Matt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

From Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed."

[S]ecrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.

I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:

'Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.'

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”

What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified. What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.

If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.

Don’t let that happen.

Free Julian Assange.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Points Out the Wages of War

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is urging Americans to look into the mirror. Look who we have become. It's not pretty.

Let's take up that call from 60 years ago and ask Americans, all of us, to re examine our attitudes. We have been immersed in a foreign policy discourse that is all about adversaries and threats and allies and enemies and domination. We've become addicted to comic book Good versus Evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and legitimate cultural and economic concerns and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations.

We have internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as the response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war: the war on drugs, the war on terror, war on cancer, war on climate change. This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad, wars and coups and bombs and drones, and regime change operations and support for paramilitaries and juntas and dictators.

None of this has made us safer. And none of it has burnished our leadership or our moral authority. More importantly, we must ask ourselves, "Is this really who we are? Is this what we want to be? Is that what Americans founders envision?"

Is it any wonder that as America has waged violence throughout the world, violence has overtaken us in our own nation. It has not come as an invasion. It has come from within. Our bombs, our drones and our armies are incapable of stopping the gun violence on our streets and schools, or domestic violence in our homes. Waging endless wars abroad we have neglected the foundation of our own well being. We have a decaying economic infrastructure. We have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health. These are the wages of war.

What will be the wages of peace?

Continue ReadingRobert F. Kennedy, Jr. Points Out the Wages of War

Neocons Who Are Being Rewarded for their Iraq 2003 Disgrace.

Some might wonder how it is that so many of our purported leaders who lied us into waging war against Iraq aren't still universally disgraced and ejected from government jobs and public influence. But no, in fact, they were responsible for leading us into war in Ukraine. This list of neocons includes Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and William Kristol.  

Glenn Greenwald recently commented on the bizarre situation that all of these neocons not only remain in power and influential. Even worse, their warmongering views are embraced by modern day Democrats. What follows is the transcript of an excerpt from Glenn's System Update show, Episode 102:

One of the most extraordinary, alarming and baffling developments to witness in American politics is the complete rehabilitation of neoconservatives. Most Americans who know this term first learned of it in 2002 during the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq. The neocons were the most vocal and vehement advocates, not just of the invasion of Iraq, but more importantly, of the warmongering framework undergirding that attack, namely that the world is better off when the United States rules it, and especially the Middle East, through the application of superior military force, in essence, ordering all countries to do the bidding of the United States, always under the threat that failure to obey will result in attacks, invasions, bombings, regime change, coups and much more. This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new.

This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new. The U.S. fought wars, imposed tyrannies, and engineered coups all over the world, on every continent, during the Cold War and after but what distinguished neocons from standard warmongers and militarists were two qualities:

First, they have no other politics beyond their quest for endless war. Many neocons in fact began as liberals or even leftists and were willing to morph into anything they needed to be as long as doing so served the only issue they really cared about: placing the US in a state of endless war, almost always fought by other people's families and children rather than their own. Starting with the war in Iraq, a war they were craving and loudly demanding long before the 9/11 attacks – that attack became the pretext for the war in Iraq – they have supported every new and proposed American war since then. "Neocons" is a polite euphemism for "bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers."

Continue ReadingNeocons Who Are Being Rewarded for their Iraq 2003 Disgrace.

Accounting Errors for Ukraine!

Why isn't there a single solitary anti-war voice among Congressional Democrats? Not even among the supposedly far left wing of the Democrats, "The Squad." This is disgraceful. Meanwhile we have rampant drug addiction, homelessness, shitty schools and crumbling infrastructure that is ignored in American cities.

But now, $6.2B of found money will pour into the coffers of American military contractors and their lobbyists. We have an endless military budget to pay for 800 American military bases around the world and for endless war that has increased the risk of annihilating everyone we know in a nuclear holocaust. I'm not making that up. I'm referring to the October 7, 2022 statement by Joe Biden, who admitted that there is a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons being used in the Ukraine war. Biden further stated, "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

All of this to unnecessarily take sides in a territorial dispute over the Donbass, to maintain our control over Ukraine, a country in which the U.S. deposed Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected leader, in 2014, to install its own puppet leader. Current "foreign policy regarding Ukraine is a neocon wet dream and it offers absolutely no benefit for ordinary Americans.

As Robert Fulghum stated, "It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber." [More . . . ]

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U.S. is Provoking War with China Because … What the Hell? Why Not?

The White House is craving even more war. Even a higher risk of nuclear annihilation. The Ukraine war is simply not enough to satisfy U.S. bloodlust. Noam Chomsky describes the situation in a way you will never hear it described in corporate media.

Continue ReadingU.S. is Provoking War with China Because … What the Hell? Why Not?