Good News, Bad News As Assange Extradition Hearing Gets Underway

Cancillería del Ecuador / Flickr

It's shaping up to be quite a month, possibly a turning point in world history. One the one hand we've got U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, opining on CIA cutout Alexey Navalny's death in prison: "The fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built."

And on the other hand we've seen evidence that the CIA planned to assassinate Julian Assange and we know the U.S. wants to extradite him for "espionage" aka journalism sharing inconvenient truths about the inner workings of empire. In other words, fear of one man underscoring the weakness and rot at the heart of the U.S. imperial system.

https://twitter.com/SMaurizi/status/1759890416852226357

Today it appears that journalists at the Assange extradition hearing in the UK are being deliberately handicapped in their efforts to cover the proceedings. The palpable fear that we, the public, might have access to this information underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system Blinken feeds off of, don't you think?

Some are blaming problematic tech in the very fancy courtroom with poor acoustics and no audio feed to the overflow rooms.

Speaking of very fancy tech that is problematic right now, how about those Houthis shooting down their second $30,000,000 MQ-9 Predator drone? Using technology that costs a few thousand dollars. U.S. military-industrial complex response: ka-ching!

Besides which the Houthis have sunk a British ship carrying fertilizer, and hit two more U.S. ships.

https://twitter.com/SprinterMedia1/status/1759889244313591868/photo/1

Did the Western powers not believe Ansar Allah leaders when they warned that they'll go on denying access to the Red Sea as long as the genocide in Gaza the West is supporting continues?

Meanwhile in the last couple of weeks we saw CIA whistleblower Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years for leaking "Vault 7" documents to wikileaks exposing illegal and immoral actions of that federal agency. Here's whistleblower John Kiriakou on the case:

Prosecutors had literally no evidence that Schulte had taken the data from the CIA and transferred it to Wikileaks. But they contended that he was a computer genius who was so brilliant that he was able to cover his tracks. That was enough for the jury..

The CIA leadership apparently thought the leak was so damaging that then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo ordered the Agency to come up with a plan to kidnap or to kill Julian Assange in London. One former Trump Administration national security official said that Pompeo and other senior CIA leaders, “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7. They were seeing blood.”

You remember John Kiriakou right? From his Covert Action Magazine bio:

Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing.

At this point we're all sorely in need of more good news as we await news on Assange that is likely to be very, very bad. Maybe historian Ilan Pappe's article belongs here: "It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end."

This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end  – such projects usually collapse violently and thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project, and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel.

9/11 And Covid-19 Have A Lot In Common

Protesters in Kabul December, 2021 demanding "Let us eat" and "Give us our frozen money" Source: Al Jazeera Photo: Mohd Rasfan/AFP

The demise of the U.S. empire is foretold by mass suffering in Afghanistan 20+ years after the unfortunate events of 9/11.

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine. More than a million children are “estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition” and could die without proper treatment.. 

-- Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coodinator, to the United Nations Security Council August, 2022 as reported in Al Jazeera.

$7,000,000,000 in Afghan government assets were frozen by the U.S. when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan amid a messy, embarrassing withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021. Now, in 2022, many nations have responded by going off the dollar, a process hastened by economic sanctions that have ramped up in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Sold as a humanitarian intervention, what was two decades of war in Afghanistan really about? 

Some things are best understood in retrospect.

That nearly 3,000 "Americans" (27 were actually foreign nationals) died in the World Trade Center was a fact repeated as often as the videos of both towers collapsing. Oh, and WTC Building 7 which collapsed 8 hours later. This magnitude of death was the pretext for going to war on Afghanistan which allegedly harbored the Saudi masterminds of the terrorist attack. Except it was Pakistan doing the harboring. But they have nuclear weapons, don't they?

The main things that 9/11 provided were an enormous spectacle to justify the endlessly profitable wars of imperial expansion for the U.S., sometimes doing business as NATO.

The other signficant thing that 9/11 provided cover for was the 300 page so-called Patriot Act which gutted constitutional rights of citizens and terrorists alike. Swiftly gutted them, and created the Department of Homeland Security and created ICE -- both of which we had gotten along without prior to 9/11.

A lot of torture happened after 9/11. No, not the torture of being an Afghan or Pakistani child trying to sleep while surveillance robots droned overhead 24/7 waiting to unleash their Hellfire missiles on your home. Torture in secret prisons and in the gulag known as Guantánamo which is on Cuba's territory without their consent.

Torture then led to persecution of torture whistleblowers. 

Persecution amounting torture of Chelsea Manning for refusing to reveal how she shared evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

Persecution amounting to torture of Julian Assange for sharing evidence of U.S. and allied forces' war crimes and dirty financial dealings. 

Persecution of John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who blew the whistle on that agency's role in torture programs in 2007.

9/11 was used to justify war on Iraq via lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it. Also bombing people in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. And justification to support Israel's brutalization of Palestinian people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.  

Source: Brown University, Watson Institute, Costs of War Project

9/11 was used to drive fossil fuel consumption and thus climate crisis.

Source: The Daily Times "Eagleton fifth-graders study 9/11" Sep. 10, 2016 

9/11 was used to produce a lot of canned curriculum that teachers are told they must use to inform kids that are not upset about 9/11. 

Becuase they were not even born when it happened.

And really, how much should they care about 9/11? Their young lives have been upended by a public health disaster, still rampaging out of control in the U.S. 

A disaster -- like 9/11 -- that many argue was at worst planned and at best allowed to happen. How has the Covid-19 disaster been used?

• To ramp up censorship and narrative management dramatically.
• To set groups in the U.S. against each other.
• To enrich the already wealthy.

Sound familiar?

'The Temptation Not To Question It' -- Daniel Hale, Drone Warfare Whistleblower

Afghanistan War veteran Daniel Hale pled guilty to revealing the truth about U.S. drone warfare on civilians. Although there's no indication he shared what he knew with opposing forces, he wrote an anonymous chapter in the book The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program (Scahill et al., 2016) and provided documents to the lead author.

Hale later pled guilty to charges under the Espionage Act and will be sentenced today. 

Hale's handwritten letter from prison explains his motivations for the choices that ruined his life and the lives of many others; it is full of eloquent wisdom. 

Some excerpts:

...I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden terrifying flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain.

Since that time and to this day, I continue to recall several such scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair. 

Source: "US Drone Strike 'Accidentally' Kills 30 Afghan Farmers" Axis of Logic, 2019

Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions.

...

how could it be that any thinking person continued to believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation.

...

in spite of my better instincts, I continued to follow orders and obey my command for fear of repercussion. 

Yemen,  2014 from "Are US military drone strikes legal?" SBS Australia, 2014

Yet, all the while, becoming increasingly aware that the war had very little to do with preventing terror from coming into the United States and a lot more to do with protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers and so-called defense contractors

...

contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform wearing soldiers 2-to-1 and earned as much as 10 times their salary. 

...

I was starting to wonder if I was contributing again to the problem of money and war by accepting to return as a defense contractor. Worse was my growing apprehension that everyone around me was also taking part in a collective delusion and denial that was used to justify our exorbitant salaries for comparatively easy labor. 

The thing I feared most at the time was the temptation not to question it.

Source: The Indypendent, 2021

...

I believe that any person either called upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma. In that way, no soldier blessed to have returned home from war does so uninjured.

...

on that day, years after the fact, my new friends [gasped] and sneered, just as my old ones had, at the sight of faceless men in the final moments of their lives. I sat by watching too, said nothing, and felt my heart breaking into pieces.

...

Left to decide whether to act, I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience. 

The answer came to me, that to stop the cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person.

So I contacted an investigative reporter with whom I had had an established prior relationship and told him that I had something the American people needed to know.

Respectfully,

Daniel Hale

Calling Out Civilian Deaths By Drone Under Yet Another Democratic Party Warmonger

Screenshot from video of protest blocking the road at Creech AFB on April 5. 

Group chanting, "Arrest Col. Jones, the war criminal, not Daniel Hale, the whistleblower!"  

Posted by Toby Blomé at https://shutdowncreech.blogspot.com

Today I am reposting a press release from the dedicated drone resistance that converges annually at Creech Air Base in Nevada. 

These people of conscience work tirelessly to shine a light into the dark crime of U.S. relentless bombing of civilians with each successive administration in Washington DC, whether Democrat or Republican. 

Many of them will risk arrest to bring attention to these atrocities.

April 2, 2021
Contact: Toby Blomé, 510.501.5412 Maggie Huntington.602.459.5257
For more details: https://shutdowncreech.blogspot.com

ANTI-DRONE PROTESTORS FROM AROUND U.S. CONVERGE THIS WEEK TO CONDEMN KILLING BY CREECH AFB DRONES

LAS VEGAS/CREECH AFB, NV – Anti-war/anti-drone demonstrators from the East and West coasts announced they are converging here April 4-10 to hold daily protests – which may lead to arrests – at the U.S. Drone Base at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

Many military veterans, now members of Veterans for Peace, will be joining. The event is co-sponsored by CODEPINK and Veterans for Peace.

At Creech, U.S. Air Force personnel, coordinating with C.I.A. officials, are, regularly and secretly, killing people remotely using unmanned armed drone planes, primarily the MQ-9 Reaper drones. 

Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere, since 2001, according to the activists.

In the aftermath of the recent and tragic U.S. massacres by lone gunmen in Georgia and Boulder, activists will hold daily two hour vigils between 6:30-8:30 a.m. and 3:30-5:30 p.m., during commute hours to underline the connection between mass violence at home and the "normalized" mass violence of the U.S. covert drone program and U.S. military.

Over the last 20 years, U.S. armed drones have been used to commit horrible atrocities that have included strikes on wedding parties, funerals, schools, mosques, homes, farm laborers, and in January, 2020, included direct hits on high level foreign military and government officials from Iran and Iraq.

"A man walks past a graffiti, denouncing strikes by U.S. drones in Yemen, painted on a wall in Sanaa November 13, 2014"KHALED ABDULLAH/REUTERS

These drone massacres have, at times, resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians with a single drone attack. Not a single U.S. official has ever been held accountable for these ongoing atrocities, 

yet, an important drone whistleblower, Daniel Hale, who leaked truths about these atrocities faces potentially harsh sentencing later this July.

The daily vigils will include different themes each time, but two notable ones include:

Mon, April 5, 3:30-4:30 p.m. "WE STAND WITH Drone Whistleblower DANIEL HALE." On Wednesday, March 31, Daniel Hale pled guilty to being the informant who anonymously leaked classified military documents to an online media publisher, The Intercept, that revealed secret military statistics documenting civilian casualties under the covert U.S. targeted drone assassination program. (See The Drone Papers, 2015).

As a U.S. citizen and USAF analyst, Daniel acted out of conscience to reveal the truth about these serious war crimes that he felt the public had a right to know. Protesters will stand in support of Daniel's courageous act and demand that the real criminals be prosecuted, including the commanders of killer drone bases like Creech AFB, not the whistleblowers, who reveal the atrocities. Some of the messages will include: "Free Daniel Hale, Exposing war crimes is not a crime" "Prosecute the War Criminals not the Truth-tellers"

Tues, April 6, 6:30 - 8:30 a.m. THE DRONE MASSACRE MEMORIAL: Activists, will display a long series of banners, stretched along the highway, each highlighting details of past U.S. drone massacres, including statistics on civilian deaths.

"It is our hope," said Toby Blomé, one of the organizers, "that the military personnel that drive into the base everyday will reflect deeply about their role in this criminal activity that causes innumerable deaths and untold suffering around the globe, and that just maybe some of them will make the difficult but ethical choice to not participate.

"Militarized drones are expanding at an unbelievable rate, replacing conventional warfare, without any meaningful public debate. It is therefore the obligation of the military personnel to embrace their own individual responsibilities."

-END-

A pre-pandemic crowd of protestors at Creech in April, 2016.

Manning, Snowden, Assange: Three Bright Stars To Lead Us

How Chelsea Manning sees herself. By Alicia Neal, in cooperation with Chelsea herself,
commissioned by the Chelsea Manning Support Network, 23 April 2014.

With all the fuss about Oliver Stone’s film SNOWDEN this week my thoughts have turned increasingly toward the martyrdom of Chelsea Manning. Along with Julian Assange, Manning and Snowden form a constellation of stars that will illuminate the heavens as long as history endures. Which may not be all that long at the rate we’re going.

Chelsea Manning is similar to Ed Snowden in more ways than one, but it is she who felt compelled to go on a five-day hunger strike at Leavenworth prison demanding the right to treatment for gender dysphoria; Snowden lives in relative freedom in an apartment in Moscow with his girlfriend. Chelsea reports having experienced gender dysphoria from a very early age and that her father often beat her as a child for not being masculine enough. 

After being duped by an online “friend” she revealed her role in sharing evidence of U.S. Army war crimes, including but certainly not limited to the attack on Reuter’s employees and their would-be rescuers in the streets of Baghdad. The video of that attack includes the crude, contemptuous commentary of boys in a helicopter shooting down at human beings and is known by the name “Collateral Murder.”

For many of us, the “Collateral Murder” video is the very emblem of the rapacious U.S. foreign policy that has dominated this century: wanton killing of civilians and journalists in an oil-rich country that had nothing to do with the staged terror events of 9/11.

The silent killer riding the helicopter is the moral injury that leads so many U.S. veterans to suicide, more than 20 per day currently.

After Chelsea was accused of sharing truth via Wikileaks she was first kept in a cage in the desert in Kuwait for several very hot days and nights; she has reported that she expected to die there. In light of how events unfolded since, I imagine she might sometimes wish that she had.

Stateside, she was incarcerated at Quanitico prison on a Marine base in Virginia. A long bout of solitary confinement where she was kept in solitary for months, deprived of her clothing, forced to wear an abrasive garment alleged to prevent suicide, and then awakened by guards once an hour 24/7 to check if she was “okay.” Being woken up over and over for no reason alone is enough to make a person feel psychotic and hopeful for the release of death.

Bear in mind, all of this happened before Manning was convicted of anything.

Her recent hunger strike at Leavenworth followed a suicide attempt which followed administrative punishments for being found in possession of LGBT literature, and toothpaste that was past its expiration date. Manning has been forced to keep her hair military-man short, and until her hunger strike has been refused gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy. These are now promised as a result of the hunger strike; also promised is more solitary confinement.

To say that Chelsea Manning is a martyr to the cause of transparency and upholding the fine ideals of the U.S. constitution would not be an exaggeration.

Image source: PopularResistance.org "Snowden: Most Wanted Man In Word Wrapped In US Flag" by Kevin Zeese

If Snowden is seen as a winner, at least by filmmaker Stone, and Manning as a martyr, Assange falls somewhere between the two. He, too, has suffered mightily for his role in creating the mechanism whereby the people find out what evils the U.S. government has actually been up to. Holed up in the London embassy of  the nation of Ecuador, which granted him asylum if he could only get there, the Australian citizen dares not emerge lest he be immediately arrested on charges of Swedish “rape” (i.e. intercourse-without-a-condom) and then extradited to the U.S. to be tortured like Manning. No one would choose to live as Assange has done these past several years, but he has several advantages that Manning doesn’t, not least of all the ability to continue his history-changing work via the information engine Wikileaks.

Julian Assange by hologram at the @Nantucketproj incredible technology, engaging conversation pic.twitter.com/SPnyRLpUSP

— Casey Neistat (@CaseyNeistat) September 28, 2014

Assange and Snowden continue to “appear” at various international conferences in absentia by means of technology. Manning’s public profile is much more limited due to her incarceration in a maximum security federal prison. All three stars publish regularly in mainstream and alternative media outlets, continuing to share their thinking on the state of information freedom and the civil liberties eroding before our very eyes on a daily basis. 

Stone’s portrayal of Snowden as an idealistic militarist who continued engaging the ethical aspect of his life’s work -- until he found himself holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room, fleeing for his life -- redeems itself from the book it is party based upon, a book that irritates Assange. It also resonates with Manning’s story. Both swore to uphold the constitution; both responded to their own moral injury when it became apparent that their work for the military and/or its contractors (Snowden’s employer Booz Allen Hamilton is an intelligence subcontractor for the NSA, a branch of the Pentagon) grossly violated that constitution.

There are unsung whistleblowers amongst us who, I am happy to say, I will not be able to write about because they remain undiscovered. The noteworthy whistleblowers from the earlier years of my time on the planet continue to inspire -- Daniel Ellsberg, Erin Brockovich, and many who are less celebrated but no less important.

Blowing the whistle on torture can lead directly to being tortured yourself. This is the lesson that the U.S. government strives to teach to potential Mannings, Assanges and Snowdens who lie awake at night struggling with their consciences and wondering whether to risk sacrificing their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for the greater good.

#Drones And Warships Seen As Jobs Programs In The U.S. Economy Of Death

Image: Anthony Freda, used by permission

Launching a warship at Bath Iron Works is always an occasion for Maine's congressional delegates to pledge allegiance to military contracting and the jobs thus created. (Photo: AP, 2014.) The next launch and christening of a warship in Bath is set for October 31. Details of how to join a planned protest may be found here.

Two related news items caught my attention this morning. One is a puff piece on the efforts of my state's freshman representative on behalf of "the HUBZone [which] provides an advantage in acquiring federal government contracts to any qualifying business." Specifically, for businesses at the re-purposed Brunswick Naval Air Station. Maine's two senators are on board, too, all working to amend the National Defense Authorization Act to expand the scope of a favorable climate in which to do the business of weapons development, including drone testing.

A U.S. military drone visiting Brunswick Landing

This is seen as wonderful and desirable because of the holy grail of creating more jobs in my struggling state. Ever since NAFTA and CAFTA passed, jobs are wicked scarce in Maine. Who dares question a scheme to create employment?

The larger news item has been rolling out over the last few days, thanks to a whistleblower who provided U.S. taxpayers and their victims with the cold details of how bureaucrats order assassinations.

Source: "The Kill Chain" by Cora Currier in The Intercept. 
GCC = Geographic Combatant Command;  SECDEF = Secretary of Defense; PDC/PC = Principals’ Deputies Committee/Principals Committee; CoM = Chief of Mission; CoS = Chief of Station 

Ordering strikes in Somalia and Yemen goes through a series of steps, such as compiling a  so-called baseball card with the stats of a desired human target, according to "multiple interviews conducted" with Department of Defense officials.


Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill described for Democracy Now! how a target was selected and evaluated in Afghanistan. Also why kids were bombed for providing context that made an adult male target appear to be especially tall and therefore presumably Arab: "it turned out that he was of average size, and that the people around him were children. They killed them all."

The disconnect between creating jobs on the one hand and killing children to do so on the other runs deep in the U.S. taxpayer psyche. "Kill them over there before we have to kill them over here" is the rationale I've heard blandly repeated for years, despite extensive testimony that drone strikes create far more terrorists than they eliminate according to those in the know. 

But as Upton Sinclair wrote in 1935, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And in 1944, "Fascism is capitalism plus murder." 

Job creation sounds so much more appealing, doesn't it?