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Julian Assange’s Day in Court

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Julian Assange’s lawyers — in a final bid on Tuesday to stop his extradition — fought valiantly to poke holes in the case of the prosecution to obtain an appeal.

And Our Flags Are Still There – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

By the afternoon the video link, which would have allowed Julian Assange to follow his final U.K. appeal to prevent his extradition, had been turned off. Julian, his attorneys said, was too ill to attend, too ill even to follow the court proceedings on a link, although it was possible he was no longer interested in sitting through another judicial lynching. The rectangular screen, tucked under the black wrought iron bars that enclosed the upper left hand corner balcony of the courtroom where Julian would have been caged as a defendant, was perhaps a metaphor for the emptiness of this long and convoluted judicial pantomime. 

The arcane procedural rules — the lawyers in their curled blonde wigs and robes, the spectral figure of the two judges looking down on the court from their raised dais in their gray wigs and forked white collars, the burnished walnut paneled walls, the rows of lancet windows, the shelves on either side filled with law books in brown, green, red, crimson, blue and beige leather bindings, the defense lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald KC and Mark Summers KC, addressing the two judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Johnson, as “your lady” and “my lord” — were all dusty Victorian props employed in a modern Anglo-American show trial. It was a harbinger of a decrepit justice system that, subservient to state and corporate power, is designed to strip us of our rights by judicial fiat.

The physical and psychological disintegration of Julian, seven years trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly five years held on remand in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh, was always the point, what Nils Melzer the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture calls his “slow-motion execution.”  Political leaders, and their echo chambers in the media, fall all over themselves to denounce the treatment of Alexei Navalny but say little when we do the same to Julian. The legal farce grinds forward like the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. It will probably grind on for a few more months — one can’t expect the Biden administration to add the extradition of Julian to all its other political woes. It may take months to issue a ruling, or grant one or two appeal requests, as Julian continues to waste away in HM Prison Belmarsh. 

Julian’s nearly 15-year legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. He took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, before being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in 2019 who were permitted by the Ecuadorian embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.

Julian did not commit a crime. He is not a spy. He did not purloin classified documents. He did what we all do, although he did it in a far more important way. He published voluminous material, leaked to him by Chelsea Manning, which exposed U.S. war crimes, lies, corruption, torture and assassinations. He ripped back the veil to expose the murderous machinery of the U.S. empire.

The two-day hearing is Julian’s last chance to appeal the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel. On Wednesday the prosecution will make its arguments. If he is denied an appeal he can request the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But the British court may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January 2021, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, refused to authorize the extradition request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk” Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would endure in the U.S. prison system. At the same time, she accepted all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith. She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised Julian would be treated well. The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to Special Administrative Measure. They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado.

The defense must convince the two judges that the District Judge made serious legal errors to see an appeal granted.  

They argued that espionage is, as a matter of law, a political offense and that the extradition treaty with the U.S. prohibits extradition for political offenses. They focused on the extensive UK law, common law and international law that defines espionage as a “pure political offense” because it is directed against a state apparatus. For this reason, those charged with espionage should be protected from extradition. The lawyers spent a long time adjudicating the case of Chelsea Manning to justify her leak of documents that exposed war crimes as in the public interest, then arguing that if she was justified in leaking the documents Julian was justified in publishing them.

As the day wore on it became evident that the two judges were not well versed in the case, constantly asking for citations and expressing surprise that senior officials in the U.S., such as Mike Pompeo when he was head of the CIA, said Julian would not be protected by the First Amendment in an American court because he was not a citizen. Julian’s lawyers brought up past espionage cases, such as that of MI5 agent David Shayler, prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1989 for passing secret documents to The Mail on Sunday in 1997 — which included the names of agents. He also disclosed that MI5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence service) kept files on prominent politicians, including Labour ministers, and that MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence service) was involved in a plot to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Momar Gaddafi. The British extradition request was rejected by the French Cour d’Appel because it was a “political offense.”  

All 18 counts filed against Julian allege that his purpose was “that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States and the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The hearing was, after those in 2020 that focused on Julian’s mental and psychological health, refreshing in that it discussed the crimes committed by the U.S. and the importance of making them public. The two judges rarely interrupted, unlike other court proceedings for Julian I have attended where the judge often condescendingly cut short the defense. This may be a reflection of the broad public support, including by major media organizations, which have belatedly rallied behind Julian. Hundreds of people thronged the entrance to The Royal Courts of Justice, an expansive Victorian Gothic stone building adorned with statues of Jesus, Moses, Solomon and Alfred the Great, the celebrated pillars of the English legal tradition, to call for Julian’s freedom.

The afternoon session was different. On about a half dozen occasions the judges halted the defense to ask about how the leaks, because they were not thoroughly redacted, had endangered lives, although the U.S. has never been able to provide evidence of anyone whose life was lost as a result of the leaks. This canard has long been the cross on which U.S. officials have sought to crucify Julian. The two judges — one wonders if they had been given instructions during the lunch break — hurled these accusations at the defense lawyers until we adjourned.

“These indiscriminate disclosures were condemned by The Guardian and The New York Times,” Judge Sharp admonished the defense team. “They could have been done differently.”

This reference was especially egregious since the unredacted documents were first made public not by WikiLeaks or Julian but by the website Cryptome after reporters from The Guardian printed the password to the unredacted documents in their book.

The U.S. is officially seeking Julian’s extradition, where he potentially faces up to 175 years in prison, for the 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and US diplomatic cables. But the U.S. did not request his extradition until the release in March 2017 of the files known as Vault 7 which detailed how the CIA could hack Apple and Android smartphones and turn internet-connected televisions — even when they were off — into listening devices. Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee, was found guilty last year of four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents after handing over classified materials to WikiLeaks. He was given a forty-year sentence in February.

After the release of Vault 7 then CIA Director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” The Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, said that Julian’s arrest was a priority. By August the U.S. Senate had passed a 78-page intelligence finance bill which included a sentence declaring that “it is the sense of Congress that Wikileaks and the senior leadership of Wikileaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.” In May 2019 the Trump administration accused Julian of violating the Espionage Act and asked the UK to extradite him to stand trial in the U.S. Trump has called the allegations against Julian treason and called for “the death penalty or something.” Other politicians, including former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, have also called for Julian to be executed.

If Julian is extradited and additionally charged for the release of the Vault 7 documents, Fitzgerald told the court, “it could result in additional charges that merit the death penalty for aiding and abetting the enemy.” The U.S., he said, especially if Trump is elected again to the presidency, could easily “reformulate these charges into a capital offense.”

Summers brought up President Donald Trump’s request for “detailed options” of how to assassinate Julian when he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy. “Sketches were even drawn up,” he said, adding that the plot fell apart when the UK authorities backed down, especially over a potential shootout, in the streets of London”.

“The evidence showed that the US was prepared to go to any lengths, including misusing its own criminal justice system, to sustain impunity for US officials in respect of the torture/war crimes committed in its infamous ‘war on terror’, and to suppress those actors and courts willing and prepared to try to bring those crimes to account,” he said.

 The lawyers were right. The CIA is the driving force behind the extradition. The leak was highly embarrassing and to the CIA highly damaging. The CIA intends to make Julian pay. Schulte, who leaked Vault 7, was given a forty year sentence. Julian, if extradited, will be next. 

When the Truth Lies Dead and Buried – Resurrect Logic

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

If you read Western mainstream propaganda these days, you’ll find the truth hidden so deep no archaeologist could unearth it. A case in point is a buried lead in a story from the New York Post suggesting Russia has secret plans to hit NATO hard in the coming months.

According to the Post’s Chris Nesi, leaked secret documents released by German newspaper BILD tell of Europe preparing for Vladimir Putin to expand his military operation in Ukraine and to attack NATO ally countries next year. If readers take the headline and a keen graphic illustrating Putin’s alleged diabolical plan, you’d be in the right stocking up those bomb shelters in Wisconsin and Luxembourg.

Fortunately, Nesi’s story is entirely misleading. It suggests BILD got hold of Russian secret plans, conveniently categorised as a “plot” to sound more sinister, when in fact, German generals made plans to etch out WW3 like some chessboard game. The New York Post super sleuth waited until the article’s end to tell readers the truth about these “plans.” Here’s the passage.

“While the plans obtained by BILD are a potential scenario prepared by generals in the German army, European allies take Russia’s threat seriously and are preparing accordingly.”

The biggest problem with these misleading stories is the downstream effect of main outlets, and their tabloid cousins, spreading the lies to the broader public. Iona Cleave of The Sun titled her version “COUNTDOWN TO CONFLICT Putin’s ‘step-by-step plan to bring West to brink of WW3’ revealed in leaked intel doc…including date of ‘Day X’ in 2025.” In this case, the lead of the story is not just buried. It’s cremated and scattered into the digital air before publication by the tabloid. Still, grocery shoppers in London and Edinburgh catch the stunning revelations about “X-Day” while waiting in the checkout line. The Putin bad man campaign continues, and the everyday citizen wonders what their government will do to protect them.

Then the narrative arrives for curious business people via Banking News: “Britain sends 20,000 troops to mammoth NATO exercise against ‘Putin threat’.” Mail Online takes things further by quoting the former head of NATO forces in Europe, retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, assuring readers the “plot” is actual. So, the German Ministry of Defence’s so-called step-by-step doomsday guide is deftly transformed into a bored staff officer scenario-building game in leather armchairs somewhere beneath the Brandenburg Gate into a bonafide Putin strategy to take over Europe.

The media is not the only conduit for Russophobia these days. Leaders of state like Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the UK, say the Russians will not stop at Ukraine’s borders. American President Joe Biden has warned my people that if Putin wins a victory over Ukraine, Russia will attack a NATO country. And the minions of continual conflict for the Liberal Order are out in force in academia, business, and on the NGO and think tank circuit. One fine example is retired Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who’s gone on the media/propaganda circuit to sell more gas masks and military headgear via companies he’s affiliated with, told The Telegraph, “Putin may be about to launch an apocalyptic assault.” For those unfamiliar, Colonel Hamish Stephen de Bretton-Gordon commanded NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion between 2005 and 2007. He was in all the right places about the time America was introduced to the post-9/11 idea of a “war on terror.” He later led a company profiting from his and other analysts’ apocalyptic prophecies. When regime change schemes came to Syria, it was the good colonel who “informed” the House of Commons and the waiting BBC audience of Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his people. Bretton-Gordon and many others trained by the spooks and the Anglo-American military-industrial complex play a continuous melody of crisis and fear.

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” ― Adolf Hitler

Logic, the holy of holies these days, seems as lost as the Ark of the Covenant. Who could fail to notice, for instance, Russia taking up a defensive stance to save her soldiers’ lives and those of countless civilians in Ukraine cities like Kyiv, Karkhov, and Dnipro? With nearly half a million troops held in reserve and with Ukraine’s forces decimated, why haven’t the Russians already pushed through the weak spots on the way to the Dnieper River? And what about the billions and billions in arms and cash Western states have now lost to an impossible cause?

Looking at the latest tally of destroyed Ukraine equipment since the start of the operation tells the real story. So far, the Russians have knocked out almost 600 Ukrainian warplanes, 265 helicopters, almost 11,000 UAVs, 450 SAM systems, 14,645 tanks and armoured vehicles, 1,202 rocket launching systems, 7,750 artillery pieces, and 17,507 special military vehicles. Unbiased experts put the number of Ukraine dead at between 400 and 500 thousand combatants. And the number of wounded surely exceeds a million by now.

And finally, let’s remember that the elitist-controlled Western media, the politicians, and the so-called experts have been telling us Russia was finished for years now. Sanctions, the blown-up pipeline, and the weapons and money dump to Zelensky were supposed to weaken Russia. This is not the truth. Russia is more vital now than ever since the 1980s, militarily and economically. This points to another point of lost logic. Why would Russia want to take over states protected by NATO? Europe is a consumer continent. It’s where a billion people need feeding, not a breadbasket for good Russian families. There is nothing in Europe that Russia needs. It is Europe, on the other hand, that desperately needs Russia and the other BRICS countries. So, who are the most likely aggressors in all this?

Never believe their slogans, especially not NATO/good, Russia/bad.

US-British Attacks on Yemen a Portent for Wider War

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By Brian Berletic

Source: New Eastern Outlook

In the opening weeks of 2024, the US and British unilaterally launched several large-scale missile and air strikes on targets in territory held by Ansar Allah (referred to as the “Houthis” across the Western media) in Yemen.

The strikes follow a campaign of missile strikes and boardings conducted by Ansar Allah against commercial shipping destined to and from Israel in response to Israel’s ongoing punitive operations in Gaza.

While the stated purpose of the US-British strikes are to protect commercial shipping, hostility of any kind in the Red Sea is likely to prompt international shipping companies to continue seeking out and using alternative routes until fighting of any kind subsides.

Indeed, according to Euronews Business, despite the US-British strikes on Ansar Allah, the CEO of Maersk, responsible for one-fifth of global maritime shipping, believes safely transiting the Red Sea is still months away.

Despite the political posturing that accompanied these attacks, strategically, they will do little to impact Ansar Allah’s fighting capacity. The political movement possesses a formidable military organization that has weathered years of full-scale war waged against it by a Saudi-led Arab coalition, backed by both the US and UK.

Not only did the US and UK encourage Saudi Arabia to sustain an air and ground war against Yemen, both Western nations contributed directly to Saudi Arabia’s war efforts.

The New York Times in a 2018 article titled, “Army Special Forces Secretly Help Saudis Combat Threat From Yemen Rebels” admitted that US special forces were operating, at a minimum, along the Saudi-Yemeni border, assisting Saudi Arabia’s armed forces in choosing targets.

The same article admits that the US was also lending assistance related to “aircraft refueling, logistics and general intelligence sharing.”

The Guardian in a 2019 article titled, “‘The Saudis couldn’t do it without us’: the UK’s true role in Yemen’s deadly war,” admitted to the scope of support provided by the UK to Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen. It included supplying weapons and munitions, thousands of maintenance contractors, pilot training, and even sending British troops to fight alongside Saudi soldiers in Yemen itself.

The scale of both Saudi Arabia’s own war on Yemen and the scale of US and British assistance to Saudi Arabia, including through the use of thousands of contractors and hundreds of soldiers on the ground, dwarfs the current missile and air strikes conducted by the US and British from the Red Sea. Even if the US and British significantly expanded their current missile and air strike campaign, it would still pale in comparison to the war that has been waged against Yemen in recent years.

Clearly then, the current US-British strikes on Yemen hold little prospect of deterring Ansar Allah, so why is the US and British carrying out these strikes anyway?

Washington’s True Motives for Striking Yemen 

CNN in an article titled, “US and UK carry out strikes against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen,” would claim:

For weeks, the US had sought to avoid direct strikes on Yemen because of the risk of escalation in a region already simmering with tension as the Israel-Hamas war continues, but the ongoing Houthi attacks on international shipping compelled the coalition to act.

Yet, because the strikes only ensure shipping in the Red Sea remains obstructed and because the strikes themselves have little hope of impacting Ansar Allah strategically, the only other explanation as to why the US launched them was to specifically raise “the risk of escalation in the region.”

Ansar Allah’s ally, Iran, has been the target of US-sponsored regime change operations for decades. Entire policy papers have been written by US government and corporate-funded think tanks, including the Brookings Institution and its 2009 paper, “Which Path to Persia?,” detailing options to achieve regime change including through deliberate attempts to draw Iran into a war by both covert action within Iran, and through attacks on Iran’s network of regional allies.

The Brookings paper admits:

“…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)”

Preceding the US-British missile and air strikes on Yemen, the US has carried out strikes on Iranian allies across the region, including in Syria and Iraq. Israel, with US-backing, has also carried out attacks across the region on Iranian allies, specifically on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

There was also recently a terrorist bombing inside of Iran, likely carried out by one of several terrorist organizations sponsored by the US to carry out just such attacks, as per the Brookings paper’s own suggestion regarding “ratcheting up cover regime change efforts inside Iran.” It should be noted that elsewhere in the Brookings paper the option of using known terrorist groups to carry out US-backed “insurgency” is afforded an entire chapter (Chapter 7, Inspiring an Insurgency – Supporting Iranian Minority and Opposition Groups). 

Together, this constitutes a strategy of attempting to degrade Iranian allies in the region ahead of a wider conflict, and as a means of provoking and thus drawing Iran itself into that wider conflict.

So far, Iran has exhibited tremendous patience. Iran, as both Russia and China who face similar US policies of encirclement and containment, knows time works in its favor. Iranian patience has already served Tehran well. It has afforded it the ability to diplomatically resolve tensions between itself and Saudi Arabia through Chinese mediation. It has also allowed Iran to continue building up not only its own military capabilities, but those across its network of allies in the region, leading to a gradual shift in the balance of power in Tehran’s favor.

Washington realizes this. This time next year, if events continue to unfold as they have in recent years, Iran will only be stronger and the US more isolated in the region. The US faced a similar problem of waning primacy in Europe, using its proxy war in Ukraine against Russia as a means of reasserting itself over Europe. Washington likely imagines it can use a similar strategy to reassert itself over the Middle East while using a regional conflict to collectively weaken and thus subordinate the nations therein.

Only time will tell if the US is as “successful” in the Middle East as it was in Europe. Already many factors are working against the US, but from Washington’s perspective, it isn’t paying the price for any of these conflicts – the regions these conflicts are fought in are paying that price. As long as Washington is absolved from any direct cost in such a foreign policy, it will continue pursuing it until it is finally and fully denied the means to continue doing so.

Internet Censorship, Everywhere All at Once

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By Debbie Lerman

Source: Activist Post

It used to be a truth universally acknowledged by citizens of democratic nations that freedom of speech was the basis not just of democracy, but of all human rights.

When a person or group can censor the speech of others, there is – by definition – an imbalance of power. Those exercising the power can decide what information and which opinions are allowed, and which should be suppressed. In order to maintain their power, they will naturally suppress information and views that challenge their position.

Free speech is the only peaceful way to hold those in power accountable, challenge potentially harmful policies, and expose corruption. Those of us privileged to live in democracies instinctively understand this nearly sacred value of free speech in maintaining our free and open societies.

Or do we?

Alarmingly, it seems like many people in what we call democratic nations are losing that understanding. And they seem willing to cede their freedom of speech to governments, organizations, and Big Tech companies who, supposedly, need to control the flow of information to keep everyone “safe.”

The locus for the disturbing shift away from free speech is the 21st-century’s global public square: the Internet. And the proclaimed reasons for allowing those in power to diminish our free speech on the Internet are: “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

In this article, I will review the three-step process by which anti-disinformation laws are introduced. Then, I will review some of the laws being rolled out in multiple countries almost simultaneously, and what such laws entail in terms of vastly increasing the potential for censorship of the global flow of information.

How to Pass Censorship Laws

Step 1: Declare an existential threat to democracy and human rights 

Step 2: Assert that the solution will protect democracy and human rights

Step 3: Enact anti-democratic, anti-human rights censorship fast and in unison

Lies, propaganda, “deep fakes,” and all manner of misleading information have always been present on the Internet. The vast global information hub that is the World Wide Web inevitably provides opportunities for criminals and other nefarious actors, including child sex traffickers and evil dictators.

At the same time, the Internet has become the central locus of open discourse for the world’s population, democratizing access to information and the ability to publish one’s views to a global audience.

The good and bad on the Internet reflect the good and bad in the real world. And when we regulate the flow of information on the Internet, the same careful balance between blocking truly dangerous actors, while retaining maximum freedom and democracy, must apply.

Distressingly, the recent slew of laws governing Internet information are significantly skewed in the direction of limiting free speech and increasing censorship. The reason, the regulators claim, is that fake news, disinformation, and hate speech are existential threats to democracy and human rights.

Here are examples of dire warnings, issued by leading international organizations, about catastrophic threats to our very existence purportedly posed by disinformation:

Propaganda, misinformation and fake news have the potential to polarise public opinion, to promote violent extremism and hate speech and, ultimately, to undermine democracies and reduce trust in the democratic processes. –Council of Europe

The world must address the grave global harm caused by the proliferation of hate and lies in the digital space.-United Nations

Online hate speech and disinformation have long incited violence, and sometimes mass atrocities.  –World Economic Forum (WEF)/The New Humanitarian

Considering the existential peril of disinformation and hate speech, these same groups assert that any solution will obviously promote the opposite:

Given such a global threat, we clearly need a global solution. And, of course, such a solution will increase democracy, protect the rights of vulnerable populations, and respect human rights. –WEF

Moreover, beyond a mere assertion that increasing democracy and respecting human rights are built into combating disinformation, international law must be invoked.

In its Common Agenda Policy Brief from June 2023, Information Integrity on Digital Platforms, the UN details the international legal framework for efforts to counter hate speech and disinformation.

First, it reminds us that freedom of expression and information are fundamental human rights:

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 19 (2) of the Covenant protect the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, and through any media. 

Linked to freedom of expression, freedom of information is itself a right. The General Assembly has stated: “Freedom of information is a fundamental human right and is the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated.” (p. 9)

Then, the UN brief explains that disinformation and hate speech are such colossal, all-encompassing evils that their very existence is antithetical to the enjoyment of any human rights:

Hate speech has been a precursor to atrocity crimes, including genocide. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide prohibits “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. 

In its resolution 76/227, adopted in 2021, the General Assembly emphasized that all forms of disinformation can negatively impact the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. Similarly, in its resolution 49/21, adopted in 2022, the Human Rights Council affirmed that disinformation can negatively affect the enjoyment and realization of all human rights.

This convoluted maze of legalese leads to an absurd, self-contradictory sequence of illogic:

  • Everything the UN is supposed to protect is founded on the freedom of information, which along with free speech is a fundamental human right.
  • The UN believes hate speech and disinformation destroy all human rights.
  • THEREFORE, anything we do to combat hate speech and disinformation protects all human rights, even if it abrogates the fundamental human rights of free speech and information, on which all other rights depend.
  • Because: genocide!

In practice, what this means is that, although the UN at one point in its history considered the freedom of speech and information fundamental to all other rights, it now believes the dangers of hate speech and disinformation eclipse the importance of protecting those rights.

The same warping of democratic values, as delineated by our international governing body, is now occurring in democracies the world over.

Censorship Laws and Actions All Happening Now

If hate speech and disinformation are the precursors of inevitable genocidal horrors, the only way to protect the world is through a coordinated international effort. Who should lead this campaign?

According to the WEF, “Governments can provide some of the most significant solutions to the crisis by enacting far-reaching regulations.”

Which is exactly what they’re doing.

United States

In the US, freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution, so it’s hard to pass laws that might violate it.

Instead, the government can work with academic and nongovernmental organizations to strong-arm social media companies into censoring disfavored content. The result is the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a vast network of government-adjacent academic and nonprofit “anti-disinformation” outfits, all ostensibly mobilized to control online speech in order to protect us from whatever they consider to be the next civilization-annihilating calamity.

The Twitter Files and recent court cases reveal how the US government uses these groups to pressure online platforms to censor content it doesn’t like:

Google

In some cases, companies may even take it upon themselves to control the narrative according to their own politics and professed values, with no need for government intervention. For example: Google, the most powerful information company in the world, has been reported to fix its algorithms to promote, demote, and disappear content according to undisclosed internal “fairness” guidelines.

This was revealed by a whistleblower named Zach Vorhies in his almost completely ignored book, Google Leaks, and by Project Veritas, in a sting operation against Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation.

In their benevolent desire to protect us from hate speech and disinformation, Google/YouTube immediately removed the original Project Veritas video from the Internet.

European Union

The Digital Services Act came into force November 16, 2022. The European Commission rejoiced that “The responsibilities of users, platforms, and public authorities are rebalanced according to European values.” Who decides what the responsibilities and what the “European values” are?

  • very large platforms and very large online search engines [are obligated] to prevent the misuse of their systems by taking risk-based action and by independent audits of their risk management systems
  • EU countries will have the primary [oversight] role, supported by a new European Board for Digital Services

Brownstone contributor David Thunder explains how the act provides an essentially unlimited potential for censorship:

This piece of legislation holds freedom of speech hostage to the ideological proclivities of unelected European officials and their armies of “trusted flaggers.” 

The European Commission is also giving itself the power to declare a Europe-wide emergency that would allow it to demand extra interventions by digital platforms to counter a public threat. 

UK

The Online Safety Bill was passed September 19, 2023. The UK government says “It will make social media companies more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms.”

According to Internet watchdog Reclaim the Net, this bill constitutes one of the widest sweeping attacks on privacy and free speech in a Western democracy:

The bill imbues the government with tremendous power; the capability to demand that online services employ government-approved software to scan through user content, including photos, files, and messages, to identify illegal content. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world, warns: “the law would create a blueprint for repression around the world.”

Australia

The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 was released in draft form June 25, 2023 and is expected to pass by the end of 2023. the Australian government says:

The new powers will enable the ACMA [Australian Communications and Media Authority] to monitor efforts and require digital platforms to do more, placing Australia at the forefront in tackling harmful online misinformation and disinformation, while balancing freedom of speech.

Reclaim the Net explains:

This legislation hands over a wide range of new powers to ACMA, which includes the enforcement of an industry-wide “standard” that will obligate digital platforms to remove what they determine as misinformation or disinformation. 

Brownstone contributor Rebekah Barnett elaborates:

Controversially, the government will be exempt from the proposed laws, as will professional news outlets, meaning that ACMA will not compel platforms to police misinformation and disinformation disseminated by official government or news sources. 

The legislation will enable the proliferation of official narratives, whether true, false or misleading, while quashing the opportunity for dissenting narratives to compete. 

Canada

The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-10) became law April 27, 2023. Here’s how the Canadian government describes it, as it relates to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC):

The legislation clarifies that online streaming services fall under the Broadcasting Act and ensures that the CRTC has the proper tools to put in place a modern and flexible regulatory framework for broadcasting. These tools include the ability to make rules, gather information, and assign penalties for non-compliance.

According to Open Media, a community-driven digital rights organization,

Bill C-11 gives the CRTC unprecedented regulatory authority to monitor all online audiovisual content. This power extends to penalizing content creators and platforms and through them, content creators that fail to comply. 

World Health Organization

In its proposed new Pandemic Treaty and in the amendments to its International Health Regulations, all of which it hopes to pass in 2024, the WHO seeks to enlist member governments to

Counter and address the negative impacts of health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization, especially on social media platforms, on people’s physical and mental health, in order to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, and foster trust in public health systems and authorities.

Brownstone contributor David Bell writes that essentially this will give the WHO, an unelected international body,

power to designate opinions or information as ‘mis-information or disinformation, and require country governments to intervene and stop such expression and dissemination. This … is, of course, incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but these seem no longer to be guiding principles for the WHO.

Conclusion

We are at a pivotal moment in the history of Western democracies. Governments, organizations and companies have more power than ever to decide what information and views are expressed on the Internet, the global public square of information and ideas.

It is natural that those in power should want to limit expression of ideas and dissemination of information that might challenge their position. They may believe they are using censorship to protect us from grave harms of disinformation and hate speech, or they may be using those reasons cynically to consolidate their control over the flow of information.

Either way, censorship inevitably entails the suppression of free speech and information, without which democracy cannot exist.

Why are the citizens of democratic nations acquiescing to the usurpation of their fundamental human rights? One reason may be the relatively abstract nature of rights and freedoms in the digital realm.

In the past, when censors burned books or jailed dissidents, citizens could easily recognize these harms and imagine how awful it would be if such negative actions were turned against them. They could also weigh the very personal and imminent negative impact of widespread censorship against much less prevalent dangers, such as child sex trafficking or genocide. Not that those dangers would be ignored or downplayed, but it would be clear that measures to combat such dangers should not include widespread book burning or jailing of regime opponents.

In the virtual world, if it’s not your post that is removed, or your video that is banned, it can be difficult to fathom the wide-ranging harm of massive online information control and censorship. It is also much easier online than in the real world to exaggerate the dangers of relatively rare threats, like pandemics or foreign interference in democratic processes. The same powerful people, governments, and companies that can censor online information can also flood the online space with propaganda, terrifying citizens in the virtual space into giving up their real-world rights.

The conundrum for free and open societies has always been the same: How to protect human rights and democracy from hate speech and disinformation without destroying human rights and democracy in the process.

The answer embodied in the recent coordinated enactment of global censorship laws is not encouraging for the future of free and open societies.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

Who are the Real Terrorists in the Palestine Story?

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By Stuart Littlewood

Source: Dissident Voice

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more sickening speech from a world leader than Biden’s following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the tormentor of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. His crass ignorance, prejudice and subservience to a criminal, apartheid regime, while utterly indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people, sets a new low among Western administrations.

Biden says that the United States “stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop. There’s never a justification for terrorist attacks and my administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.’’ He added that the people of Israel were “under attack, orchestrated by a terrorist organisation… The United States stands with Israel. We will not ever fail to have their back. We’ll make sure that they have the help their citizens need and they can continue to defend themselves.”

And Israel’s faithful stooges in the UK and Europe are in perfect harmony:

  • UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “Shocked by this morning’s attacks by Hamas terrorists… Israel has an absolute right to defend itself.”
  • UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly: “The UK will always support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
  • Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey: “Liberal Democrats fully condemn Hamas. This terrorism must cease. Israel has a right to defend itself.”
  • UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer: “No justification for this act of terror… perpetrated by those who seek to undermine any chance for future peace in the region.”
  • Head of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen: The attack was “terrorism in its most despicable form… Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks”.

But who are the real “despicable” terrorists?

The US’s own definition of terrorism fits Israel itself perfectly. Under Section 3 of Executive Order 13224 “Blocking Property and prohibiting Transactions with Persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support Terrorism”, the term “terrorism” means an activity that:
(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
(ii) appears to be intended:

  • to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
  • to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
  • to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.

This instrument, signed on 23 September 2001 by George W. Bush, is used to outlaw and crush any organisation, individual or country the US doesn’t like. And the Israeli regime’s “amoral thugs”, as one British MP branded them, have plainly been terrorising Palestinian civilians for decades. Biden is one very confused bunny.

As for the other stooges, their position is demolished by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), said to be the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organisation in the world. “We’re organising a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews into solidarity with Palestinian freedom struggle,” they say on their website. Here’s an extract from their statement on the hostilities.

The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes and orchards and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The US government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment. The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the US enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime.

Meanwhile, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)’s team on the ground in Gaza have a close-up view of the situation. They say they “are releasing all of our pre-positioned stocks, worth $570,000 USD (approximately £465,000), to ensure hospitals and emergency responders have the supplies they need to cope with an unprecedented influx of casualties”.

Supplies provided by MAP include essential drugs and disposables, laboratory reagents and support for Gaza’s blood bank services. Even before this latest escalation Gaza’s beleaguered health system was struggling, with 48 per cent of essential medicines and 26 per cent of medical disposables unavailable or in critically short supply. Today, the Ministry of Health in Gaza is calling for blood donations for the influx of casualties. Melanie Ward, MAP’s chief executive, says: “We are deeply concerned about the potential for substantial loss of civilian life in the coming days. Gaza’s healthcare services are woefully under-equipped to respond to this emergency, and MAP’s support is needed now more than ever. We call on the international community to take urgent steps to protect civilian life and infrastructure from attack, and to launch immediate humanitarian relief efforts to ensure that health services have the resources they need to save lives and respond to casualties.”

MAP is also committed to bearing witness to the injustices caused by occupation, displacement and conflict. “We speak out in the UK and internationally, and ensure Palestinian voices are heard at the highest levels, to press for the political and social barriers to Palestinian health and dignity to be addressed.”

Self-defence? Really?

And what about this mantra-like claim that Israel, the aggressor and illegal occupier, has a right to defend itself? The West Bank, East Jerusalem (including the Old City) and Gaza are regarded as Palestinian territory under international law and by the United Nations. So what are Israel’s occupation army and armed settlers doing there?

The word “settler” is much too nice. I call these armed thugs “squatters”. They are transferred illegally onto Palestinian territory by the Israeli government to establish “facts on the ground” in the hope of eventually annexing and acquiring the territory for itself. That’s why Israel has never declared its borders – it intends to keep expanding until it has stolen all of the Holy Land.

This of course is a violation of occupation law and a war crime on the part of the individuals involved. And it is a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the sovereignty of another state and a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people; also a violation of Israel’s obligations regarding international law on the use of force. Ending these violations calls for the removal of the squatters and their squats from occupied land and an immediate end to Israel’s exercise of control, including its use of military force, over the Palestinians’ territory. It is nonsense to suggest that Israel has any right to defend its nationals when misbehaving and committing war crimes on somebody else’s territory.

The UK government is complicit in these crimes, having created the problem in the first place back in 1916/17 (Balfour’s infamous declaration and promise to the Zionists) and even today refuses to sanction Israel’s murderous behaviour and racist policies. As we so often see demonstrated, all our political parties have brainwashed elements within their ruling elite that are obedient to the Israel lobby.

Know your terrorist

Furthermore, there’s nothing anyone can teach Israelis about terrorism. They wrote the manual. If you don’t believe it, read their Dalet Plan, or ‘Plan D’. This was the Zionists’ blueprint for the violent and bloody takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – drawn up in early 1948 by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency.

Plan D anticipated the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood, and plotted the ethnic cleansing that was to follow. Here is a chilling extract setting out guidelines for besieging, occupying and controlling Arab cities:

1. By isolating them from transportation arteries by laying mines, blowing up bridges, and a system of fixed ambushes.
2. If necessary, by occupying high points which overlook transportation arteries leading to enemy cities, and the fortification of our units in these positions.
3. By disrupting vital services, such as electricity, water, and fuel, or by using economic resources available to us, or by sabotage.
4. By launching a naval operation against the cities that can receive supplies by sea, in order to destroy the vessels carrying the provisions, as well as by carrying out acts of sabotage against harbour facilities.

It is one of the vilest documents in history and shows why so many people question Israel’s legitimacy. Jewish terror gangs committed a massacre at Deir Yassin to set the tone and “soften up” the Arabs for expulsion. More atrocities followed the declaration of Israeli statehood on 14 May 1948. Some 750,000 Palestinians were put to flight as Israel’s forces obliterated hundreds of Arab town and villages. The village on which Sderot now stands was one of these. It was designate an Arab town in the UN Partition Plan but that made no difference. To this day its inhabitants have been denied the right to return and received no compensation. Thirty four massacres are said to have been committed in pursuit of the Jewish nation’s racist and territorial ambitions, which immediately overran the generous borders gifted to the Zionists in the Partition Plan.

Biden, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Julian Assange’s Imprisonment Is The Intellectual Imprisonment of Us All

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Julian Assange has been imprisoned since 2012 because he had provided, to whistleblowers who were in government and who saw and could supply to his WikiLeaks organization, items of evidence which indicated that their government was breaking its own laws, protection of their personal identity, which confidentiality they could then rely upon for their personal safety, to protect those whistleblowers against retaliation by their government. No regular ‘news’-medium could or would reliably do that, but Assange and his WikiLeaks organization could, and they always did. This is why governmental whistleblowers did go to them for this purpose.

The power that a government has to ‘classify’ documents is the power that it has to hide evidence from its public and so to rule its population as being their subjects instead of (authentically) their citizens: it is the ability to BE a dictatorship. (It might arguably be acceptable when a democracy is being invaded by a foreign country, but never — other than that — can there be governmental secrecy to protect itself unless the government is a dictatorship — NOT a democracy — in which case the Government is, itself, being the enemy of its own population.) Without such secrecy against the public, the government would be a democracy, because then the population would be voting in an authentically free information-environment where there exists uncensored information to the public, so that each individual can make one’s OWN individual judgments regarding what is true, and what is false. But, otherwise, a government is a dictatorship.

This power (classifying governmental information) is also a government’s power of legal impunity so that it can violate its own laws and know that the voting public will not know that it did. That routine power of classifying information is the intellectual imprisonment of the nation’s entire population.

Julian Assange is not a subject (‘citizen’) of the U.S. Government, nor is he a subject of the UK Government, nor is he a subject of the other two Governments (Sweden and Ecuador) that have participated in assisting America and Britain to place and keep him in varying forms of (now super-max) imprisonment for over a decade, but they have done it, during all of this time, and never yet has he been tried and convicted of anything other than his having jumped bail in 2012 on a phony rape charge that even its alleged victim admitted had been false; so, in effect, if not in reality, his very imprisonment is an example of those governments’ dictatorships — it has already been long-term imprisonment without trial. ONLY a dictatorship does that. Only a dictatorship can do that.

Assange is instead a subject of the Australian dictatorship, which has done nothing at all to assist him or to protest his being raped by ‘law’ in those foreign lands. The fact that there are not revolutions overthrowing and replacing the Governments in each one of the countries that has participated in this ‘legal’ rape of Assange is testimony to the effectiveness of the intellectual imprisonment of each one of those nations’ populations.

Assange has been in various forms of imprisonment by UK for the last ten years without his ever having been convicted of anything except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accuser denied were true). And yet he remains now in solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government won’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here — imprisoned for up to 175 years — instead of in Britain). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the U.S. regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been WikiLeaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration then prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s Government allowed UK’s Government to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” Earlier, her handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing, was a travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, are all to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against that champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. On 10 December 2021, BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons. It’s the world’s #1 police-state. Is that because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? Evidence will now be linked-to on that question: America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few). And Norway’s aristocracy had also been part of this scandal. It is an international scandal, and keeps getting worse.

On June 19th, Chris Hedges headlined “The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange & the Death of Journalism” and documented that the alleged ‘assurances’ that the U.S. regime had provided to the UK regime on the basis of which the latter dictatorship would be transferring Assange to a super-max prison in the United States, had as many holes in it as a ton of Swiss cheese.

ONLY in barbaric dictatorships is any of this even possible, but here it is real.

Assange’s ‘trial’ will be the trial of ‘democracy’ in whatever nation it will be executed.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

A Credible Explanation of How Kakhovka Dam Was Blown Up

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By Eric Zuesse 

Source: Dissident Voice

Though Western ‘news’ media have gotten their ‘explanation’ of this event from Ukraine’s Government, it never made sense that Russia would have wanted to flood, harm, and weaken, the entire western half of the territory that Russia now controls in the former Ukraine, including in Crimea (which was getting its water-supply from that dam).

The anonymous author of the “Moon of Alabama” website has a long and almost flawless record of accurately exposing realities that mainstream U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media had been hiding, and the latest such is his June 13 “Did Russia Destroy The Nova Kakhovka Dam?” His report there turns upside-down and inside-out the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ that the dam had been bombed not by a missile, but by an explosive device which had been placed there by saboteurs whom Ukraine’s Government assumes were from Russia. U.S.-Government-approved ‘news’-media accept and amplify that assumption, but “MoA” does not.

First, he quotes the New York Times and other U.S. Government mouthpieces presenting the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of the blow-up; and then he rips it apart by noting the extremely relevant (but in U.S.-and-occupied lands ignored) fact, that on May 12, Britain had supplied to Ukraine its “Storm Shadow” missiles that are designed to have a two-stage bombing-operation: first, a normal surface bomb, but then after it a fuse-ignited ground-penetrating bomb to explode deeper inside even a fortified and hardened underground target such as that dam was apparently blown up.

The British-supplied Storm Shadow weapon is perfect for this type of destruction — exploding from deep underground, instead of from the surface. And whereas Russia doesn’t have any Storm Shadows, Ukraine definitely does — ever since May 12.

The present news-report about U.S.-and-allied lies is being simultaneously submitted for publication by all of the standard U.S.-Government mouthpiece propaganda-media, just in case any of them might finally want to go beyond their standard U.S.-Government-approved sources.

Ever since at least late 2022, Russia has been warning that Ukraine’s government wants to blow up that dam. For example, on 1 November 2022, Reuters headlined “Russia announces wider evacuation of occupied southern Ukraine,” and reported that,

“Due to the possibility of the use of prohibited methods of war by the Ukrainian regime, as well as information that Kyiv is preparing a massive missile strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, there is an immediate danger of the Kherson region being flooded,” Vladimir Saldo, Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson province, said in a video message.

“Given the situation, I have decided to expand the evacuation zone by 15 km from the Dnipro,” he said. “The decision will make it possible to create a layered defence in order to repel Ukrainian attacks and protect civilians.”

Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning to use a so-called “dirty bomb” to spread radiation, or to blow up a dam to flood towns and villages in Kherson province. Kyiv says accusations it would use such tactics on its own territory are absurd, but that Russia might be planning such actions itself to blame Ukraine. …

Saldo, the Russian-imposed occupation leader for the province, identified seven towns on the east bank that would now be evacuated, comprising the main populated settlements along that stretch of the river.

Even U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media occasionally report relevant facts when they find them useful to mention in a ‘news’-report that has an anti-Russian “spin.”

So: we know that Russia’s Government was trying to protect the residents in that region against this attack, but U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media have unquestioningly accepted the Ukrainian government’s accusation that Russia’s Government did it. And, now, an extremely likely explanation has finally been provided, which implicates both Ukraine’s government and UK’s Government as having done it.

The Twilight of Freedom

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By Craig Murray

Source: CraigMurray.org.uk

Three British journalists I know personally – Johanna Ross, Vanessa Beeley and Kit Klarenberg – have each in the last two years been detained at immigration for hours on re-entering their own country, and questioned by police under anti-terrorist legislation.

This is plainly an abuse of the power to detain at port of entry, because in each case they could have been questioned at any time in the UK were there legitimate cause, and the questioning was not focused on their travels.

They were in fact detained and interrogated simply for holding and publishing dissident opinion on foreign policy, and in particular for supporting a more collaborative approach to Russia – with which, lest we forget, the UK is not at war.

These detentions have taken place over the period of a couple of years. All were targeted for journalism and this is plainly a continuing policy of harassment of dissident British journalists.

I have three times in that same period been questioned by police in my own home in Edinburgh for journalism, over three separate matters. I spent four months in jail for publicising essential information to show that a high level conspiracy was behind the false accusations against Scottish Independence leader Alex Salmond.

Julian Assange remains in maximum security jail for publicising the truth about war crimes. Meanwhile a new National Security Bill goes through the Westminster parliament, which will make it illegal for a journalist possess or publish classified information.

This has never been illegal. The responsibility has always lain with the whistleblower or leaker, not the journalist or publisher. It seeks to enshrine in UK law precisely what the US Government is seeking to achieve against Assange using the US 1917 Espionage Act. This is a huge threat to journalism.

It is also worth pointing out that, if Evan Gershkovich was indeed doing nothing more than he has claimed to have been doing in Russia, that action would land him a long jail sentence in either the USA or the UK under the provisions which both governments are attempting to enforce.

On top of that, you have the Online Safety Bill, which under the excuse of protecting against paedophilia, will require social media gatekeepers to remove any kind of content the government deems as illegal.

When you put all this together with the new Public Order Act, which effectively gives the police authority to ban any protest they wish to ban, there is a fundamental change happening.

This is not just a theoretical restriction on liberty. Active enforcement against non-approved speech is already underway, as shown by those detentions and, most strongly of all, by Julian’s continued and appalling incarceration.

To complete the horror, there is no longer a genuine opposition within the political class. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party opposes none of this wave of attacks on civil liberties. The SNP has been sending out identical stock replies from its MPs on Julian Assange, 100% backing the UK government line on his extradition and imprisonment.

I feel this very personally. I know all of these people affected – Julian, Alex, Kit, Vanessa, Johanna, and view them as colleagues whose rights I defend, even though I do not always agree with all of their disparate views.

Two other people I know personally and admire are under attack. The campaign of lies and innuendo against Roger Waters this last few weeks has been astonishing in both its viciousness and its mendacity, recalling the dreadful attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

More mundane but also part of the same phenomenon, my friend Randy Credico has had his Twitter account cancelled.

To be a dissident in the UK, or indeed the “West”, today is to see, every single day, your friends persecuted and to see the walls close in upon yourself.

A unified political class, controlled by billionaires, is hurtling us towards fascism. That now seems to me undeniable.