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.”
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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
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 