to the Murdoch line have felt intimidated into silence. Adding to this such matters as the mass-sackings of news journalists, the stripping influence of digital platforms on media diversity, News Corps closure of 200 smaller newspapers after their acquisition and relentless attacks on the ABCs independence and funding, the picture is bleak.

The petitions tabling caused a flutter of interest in Parliament. While Murdoch is unlikely to break out into sweat at efforts made by Australias politicians to investigate his reach of influence, any inquiry will be irritating. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young is certainly hoping to cause a stir, having pushed members of the Senate to establish an inquiry into media diversity in response to Rudds petition. Australians have become increasingly concerned about the concentration of media ownership and the power and political influence of Murdoch. The Senator is also keen to see the two former prime ministers speak frankly and have the protection of parliamentary privilege, which is important when youre talking about issues of power and influence.

Murdochs hirelings are ready. Unfortunately for Hanson-Young, the News Corp imperium is skilled in camouflaging inertia against change with promises of activity. The inquirys terms of reference are also shallow, omitting any reference to News Corp Australia while calling for an examination of the state of media diversity, independence and reliability in Australia and the impact that this has on public interest journalism and democracy.

News Corp Australias executive chairman, Michael Miller, was cool in his statement, noting that the company had participated in at least nine previous media inquiries. As always, we will continue to constructively engage in these important conversations. Murdoch will be hoping that the conservative Morrison government, and a good number of Labor opposition figures, will not go wobbly in preventing change. History may well prove him right. Again.

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Petitions, Probes and Rupert Murdoch - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

Robert Fisk was that rare phenomenon, a journalist who reported truthfully and indeed courageously for decades on the Middle East. He died October 30 in a Dublin hospital at the age of 74 following a stroke.

In 2005, the New York Times described him as probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain.

The British journalist, who lived in Beirut during Lebanons civil war and long after, was a fluent Arabic speaker. His work spanned nearly five decades and included news articles, comment and analysis, a three-part series From Beirut To Bosnia (1993) for the Discovery Channel, and several books, most notably Pity the nation: Lebanon at war (1990) and The great war for civilisation: The conquest of the Middle East (2005).

One of the most outstanding journalists of his era, he received numerous awards for his work, including the Orwell prize for journalism, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, the Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 and in 2000, and numerous British Press Awards in the categories of international reporter of the year and foreign reporter of the year. He completed a PhD thesis on Irelands neutrality and relations with Britain in World War II at Trinity College Dublin, receiving the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society awards gold medal in 2009, as well as numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. More recently, his talks on the Middle East attracted huge audiences around the world.

Born in Maidstone, England, he was the only child of William Fisk, a local government official who had served as a young man in the Battle of the Somme in World War I, keeping a diary of the wars horrors. Despite his many disagreements with his father, a right-wing, church-going disciplinarian from whom he became estranged, Robert explained that his fathers punishment for disobeying an order to execute another soldier had a profound influence on him. He said, My fathers refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done. He decided to become a journalist at the age of 12 after seeing the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film Foreign Correspondent.

After working for several local newspapers, he joined the Sunday Express and then theTimes of London, covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Portugal, and then Lebanons civil war, including the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982 and the massacre of the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war.

While Fleet Street was always conservative, there were spaces for different, dissenting work, and a certain range of views as evidenced by the work of the Insight team at the Sunday Times in the 1960s and 70s. But following the takeover of the Times in 1981 by Rupert Murdoch, with the backing of Margaret Thatcher, journalism changed.

Murdoch, who was opposed to investigative journalismwith its fact-checking and months of interviewsturned the newspaper into a nakedly pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence, leading to increasing conflicts with Fisk. Murdochs shift to production at Wapping and a union busting operation in 1986 saw his journalists crossing picket lines that Murdoch won thanks in large part to a scabbing operation by the EETPU electricians union against sacked printworkers. But it resulted in an exodus of journalists to the newly established Independent. Fisk joined the Independent in 1989 after one of his stories was spiked. There he covered the first Gulf War, the civil war in Algeria, the communal conflicts that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the NATO assault on Serbia in 1999, the US-led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the proxy war in Syria.

Fisk was one of a dwindling breed of journalistsalong with John Pilger, Seymour Hersh and, from a significantly different background, Julian Assangethat have dared to question the official narratives from governments and publish what they uncovered. Explaining his approach to journalism, he cited an Israeli journalist who had told him the role of journalists was to monitor the centres of power. Fisk said, I think that is the best definition of my job Ive ever heard. Especially when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4s Desert Island Discs in 2006, he explained that what he had witnessed during his years covering conflicts and wars, with their horrors, cruelty and inhumanityhe called it the pornography of warmade him angry. He hated violence. It made him determined to report history as it happens, so no one could say we didnt know, nobody told us.

He spoke of one of his first assignments, when he was sent at the age of 25 to cover the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was struck at how poor Belfast was and the brutality of the British army. He couldnt believe the dead bodies that he saw for the first time, none of which figured on television or in the newspapers.

Fisk said, You cannot get near the truth without being there, in This Is Not a Movie, a 2019 documentary about his work. He rejected what he called hotel journalismthe journalism of war reporters, embedded with American or British armed forces, who stayed in their guarded rooms, using their mobile phones and local correspondents who risked their lives conducting interviews on their behalf. Under the Pentagons rules, embedded correspondents were forbidden to report any information that would undermine or compromise the US offensive in Iraq, including reports of military and civilian casualties. Journalists not only had to agree to this but were sucked into life with the troops that altered their perspective on the war.

Fisk was not a socialist. He wrote as a liberal supporter of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism. He cared passionately about the great historical experiences of the twentieth century. Deeply imbued with a sense of the historical processes that shaped the events he witnessed, he believed that every reporter should carry a history book in his or her back-pocket.

Speaking at the University of Sydney in 2005, on a visit to Australia to give the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, he said, In 1992, I was in Sarajevo and once, as Serb shells whistled over my head, I stood upon the very paving stone where Gavrilo Princip stood as he fired the fatal shot that sent my father to the trenches of the First World War. It was as if history was a giant echo-chamber...

Fisk was very aware of role of the imperialist powers in determining the course of events in the Middle East and internationally. He told his audience, After the Allied victory in 1918, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. And in the space of just 17 months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, and most of the Middle East. I have spent my entire career, in Belfast, and Sarajevo, and Beirut, and Baghdad, watching the people within those borders burn.

Returning to the present, he said, America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Husseins mythical weapons of mass destruction which had long ago been destroyed, but to change the map of the Middle East, much as fathers generation had done more than 80 years earlier. The war stemmed from not only the desire to dominate oil supplies, but a visceral need to project power on a massive scale on the part of Washington. It was all supported by the uncritical mainstream media.

Giving the keynote speech at the fifth annual Al Jazeera Forum in May 2010, he noted that the New York Times, cheerleader in chief for the 2003 war against Iraq, was again banging the drums for war, with claims that Iran was working on weapons of mass destruction. He added, And after the war, if there is a war, more self-condemnation, no doubt, if there are no nuclear weapons projects.

Almost every obituary belittled Fisk as an acclaimed but controversial journalist, which says as much about the writers themselves as their subject, who did not shrink from speaking truth to power.

Much of the controversy surrounding Fisk stemmed from his efforts to place the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington within the context of the malign US-led machinations in the Middle East. Fully acknowledging the horrific and criminal nature of the attacks, he said, September 11 was a crime against humanity, but he added, Im actively against the brutal, cynical, lying war of civilisation that he [President George W. Bush] has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Center mass murder.

Unlike most of his peers, Fisk was an outspoken critic of US and British wars against Afghanistan and Iraq that followed 9/11, accusing US and British forces of war crimes and his fellow journalists of showing no interest in following up on the killing of prisoners.

In November 2001, he referred to the massacre of Taliban prisoners at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress, writing that US Special Forcesand, it has emerged, British troopshelped the [Northern] Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were executed trying to escape. He added, It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes.

Days later, he continued, more executed Taliban members were found in Kunduz. Yet The US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that US air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop if the Northern Alliance requested it.

In December 2001, Fisk was attacked and beaten by Afghan refugees in Pakistan, suffering facial, hand and head injuries. Describing the attack, he said he understood the refugees anger, as many had relatives who had been killed by the US bombing of Afghan city Kandahar the previous week. He wrote a graphic and moving account of the assault because I dont want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. Responsibility for the silly, bloody, tiny incident lay with the West. The refugees had every reason to be angry. In their position, I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find. It was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war.

Fisk wrote about the killing of civilians and the use of collective punishment in Iraq by US-led forces, as well as the looting of Iraq following the 2003 invasion and occupation, noting that the response of American forces shows clearly what the US intends to protect After days of arson and pillage, heres a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn government ministries and did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraqs history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.

But at the same time, the Americans protected two ministries, And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of coursewith its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraqand the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraqs most valuable assetits oilfields and, even more important, its massive reservesare safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared, as Washington almost certainly intends, with American oil companies.

Washingtons avowed hostility to any expression of independent journalism was aided and abetted by Tony Blairs UK Labour government. Defence Minister Geoff Hoon accused Fisk of being a dupe of Saddam Husseins regime for revealing evidence that two bombings of Iraqi markets had been carried out by the US and not Iraq. Home Secretary David Blunkett attacked not only the media for treating reports from Baghdad as though they were the moral equivalent of reports based on information given by the US and UK armed forces, but also the progressive and liberal public that believe their reports.

As well as bringing to light the brutality of Israels wars and suppression of the Palestinians, he exposed the lies on which the official pretext for the illegal US-British-French bombing of Syria in April 2018 were basedthe claim that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack in eastern Ghouta. He visited Douma, the town in Ghouta where a gas attack supposedly occurred, and spoke with Dr. Assim Rahaibani, who worked at the medical clinic where widely publicised videos were filmed showing children being hosed down with water, ostensibly to relieve poison gas inhalation. Rahaibani explained what had happened, Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia, not gas poisoning.

His account was in line with statements by Russian authorities, who charged that the White Helmets, the anti-Assad rebel organization funded by Britain, staged the gas attack under orders from UK intelligence to provide its Western sponsors with a pretext for intervention. Fisk notes that by the time he arrived in Douma, the White Helmets had already left to join fighters of the Islamic fundamentalist group Jaysh-al Islam, who fled Douma for Idlib under an agreement brokered with Russia. The response of the mainstream media was to bury his report.

The Iraq war largely eliminated whatever media independence remained, with most news organisations accepting this without complaint and those objecting subjected to sustained pressure to fall into line. Today, the best journalists write online, or in foreign publications, or not at all.

Fisk spoke out passionately in defence of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and journalistic freedom, saying that the US prosecution of Assange should set off alarm bells everywhere. In June last year he wrote, The final punishment of Julian Assange reminds journalists their job is to uncover what the state keeps hidden. If we do our job, we will expose the same vile mendacity of our masters that has led to the clamour of hatred towards Assange, [Chelsea] Manning and [Edward] Snowden.

In his revelations of imperialisms criminal and fraudulent wars, its proxy wars, and the shameless lies of governments, Fisk shone a light into the most deeply reactionary machinations of the late 20th and 21st century. That to expose the truth is deemed controversial is an indictment of todays journalism and a tribute to him.

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Robert Fiska courageous and truthful reporter on the Middle East who covered history (19462020) - WSWS

Counter Punch/Garry Knight

THERE is no need to inform the conscious world that the United States is applying all its power and influence to extradite Julian Assange from England in order to put him on trial in America. The case against him is based on his having committed journalism in publishing leaked secret government information on Wikileaks. While it is comprised of multiple charges, crafted with cynicism and malice in order to convict and imprison him for life, not one of them has any legal merit.

In truth, the case is not about commission of crime at all. It is a cruel, vindictive scam by a shamed empire to punish an honourable and ethical man for having revealed damning truths about its barbaric behaviour in brazen, criminal contempt for the laws of peace and war.

Material he published has shown the United States to have been blatantly and contemptibly false to its own people and the world. That an individual could be framed and railroaded into a corrupt process contrived to punish him for exposing Americas monstrous crimes is a moral horror that beggars belief, and yet that is the unstated intention of the government of the United States.

Virtually the whole American and western official press, including all mainstream news organisations, both print and television and their reporters, have not only abandoned Assange as if he were guilty of something other than what they all routinely do much less well, but in their moral cowardice they have made themselves vulnerable to precisely the kind of dirty, dishonest state vendetta he is suffering.

What is most extraordinary about the astonishing length to which the American government has gone to persecute Assange, and the vast amount of money it has wasted on it, is the fact that all he has been accused of exposing, and has been so vilified and anathematised for revealing, is mere incidental trivia when compared with the vast body of Americas horrific state crime so long documented as proven fact, on the public record, and already well known to the entire world.

Beginning with the contorted sham that legitimised black slavery when its Constitution declared all men created equal, and the routine violation of sworn treaties which facilitated the murder of whole native peoples, America has lied, stolen, bullied, and subverted as state policy throughout its era of imperial aggrandisement and continues to do so well into that of its richly deserved, and now inexorable decay.

The extent of blind, mindless loyalty to, and deeply, stubbornly ignorant worship of, this rogue, dishonest nation that unstinting poisoning by infantile propaganda has wrought on the American mind is profoundly sad. Our people never deserved to be traduced and shit on so brutishly. Nothing can justify it. It was done so that predatory, anti-life Capitalism could rape and fleece a people largely made crass, base, and stupid once decent values were replaced by the shallow, dead-end dogma of ethicless materialism. Americans now worship the money none but a tiny few ever see, in thrall to a monstrous criminal racket that scorns them as mindless serfs.

So it is that information readily available that shows, with irrefutable clarity, the villainous history of this morbidly rotten, failing empire is almost universally rejected by a citizenry whose hope of any decent future depends on its absorbing and comprehending that information. The catechism of rank bullshit marshalled for generations to cover the frauds, crimes, betrayals, invasions, assassinations and massacres that are Americas legacy has been exposed and documented for any mind not crippled and poisoned to see, and yet Americans have not had the mental or psychological capacity to take it in and act on it.

That said, its undeniable that more people have more exposure to more sound data than was ever conceivable before, and in spite of Capitalism doing all it can to pollute all information streams, more Americans are more aware, if dimly, that Exceptionalist notions theyve been schooled to embrace are somehow desafinado, as the bossa nova song had it: out of tune. As the Presidential election nears, with the country facing a Hobsons choice between two defective, demented, old white shysters, and the nasty chore of electing another Congress of Pimps to represent their owners and sponsors, there is palpable disgust at the dysfunction of our polity.

This, though miserably painful to the spirit, is a good thing since it indicates a broad wave of actual recognition, an inchoate but definite awareness of the appalling depravity that the smothering gas of Exceptionalist propaganda has always concealed. How many now feel this malaise due to dawning comprehension of the monstrous, anti-democratic, destructive force America has historically been cannot be known, but for a large percentage this has to be true.

Because Americas dark secrets are not secret any more, and havent been for decades. The horror has been told, chapter and verse, in scholarly works that fill libraries, from barbaric rape of the Philippines and violent subversion of poor Central American countries reduced to money farms for Wall Street to the present kill list of Middle Eastern countries droned, blown up, devastated and destroyed by clumsily bungled wars run by stupid, sycophantic Big Brass Whores to feed the War Machine that our psychotic ruling cliques serve and obey.

All this being true, how is it that this sick, raging, giant monster of a nation can muster the free-floating fury to invest so much time and money to destroy one man who simply revealed a relatively minor snippet of its grossly criminal history? Whence comes this obsessive madness? It is the savage, vindictive mania of a failing empire. Like the shameful sixty-year Cuban embargo, it harks back in spirit to the Roman slaughter of Christians or Nazi atrocities at Lidice or Babi Yar. There is no force like humiliating failure to make a decaying empire lash out in insensate ferocity at an object that symbolises its shame.

Assange is one of the rarest of men: those who put principles and personal honour above their safety or gain. America may succeed in destroying him or unexpected justice may save him, but nothing can save this sick empire that has betrayed and fatally envenomed itself.

CounterPunch.org, November 3. Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana.

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Assange and the empire - newagebd.net

Register-GuardCuff'im

There are numerous reasons to remove Trump from office: corruption, dishonesty, enriching him and his family, fueling racial division and many more, but maybe none more egregious than his handling of public health:

In 2017 he fired Linda Quick, our CDC representative in Beijing, charged with letting us know about developing epidemics in China.

In 2018 he disbanded the White House-NSC pandemic team that Obama had assembled after two people in the U.S. died from Ebola.

And in 2019 he closed the CDC National Vaccine Program Office so that doctors now have no idea whether any vaccine will be safe in the long run.

This should land him in prison. The evidence cant be any clearer: He needs to be held responsible for 230,000 deaths, millions of infections and lost jobs.

Michael Young, Eugene

I had been away from Eugene/Springfield for about a year.As I drove into the area, I was shocked at what I was seeing.Both cities were void of any activity. There were no cars on the streets, no one was walking on the sidewalks and the businesses where all closed.

This was so strange.

I decided to go to my old neighborhood to visit with friends and ask them what was going on?As I drove though the residential area, I found the streets empty and the houses looking as if no one lived in them. Where was everyone?

I was getting scared and then I awoke from my dream and everything became clear. This week the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States equaled the population of Eugene/Springfield.

Dixie Huffman, Springfield

John Pinney unwisely advises trust in anonymous, invisible, unaccountable fact-checkers (Letters, Oct. 31). These are useful for alerting us not to truth but to what we are not allowed to know, consistently supporting the soporific fictions supplied by our billionaire-controlled print and broadcast news media while honest, reliable, detailed and well-documented online sources are increasingly censored by equally compromised billionaire tech giants.

In a recentwebinaron Julian Assange now deteriorating in a modern Tower of London prison rather than receiving the Nobel Peace Prize he deserves distinguished journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger described journalism as 100% propaganda and retired CIA Russia desk chief Ray McGovern identified our suffocating media censorship as a defining characteristic of fascism.

Our citizenship duties are not satisfied by biannual vote-casting for candidates marketed like fast food or SUVs. No responsible employer hiring for a vital position depends solely on applicant-constructed resumes or promises.Public figures are resourceful at concealment of facts we have a right to know and a duty to discover. Citizenship duties are daily.Turn off the TV and spend that same time searching out truth from many extraordinary books, online writers and broadcasters providing the best journalism of my lifetime.

Jack Dresser, Springfield

The New York Times article in The Register-Guard suggesting we, for all intents and purposes, cancel the holidays was telling. This latest bit of insanity from a media outlet confirms what most clear-thinking individuals already know: This is no longer about the health of the nation; it is about absolute power and control.

Are more government mandates in the mix? On Thanksgiving, can we expect to see "inspectors" randomly knocking on our doors because they saw too many cars in the driveway? The idea of having Thanksgiving dinner on Zoom or some other childish website is absurd. I really don't care that Dr. Fauci doesn't plan to see his grandchildren on the holiday. That's his choice. I will make my own decisions.

Raymond Moreno, Eugene

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Letters to the editor for Thursday Nov. 5 - The Register-Guard