A blog about a criminal enterprise
By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War
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By Dave Lindorff The arrest by British Metropolitan Police of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, dragged The arrest by British Metropolitan Police of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, dragged unceremonially out of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on a charge of failure to appear for a court hearing on an expired (and trumped-up) accusation in Sweden of sexual assault, is a grave and terrible threat to independent journalism and to the US Constitution’s First Amendment promise of freedom of the press. Make no mistake. This arrest, made at the UK government’s insistence, for “failure to appear” in court for a no longer required hearing on an expired Swedish extradition request to “question him” about a bogus charge of sexual assault, is all a gigantic fraud. At the same time as the arrest was made, and that the Ecuadorian government shamelessly invited UK police into their Embassy to arrest and remove Assange, London Police revealed what has long been known by Assange and his attorneys: that behind it all is the US government, which has for nine years had a secret sealed indictment waiting, an indictment charging Assange with a conspiracy with Army veteran Chelsea Manning to steal and disseminate classified US military documents related to conduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A US warrant requesting Assange’s extradition from the UK to the US was also reportedly issued in 2017. As Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept, who worked with Assange and Wikileaks in reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to help Snowden escape US arrest and win asylum in Russia, tweeted early this morning, “If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a US extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs & punish (Wikileaks) for exposing war crimes. Indeed, the specific documents that Assange and Manning released (the latter, released in 2016 from a 32-year military court-martial sentence for disclosing classified military and diplomatic documents after having her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama, but currently in prison again for refusing to testify to a Grand Jury investigating Assange and Wikileaks), exposed grave war crimes by US forces in those two wars. Since Assange seven years ago accepted an asylum offer from Ecuador and its then president Rafael Correa to avoid being extradited by to the US, jumping bail and escaping into the safety of the Ecuadorian Embassy, a shameless campaign by the US government and a complicit mainstream US and UK media to denigrate him, portray him as a sex offender, and deny that he is a journalism, has been underway. As well, during his seven years holed up in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy, which is actually just one floor of an apartment building in a swanky part of London, the US brought intense pressure, including economic threats, against Ecuador trying to get the little Latin American nation to revoke the asylum offer granted to Assange by Correa… For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappenineg!, the uncompromised, collectively run six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/london-police-grab-wikileaks-founder-from-ecuador-embassy-admit-us-seeks-his-extradition/
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen MomentThis article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Here was a tweet from October 2014 about a president who liked to golf: “Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf. Worse than Carter.” And that was just one of 27 times between 2011 and 2016 Tomgram: Alfred W. McCoy, America’s Self-Inflicted WoundThis article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. He was a graduate student when, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he started to explore the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He soon found himself, almost inadvertently, on the heroin trail across Southeast Asia and deep into the CIA’s involvement in an earlier version of America’s drug wars. In a shadow world of black ops, mercenaries, Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Behind Fronds of Fakery, Here’s Some Real NewsThis article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Once upon a time, it was an “invisible government” — or, at least, that’s what David Wise and Thomas Ross called it in their famed 1964 book of that title. Those two journalists, shining Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in PerilThis article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. There are a few genuinely upbeat news stories when it comes to this planet and people trying to figure out how to save us from ourselves and our fossil-fuel addiction. This at a moment of record global surface temperatures and record ocean New TCBH! poem: ‘Patriarchy — how it ends’The kings, One hundred years apart For paving stones And are buried and so on.
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Whose Money? Not YoursThis article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Charles W. Engelhard, Jr., was “the platinum king” of South Africa (and was evidently the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond nemesis Goldfinger). He lived mainly in a “Rhinelike castle, turrets and all,” in Far Hills, New Jersey, but did shuttle via his own fleet of aircraft among Talk Nation Radio: Maria Zakharova on Ukraine and NATOMaria Zakharova is an activist and public lecturer based in Odessa, Ukraine. She has been a strong supporter of the Council of Mothers of May 2, which represents relatives of the scores of progressives murdered at Odessa’s House of Trade Unions by a right-wing mob on May 2, 2014, just a few months after the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine. Ever since the massacre, Zakharova has been promoting the demand by the Council of Mothers for an international investigation Political cartoonist Ron Cobb memorialized Phil Ochs in April 1967 Remembering the Loss of a Great and Irreplaceable Political TroubadourBy Dave Lindorff
The harried and still getting-the-hang-of-things staff of the Los Angeles Vanguard were frantically pasting up the boards of the pages to deliver to the printer to put out the ninth issue of their new left-alternative weekly on time when political cartoonist Ron Cobb walked in the door looking downcast. |