US Indicts Journalist Who Revealed Major US War Crime In Iraq

A new age of terror is upon us: expose US war crimes, from anywhere in the world, go to prison. US Big Brother has spoken. This is big: as I will show below, even the Nazis were not in enough control of infamy, to go that far: Nazis didn’t indict those who revealed Nazi war crimes (because Nazis didn’t want their crimes to go in front of a judge, lest they be revealed to all Germans!)

US Army Helicopter getting ready to kill those civilians. Courtesy Assange…

Says the New York Times: “Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues. Though Julian Assange is not a conventional journalist, much of what he does at WikiLeaks is difficult to distinguish in a legally meaningful way from what traditional news organizations do.”

In a NYT article by Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, May 23, 2019:
“WASHINGTON — Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, has been indicted on 17 new counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday — a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues.

The new charges were part of a superseding indictment obtained by the Trump administration that significantly expanded the legal case against Mr. Assange, who is already fighting extradition proceedings in London based on an earlier hacking-related count brought by federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia.

The secret documents that Mr. Assange published were provided by the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was convicted at a court-martial trial in 2013 of leaking the records.

“Assange, WikiLeaks affiliates and Manning shared the common objective to subvert lawful restrictions on classified information and to publicly disseminate it,” the indictment said.”

***

This image captured from a classified U.S. military video footage shows Iraqis being shot from an U.S. Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff on July 12, 2007, and released to Reuters on April 5, 2010 by WikiLeaks, a group that promotes leaking to fight government and corporate corruption. Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his assistant and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in the incident. The helicopter initially opens fire on the small group. Minutes later a van comes by, and starts assisting the wounded, and the helicopter opens fire on the van. REUTERS/WikiLeaks/Handout (IRAQ – Tags: CRIME LAW DISASTER MILITARY CIVIL UNREST

Among other things, Wikileaks revealed a US Army video of what looked like a very serious war crime: the arguably deliberate, premeditated, insistent killing, in occupied Iraq, by the US Army, of civilians who happened to be journalists and rescue personnel, over a period of several minutes.

A republic in good standing with respect to human rights, would have thanked Wikileaks, for exposing such a serious crime, and made a serious inquiry to see if crimes against humanity and crimes against the US military code of conduct had been committed.

Such an inquiry would have been an indispensable preliminary to preventing another occurrence of such crimes.

In other words, Wikileaks acted as a whistleblower.

Not satisfied with killing journalists, US Army helicopter in radio relation with headquarters, will now kill the rescuers… Photo courtesy of Assange. Now US says Assange is a spy.

Any unlawful acts on the way to commit whistleblowing should be viewed as minor, considering the gravity of the war crime they revealed: killing deliberately civilians, especially when they belong to categories which should be protected (journalists, rescuers).

The decision taken today by the US is tantamount to saying that keeping war crime secrets is of the utmost importance.

It may be good to remember that the massacre of more than 15 millions in Nazi death camps, including 6 million innocent Jewish civilians, was rendered possible by enough secrecy to enable the average Germans to claim they didn’t really know what was going on.

Without secrecy, the crimes against humanity of the Nazi regime would have been exposed, for all to see. Even Germans couldn’t have denied and the German population and military would have had to put an end to Nazism.

The same holds in roughly all regimes committing crimes against humanity: secrecy is a necessary condition to commit crimes against humanity.

So the US is now saying: we want to be able to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, unnoticed… And we will be capable of doing so, because our judicial system says that exposing such crimes is more of a crime than the crime itself.

This is coherent with the United States not being a State Party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a permanent international criminal court to “bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind – war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide”  

The Nazis faced roughly 150 defined cases where German military personnel disobeyed direct orders, on the ground they were war crimes. Every single time, Nazi authorities counter-ordered to not prosecute the official disobedience…  Because Nazis didn’t want a case in front of a judge, even a military judge.: if they lost, there was jurisprudence. Worse: people would talk about it.

Even the Obama administration saw the validity of this approach, and didn’t prosecute Assange all the way (keeping the workings of their prosecution secret).

At least now, the US is revealed in its full war criminal glory. But, after all, isn’t it how the West was won?

Patrice Ayme

Golden Rule Reassessed

The so-called “Golden Rule” is never to do to others what one would not like others to do to oneself. Or variation thereof. It implicitly, and naively, assumes people don’t like to suffer, or to inflict pain and extermination onto everybody. It also assumes that right and wrong are sharply defined, like night and day (that is literally the root of the religion known as Manichaeism) Thus the Golden Rule is inapplicable: history, Christianism, Islamism are full of people, or even a “God” who is a glutton for pain, punishment, suffering, even when applied to oneself, not just others.

Buddhism is different that way. It just as naively assumes that people want to avoid suffering at all cost. But if we did this, it’s not clear we could exist. Life is full of pains, and that’s alright, because that’s how we pay for it. Actually the best way would be to absorb a deadly dose of barbiturates, and be done, Marilyn Monroe style.

Thus, fundamentally, Buddhism is so irrelevant, as to be inhuman (whereas Christianism and Islamism are all too human!) Pain and suffering are intrinsically human. Pain and suffering are regulators of the human species. Regulation by pain and suffering is not a necessary consequence of the animal condition. Pain and suffering do not necessarily regulate all species. They do not regulate marmots. When marmots come out of hibernation, the head marmot considers her folk, and how many have died over winter. She wants a group of between 15 and 21 individuals. Say three have died: she asks her consort to make her three little ones. Then she turns on a pheromone to turn him off. 

Humans Are Not Marmots. Agent Of Evolution Such as Human Beings Are Made For Deception, And Destruction, Not Contraception

The dominant female cannot bear more than two to four babies. If she is unable to replenish the colony, all by herself, she makes it so that her consort impregnates another female. Thus marmots are made for the Golden Rule: they regulate their population in a very gentle, specific way. Humans do not regulate their population through fancy birth control, but through mayhem, pain, suffering, deprivation, famine.

Reciprocal perversity, not just reciprocal altruism, is then intrinsic to the human species: this . Higher wisdom consists not in denying reality,  but in circumnavigating it, for the best. We have so much technology, nowadays, the fanciest moral principles can be brought to bear.     

Take an example. The cases of Mr. Assange (an Australian citizen) and Mr. Snowden (an US citizen). Assange and Snowden are the two most prominent whistle-blowers in the world (lanceurs d’alerte, alarm launchers, literally, in French).

Julian Assange revealed that US military forces, using an attack helicopter, had killed journalists, and then fired again and again, on would-be rescuers. One would think that US authorities, were they compatible with the Golden Rule as traditionally interpreted, and the Jesus god Obama talks about all the time, would have tanked Assange for this revelation. After all, a democracy should have armed forces beyond any suspicion. (The military forces of the UK, the US and France went through the Second World War without extremely blatant, shocking war crimes committed, although the Americans were ruthless, the French somewhat vengeful, and both the French and British suffered striking war crimes from Nazi forces in May-June 1940). 

Instead of lauding Assange, the Washington government has gone all out to capture Assange, and had an ex-CIA agent accusing him of unclear activities. The same violent treatment was extended to Edward Snowden, who had the presence of mind to escape to Russia (making Putin a force for the good!) Snowden’s crime was to reveal that the so-called “social networks” and “search engines” of the USA were actually spy networks searching for miscreants. That, in turn, brought many questions, including how much of world public opinion is fabricated deliberately by the US “Deep State”.

Philosophically, it means the Obama administration had it all wrong. At least all wrong, if, and only if, democracy is what it wants to preserve. In democracy, or justice, and democracy is about justice for all, as all, information is the prime ingredient. A really democratic state will never, ever pursue information providers. Whistle-blowers are among the saints of democracy. 

Assange and Snowden made precious gifts to US democracy. In answer, Obama offered We The People a poisoned dish: serving rabid nationalism the frantic fever of blind vengeance, forgetting that revealing crimes against democracy should be rewarded, not punished.

None of this is an accident, it’s a system, white as the driven snow, same as a polar bear on a rampage, and for the same reason. Ask the average democratic voters: they will telly you Hillary Clinton is more “Golden Rule” than her friend and rival, Donald Trump. As Bill Moyers put it, in his essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State“:

“Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.”

Take another example: tolerance. Many feel, rightly, that the Golden Rule should include tolerance. Tolerance is necessary to be nice to others. Tolerance goes beyond just being nice to others. It’s about being nice to oneself, be it only by becoming smarter.

Tolerance is, fundamentally, a neurobiological problem. Any brain is a set of neuroglial networks. Any seriously new idea, or new emotion, is a threat against one, or several elements of that set. To welcome the threat requires a deliberate effort. One needs to train oneself to such mental gymnastics, deconstructing, fusioning and rebuilding. Mind. Tolerance is necessary for adopting superior ideas, and feelings, discarding inferior ones.

How does one train for tolerance? One should not be proud of being a citizen of some predigested, mass mental system. Instead one should be ashamed. Instead of following the herd, bleating altogether, one should shout from rooftops: “I am a citizen of the mind“.

The Golden Rule is thus, in part, necessarily, just from the inclusion of tolerance, about building a better mind. And tolerance is not easy to foster (as shown by the local interdiction of “burkini” on some beaches in France. See #tolerance). Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance, but, potentially, its exact opposite:collaborating with mental fascism. We can see that the traditional Golden Rule is not easy to apply.

The real Golden Rule of humanity is that deeper thinking always works best, in the long run. For all that is the most worth it.  

Patrice Ayme’

Plutocracy: I Lie, Therefore I Am

Submission To High Finance From Propaganda To Corruption, USA To EU:

IN EUROPE, OR ELSEWHERE. WHAT IS IT TO BE PROGRESSIVE, OR ON THE LEFT?

The debate about what is progress has been going since before Marx was a toddler. Actually, one can go back to Voltaire, and even all the way back to philosopher Abelard fighting Saint Bernard (Twelfth Century).

Abelard believed in debate (“Sic et Non”). Whereas Saint Bernard was all about having explained the world, all by himself, by following the herd, just as the average Christian gnu. Bernard, one of history’s greatest criminals, and thus, a “Saint, said, with revealing madness: ”I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.”

Nowadays, many emulate Bernard, holding by faith that what they call the “free market” is the way to whatever they believe we are going to. In the “Free Market”, which is neither free, nor a market, banksters are free to enslave Peoples with as much interest as catches their fancy:

Unemployment Reached Nearly 30% in Greece, To Serve Better Banksters & Their Obsequious Servants

[Well above 50% of the total Greek debt is interest. The graph shall be produced another day! Greece has been ravaged by plutocracy, but is starting to resist.]

My answer is the simplest, to guide those who want a better, or just survivable world: You want progress, go with the truth. And truth is always from debate. That is what should guide the “left”, or whatever they want to call themselves.

Want some simple truths?

***

WHY CLIMATE CRIMINALS ARE RICH:

Vanuatu was just lashed by a grade 5, maximum force hurricane. Those used to be very rare. But heat is energy, so more heat, more energy.

A truth that is simple: California is experiencing the greatest drought in millennia. This is directly related, in my learned opinion, to the general accelerated upwelling observed along such coasts, at such latitudes, worldwide.

Thus the unfolding California disaster (expect striking restrictions within weeks), is part of a much more general catastrophe.

Ironically, California, as the epicenter of USA propaganda, is punished by its own instruments.

This ecological disaster wisdom is percolating down. “70% of the unfolding catastrophes experienced today are caused by the climate change.” Just said in Japan, Laurent Fabius, the extremely experienced French Foreign Minister (an ex-Prime Minister).

His USA homologue, John Kerry warned: “future generations will not and should not forgive those who ignore this moment, no matter their reasoning… It is time, my friends, for people to do real cost accounting,” Kerry said. “The bottom line is that we can’t only factor in the price of immediate energy needs. We have to include the long-term cost of carbon pollution. We have to factor in the cost of survival. And if we do, we will find that pursuing clean energy now is far more affordable than paying for the consequences of climate change later.”

Survival is the concept I have been using for years.

When the greenhouse crisis will strike in full, BILLIONS will die. It’s not just a question of acidic seas rising. One thing will lead to another. Giant wars will erupt as ecological systems collapse.

The attack on Crimea by Putin was fully part of it: Crimea controls half of the Black Sea potential oil fields (and exploration was set to start; now it has been blocked by Western law; companies such as Chevron are blocked; corrupt and backward Russia does not have the tech). Ukraine also has potential vast reserve of Shale Oil and Gas.

One should speak of climate derangement caused by the CO2 CRISIS…

***

PAY SCIENTISTS WELL, THEY WILL SAY AS PLUTO WANTS:

It turns out that some “Climate Skeptics” were paid by the fossil fuel industries. All the way to the usual suspect, Harvard University. Cash for claims, that is the faith of academics who grew up in plutocratic universities (I have spent two decades in them, I should have seen many things; I did).

Says the New York Times: “For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.”

The New York Times then details the case of a Harvard-Heritage Foundation, Asian looking (that seems more serious), prostitute, who got at least 1.2 million dollars below the table to say absurdities about CO2.

“Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden.

[By the way, the recent revelation are coming, through Greenpeace, thanks to Freedom of Information Act, which acts only on government agencies, in this case the Smithsonian Institution; lying, private, plutocratic universities are not forced to reveal the corruption; and also: why did the Obama administration revealed it by itself?]

“The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University…”

The god debate in the USA is the mother of all plutocratically founded brain washing: thousands of extremely rich people in the USA work for god, and are paid by taxpayers.

Plutocrats love god, because god works for them.

As Jesus will save all Americans, Americans should just lay nailed to the cross, as plutocrats walk all over them, and just thank them for giving us a hard time, easing our way closer to you, my lord (of Wall Street).

***

SWEDISH CIA WHORES CHANGING SONGS:

So Sweden, who told us that it was “illegal” to go interview Julian Assange for hard-to-believe sex charges, is changing its mind. Now that plutocrats have spent already 20 million dollars keeping him caged because he looked at a Swedish CIA woman funny.

After 1,000 days of detention in the Ecuadoran embassy, Julian Assange will be interviewed by Swedish prosecutors inside the embassy (for having sex in a non-Swedish way).

British plutocracy has spent more than 10 million pounds watching Assange. Yes, more than 18 million dollars.

Money in the pursuit of plutocracy has no limits. This, from a government which introduced PAY TO PLAY, all over Britain, including education.

It is widely expected that, as Sweden is a stooge for the USA, Assange would be deported to the Guantanamo Archipelago, to see his human rights trampled into nothingness. Nothing personal, it’s all about terrorizing Americans.

Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Bodström

Two women admitted to consensual sexual relations with Assange, but then asked him, they said, to stop what they had agreed to, and that he did not. After this sort of interrupted coitus interruptus, one woman lauded Assange on the Internet, and to the next future victim, who proceed immediately to be equally victimized, upon apparent recommendation of the first.

It turned out that one of the accusers of Assange provided the CIA torture program called “rendition” with victims. So Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Bodström tortures, and that is OK. (That was obvious all along, as he tortured Assange for all to see.)

Assange’s biggest crime? Publishing a video showing Americans pilots gunning down journalists, and then those who tried to rescue them. The Pentagon immediately claimed that WikiLeaks was a “security threat”.

It obviously said something about the USA, namely that the behavior of police in Ferguson is something that the USA finds so natural (shoot first, check later) that it is anti-American to reveal it.

***

HAVE THE COURAGE TO CALL POLITICIANS CORRUPT CRIMINALS:

Matthew Yglesias repeated like a parrot what I have said for many years: small-country, and even medium-countries (Sarkozy, Brown, Blair, Monti, Schroeder), or large-countries (Clinton) politicians generally have personal incentives to go along with troika, or plutocratic demands even if they are against their nation’s interests:

“Normally you would think that a national prime minister’s best option is to try to do the stuff that’s likely to get him re-elected. No matter how bleak the outlook, this is your dominant strategy. But in the era of globalization and EU-ification, I think the leaders of small countries are actually in a somewhat different situation. If you leave office held in high esteem by the Davos set, there are any number of European Commission or IMF or whatnot gigs that you might be eligible for even if you’re absolutely despised by your fellow countrymen. Indeed, in some ways being absolutely despised would be a plus. The ultimate demonstration of solidarity to the “international community” would be to do what the international community wants even in the face of massive resistance from your domestic political constituency.”

But a genuine government of the left would be very different. And this is what we have got in Greece right now with Syriza. — not because its policy ideas are wild and crazy, which they aren’t, but because its officials are never going to be held in high esteem, and great gratitude by the Davos, private jet set. Alexis Tsipras is not going to be on bank boards of directors, president of the BIS, or, probably, an EU commissioner. Neither he, nor Finance Minister Varoufakis even like to wear ties, and they have announced they won’t wear any as long as the Greek debt crisis goes on.

Yglesias’ cogent remarks are nothing new, I have been writing about them for more than a decade. OK, Yglesias is part of the establishment of sorts, he has high visibility, he went the plutocratic university par excellence, Harvard, studying philosophy, so he is supposed to be taken seriously (Krugman refers to him continuously, while censoring my declarations saying the same for years).

All right, so that leaders of small countries betray their countries to foster their careers, is not new, indeed. Draghi, for example is a pure product of AMERICAN plutocracy (PhD MIT, jobs at prestigious American Think (Sink?) Tanks, Goldman Sachs, etc.). So how come this pure pluto made in USA is one of the leaders of Europe? Because European plutocracy is the poodle of American plutocracy.

Not that I do not like Draghi. He is better than his Prussian alternatives. That was just an example.

The situation with Luxembourg and Juncker has been even worse: we are talking about 200 billions of tax evasion a year, there.

When there is no economy but corruption, Pluto is its prophet.

We need a name for all this activity. We have it: corruption.

OK, let’s take a rest. Next I will explain why, as in Greece, Nationalism may help. Syriza governs with a right wing party. In Israel, the corrupt Netanyahu may lose power to a left wing opposition which proclaims its nationalism (“Zionism”).

But it will not end before the fat lady sings, and it’s in France that she playing Valkyrie. Fear, little Plutos, the pain you visited on the world!

Patrice Ayme’

Google & Other Free Riders: Civilization Pays For Them

Julian Assange just updated on October 24, 2014, a long essay from 2011: “Google Is Not What It Seems”. In this long expose’, Assange explains that he was taken for a ride by Google, which turned out to be, to his great surprise, little more than an arm of the government of the USA, and the “bipartisan” oligarchy behind it.

Assange’s report is full of amusing details, such as the CEO of Google giving to Hatch, Senior Republican Senator of Nevada, plots of lands. An ex-wife of Google CEO also joined in gifting plots of land to Hatch. (Sen. Errin Hatch is worth personally only 4 million dollars, much less than the average Senator’s worth: 13 million; no doubt Google felt his pain.)

Google’s ocean of equally apportioned gifts to politicians of both sides, goes well beyond any common decency: as I have explained in the past, Google’s billionaires also gave millions of climate deniers, probably to be able to keep on distracting the public with stupidities, just so… While at the same time posing, loud, clear, and splendid, as great protectors of the climate (between two flights in private jumbo jets, between various exclusive ski resorts and paradisiac tax havens).

In the end Assange’s interesting mountain of facts on Google gives birth to a protesting mouse. Here his Assange’s conclusion, in extenso:

“But part of the resilient image of Google as “more than just a company” comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation. Its penchant for luring people into its services trap with gigabytes of “free storage” produces the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly contrary to the corporate profit motive.

Google is perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise—a magical engine presided over by otherworldly visionaries—for creating a utopian future. The company has at times appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into “corporate responsibility” initiatives to produce “social change”—exemplified by Google Ideas.

But as Google Ideas shows, the company’s “philanthropic” efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of U.S. influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.

Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and Internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend Internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the Internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.

If the future of the Internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in Europe—for whom the Internet embodies the promise of an alternative to U.S. cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.

A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.”

Tellingly, Assange focuses on the way Google manipulates data and public opinion. He forgets the core of the problem: where does Google’s immense power comes from?

Well, Google pays very little taxes… And has corrupted politicians, worldwide, to make it so. That does not mean money was always exchanged. But certainly clout and promises were.

An organization which profits from the state, worldwide, as Google does, and then pays nearly no taxes, as the top corporations of the USA, including Google do, is a criminal organization.

(Normal people and small businesses do pay taxes, and, if they do not, they are treated like criminals, and go to jail.)

“Don’t be evil”, Google’s order is just a way to make people impotent: “Don’t be evil, we will do it for you!”

The owners of Google own personal jumbo jets. One can argue that they are leeches on civilization, as all of other owners and CEOs also are, per the nature of the tax-free money they make, and allow their giant corporations to make, and their influence on political leaders, whom they induce to perpetuate the system which makes them fat, well fed leeches.

Leeches are brainless, because they don’t need a brain. And those brainless creatures are fatally weakening civilization.

It’s because of the fact those people use the state, for example the fundamental scientific research financed by the state, but are not contributing to it proportionally to the profits they make from it, that the fundamental research budgets are falling everywhere (and especially in the USA and the EU).

This is not just a matter of lost opportunity, injustice, and the masses increasingly walloping in lack of education, lack of health, employment, and gathering misery. It’s also a matter of refusing to finance research on many lethal infectious diseases: Ebola is a prominent example now. But many diseases, which would be perfectly curable if the research was financed, are perking up. Not just tuberculosis. Research on general antibiotic resistance, worldwide, would be flushed with money, if just one billionaire paid taxes as much as they used to in the 1950s… In the USA. (I’m serious, I checked the numbers, and the science; thousands of antibiotics in the wild could be developed for a few tens of millions of dollars.)

A lot of the “austerity” drive is entirely synonymous with little people paying Google’s, and other enormous corporations’ taxes. And not just with their pocket books, but also with their lives.

Patrice Ayme’