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The Rutherford Institute :: You’re Under Arrest: How the Police State Muzzles Our Right to Speak Truth to Power | By John W. Whitehead |

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2019

It’s your choice: Comply, or die.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/youre_under_arrest_how_the_police_state_muzzles_our_right_to_speak_truth_to_power

By John W. Whitehead

“History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is ‘one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.’”—Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissenting, Nieves v. Bartlett (2019)

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

What the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

For those who refuse to meekly accept the heavy-handed tyranny of the police state, the danger is all too real.

We live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.

This is the painful lesson being imparted with every incident in which someone gets arrested and charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers-that-be.

Merely daring to question, challenge or hesitate when a cop issues an order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, free speech be damned.

In fact, getting charged or arrested is now the best case scenario for encounters with police officers who are allowed to operate under the assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of disagreement or even question.

The worst case scenario involves getting probed, beaten, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, shot, or killed by police.

This mindset that anyone who wears a government uniform (soldier, police officer, prison guard) must be obeyed without question is a telltale sign of authoritarianism goose-stepping its way towards totalitarianism.

The rationale goes like this:

Do exactly what I say, and we’ll get along fine. Do not question me or talk back in any way. You do not have the right to object to anything I may say or ask you to do, or ask for clarification if my demands are unclear or contradictory. You must obey me under all circumstances without hesitation, no matter how arbitrary, unreasonable, discriminatory, or blatantly racist my commands may be. Anything other than immediate perfect servile compliance will be labeled as resisting arrest, and expose you to the possibility of a violent reaction from me. That reaction could cause you severe injury or even death. And I will suffer no consequences. It’s your choice: Comply, or die.

Indeed, as Officer Sunil Dutta of the Los Angeles Police Department advises:

If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

This is not the attitude of someone who understands, let alone respects, free speech.

Then again, there can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.

What is this language of force?

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

Unfortunately, this is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to speak freely…

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Banksy

 

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How US “good guys” wiped out an Afghan family — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2019

More civilians than soldiers die in war.

Still recruiting terrorists by killing civilian families.

17 years and still losing.

How is this defending America?

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-06-03/us-bomb-kills-afghan-family

How US “good guys” wiped out an Afghan family

This story was published in partnership with:

The New York Times

Find out how to use the Bureau’s work

It was 4am when Masih Ur-Rahman Mubarez’s wife Amina called, an unusually early time for their daily chat. When he picked up the phone, he could hear the panic in her voice.

Amina was calling from the Afghan province of Wardak, where she brought up their children while he worked over the border in Iran to support them. She told him that soldiers were raiding their village. Some of them were speaking English. Amina was told to turn off her phone but Masih asked her not to – how would he know they were ok?

The call ended with Masih saying he would call again when things had calmed. But at 9am, when he dialled his wife’s number, her phone was off. He tried again at 9.30am. Still off. Through the whole of that day and the next, he repeatedly called. But Amina’s phone remained off.

It took another day for him to the learn the truth. Relatives avoided his calls or gave vague replies to his questions, until finally his brother broke the news. “He tried to avoid telling me the whole story, but I insisted that he tell me the truth,” Masih recalled in a wavering voice. “He told me to have patience in God – no one is left.”

An airstrike on Masih’s house had killed his wife and all his seven children, alongside four young cousins. His youngest child was just four years old.

In the following weeks, as grief consumed Masih, so did an intense need for answers. Who had killed his family and why?

His journey to find out would last more than eight months, pit him against military and government officials, and see him face obfuscation and denials. It would lead him to work alongside the Bureau and journalists from The New York Times, putting together a puzzle piece by piece. Ultimately it would lead to one definitive conclusion – the US military had dropped the fatal bomb.

His story is one window into the struggles faced by families across Afghanistan every day. Airstrikes are raining down on the country, with US and Afghan operations now killing more civilians than the insurgency for the first time in a decade. But getting confirmation of who has carried out a fatal strike is often impossible. An apology, or any form of public accountability, is even harder to obtain.

The US denied repeatedly that it had bombed Masih’s house, or even that any airstrike in his area had taken place. But using satellite imagery, photos and open source content, we proved that denial false. Following our investigation, the military has now admitted that it did conduct a strike in that location, but it still denies it resulted in civilian deaths.

Masih spent months working alongside journalists to prove who had killed his family

A happy life destroyed

“Prior to my house being bombed, I had a normal life. I was married, had four daughters and three sons,” Masih told our reporter in Kabul. “Our life was full of love.”

Masih was the headteacher in a local school run by a Swedish organisation before financial issues forced him to seek employment in construction in Iran in 2014. He still reminisces about his days in the village of Mullah Hafiz, where he split his time between farming, teaching and his children. “We were so happy,” he says.

Exactly what happened on the day of the strike is not clear. Villagers say that overnight on September 22 2018, bombs were dropped in Mullah Hafiz, which lies in a Taliban-controlled area. The same night, they said, soldiers carried out a raid on the village as part of an operation on a Taliban prison, which was about 200 metres away from Masih’s house. One of the villagers said Taliban fighters had fired on the soldiers from some civilian homes.

A cousin of Masih’s told us he and and other male relatives were taken away and detained, alongside some other villagers. At some point the next morning, a strike hit Masih’s house. When his relatives returned, they found the building flattened. In the rubble were the bodies of Amina, the seven children and their four cousins, they say.

Masih’s children were aged between four and 14 years old; his wife Amina was 32. The cousins, all girls, were aged from 10 to 16.

Clockwise from top left: Masih’s children Mohammad Elyas (8), Mohammad Wiqad (10), Fahim (5), Samina (7) and Mohammad Fayaz (4) all died in the strike, alongside their two elder sisters, Anisa (14), and Safia (12), and their mother Amina (32). (Fahim appears in both photos in the bottom row) Photo supplied by family. We do not have photos of the teenage girls or Masih’s wife Amina
The full list of those who died in the strike
Name Age
Mohammad Fayaz 4
Fahima 5
Samina 7
Mohammad Ilyas 8
Mohammad Wiqad 10
Amina 10
Safia 12
Zarifa 12
Anisa 14
Nafisa 14
Rahmania 16
Amina 32

On finding out his family had been killed, Masih returned immediately to Afghanistan. The return journey was tough – having been working illegally in construction in Iran he says he had to hand himself to the Iranian police and wait for deportation. It took him three days to get back to his village. It was then that he began hunting for the truth.

Masih claims government officials acknowledged in private that his family died. However while both the Afghan Ministry of Defence and the provincial police publicly announced in the days following the attack that an operation on a Taliban prison had killed large numbers of Taliban fighters, they did not acknowledge that any civilians died in a strike.

“I have repeatedly told them that it was my children, that it was my wife, that it was my cousins, that they were all civilians and that my house was destroyed,” Masih said. “When they say that they have bombed a [Taliban] prison, they have absolutely not done that.”

Journalists investigate

As Masih was investigating, so was the Bureau. We had independently heard of a strike that had killed multiple children in Mullah Hafiz on September 23, and were trying to establish who had carried it out.

The Bureau has been recording strikes in Afghanistan for over four years. Getting to the bottom of what has happened is often difficult. The attacks mostly take place in remote areas under Taliban control. They are often not reported by local media and neither the US nor the Afghan military is fully transparent.

We faced all these same barriers with this strike. But this time, over the course of several months, working with Afghan reporters on the ground and the Visual Investigations unit of The New York Times, we were able to prove that the US was responsible for a strike which killed multiple children.

Our first step was to contact both the Afghan and the US militaries.

Officials in the Afghan Ministry of Defence told us no one was available for comment.

When we went to the US military, we were met with contradictory statements. Its story changed repeatedly as our reporting developed and the New York Times got involved.

A US spokesperson first stated in October that there were “no connections” between their actions and the allegations of civilian casualties in Mullah Hafiz. In a later email in February, they claimed to have no record at all of a strike in the district on September 23.

In a Pentagon report released this month the strike on Masih’s house was not included in a list of confirmed civilian casualties.

Finally, as we prepared to go to press earlier this week, they admitted they had bombed Masih’s house. Days later, there was yet another statement. American soldiers had reported being fired on from the house, they said, and a strike had been carried out “in self-defence.” But they did not kill Masih’s family, they said.

The military has not told us what information it used to reach its conclusion. It is not uncommon for the US to rely, for the most part, on pre-strike and post-strike footage filmed by aircraft to investigate claims that an air attack has harmed civilians. But when a strike hits a building, as in the case of Masih’s home, it can be difficult to tell what’s under the rubble.

Crucial evidence

Masih wanted the world to know what had happened. Interviews he did with Afghan media led us to contact him, and in April we were able to meet him in Kabul. By this time, he had been knocking on doors for months in search for answers. He had carefully collected evidence he hoped would shine a light on what happened that day.

Some of this helped our investigation. First we needed to do the basics – to verify that a strike had hit his house. We had to do this without visiting the village, because it was not safe for reporters to go to the Taliban-controlled area. From metadata contained in photos supplied by Masih, we were able to obtain the coordinates of his home. We used these to get satellite images which showed the house had been attacked, with the damage consistent with a strike. A team from the Bureau and the The New York Times’ Visual Investigations unit also reviewed photos of Masih’s children’s graves and found satellite images of the burial site. Both the damage to the house and the burial site are only visible in satellite images after September 23.

Crucially, we also were given photos of weapon fragments said to be found at the site of the strike. While most were nondescript, a few pieces had distinctive markings. On one piece we could see what is known as a “CAGE code” – this is a unique identifier given to companies which supply government or defence agencies. This code linked the fragment to a US-based company called Woodward, that makes components for a missile kit known as a JDAM. These enable bombs to be guided by GPS.

Weapons experts then reviewed the photos, and saw something else – the distinctive pattern of four bolts on a tail fin that identified it as part of a JDAM.

We trawled defence and aviation news archives and found the Afghan military did not have capability to use JDAMs. The only other military carrying out strikes in Afghanistan is America’s.

We asked the weapons experts which military could have dropped the bomb and they confirmed what we had learned – only the US military has the capability to use JDAMs in Afghanistan.

The weapon fragments said to be found in the rubble from the strike on Masih’s house Via Masih
A close-up of the tail fin with distinctive arrangement of four bolts that indicated it was from a JDAM Via Masih

After four and a half years of recording civilian casualties from strikes in Afghanistan, we were finally able to say for certain who pushed the button on one.

Answering the why

While we believe our investigation answers the who, the why is less clear.

The US’s final statement – that they dropped a bomb on the house after American soldiers reported being fired on – tallies in part with one villager who said the soldiers were shot at from civilian homes. However two others say everything was quiet in the area by the time the strike happened.

Perhaps a clue lies in the location of the house, which was set apart from the rest of the village, very close to a Taliban prison. We know an operation on the prison was carried out, with villagers claiming that a number of security force members being held inside were rescued during the raid. It’s possible that Masih’s house was hit by accident.

This panorama shows how close the two buildings were:

Panorama of the outskirts of Mullah Hafiz, showing the Taliban prison on the left and Masih’s family home on the right Photo sent via Masih

Without full military transparency, these questions will remain unanswered. And whatever the reason for the attack, the US still claims it did not kill any civilians.

Soaring civilian deaths

Our investigation raises serious questions about US military accountability.

Last year, the UN found that US military operations in Afghanistan killed and injured 632 civilians – more than double the year before. The US military has admitted to just over 20 percent of that figure. The reason for the discrepancy, says the US, is that they have access to intelligence such as drone footage which shows that “what often looks like civilian harm from US actions was actually a result of other causes.”

In its first statement back in October, the US spokesperson had warned us: “It isn’t uncommon for insurgents to use these accusations to drive a wedge between the military and the population. As Secretary Mattis has said: ‘We do everything humanly possible consistent with military necessity, taking many chances to avoid civilian casualties at all costs.

“’We’re not perfect guys, but we are the good guys. And so we’re doing what we can.’”

There have been calls for change, even from the Pentagon itself. It released a report in February highlighting concerns about how the US military investigates and responds to civilian casualties. The military was sometimes seen as “restrictive” in how it assessed allegations of civilian harm received from organisations like the Bureau or NGOs, it said.

The report also found that different regional military commands had different processes for reviewing civilian casualties. The US is now developing the first military-wide policy on civilian casualties, which has sparked hopes that things may improve.

For Masih, the pursuit of justice continues. The little money the family managed to save as a result of his work in Iran is now being used for this battle.

“We have a saying; staying silent against injustice is a crime, therefore I will spread my voice throughout the world,” Masih said. “I will talk to everyone, everywhere. I will not stay silent.

“But this is Afghanistan. If someone hears us, or not, we will still raise our voice.”

Additional reporting by Abbie Cheeseman and Ahmed Mengli. This investigation was a partnership between the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The New York Times’ Visual Investigations team.

To see the video of this story, click here.

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Coulter: The Whole Folk Tale and Nothing but the Folk Tale | Breitbart

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2019

“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”

― Ayn Rand

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/06/05/coulter-the-whole-folk-tale-and-nothing-but-the-folk-tale/

by ANN COULTER

New York City public school teachers recently revealed that they have been instructed to reject “objectivity,” “written documentation” and “perfectionism” by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, as part of his effort to “dismantle racism.” Carranza identified these values as tools of the “white-supremacy culture.”

Our cultural overlords are way ahead of Carranza. With lightning speed, we’ve abandoned old, hidebound, Anglo-Saxon facts-and-evidence standards in deference to new, fresh African folk tale standards. (According to J. Bekunuru Kubayanda, writing in the Afro-Hispanic Review, even Latin America and the Caribbean got their oral history traditions from Africa.) 

Thus, for example, Gen. Robert E. Lee has been re-invented as a white genocidal lunatic. Meanwhile, actual tape-recorded evidence of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. engaging in sex orgies will not put a dent in his hero status. 

Michael Korda, a lion of the New York literary set, published an admiring biography of Lee just five years ago, Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee. His book received a favorable review in The New York Times, which chirped that Korda portrayed Lee as a “master strategist” who was “physically fearless.” 

How can it be that the longtime editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and author of dozens of books — not to mention The New York Times itself — totally missed that Lee was a vicious racist, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever? Thank God Nikki Haley’s parents emigrated here from India so she could set Korda straight on this country’s history!

(Here’s an interesting fact about Lee: After graduating second in his class at West Point, he spent several decades overseeing the construction of fortifications on our borders. He rose to fame during the war with — GUESS WHO? — Mexico! Wasn’t it great when our military defended our country?) 

Two weeks ago, David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer, revealed shocking facts about the civil rights leader, based on extensive FBI notes on the wiretaps of his hotel rooms. In addition to King’s endless orgies with prostitutes, lesbians, ministers and parishioners, Garrow reports that King “looked on, laughed and offered advice” as one minister forcibly raped a parishioner. 

If any confederate cavalryman had behaved like King, Lee would have had him shot. American folk tale version-cum-Revealed Truth: Lee is Hitler. King is a saint. 

It took The New York Times a mere two weeks to report on Garrow’s mind-blowing article — an article he had offered to the Times (and dozens of other outlets), but which the newspaper declined to print. 

The Times’ eventual acknowledgment of Garrow’s groundbreaking research began with a column titled, “A Black Feminist’s Response to Attacks on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy.” The author attacked Garrow’s “irresponsible account, drawn from questionable documents.” (Yes, that would be the treacherous “written documentation”!) 

This was followed by a news story on Garrow’s findings that bristled with denunciations of … the rapey minister? NO! Denunciations of Garrow for reporting what his research had uncovered. The Times even resurrected a 2002 incident at Emory Law School when Garrow was accused of abusively grabbing the wrists of a school official. 

Wikipedia has still not added the new information to King’s entry. Folk tales take precedence over the written documentation favored by “white-supremacy culture.” 

In our new objectivity-free country, it was an act of indisputable racism for Trump to question whether President Obama was born in America. He may as well have screamed the N-word. 

Even Trump’s loyal little defender, presidential adviser Jared Kushner, refused to deny in an interview this week that Trump’s “birtherism” was racist. (No wonder his father-in-law thinks he’s a girl.)…

This week, the “oral tradition” of the Central Park wilding as told in the debut of Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series, “When They See Us,” forced the chief sorcerer — er, prosecutor — Linda Fairstein to resign from the boards of three charities and Vassar College. As one of the convicted, then “exonerated,” rapists said, “Even if it’s 30 years later, she has to pay for her crime.” 

The actual evidence against the convicted rapists was, and remains, overwhelming, as I have described repeatedly in columns and in my book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. Evidently, I will be forced to continue restating the facts periodically, in some third-world version of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. 

In our new country, nonsense like “objectivity” and “written documentation” are mere tricks, chicanery, hocus-pocus, used against “communities of color” — as Schools Chancellor Carranza explained — in order “to win victories for white people.”

Be seeing you

How To Prevent Another Militarized Police Massacre ...

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More Police Raids As War On Journalism Escalates Worldwide – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2019

AFP: I’m still staggered by the power of this warrant. It allows the AFP to “add, copy, delete or alter” material in the ABC’s computers. All Australians, please think about that: as of this moment, the AFP has the power to delete material in the ABC’s computers. Australia 2019.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/05/more-police-raids-as-war-on-journalism-escalates-worldwide/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

The Australian Federal Police have conducted two raids on journalists and seized documents in purportedly unrelated incidents in the span of just two days.

Yesterday the AFP raided the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst, seeking information related to her investigative report last year which exposed the fact that the Australian government has been discussing the possibility of giving itself unprecedented powers to spy on its own citizens. Today they raided the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp, seizing information related to a 2017 investigative report on possible war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

In a third, also ostensibly unrelated incident, another Australian reporter disclosed yesterday that the Department of Home Affairs has initiated an investigation of his reporting on a story about asylum seeker boats which could lead to an AFP criminal case, saying he’s being pressured to disclose his source.

“Why has AFP suddenly decided to carry out these two raids after the election?” tweeted Australian Sky News political editor David Speers during the Sydney raid. “Did new evidence really just emerge in both the Annika Smethurst and ABC stories?!”

Why indeed?

“If these raids unconnected, as AFP reportedly said, it’s an extraordinary coincidence,” tweeted The Conversation chief political correspondent Michelle Grattan. “AFP needs to explain ASAP the timing so long after the stories. It can’t be that inefficient! Must be some explanation – which makes the ‘unconnected’ claim even more odd.”

Odd indeed.

It is true that the AFP has formally denied that there was any connection between the two raids, and it is in fact difficult to imagine how the two could be connected apart from their sharing a common theme of exposing malfeasance that the government wanted kept secret. If it is true that they are unconnected, then what changed? What in the world could have changed to spark this sudden escalation of the Australian government’s assault on the free press?

Well, if as I suggested recently you don’t think in terms of separate, individual nations, it’s not hard to think of at least one thing that’s changed.

“The criminalization and crack down on national security journalism is spreading like a virus,” WikiLeaks tweeted today in response to the ABC raid. “The Assange precedent is already having effect. Journalists must unite and remember that courage is also contagious.”

“The arrest and espionage charges against Assange was just the beginning, as many in the media, even those who hate Assange, feared,”  tweeted Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria in response to the News Corp raid. “The home of a mainstream Australian journalist was raided Wed. morning by police because of a story she worked on.”

“Shameful news from Australia as the police raid journalists’ offices and homes,” tweeted legendary Australian journalist John Pilger. “One warrant allows them to ‘add, copy, delete or alter’ computer files at the ABC. The assault on Julian Assange was a clear warning to all of us: it was only the beginning.”

If you think about it, it would have been far less disturbing than the alternative if there were a connection between the two raids, because the alternative is vastly more sinister: that the Australian government’s attitude toward the free press has changed. And that it has perhaps done so, as Australia has been doing for decades, in alignment with the behavior of the rest of the US-centralized empire.

In an article for Consortium News titled “After Assange’s Espionage Act Indictment, Police Move Against More Journalists for Publishing Classified Material”, Joe Lauria reminds us that Australia is not the first nation within the western power alliance to see such an escalation since the paradigm-shifting imprisonment of Julian Assange in the UK.

“Police in Paris arrested two journalists who were covering Yellow Vest protests on April 20,” Lauria writes.  “One of the journalists, Alexis Kraland, said he was taken into custody after refusing to be searched and to turn his camera over to police at Gare du Nord train station. The largest journalism union in France demanded an explanation from police.”

“And on May 10 in San Francisco, police using sledgehammers to break down the door, raided the home of Bryan Carmody, a freelance journalist, to get him, while handcuffed, to reveal his source who leaked him a police report into the sudden death the city’s elected public defender,” Lauria added. “Police took away computers, cameras, mobile phones and notes.”

So we’re seeing a pattern already. You can choose to ignore it or dismiss it with a pleasant story, or you can acknowledge that we appear to be in the midst of a rapidly escalating shutdown of the free press in the western world.

There does not necessarily have to be any centrally-planned conspiracy behind this trend; it can simply be the natural result of an ailing empire seeing that it’s going to need a lot more war, lies and deception in order to keep from collapsing, and responding accordingly. Once the Assange line was crossed, it could simply have served as a precedent for the other governments within the empire to begin doing things they’d already wanted to do anyway.

Julian Assange is the dot of a question mark at the end of a historically important question which we are all being asked right now. That question reads as follows: Does humanity wish to create a society that is based on truth and holds power to account, or does it want the exact opposite?

So far, the general consensus answer to that question has been going somewhere along the lines of “We’re actually fine with a headlong plunge into Orwellian dystopia, thanks.” But as the implications of that answer become clearer and clearer, we may yet see some stirrings in the other direction before it is too late.

_____________________

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me onFacebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Craig Murray – Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2019

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

When, eight years late, the European Arrest Warrant request for Assange was finally put before a Swedish court, the court refused to issue it.

Readers of this blog are amongst the very few people who have had the chance to learn the information that the original European Arrest Warrant for Julian Assange from Sweden was not issued by any court but by a prosecutor; that this was upheld in the UK Supreme Court despite the Court’s open acknowledgement that this was not what the UK Parliament had intended by the phrase that the warrant must come from a “judicial authority”; and that the law had been changed immediately thereafter so it could not be done again.

Consequently in seeking a new European Arrest Warrant against Assange, Swedish prosecutors had finally, eight years on, to ask a court for the warrant. And the court looked at the case and declined, saying that the move would be disproportionate. It therefore remains the case that there is no Swedish extradition warrant for Assange. This is a desperate disappointment to the false left in the UK, the Blairites and their ilk, who desperately want Assange to be a rapist in order to avoid the moral decision about prosecuting him for publishing truths about the neo-con illegal wars which they support.

The problem is that the evidence of sexual crimes was always extremely, extremely weak to anybody who took the trouble to examine it – which is why the same false left were desperate to convince us that it was wrong to examine the evidence as the “victim” must always be believed, a strange abandonment of the entire principle of justice.

In the lesser charge which fell through the statute of limitations, Anna Ardin claimed that during the act of sex Julian Assange had deliberately torn the condom with his fingers. But the torn condom she produced to police had none of Assange’s DNA on it, a physical impossibility.

In the remaining charge of “rape, less serious”, Sofie Wilen alleges the following. She had consensual sex with Assange in her bed. She then dozed and was “half asleep” when Assange started having sex with her again. He states that she was fully awake and responsive through a series of sexual acts.

I have looked Julian Assange in the eye when he explained what happened, and believed him. I have not had the same opportunity with Sofie Wilen, and quite possibly she is equally honest in her account of events and I would believe her too. They had both been drinking. The difficulty is that this scenario is incapable of proof. A private sexual act that everybody agrees started and was consummated as fully consensual, but then continues or resumes as one partner is drifting off or has drifted off, but the other partner says they were still awake, absent a recording is quite simply incapable of proof either way.

What is beyond doubt true is that Sofie Wilen had no thought she had been raped when she met police to ask if Assange could be compelled to take an HIV test – a visit to the police which had been encouraged by Anna Ardin (she of the faked condom evidence). Ardin was present during Wilen’s police interview.

At the police station on 20 August, Wilen texted a friend at 14.25 “did not want to put any charges against JA but the police wanted to get a grip on him.”

At 17.26 she texted that she was “shocked when they arrested JA because I only wanted him to take a test”.

The next evening at 22.22 she texted “it was the police who fabricated the charges”…

Be seeing you

Assange

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Why Gun Ownership Rates Tell Us Little About Homicide Trends in America | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 5, 2019

One of the rare websites where the commenters are on a par with the author.

https://mises.org/wire/why-gun-ownership-rates-tell-us-little-about-homicide-trends-america

Every time a homicide committed with a firearm makes the national news, it happens like clockwork: a variety of pundits in the corporate media quickly pen columns advocating for ever broader and stricter gun control laws. If only government agents were entrusted with a strict monopoly (or near-monopoly) on firearm ownership — we are told — then the United States would have much lower homicide rates similar to those found in most other so-called “developed” countries like Norway or Canada.

The journalists and pundits who write these articles present their argument as if they were merely repeating a consensus among scholars who all agree that guns are the reason homicide rates are significantly higher in the United States — well, in many parts of it — than in Canada and Europe.

But there’s a problem with this claim: there is not at all a consensus among criminologists, sociologists, and historians that guns are the primary or driving factor behind the United States’ relatively high homicide rates.

Gun-Driven Crime vs. Culture-Driven Crime

Contrary to the simplistic narrative often pushed by columnists at the Washington Post, et al, homicide scholars frequently debate the most important factors behind the US’s homicide numbers.

To be sure, the “more guns, more homicide” position is influential among researchers. Numerous studies have appeared in the past twenty years attempting to draw a causal relationship between total gun-ownership numbers and homicide. Some of the more notable studies include “The Social Costs of Gun Ownership” by Philip J Cook and Jens Ludwig;” More Guns, More Crime” by Mark Duggan; and “Examining the Relationship Between the Prevalence of Guns and Homicide Rates in the USA,” by Michael Siegel, Craig Ross, and Charles King.

Also influential within this line of thinking is the book Crime Is Not the Problem by Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. Their claim is not that more guns produce more crime, but that American crime is more lethal thanks to the high availability of guns.

There have always been two big problems with these types of studies, and both were covered in a 2018 Rand Corp. analysis. One is that there is no data which directly tells us how many guns are owned by or available to Americans. Researches attempting to show correlations between crime and gun ownership must rely on proxies such as the “FS/S” proxy, which is the proportion of suicides that were firearm suicides. Other proxies include the proportion of residents who are military veterans, and “subscriptions per 100,000 people to Guns & Ammo.”

Writing for Rand, researcher Rouslan Karimov finds this reliance on these proxies problematic, and notes “many such study designs are currently hampered by poor information on the prevalence of gun ownership and the consequent reliance on proxy measures of availability and prevalence.”

A second problem with the more-guns-more-crime hypothesis is the fact that a high crime rate may itself be a driver of high rates of gun ownership. Karimov notes:

In the past 12 years, several new studies found that increases in the prevalence of gun ownership are associated with increases in violent crime. Whether this association is attributable to gun prevalence causing more violent crime is unclear. If people are more likely to acquire guns when crime rates are rising or high, then the same pattern of evidence would be expected.

Efforts to overcome this problem in establishing gun ownership as the driver of high crime rates remains a serious problem for researchers attempting to establish causation.

Homicide Driven by Perceptions of Government Legitimacy

In contrast to this view, we find crime scholars who instead suggest that “a lack of legitimacy of the state and its institutions predicts variation in levels of crime.” The idea’s origins are summarized by Manuel Eisner and Amy Nivette:

But amongst empirical criminologists the idea that legitimacy could explain macro-level variation in crime only gained some prominence in the late 1990s. In ‘Losing Legitimacy’ [Gary] LaFree (1998) argued that three key social institutions – family, economic, and political –motivate citizens to abide by the rules, participate in social control, and obey the law. When these social institutions are seen as unfair, useless, or corrupt, they lose legitimacy and subsequently the ability to maintain social control.

Since then, other authors have explored how a lack of confidence in government’s ability to deliver on its promises leads to greater lawlessness. Examples include ” Beyond Procedural Justice: A Dialogic Approach toLegitimacy in Criminal Just ice” by Anthony Bottoms and Justice Tankebe and “Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law” by Tom R. Tyler.

Perhaps the largest study within this theoretical framework is Randolph Roth’s American Homicide. Roth is doubtful of the pat answers given by both pundits and academics “who claim that they can measure the impact of gun laws or unemployment or the death panlty on homicide rates by controlling statistically for the impact of other variables.” According to Roth, “Those claims are false.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Donald Trump Is The Most Honest US President Of All Time

Posted by M. C. on June 5, 2019

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/04/donald-trump-is-the-most-honest-us-president-of-all-time/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

I happened upon some pictures from Trump’s UK visit with Queen Elizabeth yesterday, which isn’t something I’d normally care about. The British royals are basically just oligarchs who rub your face in it, and the fluffy media publicity around a monarch of one murderous kleptocratic  imperialist regime meeting the leader of another murderous kleptocratic imperialist regime is something I’d usually try to avoid looking at or commenting on.

I’ve paid exactly zero attention to the stories about the visit itself, so if you want to know what kind of tea they drank or how Trump got along with Lord Hothalbotham and the Duchess of Yorksquire or whatever you’ve come to the wrong place. But I saw one photo from the visit that made me stop and realize something that is definitely worth noting: Donald Trump is the most honest US president of all time.

To be clear, I am not saying that Trump actually tells the truth with his words; he obviously does not. Trump is so comfortable with lying that he once tweeted the claim that he’d never urged House Republicans to vote for a particular immigration bill, three days after posting a tweet explicitly urging House Republicans to vote for that bill. He left both tweets up. I mean, that’s like one click away from literally looking someone in the eye while urinating on their leg and telling them it must be the rain.

No, when I say that Trump is the most honest US president of all time, what I mean is that he has a unique gift for exposing the face of the empire for exactly what it is, in all its depravity, all its deceitfulness, all its corruption, and in this case, all its jaw-dropping ridiculousness. I mean, look at this photo:

Really look at it. Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous? Who the fuck dressed him? And what’s going on with that freak in the red dress? And why are these rich assholes all walking in formation? Is it some kind of weird parade for people who’ve never bought their own groceries?

Obama could have made this look normal. Bush would have looked a little bit goofy, but nothing that would make you spit your coffee on your screen. Hell, Bill Clinton would have looked downright at home, like he was born in Buckingham Palace and spent his whole life sipping champagne and groping the maids while he waited for this photo to be taken. It took the badly-dressed awkward posture and golf bod of a reality TV star who became president via 4chan prank to expose that whole absurd royalty display for the risible self-parody that it deserves to be seen as.

Trump’s entire presidency has been like this. Blatant, tactless, and completely unmasked.

Journalist gets literally butchered in an embassy by the Saudi government? Yeah well we don’t want to do anything about that because they’ve got an arms deal with us worth billions of dollars. He just comes right out and says it. When they want to stage a coup in Venezuela, they don’t limit it to CIA covert ops and behind-the-scenes manipulations; the whole administration is on Twitter saying they’re going to keep starving everyone with sanctions until the nation’s president is replaced with the guy they prefer. It’s all right there, right in your face, as closeted and secret Flavor Flav’s fondness for clocks.

His whole cabinet is basically human versions of the departments they represent. His Secretary Treasurer was a Goldman Sachs executive. His CIA Director literally tortured people. His National Security Advisor is an Iraq-raping Bush-era neocon. His Secretary of Commerce is a former Rothschild executive. His EPA Administrator is a former coal lobbyist. His Secretary of State came straight out of the CIA. It’s like he designed a convenient labeling system for everyone who’s unsure of what it is that each department in the executive branch of the US government actually does.

Trump has been continuing and expanding all of the depravities of his predecessors, but he’s been doing so openly, making it look exactly as ugly and disgusting as it is. His supporters try to justify this by claiming he’s making brilliant 4-D chess maneuvers against the Deep State, but Trump isn’t playing chess. He isn’t even playing checkers. He’s playing Uno, and he’s playing it with his hand fully exposed on the table, with his only defense being to point at a red card and say “This one’s green” and point at an eight and say “That’s a two. It’s the best two, absolutely terrific two.”

Even his dishonesty is honesty, in a way. He lies constantly, brazenly and unapologetically, while his predecessors have lied sneakily, subtly and usually only by distortions, omissions and half-truths. Trump is a walking public service announcement that US presidents are liars. Which is the truth.

And I for one think that’s great. It’s entirely possible that Trump will be ousted in 2020 by Joe Biden or by one of Joe Biden’s 397 ideological clones who are also in the race, and that will make a lot of people very happy. It will make them happy because they won’t have to look at the ugly face of Orwellian dystopia anymore, because an infinitely smoother and more charismatic leader will go back to hiding it for them. And then things will at long last go back to normal, the way they always were: no partisan divisiveness, no corrupt politicians, no racism in America, and brunch all day, every day.

The most aggressive anti-Trumpists have no interest in real change, they just want things to go back to the way they were before Trump, which is actually just wanting to go back to the conditions which gave rise to Trump. They’re not interested in waking up, they’re interested in smoothing an uncomfortable wrinkle in their bedsheets so that they can go back to sleep.

And if that happens, fine, whatever; it’s not like they were taking any meaningful action against the ugly face of empire anyway. But at least things got shaken up with a little honesty for a while. A little corrupt, blood-spattered, button-popping honesty.

___________________________

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me onFacebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

 

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Watch “Telling The Truth About Government Is Dangerous Policy” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on June 5, 2019

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Rep. Duncan Hunter Admits His Marine Unit ‘Killed Probably Hundreds of Civilians’ in Iraq – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on June 5, 2019

And proud of it. Hunter is a warparty poster boy. It is so sad that…

Meanwhile, Hunter and his wife Margaret – who were indicted last August on 60 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, records falsification and campaign finance violations related to the alleged misuse of $250,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses – are due to appear in court to stand trial later this year.

https://original.antiwar.com/brett_wilkins/2019/06/04/rep-duncan-hunter-admits-his-marine-unit-killed-probably-hundreds-of-civilians-in-iraq/

by

Rep. Duncan Hunter (D-CA) has come under fire after admitting during a podcast interview that his Marine Corps unit “killed probably hundreds of civilians” during the atrocity-laden First Battle of Fallujah in 2004.

Hunter’s comments came during an interview on Barstool Sports’ “Zero Blog Thirty” podcast in which he voiced support for Edward Gallagher, a decorated Navy SEAL facing trial for alleged war crimes, including shooting unarmed civilians and stabbing a critically wounded prisoner of war to death.

When asked about his support for Gallagher, Hunter doubled down. “I frankly don’t care if he was killed,” the congressman said, referring to the 17-year-old Islamic State fighter allegedly stabbed to death by the SEAL. “I just don’t care. And as a congressman, that’s my prerogative to help a guy out like that.”

“Even if everything the prosecutors say is true in this case, then… Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break,” Hunter added…

According to US veterans of the assault, as well as survivors, journalists, medical personnel, human rights groups and others, Marines indiscriminately killed men, women, children, the elderly and disabled residents of the city.

“Chief Gallagher decided to act like the monster the terrorists accuse us of being,” Navy prosecutor Chris Czaplak said of the defendant. “He handed ISIS propaganda manna from heaven. His actions are everything ISIS says we are.”…

According to the US military, 600 civilians were killed during Vigilant Resolve, which failed to achieve its objective of crushing Fallujah’s resistance to US occupation. A second assault on the city in November-December 2004, Operation Phantom Fury, resulted in the deaths of around 800 more civilians. It was during Vigilant Resolve that commanding general James Mattis earned the moniker “Mad Dog.” After President Donald Trump nominated Mattis for defense secretary, Hunter responded to questions of whether the general was a war criminal by telling critics to “get over it.”…

In addition to defending alleged war crimes, Hunter has also said that if the US wages war against Iran, it should be a nuclear war…

Be seeing you

napalm

 

 

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US approved transfer of nuclear expertise to Riyadh after Khashoggi murder | Middle East Eye

Posted by M. C. on June 5, 2019

What happened to non-interventionist, bring the troops home Trump?

Saudi Arabia financed 9/11 and they are still taking us for a ride.

I would call Congress morons but that would be insulting to those poor non-Washingtonians.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-approved-transfer-nuclear-expertise-riyadh-after-khashoggi-murder

By

MEE staff

The Donald Trump administration issued two authorisations for the transfer of technical “nuclear expertise” to Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi late last year, US Senator Tim Kaine has revealed.

Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, where Khashoggi resided, called the decision “shocking” – as it came amid global outrage over the Saudi journalist’s gruesome murder on 2 October.

The two approvals were issued on 18 October – only 16 days after Khashoggi was killed – and on 18 February, respectively.

Known as “Part 810 authorisations”, they allow US companies to discuss and work on nuclear-related projects in the Gulf kingdom.

“I have serious questions about whether any decisions on nuclear transfers were made based on the Trump family’s financial ties rather than the interests of the American people,” Kaine said in a statement on Tuesday…

“The process involves a thorough interagency review that requires the Department of Energy to secure the concurrence of the Department of State, and consult with the Departments of Defense and Commerce, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” the official said in an email.

Lawmakers from both major parties introduced legislation in April to require US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to report to Congress about the transfer of nuclear technology to foreign nations.

During a congressional hearing earlier this year, Kaine also personally grilled Perry over when the nuclear transfers to Saudi Arabia were approved.

Perry said at the time that he did not know the specific dates of the approvals.

The Energy Department has also kept the companies involved in the sharing of nuclear technology information with Saudi Arabia confidential, citing the need to protect business interests, Reuters reported.

‘Fuelling a dangerous escalation’

Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of the government in Riyadh, was killed by Saudi agents inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul last autumn.

His death led to unprecedented criticism of Riyadh in Congress…

The US president also vetoed a bill to halt US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and last month, the Trump administration bypassed Congress to push through a weapons sale to the Gulf kingdom.

The authorisations for the transfer of nuclear information to Saudi Arabia come amid growing concerns about the possibility of an atomic arms race in the Middle East.

Earlier this year, bin Salman told CBS News that his country would “without a doubt” try to acquire a nuclear weapon if Iran develops one.

“President Trump’s eagerness to give the Saudis anything they want, over bipartisan congressional objection, harms American national security interests,” Kaine said in his statement on Tuesday.

It is also “one of many steps the administration is taking that is fuelling a dangerous escalation of tension in the region”, he said.

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