radiofree.asia

Category: Courts and Judges

  • Home Invasions on the Rise: Constitution-Free Policing in Trump’s America

    One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle.
    —James Otis, Revolutionary War activist, on the Writs of Assistance, 1761

    What the Founders rebelled against—armed government agents invading homes without cause—we are now being told to accept in the so-called name of law and order.

    Imagine it: it’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is asleep. Suddenly, your front door is splintered by battering rams. Shadowy figures flood your home, screaming orders, pointing guns, threatening violence. You and your children are dragged out into the night—barefoot, in your underwear, in the rain.

    Your home is torn apart, your valuables seized, and your sense of safety demolished.

    But this isn’t a robbery by lawless criminals.

    This is what terror policing looks like in Trump’s America: raids by night, flashbangs at dawn, mistaken identities, and shattered lives.

    On April 24, 2025, in Oklahoma City, 20 heavily armed federal agents from ICE, the FBI, and DHS kicked in the door of a home where a woman and her three daughters—all American citizens—were sleeping. They were forced out of bed at gunpoint and made to wait in the rain while agents ransacked the house, confiscating their belongings.

    It was the wrong house and the wrong family.

    There were no apologies. No compensation. No accountability.

    This is the new face of American policing, and it’s about to get so much worse thanks to President Trump’s latest executive order, which aims to eliminate federal oversight and empower local law enforcement to act with impunity.

    Titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” the executive order announced on April 28, 2025, removes restraints on police power, offers enhanced federal protections for officers accused of misconduct, expands access to military-grade equipment, and nullifies key oversight provisions from prior reform efforts.

    Trump’s supporters have long praised his efforts to deregulate business and government under the slogan of “no handcuffs.” But when that logic is applied to law enforcement, the result isn’t freedom—it’s unchecked power.

    What it really means is no restraints on police power, while the rest of us are left with fewer rights, less recourse, and a constitution increasingly ignored behind the barrel of a gun.

    This isn’t just a political shift. It’s a constitutional unraveling that hands law enforcement a blank check: more weapons, more power, and fewer consequences.

    The result is not safety; it’s state-sanctioned violence.

    It’s a future in which no home is safe, no knock is required, and no officer is ever held accountable.

    That future is already here.

    We’ve entered an era in which federal agents can destroy your home, traumatize your family, and violate the Fourth Amendment with impunity. And the courts have said: that’s just how it works.

    These rulings reflect a growing doctrine of unaccountability enshrined by the courts and now supercharged by the Trump administration.

    Trump wants to give police even more immunity, ushering in a new era of police brutality, lawlessness, and the reckless deployment of lethal force on unarmed civilians.

    This is how the rights of ordinary Americans get trampled under the boots of unchecked power.

    There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, protected by the Fourth Amendment from unlawful searches and seizures.

    That promise is dead.

    We have returned to the era of the King’s Writ—blanket search powers once used by British soldiers to invade colonial homes without cause. As James Otis warned in 1761, such writs “annihilate the privilege” of privacy and due process, allowing agents of the state to enter homes “when they please.”

    Trump’s new executive order revives this tyranny in modern form: armored vehicles, night raids, no-knock warrants, federal immunity. It empowers police to act without restraint, and it rewards those who brutalize with impunity.

    Even more alarming, the order sets the stage for future legislation that could effectively codify qualified immunity into federal law, making it nearly impossible for victims of police violence to sue.

    This is how constitutional protections are dismantled—not in one dramatic blow, but in a thousand raids, a thousand broken doors, a thousand courts that look the other way.

    Let’s not pretend we’re safe. Who will protect us from the police when the police have become the law unto themselves?

    The war on the American people is no longer metaphorical.

    Government agents can now kick in your door without warning, shoot your dog, point a gun at your children, and suffer no legal consequences—so long as they claim it was a “reasonable” mistake. They are judge, jury, and executioner.

    With Trump’s new order, the architecture of a police state is no longer theoretical. It is being built in real time. It is being normalized.

    Nowhere is this threat more visible than in the unholy alliance between ICE and militarized police forces, a convergence of two of the most dangerous arms of the modern security state.

    Together, they’ve created a government apparatus that acts first and justifies itself later, if at all. And it runs counter to everything the Bill of Rights was designed to prevent: punishment without trial, surveillance without suspicion, and power without accountability.

    When ICE agents armed with military-grade equipment conduct predawn raids alongside SWAT teams, with little to no accountability, the result is not public safety. It is state terror. And it’s exactly the kind of unchecked power the Constitution was written to prevent.

    The Constitution is intended to serve as a shield, particularly the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. But in this new reality, the government has nullified that shield.

    All of America is fast becoming a Constitution-free zone.

    The Founders were aware of the dangers of unchecked power. That’s why they gave us the Fourth Amendment. But rights are only as strong as the public’s willingness to defend them.

    If we allow the government to turn our homes into war zones—if we continue to reward police for lawless raids, ignore the courts for rubber-stamping abuse, and cheer political leaders who promise “no more handcuffs”—we will lose the last refuge of freedom: the right to be left alone.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Constitution cannot protect you if the government no longer follows it—and if the courts no longer enforce it.

    The knock may never come again. Just the crash of a door. The sound of boots. And the silence that follows.

    The post Home Invasions on the Rise: Constitution-Free Policing in Trump’s America first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Persecution of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich

    In September 2024, Malone News published an article on Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, titled “The Persecution of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, A POLITICAL PRISONER.” German authorities continue to illegally imprison Dr. Fuellmich. This is an update.

    *****

    Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is known and respected internationally for his work as a consumer defense lawyer and for winning major lawsuits against corporate giants such as Volkswagen, Kühne & Nagel, and Deutsche Bank. He was one of the first individuals to recognize that the COVID measures constituted crimes against humanity and decided, along with three other lawyers, to create the Corona Investigative Committee, which aimed to shed light on the actions of governments, public institutions, and the medical community in the context of the so-called “pandemic.”

    Thanks to his brilliant investigative work, and after consulting more than 150 scientists and experts in all fields around the world, as well as numerous whistleblowers (from Pfizer, WHO, CDC, UN), he was able to collect an abundance of evidence of what he calls “the biggest crime ever perpetrated against humanity.”

    He was ready to take action

    However, the German secret services, in cooperation with Göttingen public prosecutor Simon Phillip John and Fuellmich’s accusers, had already decided to construct a case against Fuellmich, aimed at stopping him.

    He is accused of having embezzled 700,000 euros, but, in truth, he did not. The imminent threat of seizure of the Corona Investigative Committee’s bank accounts by the German government during the fallout of the COVID pandemic, along with the risk of no longer being able to use the funds raised by private donations to carry out their investigative work, Reiner Fuellmich and Viviane Fischer took steps to protect those funds. They purchased 1 million euros worth of gold (current value: 1.8 million euros), and each took out personal loans (700,000 euros to Reiner Fuellmich, and 100,000 euros to Viviane Fischer). Their loan agreements were documented in written, signed contracts.

    When the defense demonstrated the erroneousness of the original accusation which asserted that Fuellmich had no authority to take a personal loan without the other committee member’s consent, the judge had to invent a new allegation in order to justify Fuellmich’s continued imprisonment. The judge thus declared that that the loans were “fake”.

    Interestingly, the previous Göttingen lead prosecutor Reinicke, who had been asked by the secret services to open an investigation on Fuellmich, had clearly stated that there were no grounds upon which to investigate him and archived the case in June 2022. Merely two and a half months later, a young, inexperienced prosecutor by the name of Simon Phillip John was transferred from Hanover to Göttingen and given the task of doing the dirty work that Reinicke had previously deemed unjustified.

    Judge Carsten Schindler and prosecutor John are, without any shadow of a doubt, following someone else’s instructions. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich has been unlawfully held in pre-trial detention in the German maximum-security prison in Rosdorf for 18 months. This, even though the maximum term for pre-trial detention in Germany is 6 months. This, after his having been lured under false pretenses, subsequently abducted in Mexico, and then deported to Germany – without an international arrest warrant NOR a formal extradition order — where he was then arrested and imprisoned.

    The circumstances of his illegal arrest and subsequent mistreatment in prison are very concerning.

    From June 2024 until December 2024, Reiner Fuellmich was placed in solitary confinement. The official reason was that he was providing fellow inmates with legal advice. Fuellmich was also subjected to various forms of abuse, in clear violation of his human rights: physical and psychological mistreatment including prolonged solitary confinement, deprived of sunlight, deprived of outdoor physical activity, deprived of sleep, forced to choose between taking a shower or having his one-hour outdoors, and even prohibited from calling his lawyers. Aside from their brief (and monitored) telephone calls on Skype, he has not seen his wife since his arrest.

    He is only permitted three hours per month of visits and telephone calls. On top of that, he has been denied adequate medical care, including simple access to vitamins.

    Moreover, Reiner was not allowed to visit his dying mother, nor attend her funeral.

    Both the inhumane prison conditions and how his trial is being conducted raise serious doubts about the level of respect for fundamental rights in the German judicial system.

    From June 10, 2024 to this day, Reiner Fuellmich, after being body-searched, is brought to the court and back to prison in shackles and handcuffs, escorted by armed security officers in armored vehicles, as if he were a serial killer!

    He is being denied a fair trial because any motions presented by his defense lawyers are rejected without explanation. As of July 2024, Judge Schindler ordered that the defense motions and arguments, instead of being read aloud to the court, were from then on to be presented in writing only, thus impeding court observers from understanding and properly documenting the proceedings. These same court spectators, as have Fuellmich’s defense lawyers, have been subject to threats.

    In addition to not permitting defense witnesses to take the stand, Judge Schindler refuses to allow the person who pocketed the funds to testify in court.

    This “kangaroo court” proceeding is now in its final phase. As we write this, the defense lawyers have completed their closing statements, and Fuellmich has begun to make his final, closing statement before the court, which, to silence him, interrupted and admonished him at least 12 times. It is feared that the court may impose upon Fuellmich a time limit for the presentation of his final defense statement, as they did to his defense lawyers, forcing them to shorten their closing statements.

    In the course of 51 hearings, what we have witnessed is nothing less than an egregious case of obstruction of justice– a criminal offense in Germany– which confirms the intent of the German secret services as stated in their dossier on Reiner Fuellmich.

    One of Fuellmich’s defense lawyers presented this dossier to the court. It specified that Fuellmich was to be stopped “at all costs”; that “it is necessary to prepare a criminal case against Fuellmich, [including the] collaboration of prosecutors and suitable third parties”; and recommending “the recruitment and involvement of trusted persons amongst Fuellmich’s closest circle.”

    It was also their stated objective to convict Fuellmich; that “the possibility of [him] obtaining a politically exposed position must be prevented by any means”. This dossier, provided by a whistleblower, demonstrates that Reiner Fuellmich was already under special surveillance as far back as 2021.

    That said, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that Reiner Fuellmich had to be stopped to prevent him from continuing his precious investigational work exposing the truth regarding the “pandemic” as well as the so-called “vaccines”.

    Fuellmich is clearly a political prisoner, punished for speaking the truth. His case demands the attention of international human rights organizations and the indignation of worldwide public opinion.

    Pre-trial detention must never be used as an instrument to defer, suppress, or completely substitute the justice system as a legitimized punishment without a sentence.

    Justice, free speech, and respect for fundamental human rights are the pillars of a democratic state, not only for but especially for those individuals who raise uncomfortable questions and dare to speak up.

    Seba Terribilini

    Cynthia Salatino

    April 17, 2025

    A postscript from Dr. Robert Malone:

    Even CHAT-GPT3 writes that the treatment of Dr. Fuellmich is indefensible. It writes:

    The treatment of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is not defensible under normal German legal standards. His prolonged solitary confinement, excessive security measures, and extended pre-trial detention are all highly unusual and have prompted widespread concern and condemnation from legal experts, human rights advocates, and international observers2,5,7,10,11,12,14. The available evidence suggests that his case is an outlier and may be politically motivated, rather than a routine application of German justice.

    When the CHAT-GPT3 doesn’t back up the German government, an AI summarizer trained on data that supports the administrative state, you know things are bad…

    Note that German courts usually opt for a suspended sentence (probation) or a fine for a first-time offender convicted of a standard embezzlement offense (without aggravating factors).

    Dr. Reiner Fuellmich has been held in that high-security prison for over 18 months during his trial process. This duration of pre-trial detention is highly unusual in Germany, particularly for non-violent offenses. This is political persecution.

    The post The Persecution of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Theodore Roosevelt: Moral Critic of Oligarchy


    After he lost the 1912 presidential election on the Progressive Party ticket, Roosevelt wrote his lengthy Autobiography. His insights on “the malefactors of great wealth”–and the urgent need to regulate and/or dismantle them–remain as perspicacious as ever.

    Regarding a sycophantic judge who had written to a prominent finance-capitalist that he was “willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion to serve your vast interests,” Roosevelt commented on the judge’s “wholly inexplicable reverence for the possession of a great fortune as such. He sincerely believed that business was the end of existence… and the bigger the business, the more he desired to favor it” (p. 50). Roosevelt noted as well “the largely unconscious way in which the courts had been twisted into the exaltation of property rights over human rights” (p. 251).

    During his first term as president, recognizing the inadequacy of the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), Roosevelt successfully pursued the dissolution of the Northern Securities railroad oligopoly (J.P. Morgan and others), as well as the American Tobacco and Standard Oil monopolies. (As to the latter, under Republicrat Clinton in the Nineties, oil giants were allowed to merge, once again–as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, etc.).

    Commenting on the folly of the single-minded pursuit of great fortunes, on the actual uselessness of massive personal wealth far beyond one’s needs–and on the public’s absurd reverence for the super-wealthy–Roosevelt commented that he was “simply unable to make myself take the attitude of respect toward the very wealthy men which such a multitude of people evidently really feel…. I wholly fail to see where any real enjoyment comes from a dozen automobiles…and a good many different homes luxuriously upholstered” (p. 243-244).

    Finally, anticipating the danger of a “Citizens United” type of corporate take-over of electoral democracy, Roosevelt noted that “those artificial individuals called corporations become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality…. It is necessary that laws be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes” (p. 257, 329).

    All quotations from: The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by Wayne Andrews, Scribner’s (New York), 1958.

    The post Theodore Roosevelt: Moral Critic of Oligarchy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine Guilty of Human Rights Violations in Trade Union Massacre, Top European Court Finds

    By Kit Klarenberg

    The court condemned Ukrainian authorities for failing to prevent a fiery 2014 massacre in which dozens of anti-Nazi activists were burned alive – but the judges’ political bias meant victims were implicitly blamed for their fate, and their families received a paltry 15,000 euro payout.

    The European Court of Human Rights has found the Ukrainian government guilty of committing human rights violations during the May 2, 2014 Odessa massacre, in which dozens of Russian-speaking demonstrators were forced into the city’s Trade Unions House and burned alive by ultranationalist thugs.

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    Citing the “relevant authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odessa,” the court ruled unanimously that Ukraine violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to life. The judges also condemned the Ukrainian government’s failure “to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events.”

    42 people were killed as a result of the fire, a bloody bookend to the so-called “Maidan revolution” that saw Ukraine’s democratically-elected president deposed in a Western-backed coup in 2014. Ukrainian officials and legacy media outlets have consistently framed the deaths as a tragic accident, with some figures even blaming anti-Maidan protesters themselves for starting the blaze. That notion is thoroughly discredited by the verdict, which was delivered by a team of seven judges including a Ukrainian justice.

    As dozens of anti-Maidan activists burned to death, the ECHR found deployment of fire engines to the site was “deliberately delayed for 40 minutes,” even though the local fire station was just one kilometer away.

    In the end, the judicial body determined there was nothing which indicated Ukrainian authorities “had done everything that could reasonably be expected of them to avert” the violence. Officials in Kiev, they said, made “no efforts whatsoever” to prevent skirmishes between pro- and anti-Maidan activists that led to the deadly inferno, despite knowing in advance such clashes were likely to break out. Their “negligence… went beyond an error of judgment or carelessness.”

    The case was brought by 25 people who lost family members in the Neo-Nazi arson attack and clashes that preceded it, and three who survived the fire with various injuries. Though the ECHR found Ukraine violated their human rights, the court demanded Ukraine pay them just 15,000 euros each in damages.

    The ruling also stopped short of acknowledging the full reality of the Odessa slaughter, as it largely overlooked the role played by Western-supported neo-Nazi elements and their intimate ties to the sniper massacre in February 2014 in Maidan Square which has been conclusively determined to have been a false flag. In the judges’ decision, they downplayed or justified violence by the violent Ukrainian football fans and skinheads, charitably describing them as “pro-unity activists.”

    Russians burned alive while Ukrainian officials looked away

    Ukraine’s Maidan protests commenced in November 2013 after President Yanukovych declined to form a trade agreement with Europe and renewed dialogue with Russia, and tensions quickly began to escalate between Odessa’s sizable Russian-speaking population and Ukrainian nationalists. As the ECHR ruling noted, “while violent incidents had overall remained rare… the situation was volatile and implied a constant risk of escalation.” In March 2014, anti-Maidan activists set up a tent camp in Kulykove Pole Square, and began calling for a referendum on the establishment of an “Odessa Autonomous Republic.”

    The next month, supporters of Odesa Chornomorets and Kharkiv Metalist football clubs announced a rally “For a United Ukraine” on May 2. According to the ECHR, that’s when “anti-Maidan posts began to appear on social media describing the event as a Nazi march and calling for people to prevent it.” Though the European court branded the description Russian “disinformation,” there’s extensive evidence that hooligans associated with both clubs had overt Neo-Nazi sympathies and associations, and well-established reputations for violence. The football clubs involved later went on to form the notorious Azov Battalion.

    Fearing their tent encampment would be attacked, anti-Maidan activists resolved to disrupt the “pro-unity” march before it reached them. The ECHR revealed Ukraine’s security services and cybercrime unit had substantive intelligence indicating “violence, clashes and disorder” were certain on the day. However, authorities “ignored the available intelligence and the relevant warning signs,” and failed to take the “proper measures” to “stamp out any provocation.”

    On May 2, 2014, anti-Nazi activists confronted the demonstrators as the march began, and violent clashes immediately erupted. At roughly 5:45 PM, in the precise manner of the Maidan Square sniper false flag massacre three months earlier, multiple anti-Maidan activists were fatally shot “by someone standing on a nearby balcony” using “a hunting gun,” the ruling states. Subsequently, “pro-unity protesters… gained the upper hand in the clashes,” and charged towards Kulykove Pole square.

    Anti-Maidan activists took refuge in the Trade Unions House, a five-story building overlooking the square, while their ultranationalist adversaries “started setting fire to the tents,” according to the ruling. Gunfire and Molotov cocktails were exchanged by both sides, and before long, the building was ablaze. “Numerous calls” were made to the local fire brigade, including by police, “to no avail.” The court noted that the fire chief had “instructed his staff not to send any fire engines to Kulykove Pole without his explicit order,” so none were dispatched.

    Many of those trapped in the building died when attempting to escape by jumping from its upper windows, and those that survived were treated to more ‘unity’ by the violent demonstrators outside. “Video footage shows pro-unity protesters attacking people who had jumped or had fallen,” the ECHR notes. It was not until 8:30 PM that firefighters finally entered the building and extinguished the blaze. Police then arrested 63 surviving activists they found remaining in the building or on the roof. Those detained weren’t released until two days later, when a several hundred-strong group of anti-Maidan protesters stormed the police station holding them.

    The litany of security failures and industrial scale negligence by authorities that day was greatly aggravated by “local prosecutors, law enforcement, and military officers” not being “contactable for a large part or all of [the] time,” as they were coincidentally attending a meeting with Ukraine’s Deputy Prosecutor General. The ECHR “found the attitude and passivity of those officials inexplicable” – apparently unwilling to consider the obvious possibility that Ukrainian authorities purposefully made themselves incommunicado to ensure maximum mayhem and bloodshed, while insulating themselves from legal repercussions.

    Because Ukrainian authorities “had not done everything they reasonably could to prevent the violence,” nor even “what could reasonably be expected of them to save people’s lives,” the ECHR found Kiev violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court also concluded authorities “failed to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events in Odessa,” a violation of the “procedural aspect” of Article 2.

    Anatomy of a Kiev coverup

    Though left unstated, the ECHR’s appraisal of the Odessa massacre, and the officials who failed in their most basic duties points to a deliberate state-level coverup.

    For example, no effort was made to seal off “affected areas of the city centre” in the event’s aftermath. Instead, “the first thing” local authorities did “was to send cleaning and maintenance services to those areas,” meaning invaluable evidence was almost inevitably eradicated.

    Unsurprisingly, when on-site inspections were finally carried out two weeks later, the probes “produced no meaningful results,” the ECHR noted. The Trade Unions House likewise “remained freely accessible to the public for 17 days after the events,” giving malicious actors plentiful time to manipulate, remove, or plant incriminating evidence at the site. Meanwhile, “many of the suspects absconded,” the court noted. Several criminal investigations were opened, only to go nowhere, left to expire under Ukraine’s statute of limitations.

    Other cases that reached trial “remained pending for years,” before being dropped, despite “extensive photographic and video evidence regarding both the clashes in the city centre and the fire,” from which culprits’ identities could be easily discerned. The ECHR expressed no confidence that Ukrainian authorities “made genuine efforts to identify all the perpetrators,” and several forensic reports weren’t released for many years, in breach of basic protocols. Elsewhere, the Court noted a criminal investigation of an individual suspected of having shot at anti-Maidan activists was inexplicably discontinued on four separate occasions, on identical grounds.

    The court also noted “serious defects” in investigations into Ukrainian officials’ role in the massacre. Primarily, this took the form of “prohibitive delays” and “significant periods of unexplained inactivity and stagnation” in opening cases. For instance, “although it had never been disputed that the fire service regional head had been responsible for the delayed deployment of fire engines to Kulykove Pole,” it took nearly two years for the Ukrainian government to officially investigate.

    Similarly, Odessa’s regional police chief not only failed to implement any “contingency plan in the event of mass disorder,” as required, but internal documents claiming that security measures had in fact been undertaken were found to have been forged. A criminal investigation into the chief took nearly a year to materialize, then remained pending “for about eight years,” when it was closed after the statute of limitations expired.

    The Georgian connection

    The notion that the incineration of anti-Maidan activists in May 2014 was an intentional and premeditated act of mass murder, conceived and directed by Kiev’s US-installed far-right government, was apparently not considered by the ECHR. But testimonies from a Ukrainian parliamentary commission which was instituted in the massacre’s immediate aftermath indicate the violence was not a freak twist of fate spontaneously produced by two hostile factions clashing in Odessa, as the ruling suggests.

    That parliamentary commission found Ukrainian national and regional officials explicitly planned to use far-right activists drawn from the fascist Maidan Self-Defence to violently suppress Odessa’s would-be separatists, and disperse all those camped by the Trade Unions House. Moreover, the notorious ultra-nationalist Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy and 500 of its armed members of Maidan Self-Defense were dispatched to the city from Kiev on the eve of the massacre.

    From 1998 – 2004, Parubiy served as founder and leader of Neo-Nazi paramilitary faction Patriot of Ukraine. He also headed Kiev’s National Security and Defence Council at the time of the Odessa massacre. Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations immediately began scrutinizing Parubiy’s role in the May 2014 events after he was replaced as lead parliamentary speaker, following the country’s 2019 general election. This probe has seemingly come to nothing since, although a year prior a Georgian militant testified to Israeli documentarians that he engaged in “provocations” in the Odessa massacre under the command of Parubiy, who told him to attack anti-Maidan activists and “burn everything.”

    That militant was one of several Georgian fighters who has admitted they were personally responsible for the February 2014 Maidan Square false flag sniper massacre, under the command of ultranationalist Ukrainian figures like Parubiy, and Mikhael Saakashvili, the founder of infamous mercenary brigade Georgian Legion. The slaughter in Maidan brought about the end of Viktor Yanukovych’s government, and sent Ukraine hurtling towards war with Russia.

    The Odessa massacre was another chapter in that morbid saga – and Europe’s foremost human rights court has now formally laid responsibility for the horror at Kiev’s feet.

    The post Ukraine Guilty of Human Rights Violations in Trade Union Massacre, Top European Court Finds first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Black Alliance for Peace Condemns U.S. Convictions of Uhuru 3 As A Fascist Farce

    After being forced to acquit Omali Yeshitela, Jesse Nevel, and Penny Hess – the “Uhuru 3” – on being agents of Russia, a U.S. federal court jury resorted to the sham conviction of “conspiracy,” in what amounted to them being guilty of internationalism and the work of liberating African people. The state’s claim is that the defendants are guilty of “planning to sow discord and inflame American political tensions at the behest of Russia,” a charge carrying a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

    Although the conspiracy charge is being regarded as the less serious of the two changes, it presents a threat to all anti-imperialists and internationalists working in the bowels of the capitalist, U.S. settler state. “Conspiracy” is a U.S. legal fiction that can mean almost anything. From the definition, it is clear that determining what counts as conspiracy is often left up to the creativity of prosecution. In other words, “conspiracy” should be understood as the state deploying anything vague and circumstantial to use against our movement when it cannot get a conviction on anything else.

    The Black Alliance for Peace sounds the alarm about the danger this particular ruling represents – the severe undermining of the human right to free speech and the free flow of information. It is the creation of Orwellian, totalitarian legal precedence in support of “thoughtcrimes,” the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the U.S. settler state.

    The trial of the “Uhuru 3,” members and supporters of the African People’s Socialist Party, is “proving to be one of the most important First Amendment cases thus far in the 21st century,” according to the group’s attorney Jenipher Jones. The case also exposes the fact that the U.S. has no regard for human rights. It violates Articles 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which protects the right to freedom of expression and opinion and freedom of association, as does Article 19 of International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

    It is also significant that a small Pan-Africanist group is the first to face legal charges and other overt repression for speaking out against the racist and imperialist policies of the U.S. regime.

    After the verdict Omali Yeshitela said:

    The most important thing is that they were unable to convict us for working for anybody except Black people, that’s the most important thing. They could not convict us for working for anybody except black people. They had to say we were not working for the Russians and I am willing to be charged and found guilty of working for black people.

    But BAP suspects that this is a test case for what is to come from the racist U.S. settler state. All activists and anti-imperialists should be concerned about what has happened to the “Uhuru 3.”

    As we declared in our September 10th statement:

    BAP and our movement will not be intimated. We recognize that the complete abandonment of constitutional and human rights by the U.S. and other Western states represents an irreversible crisis of legitimacy. We will continue to stand in support of the right to resist as a core human right.

    No Compromise!
    No Retreat!

    BAP Coordinating Committee

    The post The Black Alliance for Peace Condemns U.S. Convictions of Uhuru 3 As A Fascist Farce first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel supporters flout Canadian law with impunity

    As an observer of foreign affairs, I’ve often written about the hypocrisy of Liberal and Conservative governments’ failure to uphold “an international rules-based order” despite claims of its importance. In the case of Israel, the duplicity is even more glaring. Our governments, past and present, repeatedly fail to uphold Canadian law.

    Activists have long shown how arms sales and military recruitment to Israel violates the law. But Global Affairs, Minister of Justice, RCMP and other government agencies have generally ignored their legal responsibilities when it comes to the genocidal apartheid state.

    Issuing arms permits to Israel contravenes Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act. According to the law, Canada shouldn’t export arms to a country if there is “a substantial risk” they would undermine peace and security or be used to violate international law. As a signatory to the UN Arms Trade Treaty Canada is also obliged to not transfer arms to a country responsible for grave human rights violations. Two recent International Court of Justice rulings strengthen the legal case against Canadian arms sales to Israel. Still, Global Affairs allows arms transfers.

    The Minister of Justice and RCMP have also failed to apply the law regarding Israel, refusing to enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act and Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. In 2020 a formal legal complaint and public letter signed by numerous prominent individuals were released calling on the federal government to investigate individuals for violating the Foreign Enlistment Act by inducing Canadians to join the Israeli military. The Trudeau government effectively ignored the public letter and legal complaint even though it was published on the front page of Le Devoir. Then Justice Minister David Lametti responded by simply saying it was up to the police to investigate. For their part, the police refused to seriously investigate. Partly in response to the police’s unwillingness to take the matter seriously, a case was launched through a private prosecution against Sar-El Canada, which brings Canadians to volunteer on Israeli military bases. A Justice of the Peace agreed the evidence warranted a hearing, but the Crown interceded to dismiss the case against Sar-El. They clearly didn’t want a court to adjudicate the matter.

    More recently, Canadians fighting in a force that’s slaughtered tens of thousands should be investigated under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Highlighting reports of Canadians in the Israeli military, a Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East letter to Justice Minister Arif Virani called on him to “Issue a warning to Canadian nationals that serving or volunteering with the Israeli military may make them criminally liable under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act”. CJPME’s January letter also requested the minister “launch an investigation under its War Crimes Program into the participation of Canadian nationals involved in Israel’s military offensive.”

    Thousands messaged the minister calling on him to investigate Canadians committing war crimes in Gaza. Following up on this push, I asked Virani directly if he’d investigate those killing Palestinians under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. He refused to answer, walking down the wrong hallway to escape my questioning.

    While staying mum on Canadians killing Palestinians, the Trudeau government actually interceded to block a bureaucratic move to properly label wines from illegal colonies. After David Kattenburg repeatedly complained about inaccurate labels on two wines sold in Ontario, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) notified the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) in 2017 that it “would not be acceptable and would be considered misleading” to declare wines produced in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as “products of Israel”. But, immediately after the decision became public the government reversed the advisory and then appealed a judge’s ruling to block accurate labelling of wines produced in the occupied West Bank.

    In a major form of Israel-focused criminality, dozens of registered charities violate the Income Tax Act by supporting the Israeli military, racist organizations and West Bank colonies. In a bid to press the CRA to uphold the law, formal complaints have been submitted to the revenue agency detailing a dozen charities’ – with over $100 million in annual revenue – violating the rules. That campaign contributed to the recent revocation of the charitable status of Canada’s second most powerful Zionist charity, the Jewish National Fund of Canada (as well as the Ne’eman Foundation). While its recent revocations restore some confidence in the CRA’s ability to act independently, a law-abiding revenue agency would do far more to curtail illegal subsidies to Israel.

    To press the CRA to revoke the charitable status of other Israel-focused organizations violating the law, actions will be held at CRA offices across the country on International Day of Charity. On September 5 join one of the many protests calling on the CRA to stop subsidizing war crimes and apartheid.

    One has to wonder why we must take to the streets to convince our government to uphold Canadian law.

    The post Israel supporters flout Canadian law with impunity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users

    Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.

    In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.

    In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

    And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.

    Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

    On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

    In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

    Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

    By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

    This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

    The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

    Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

    This is the very definition of technofascism.

    Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

    The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

    As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

    Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

    The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

    In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

    Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

    This is how it starts.

    First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

    Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

    By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

    Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

    Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

    Watch and learn.

    We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

    Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

    Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

    Eventually, as Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

    If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s happening already.

    The post Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Mike Lynch, Probability and the Cyber Industrial Complex

    It began as a devastating, confined storm off the coast of Sicily, striking the luxury yacht Bayesian in the form of a devastating water column resembling a tornado.  Probability was inherent in the name (Thomas Bayes, mathematician and nonconformist theologian of the 18th century, had been the first to use probability inductively) and improbability the nature of the accident.

    It also led to rich speculation about the fate of those on the doomed vessel.  While most on the sunk yacht were saved (the eventual number totalled fifteen), a number of prominent figures initially went missing before being found.  They included British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, along with Morgan Stanley International Bank chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo.

    Lynch, co-founder of the British data analytics firm Autonomy and co-founder and investor in the cybersecurity firm Darktrace, had been recently acquitted by a US federal jury of fifteen counts of fraud and conspiracy, along with his co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain, regarding Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Autonomy in 2011.  While the firm’s acquisition had cost a mighty US$11 billion, HP wrote off a stunning US$8.8 billion within 12 months, demanding an investigation into what it regarded as “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy.”  Clifford Chance was instructed by Lynch to act for him following the write down of Autonomy’s value in November 2012, hence Morvillo’s presence.

    Lynch had his fair share of unwanted excitement.  The US Department of Justice successfully secured his extradition, though failed to get a conviction.  The investor proved less fortunate in a 2022 civil suit in the UK, one he lost.

    For all his legal travails, Lynch stayed busy. He founded Invoke Capital, which became the largest investor in the cybersecurity firm Darktrace.  Other companies featured in terms of funding targets for the company, among them Sophia Genetics, Featurespace and Luminance.

    Darktrace, founded in 2013, has thrived in the thick soup of security establishment interests.  British prime ministers have fallen within its orbit of influence, so much so that David Cameron accompanied its CEO Nicole Egan on an official visit to Washington DC in January 2015 ahead of the opening of the company’s US headquarters.

    Members of the UK signals intelligence agency GCHQ are said to have approached Lynch, who proceeded to broker a meeting that proved most profitable in packing Darktrace with former members of the UK and, eventually, US intelligence community.  The company boasts a veritable closet of former operatives on the books: MI5, MI6, CIA, the NSA, and FBI.  Co-founder Stephen Huxter, a notable official in MI5’s cyber defence team, became Darktrace’s managing director.

    Other connections are also of interest in sketching the extensive reach of the cyber industrial complex.  This need not lend itself to a conspiratorial reading of power so much as the influence companies such as Darktrace wield in the field.  Take Alexander Arbuthnot, yet another cut and dried establishment figure whose private equity firm Vitruvian Partners found Darktrace worthy of receiving a multi-million-pound investment as part of a push into cybersecurity.

    Fascinating as this is, such matters gather steam and huff on looking at Arbuthnot’s family ties.  Take Arbuthnot’s mother and Westminster chief magistrate, one Lady Emma Arbuthnot.  The magistrate presided over part of the lengthily cruel and prolonged extradition proceedings of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and hounded for alleged breaches of the US Espionage Act.  (Assange recently pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917.)  Any conflict of interest, actual or perceived, including her husband’s own links to the UK military community as former UK defence minister, were not declared during the legal circus.  Establishment members tend to regard themselves as above reproach.

    With such a tight tangle of links, it took another coincidence to send the amateur sleuths on a feverish digital trawl for sauce and conspiracy.  On August 17, a few days prior to Lynch’s drowning, his co-defendant was struck while running in Cambridgeshire.  Chamberlain died in hospital from his injuries, with the driver, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, assisting at the scene with inquiries.

    Reddit and the platform X duly caught fire with theories on the alleged role of hidden corporate actors, disgruntled US justice officials robbed of their quarry, and links to the intelligence community.  Chay Bowes, a blustery Irish businessman with an addiction to internet soapbox pontification, found himself obsessed with probabilities, wondering, “How could two of the statistically most charmed men alive meet tragic ends within two days of each other in the most improbable ways?”

    A better line of reflection is considering the influence and power such corporations exercise in the cyber military-industrial complex.  In the realm of cyber policy, the line between public sector notions of security and defence, and the entrepreneurial pursuit of profit, have ceased to be meaningful.  In a fundamental sense, Lynch was vital to that blurring, the innovator as semi-divine.

    Darktrace became an apotheosis of that phenomenon, retaining influence in the market despite a scandal spotted record.  It has, for instance, survived claims and investigations of sexual harassment.  (One of those accused at the company was the most appropriately named Randy Cheek, a sales chief based in the San Francisco office.)

    In 2023, its chief executive Poppy Gustafsson fended off a stinging report by the US-hedge fund Quintessential Capital Management (QCM) alleging questionable sales and accounting practices intended to drive up the value of the company before it was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2021.  This sounded rather typical and seemed eerily reminiscent of the Autonomy affair.  “After a careful analysis,” QCM reported, “we are deeply sceptical about the validity of Darktrace’s financial statements and fear that sales, margins and growth rates may be overstated and close to sharp correction.”

    QCM’s efforts did no lasting damage.  In April this year, it was revealed that Darktrace would be purchased by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo for the punchy sum of US$5.32 billion.  The Darktrace board was bullish about the deal, telling investors that its “operating and financial achievements have not been reflected commensurately in its valuation, with shares trading at a significant discount to its global peer group”.  If things sour on this one, Thoma Bravo will only have itself to blame, given the collapse of takeover talks it had with the company in 2022.  Irrespective of any anticipated sketchiness, Lynch’s troubled legacy regarding data-driven technology and its relation to the state will remain.

    The post Mike Lynch, Probability and the Cyber Industrial Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • American Theocracy: Politics Has Become Our National Religion

    You shall have no other gods before me.

    — The Ten Commandments

    Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.

    — Donald Trump

    Politics has become our national religion.

    While those on the Left have feared a religious coup by evangelical Christians on the Right, the danger has come from an altogether different direction: our constitutional republic has given way to a theocracy structured around the worship of a political savior.

    For all intents and purposes, politics has become America’s God.

    Pay close attention to the political conventions for presidential candidates, and it becomes immediately evident that Americans have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into worshipping a political idol manufactured by the Deep State.

    In a carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” have become victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.

    Every confidence game has six essential stages: 1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion; 2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted; 3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome; 4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up; 5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and 6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.

    In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.

    In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.

    Terrorist attacks, pandemics, economic uncertainty, national security threats, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.

    No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.

    Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control. Thus, since 9/11, the government’s answer to every problem has been more government and less freedom.

    Yet despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.

    However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, the Constitution provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.

    Unfortunately, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.

    Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.

    The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, once the map by which we navigated sometimes hostile government terrain, has been unceremoniously booted out of the runaway car that is the U.S. government by the Deep State.

    What we are dealing with is a rogue government whose policies are dictated more by greed than need. Making matters worse, “we the people” have become so gullible, so easily distracted, and so out-of-touch that we have ignored the warning signs all around us in favor of political expediency in the form of electoral saviors.

    Yet it’s not just Americans who have given themselves over to political gods, however.

    Evangelical Christians, seduced by electoral promises of power and religious domination, have become yet another tool in the politician’s toolbox.

    For instance, repeatedly conned into believing that Republican candidates from George W. Bush to Donald Trump will save the church, evangelical Christians have turned the ballot box into a referendum on morality. Yet in doing so, they have shown themselves to be as willing to support totalitarian tactics as those on the Left.

    This was exactly what theologian Francis Schaeffer warned against: “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way, ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”

    Equating religion and politics, and allowing the ends to justify the means, only empowers tyrants and lays the groundwork for totalitarianism.

    This way lies madness and the certain loss of our freedoms.

    If you must vote, vote, but don’t make the mistake of consecrating the ballot box.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it doesn’t matter what religion a particular candidate claims to subscribe to: all politicians answer to their own higher power, which is the Deep State.

    The post American Theocracy: Politics Has Become Our National Religion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • American Theocracy: Politics Has Become Our National Religion

    You shall have no other gods before me.

    — The Ten Commandments

    Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.

    — Donald Trump

    Politics has become our national religion.

    While those on the Left have feared a religious coup by evangelical Christians on the Right, the danger has come from an altogether different direction: our constitutional republic has given way to a theocracy structured around the worship of a political savior.

    For all intents and purposes, politics has become America’s God.

    Pay close attention to the political conventions for presidential candidates, and it becomes immediately evident that Americans have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into worshipping a political idol manufactured by the Deep State.

    In a carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” have become victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.

    Every confidence game has six essential stages: 1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion; 2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted; 3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome; 4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up; 5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and 6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.

    In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.

    In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.

    Terrorist attacks, pandemics, economic uncertainty, national security threats, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.

    No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.

    Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control. Thus, since 9/11, the government’s answer to every problem has been more government and less freedom.

    Yet despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.

    However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, the Constitution provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.

    Unfortunately, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.

    Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.

    The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, once the map by which we navigated sometimes hostile government terrain, has been unceremoniously booted out of the runaway car that is the U.S. government by the Deep State.

    What we are dealing with is a rogue government whose policies are dictated more by greed than need. Making matters worse, “we the people” have become so gullible, so easily distracted, and so out-of-touch that we have ignored the warning signs all around us in favor of political expediency in the form of electoral saviors.

    Yet it’s not just Americans who have given themselves over to political gods, however.

    Evangelical Christians, seduced by electoral promises of power and religious domination, have become yet another tool in the politician’s toolbox.

    For instance, repeatedly conned into believing that Republican candidates from George W. Bush to Donald Trump will save the church, evangelical Christians have turned the ballot box into a referendum on morality. Yet in doing so, they have shown themselves to be as willing to support totalitarian tactics as those on the Left.

    This was exactly what theologian Francis Schaeffer warned against: “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way, ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”

    Equating religion and politics, and allowing the ends to justify the means, only empowers tyrants and lays the groundwork for totalitarianism.

    This way lies madness and the certain loss of our freedoms.

    If you must vote, vote, but don’t make the mistake of consecrating the ballot box.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it doesn’t matter what religion a particular candidate claims to subscribe to: all politicians answer to their own higher power, which is the Deep State.

    The post American Theocracy: Politics Has Become Our National Religion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Military Rule and the Disappearing Critics

    Democracy can be considered a commodity with multitude of varieties. Each elite ruling class claims theirs is the best suitable for its people, and thus imposes it on them. Mind you, not pure democracy — government of the people, by the people, for the people” — because that would amount to nothing less than socialism. The “democracy” that countries profess to practice is nothing but an interpretation of the ruling class in those countries with the aim to control its general populace.

    India has Modi-cracy where one man, Narendra Modi, is running the show. A year ago, he boasted: “India is the mother of democracy.” If India is the mother of democracy, then Modi must be the illegitimate father of democracy who was till last month busy Hindu-izing the country. (He did not get a simple majority in the June 2024 elections, so his Hindu-ization project has slowed down, but it remains doubtful he’ll give up so easily. He could instigate a war with Pakistan, declare an emergency, and assume extraordinaire power. Never underestimate the power of elected fascists.)

    England has monacracy and the taxpayers bear the burden of monarchy which can’t be called a true democracy.

    The United States has oligacracy where a small group of extremely wealthy people decide the fate of more than 335 million common people in the name of democracy. Biden could fight the proxy war against Russia or support the genocide of Palestinians and nothing changes; but he loses a debate against Trump and the wealthy halt $90 million in donations.

    Military Power

    Then there is Pakistan’s militocracy. The military has ruled that country, directly or indirectly, for most of that nation’s existence. When the military favors a politician, that person becomes the prime minister but has to be subservient because the rein (important portfolios such as foreign policy, defense, etc.) is always determined by the military. When the premier tries to control the entire government machinery, that person is deposed and could be sent to prison. Politicians are at the army’s mercy.

    The Pakistan military and governments constantly plead and beg the IMF, Saudi rulers, and UAE rulers for a billion dollars or more.

    The military torpedoed Nawaz Sharis’s past efforts to improve relations with India. But it now wants better relations. The increase in trade with India can help Pakistan to overcome its dire economic and financial condition.

    The 2018 election saw cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party become the Prime Minister, with the military’s blessing . But when Khan tried to do things his own way, a vote of no-confidence was engineered and Khan was ousted in 2022. At present, he’s in jail with over 100 cases registered against him. Even when a case is dismissed, police or some agency person issues another arrest warrant and he gets re-arrested. Khan, his wife Bushra Bibi, and some PTI members are entangled in this vicious cycle.

    After more than a year in various prisons all over Pakistan, Sanam Javed of PTI was released on July 10, 2024 by the Lahore High Court (in Punjab province) but soon after the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) arrested her and took her to Islamabad. On July 14, she was let go but was re-arrested by the police of Balochistan. She was freed on July 15 by the Islamabad High Court which restrained police from arresting her till July 18. The IHC justice asked her to “avoid unnecessary rhetoric” or else the court would reverse its order. In other words, keep your mouth shut. Her lawyer guaranteed that she would refrain from such language. On June 18, the IHC considered her arrest to be illegal and she was set free. Immediately, the Punjab government challenged IHC verdict.

    While in power, Khan had visited Russia the day it had launched the special military operation into Ukraine. Khan was also critical of the US. The US is never too busy not to interfere in other countries’ affairs. David Lu, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, asked Pakistan’s then ambassador to the US, Asad Majeed, to get rid of Khan.

    The army’s open hostility and its tactics to break up Khan’s party PTI by levying various charges and arresting and re-arresting PTI members, including Khan, saw Khan’s supporters out on the streets on May 9, 2023; they did some damage to military installations. The army in response, came up with an event called Youm-e-Takreem Shuhada-e-Pakistan or Martyrs’ Reverence Day to be celebrated on May 25 every year to remember the soldiers who lose their lives while serving.

    Seven and a half months after Khan was ousted, in November 2022, the retiring army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa conceded the army’s meddling in politics.

    “… our army which day and night remains busy in serving the nation, is often made the subject of criticism.” “A major reason for this is the army’s interference in politics for the last 70 years which is unconstitutional.

    “This is why in February last year [2021] the army, after great deliberation, decided that it would never interfere in any political matter. I assure you we are strictly adamant on this and will remain so.”

    One wonders why leaders accept their lies and mistakes, or talk peace and the danger of military-industrial complex, etc only when they’re leaving or have left. Bajwa was lying.

    Today, the army is still omnipresent. The current army Chief Asim Munir meets with the business community, invites winning athletes, issues regular statements, and so on. The current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) took over power after military approval. His older brother and former three-incomplete-term prime minister Nawaz Sharif came back from exile with military’s approval.

    Disappearing Critics

    The intelligence agencies in Pakistan such as MI (Military Intelligence), IB (Intelligence Bureau), ISI (Inter Services Intelligence), etc. take care of the critics — journalists and common people — who write, speak, or protest against the military interference in government affairs.

    Sometimes they are abducted, tortured, and then released. Other times they are killed with no clues left.

    In 2011, the Islamabad Bureau Chief of Asia Times, Syed Saleem Shahzad was tortured and murdered. News anchor and journalist Arshad Sharif, a critic of military, was shot dead in 2022, by police in Nairobi, Kenya. In May 2024, four journalists were murdered. Since 1992, more than 60 journalists have lost their lives. Then there are those who have disappeared and never reappeared. In many instances, the victims are harassed and blackmailed, their phones are tapped, and they are detained illegally. The agencies never issue any kind of statement because that would be tantamount to accepting guilt.

    Thousands of people are missing in Pakistan, without any clue as to where they are. The number of enforced disappearances in 2023 was 51.

    Then there is the Pakistani province of Balochistan — a vast land mass with the smallest population that is underdeveloped and ignored by governments. This has caused resentment among the Balochis that has resulted in insurgency. The first six months of 2024 saw 197 persons missing — most of them Balochis. On July 28, three persons died and eight were injured during a clash between Balochistan Yakjehti Committee (BYC) and security forces. People from the province overcame roadblocks set up by the authorities and met at Gwader’s Marine Drive for the Baloch Rajee Muchi (Baloch National Gathering). BYC leader Dr Mahrang Baloch asked security officials to free the apprehended protestors. She proclaimed:

    “Until the release of our people, the sit-in will continue at Marine Drive.”

    More than 5,000 Balochis are missing. Families of missing and/or killed Balochis demonstrate holding photos of victims every now and then but to no avail. In protests, Baloch women are in the forefront. They live in a tortured state of mind not knowing whether their sons, husbands, fathers are alive or not. In January 2024, Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister, Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, got mad at Baloch protestors and called supporters and “relatives of those fighting against the state” as “advocates of terrorists in Balochistan.” Kakar himself hails from Balochistan.

    On the night of May 14, 2024, the Kashmiri poet, journalist Ahmed Farhad Shah was kidnapped by four men outside his home while returning from a dinner. A petition from his family was filed with Islamabad High Court (IHC) saying that Shah was abducted for his criticism of ISI. According to his wife, Syeda Urooj Zainab, the agencies felt that Shah was a PTI and Imran Khan supporter, so they were after him. Zainab refutes that impression and says he has also supported PML-N when it was under pressure by the Pakistan’s military. One of the judges at IHC, Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, initiated an enquiry and ordered that Shah be found and produced before the court. Two weeks later, it was reported that he was in police custody. But then the federal government asked the IHC on June 1 to close the case. On June 4, his bail was rejected by an anti-terrorism court in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Critics are treated as terrorists! Since then, there has been no news on Shah, it is doubtful if they’ve found him.

    The Advocate Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir, a Baloch, who is Shah’s counsel, has herself been harassed, threatened, arrested, re-arrested, for calling the Pakistan army “terrorists” and for supporting the protesting Baloch students.

    Ahmed Farhad Shah is a poet whose poems are critical of the army. Here is the translation of one of his poems originally written in Hindi/Urdu.

    he thinks of his own freewill

    he thinks of his own freewill, pick him up
    he’s somewhat different than our henchmen, pick him up
    the arrogant ones we abducted before him, pick him up
    he’s is enquiring about them, pick him up
    he was clearly ordered what to speak and what not to, but he speaks his own mind, pick him up
    the minions whom we honored with positions and rewards, he’s laughing at those clever souls, pick him up
    he questions why there’s peace and security problem, he is the peace and security problem, pick him up*
    he was told to see only what we show him, but he uses his own discretion, pick him up
    this lunatic is questioning extent of our power, he has crossed the line, pick him up

    * Farhad reminds his audience that just for raising the question of peace and security, fifty people were imprisoned.

    The post Military Rule and the Disappearing Critics first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Two)

    So, my second trial for alleged thoughtcrime-tweeting is going ahead as planned on August 15 in Berlin Superior Court (Das Kammergericht). Full-blown anti-terrorism security protocols will be in effect in the courtroom. Yes, that’s right, the Berlin Superior Court denied my attorney’s motion to rescind their special Security Order, so the German authorities will be putting on an elaborate official show of force, which everyone is welcome to attend!

    Or, actually, according to the Security Order, only 35 people are welcome to attend. That’s one of the anti-terrorism security protocols. Also, if you do attend, you’ll have to surrender all your personal possessions (i.e., notebooks, phones, wallets, pens, pencils, other writing instruments, wristwatches, hats, and other head coverings, etc.) and any outwear (i.e., jackets, scarves, etc.) and totally empty your pockets of all items, presumably into a plastic bin like the ones they use at airport security, which the Court’s security personnel will carry away and store somewhere while you attend the trial, and which the Superior Court expressly denies any liability for (i.e., for your items). Once you have surrendered all your possessions, and have been body-scanned and metal-detected, and possibly physically patted down, you will be admitted into Room 145a, where you will have to sit in the rear five rows of the gallery, behind a presumably bullet-proof security barrier, so that the security staff can monitor you during the proceedings.

    OK, I know what you’re probably thinking, but the Superior Court’s Security Order is not at all intended to prevent members of the press from attending and reporting on the trial. Members of the press are absolutely welcome! It’s just that they will have to surrender their cameras and phones and their pens and other writing instruments to the security staff before they enter the courtroom. But they are welcome to attend and report on the trial! The security personnel will even provide them with pencils — presumably those little child-sized pencils, which are harder to use as Jason-Bourne-style stabbing weapons — and sheets of paper that they can position on their knees and attempt to make notes on during the trial.

    Same goes for all you members of the public. This Security Order is not in any way intended to discourage you from attending the trial, or to intimidate or humiliate you by subjecting you to pointless “security protocols” and treating you like suspected terrorists. No, you are absolutely welcome to attend! You just might want to think about what you bring with you. Sharp objects are probably not a good idea. Likewise anything the Court might construe to be a camera or an audio-recording device. The Security Order is clear about that … there is to be no photographic or audio record of the proceedings.

    Oh, and, definitely do not bring any state-of-the-art terrorist “wiretapping technology” with you. The Court is particularly worried about that stuff. Hence the need to subject everyone to TSA-style body-scanning, and pat-downs, and to confiscate their personal possessions, i.e., to ensure that no one smuggles in some sort of remotely-activated wiretapping technology that will infect the judges’ smartphones with some kind of untraceable surveillance software that will secretly record everything they say and transmit it to Tehran, or Moscow, or wherever.

    You probably think I’m joking. I’m not. Here’s how one of the Superior Court judges justified the Court’s Security Order in his denial of our motion to have the Order rescinded …

    I cannot see the unreasonable restriction of the press and your defense that you are concerned about, nor any violation of the guarantee of a fair trial. I admit that the restrictions imposed by the Security Order are quite significant; however, they are by no means unreasonable. They are objectively required both by the overall tense security situation (e.g. publicly announced threats of attacks against judges of the Superior Court) and the increased special security requirements in at least one criminal trial conducted in the same courtroom. Since only the courtroom in question is assigned to the Criminal Division (and the other divisions) as a permanent courtroom, and a regular search of the courtroom following every session using suitable technology for recently introduced wiretapping technology represents an objectively unjustifiable burden, its introduction must be prevented from the outset if possible.

    Yes, you read the judge’s explanation right. Apparently, the Court is worried that my readers, or maybe members of the German independent press, might be planning to launch an “attack” on the judges, presumably with their phones and writing instruments, and possibly their head coverings and outerwear (for example, their scarves, which I suppose, in the hands of trained terrorist assassins, could be used to strangle them). In any event, they clearly believe that an “overall tense security situation” exists, one which necessitates these anti-terrorism security protocols at the trial of a 62-year-old playwright, author, and political satirist.

    OK, I probably should have mentioned that earlier for the benefit of anyone not familiar with my case. I’m not a terrorist, or in any way terrorist adjacent. I’m just an author and a political satirist. The German authorities are prosecuting me because I criticized them and their Covid mask mandates.

    As I explained in my most recent column …

    The German authorities have been investigating and prosecuting me since August 2022. My case has been covered in The Atlantic, Racket News, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Multipolar, and many other outlets … Basically, I am being prosecuted for ‘spreading pro-Nazi propaganda’ because I criticized the Covid mask mandates and tweeted the cover artwork of one of my books, The Rise of The New Normal Reich. Here’s the cover artwork of that book. The other two images are recent covers of Der Spiegel and Stern, two well-known mainstream German magazines, which are not being prosecuted for spreading pro-Nazi propaganda.

    My punishment for doing that (i.e., criticizing the Covid mask mandates, not spreading Nazi propaganda) has been … well, here I am, on trial, again, in The People’s Court of New Normal Germany. The German authorities had my Tweets censored by Twitter. They reported me to The Federal Criminal Police Office, which is kind of the German FBI. They reported me to The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic Intelligence agency. My book is banned in Germany. They have damaged my income and reputation as an author. They have forced me to spend thousands of Euros in attorney’s fees to defend myself against these blatantly trumped-up charges. And now they are going to subject me, and my attorney, and anyone who attends my trial, to this humiliating, ham-fisted, official show of force.

    If you’re an American (or a Brit, or Australian, or whatever), and you’re thinking this is just a story about Germany, or the EU … well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t. My case is just one of countless examples of the criminalization of dissent that is happening throughout the West. A lot of Americans don’t realize it, but freedom of speech is protected in the German constitution.

    My story is not about the differences between the German and American freedom-of-speech protections. It is about the authorities prosecuting government critics like me on fabricated charges, banning our books, and censoring our political speech.

    Once a government starts doing that, the protections in its constitution no longer matter. You are no longer dealing with questions of law. You are dealing with the exercise of authoritarian power. That is what my story is about. Any Americans (and any other non-Germans) who have been paying attention to recent events will recognize what I’m talking about.

    As I’ve been saying, repeatedly, for the last four years or so, the global-capitalist power system (or the “corporatocracy,” or “The Powers That Be,” or whatever other name you need to call it) is going totalitarian on us. It dominates the entire planet, so it doesn’t have anything else to do. It is conducting a global “Clear and Hold” op. It is neutralizing internal resistance … any and all forms of internal resistance. The criminalization of dissent is an essential part of that. I’ve been documenting this process in my columns and in my books, and specifically in The Rise of the New Normal Reich — which you can read, unless you live in Germany — so forgive me if I don’t rehash it all here.

    The point is, we’re not in Kansas anymore. All that democracy and rule of law stuff is over. It is being gradually, and not so gradually, phased out.

    I get that most people don’t believe that. Most people won’t, until it’s too late. That’s how these transitions generally work. Most people can’t see what is coming until it gets here. I see it, but not because I’m a prophet. I’m just a loudmouth, and the loudmouths get crushed first.

    Anyway, if you are in Berlin on August 15, and would like to observe The People’s Court of New Normal Germany in action, or just get groped by a German law enforcement officer, the trial is scheduled to start at 10:30AM. Seating is on a first-come-first-served basis. So you may want to show up a little early, given all the scanning and screening and groping, and the “overall tense security situation.”

    The address is Elßholzstraße 30-33.

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Two) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Assange, CIA Surveillance and Spain’s Audencia Nacional

    The sordid story on the CIA-backed operation against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange during his time cramped in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy continues to froth and thicken. US officials have persisted in their reticent attitude, refusing to cooperate with Spain’s national high court, the Audiencia Nacional, regarding its investigation into the Agency’s espionage operations against the publisher, spearheaded by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global.

    Since 2019, requests for assistance regarding the matter, including querying public statements by former CIA director Mike Pompeo and former head of counterintelligence, William Evanina, along with information mustered by the relevant Senate Intelligence Committee, have been made to US authorities by judges José de la Mata and Santiago Pedraz. These have been treated with a glacial silence.

    On December 12, 2023, the General Subdirectorate of International Legal Cooperation furnished the US authorities “an express announcement” whether such judicial assistance would be denied.

    Spain’s liaison magistrate in the US, María de las Heras García, duly revealed that the tardiness to engage had been occasioned by ongoing legal proceedings being conducted before the US District Court of the Southern District of New York.  As Courtney E. Lee, trial attorney at the US Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs explained, supplying Spain’s national high court with such information would “interfere” with “ongoing US litigation”.  Hardly a satisfactory response, given requests made prior to the putative litigation.

    The litigation in question involved a legal suit filed in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York by civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler, media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass.

    In their August 2022 action, the complainants alleged that they had been the subject of surveillance during visits to Assange during his embassy tenure, conduct said to be in breach of the Fourth Amendment.  The plaintiffs accordingly argued that this entitled them to money damages and injunctive relief from former CIA director Mike Pompeo, the director of the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global David Morales, and UC Global itself.

    On December 19, 2023 District Judge John G. Koeltl granted, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss while denying other portions of it.  The judge accepted the record of hostility shown by Pompeo to WikiLeaks openly expressed by his April 2017 speech and acknowledged that “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

    The litigants found themselves on solid ground with Koeltl in the finding that they had standing to sue the intelligence organisation. “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.”   The plaintiffs would “have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling” if the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices were found to be unlawful.

    The plaintiffs also convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.”  But they failed to convince Koeltl that they had a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with Assange, given the rather odd reasoning that they were aware the publisher was already being “surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.”  Nor could such an expectation arise given the acceptance of video surveillance of government buildings.  Problematically, the judge also held that those surrendering devices and passports at an Embassy reception desk “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”

    Sadly, Pompeo was spared the legal lash and could not be held personally accountable for violating the constitutional rights of US citizens.  “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”

    In February this year, US Attorney Damian Williams and Assistant US Attorney Jean-David Barnea clarified the Agency’s line of response in a submission to Judge Koeltl.  “Any factual inquiry into these allegations – whether they are true or not – would implicate classified information, as it would require the CIA to reveal what intelligence-gathering activities it did or did not engage in, among other things.”  As the agency could not “publicly reveal the very facts over which it is seeking authorization to assert the State Secrets Privilege, it is not able to respond to the relevant allegations in the complaint or to respond to any discovery requests pertaining to those allegations.”

    Richard Roth, an attorney representing the four litigants, found this reasoning bemusing in remarks made to The Dissenter.  “From our vantage point, we cannot imagine how there is any privilege at all that relates to proprietary information of American citizens who visited the Ecuadorian embassy.”

    In April, CIA director William J. Burns sought to further draw the veil in submitting a “classified declaration” defining “the scope of the information” concerning the case, claiming it satisfactorily explained “the harm that reasonably could be expected to result from the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”  For those in such lines of work, alleged harm has no quantum or sense of proportion.

    Again, Roth was unimpressed, issuing a reminder that this case had nothing to do with “terroristic threats to destroy America that were uncovered through technology or a program that must never be disclosed or else the threat will succeed.”  The case, importantly, concerned the CIA’s search and seizure of cell phone and laptop devices in the possession of “respected American lawyers and journalists, who committed no crime, and who have now stood up against the loss of liberties and the government’s intrusion into their private lives by copying the contents of their cell phones and laptops.”

    As long as the Agency stifles and drags out proceedings on the grounds of this misused privilege, the Justice Department is bound to remain inert in the face of the Spanish investigation.

    The post Assange, CIA Surveillance and Spain’s Audencia Nacional first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The People’s Court of New Normal Germany

    Just when I thought things could not possibly get more shockingly totalitarian in New Normal Germany, where I’m being prosecuted in criminal court (for the second time) for tweeting, the German authorities have gone and surprised me again. No, they haven’t established an actual Nazi-style People’s Court (pictured above) yet, and, of course, there is absolutely no similarity between the current German justice system, which is totally fair and democratic and a paragon of impartial justice and the rule of law, and The People’s Court of Berlin during the Nazi era, nor is there any similarity between Nazi Germany and New Normal Germany (i.e., modern-day Germany), and I would never, ever, suggest that there was, as that would be intellectually lazy, and tasteless, and completely inaccurate, and illegal, and … well, let me fill you in on the latest.

    The Berlin Superior Court has set a date for my next thoughtcrime trial. As regular readers will probably recall, my first thoughtcrime trial in January ended with my acquittal. So, the German authorities are putting me on trial again. Yes, they can do that in Germany. But, wait, that’s not the best part.

    The best part is, at my new thoughtcrime trial — this time in Berlin Superior Court — full-scale Anti-Terrorism Security protocols will be effect in the courtroom. Everyone will be subjected to TSA-style scanning and screening, and will have to surrender all their personal possessions and hats and coats and head coverings to the Security Staff, and completely empty their pockets of all items, before entering the courtroom. No computers, phones, smart-watches, or any other potential recording devices will be allowed in the courtroom. Pencils and sheets of paper will purportedly be provided to members of the press by Security Staff. Members of the press and public will be limited to 35, and, after they have successfully passed their “security screening,” they will be cordoned off in the last five rows of the gallery in the very back of the courtroom, “for security reasons,” and monitored by the armed Security Staff.

    For the benefit of any new readers unfamiliar with me and my case, I am not a terrorist. I’m an award-winning American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. I have lived here in Berlin for 20 years. The German authorities have been investigating and prosecuting me since August 2022. My case has been covered in The Atlantic, Racket News, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Multipolar, and many other outlets, so I won’t reiterate every little detail again here. Basically, I am being prosecuted for “spreading pro-Nazi propaganda” because I criticized the Covid mask mandates and tweeted the cover artwork of one of my books, The Rise of The New Normal Reich.

    Here’s the cover artwork of that book. The other two images are the recent covers of Der Spiegel and Stern, two well-known mainstream German magazines, which are not being prosecuted for “spreading pro-Nazi propaganda.”As anyone (even the German authorities) can see, the Spiegel cover artwork uses exactly the same concept as the cover artwork of my book. The only difference is, the Spiegel swastika is covered by the German flag, whereas the swastika on my book is covered by a medical mask.

    Both artworks are obviously intended as warnings of the rise of a new form of totalitarianism. Der Spiegel was warning about the Alternativ für Deutschland party (AfD) — as was Stern with its swastika floating in a champagne glass. I was warning about what I dubbed “The New Normal Reich,” the new nascent form of totalitarianism that emerged during 2020-2023, which is still very much on the rise, and which is thoroughly documented and analyzed in my book (which book was banned by Amazon in Germany at the same time the German authorities launched a criminal investigation of me and instructed Twitter to censor my Tweets, which Twitter did).

    The pretext the Court is citing for ordering these Anti-Terrorism Security protocols at my trial is ridiculous, and infuriating. The Court claims that the courtroom in which my trial is to take place is occasionally used for a certain “high-security” trial. Therefore, according to the Court, my trial must also be subjected to Anti-Terrorism Security protocols. Seriously, the Court sent my attorney a fax setting forth this “explanation,” which is, of course, a load of horseshit. The Berlin Superior Court is a huge building containing multiple courtrooms, one or two which are probably not subject to such Anti-Terrorism Security protocols when “high-security” trials are not taking place within them.

    No, the imposition of these Anti-Terrorism Security protocols is clearly a cynical ploy intended (a) to suppress coverage of the trial, (b) to discourage the press and public from attending, and (c) to intimidate and harass me and my legal counsel, and any members of the press and public who nevertheless attend the trial in spite of the “security procedures” they will be subjected to.

    This cynical tactic — which is not an official press blackout, because journalists can still attend and attempt to scribble notes on their knees with the pencils and sheets of paper provided by the Security Staff — comes as no real surprise. As I mentioned above, my case and my first trial got a fair amount of attention from the international press, enough to put the Court on notice that my prosecution was being watched. So, it’s no mystery why the German authorities would want to discourage any reporting on my “do-over” trial in Superior Court.

    Also, the gallery was filled to capacity at my original trial in January, where I delivered a rather unusual closing Statement to the Court, which was then published and disseminated widely in Germany. So, again, it is no real mystery why the Superior Court wants to discourage members of the public from attending this new trial by threatening to subject them to these humiliating “security” protocols, and why it has limited the gallery size to only 35 seats.

    I assume the German authorities — and by “authorities” I mean the Berlin District Prosecutor’s office, the Berlin Superior Court (Der Kammergericht), and whatever other authorities are intent on punishing me, and making an example of me, for daring to criticize the government’s edicts during 2020-2022, i.e., suspension of the constitutional rights, mask mandates, segregation, the banning of protests, etc. — I assume these authorities are particularly motivated to prevent the press from covering this second trial in Superior Court, because, from what I understand of the German legal system, they are going to “do” me (i.e., convict me) this time.

    The way the German legal system works, if they want to do you, is (1) you are acquitted in the lower Criminal Court, (2) the District Prosecutor appeals the verdict to the Superior Court, (3) the Superior Court overturns your acquittal, and (4) the prosecution goes back to the original Criminal Court, which stages a new trial, at which you will be found guilty, because, once the Superior Court has overruled your acquittal, the Criminal Court will convict you based on the Superior Court’s ruling. At which point you will appeal. And on and on and on it will go, until you are broke, or until you give up fighting because you are just so fucking exhausted.

    I’m not making this up. This is how The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (i.e., the post-Covid German justice system, which, again, bears no resemblance whatsoever to The People’s Court of Berlin in Nazi Germany, or to the courts in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, or any other totalitarian “justice” system) … this is how it works in New Normal Germany if you are a critic of the authorities and refuse to meekly accept whatever punishment they want to summarily dish out for whatever they deem to be your thoughtcrimes.

    But, hey, at least they’re not going to take me out and put me up against a wall and shoot me, like they did with political criminals in Nazi Germany, and the USSR, so I suppose I should be grateful. I’ll have to work on that.

    If you think my case is an aberration, it isn’t. There are many, many other people — critics of the government’s “Covid measures” during 2020-2023 — who are being persecuted and made examples of. Most of these people do not have the financial resources to pay lawyers to fight these prosecutions, so they plead guilty to the charges and pay the fines, which are typically much less than what they would face in attorney’s fees. Being somewhat of a public figure, I thought it was my responsibility not to do that. I’m extremely grateful to everyone who has donated to my legal defense fund, which is how I have been able to cover my legal expenses. There’s enough left in that fund to cover this next trial in Superior Court, so I’m OK for now, financially. I mention that because people are already asking how they can send me money.

    What people can do, if they want to do something helpful, is make as much noise as possible about what is happening, not just in Germany, but all throughout the West. Because what is happening is, well, what I tried to capture and analyze in my book. The Powers That Be are going totalitarian on us. They are gradually, and not so gradually, phasing out the so-called “liberal” or “democratic” rights and principles that it was necessary to placate the Western masses with during the Cold War era, which it is no longer necessary to do beyond a certain superficial point.

    I have published three books of essays documenting this transition to a new global-capitalist form of totalitarianism, so I’m not going to go on and on about it here. But that’s what all the censorship is about. That’s what all the manufactured hysteria, fomented hatred, fanaticism, the permanent state of “emergency” and “crisis,” the “culture wars,” the cults of personality, the bombardment of our minds with absolutely meaningless nonsense, the naked displays of force, the blatant instrumentalization of the justice system to punish political dissidents, not just here in Germany, but throughout the “democratic” West … that is what all this is about.

    I’ll keep my readers posted on the details of my upcoming trial in Berlin Superior Court. My attorney is objecting to these “security protocols,” of course. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, instead of sending me money this time, maybe try to step back from all the mass hysteria and hatred that we are being inundated with and see the big picture. It isn’t pretty.

    Help spread the word about the new totalitarianism, about the phasing-out of our democratic rights. I don’t care which “side” of whatever you are on — Trump, Biden, Palestine, Israel, the culture wars, the cancel campaigns, Covid, Elon Musk, Russia, whatever — and neither do The Powers That Be. Take a step back and try to see the bigger picture … the forest, instead of just the trees. And then make as much noise about it as you can.

    We are heading somewhere very ugly … somewhere most of us can’t imagine. Some of us will get there first, but all of us will be there, together, eventually. My story is just one example of what it will be like there, in that ugly place. It isn’t really a story about Germany. It is a story about the end of the myth of democracy, and the rule of law, and all that good stuff. As Frank Zappa once so eloquently explained …

    The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

    It’s something to behold, that brick wall is, especially up close and personal. You’ll see when you get here. I’ll save you a seat.

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Supreme Court Takes on the Administrative State

    In a highly controversial decision, the Supreme Court on June 28 reversed a 40-year old ruling, reclaiming the Court’s role as interpreter of statutory law as it applies to a massive body of regulations imposed by federal agencies in such areas as the environment, workplace safety, public health and more.

    The Court’s 6-3 conservative majority overturned a 1984 ruling, also issued by that Court’s conservative majority, that  granted authority to a federal agency if a Congressional statute involving that agency was ambiguous or incomplete. It left the interpretation of the law to the agency rather than the courts.

    This principle blocked individuals and businesses from suing agencies in court for damages incurred when the agencies exceeded their Congressional mandates.

    “Chevron deference,” the name given the 1984 decision due to the litigation involving that company, has been grounds for upholding thousands of regulations by a host of federal agencies over the last four decades. Opinions by commentators on its reversal range from “an epic disaster, … one of the worst Supreme Court rulings … another huge gift to special interests and corporations,” to “a victory for the common man” and “an important win for accountability and predictability at a time when agencies are unleashing a tsunami of regulation — in many cases clearly exceeding their statutory authority ….”

    On July 10, Reuters reported that House Republicans had asked all federal agencies to begin reviews of regulations that could be affected by the recent ruling, noting:

    Three House committees — Agriculture, Oversight, and Education and Workforce — targeted agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Labor in what the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, Steve Scalise, called a “fight to free the American people from the power-​hungry administrative state.”

    The “administrative state” had modest beginnings during George Washington’s presidency, with the formation of the Defense, State, Treasury and Justice Departments. Today it has mushroomed into more than 400 agencies.  For the 178 laws passed by Congress in 2020 alone, federal agencies issued an average of 19 rules and regulations for each law passed, for a total of 3,382 such rules. The Federal Register, a common measure of regulatory action, hit an all-time high 95,894 pages in 2016. That’s 75 times The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which contains 1280 pages.

    The issues raised by the Chevron doctrine go back to the founding of the country and make for an interesting lesson in civics. But first a look at the fishing case that reversed it.

    The Fishermen Who Challenged a Bureaucracy

    On Jan.17, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two combined cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless, Inc v Department of Commerce, which would determine the fate of Chevron. On June 28, the Court ruled in favor of the fishermen plaintiffs in the Loper Bright case, rejecting the deference that courts have given federal agencies in cases where the law is unclear. The Court did not rule on the merits — the question whether the agency had exceeded its statutory authority. It just ruled on the judicial question whether Chevron blocked the case from proceeding. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Opinion of the Court, stated:

    Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. …

    Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA [Administrative Procedures Act] requires.

    The case was therefore allowed to go forward in the lower D.C. District Court where it originated. Those proceedings are expected to begin this fall.

    The plaintiffs are three New Jersey herring fishermen who challenge what they say is an unlawful requirement that forces them to surrender 20% of their earnings to pay at-sea monitors – individuals who gather information used to regulate their industry. The cost works out to as much as $700 a day, which can be more pay than the crews themselves take home.

    The requirement was imposed on them by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates the nation’s fisheries. The fishermen don’t contest that federal law allows the government to require at-sea monitors on their boats, but they argue that Congress never gave the executive branch authority to pass monitoring costs onto the fishermen. They contend that the NOAA abused its power, but they were handicapped by Chevron in fighting the rule.

    “We are grateful the Court has overruled Chevron,” said Bill Bright, one of the fishermen plaintiffs. “Restoration of the separation of powers is a victory for small, family-run businesses like ours, whether they’re involved in fishing, farming or retail.”

    Paul Clement, former U.S. Solicitor General and attorney for the fishermen, echoed that sentiment, stating, “We are gratified that the Court restored the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.” And that Constitutional mandate is what makes for an interesting civics lesson on the issues.

    Designing a Republic with a Balanced Separation of Powers

    The Founding Fathers were famously afraid of centralized power, and they designed the Constitution and Bill of Rights to avoid it. Power was balanced among separate branches of the government — watchers watching the watchdogs, with no one imperial controller.

    In colonial America, judges were appointed and paid by the monarchy, receiving salaries that were raised from duties paid by the colonists. King George exercised sole authority to appoint colonial governors to represent the Crown’s interests. For legislative control, the monarchy possessed the powers of the purse and the sword, stationing soldiers in the colonies while requiring that colonists house, feed, and pay taxes for the soldiers’ imported supplies.

    Today, many regulatory agencies have their own in-house court systems, which similarly serve as judge and jury. As Stone Washington with the Competitive Economic Institute, a nonprofit libertarian think tank, wrote:

    The judicial branch is presumably an independent branch of government, alongside the legislative and executive branches. But many regulatory agencies have their own in-house court systems, called administrative law courts (ALCs). In ALCs, agencies choose their own judges, pay their salaries, and set the rules of procedure. Agencies rarely lose in their own courts. And their abuses to established constitutional norms have garnered the attention of federal courts in recent years especially in antitrust and securities law matters.

    In administrative law courts, private litigants are deprived of basic constitutional privileges, including the right to trial by jury, freedom to petition a case before a Constitutional (Art. III) court, and equal application of justice under the law. Litigants who lose may or may not be granted the right to appeal to a federal court; but even if they succeed in getting on the appellate court docket, the process is lengthy and expensive, undemocratically excluding those who cannot afford the cost or the time to wait for a decision.

    The New Jersey fishermen in the two herring boat cases were not required to go through the administrative law court system, but the result was the same: the agency made the rules and enforced them; and under “Chevron deference,” the plaintiffs were powerless to contest the outcome.

    Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist that any irreconcilable differences between the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress were to be decided in favor of protecting the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. The power of judicial review was first asserted in the Supreme Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, recognizing the Constitution as the highest law in the land. Through judicial review, the Court reinforced that constitutional system by checking the power of other branches. Not just the administrative arm of the executive branch but the legislature itself could be restrained from passing legislation that violated the Constitution.

    In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to codify the procedure for executing administrative law. The APA provides that the “reviewing court shall decide all  relevant questions of law, [and] interpret… statutory provisions.”

    It is that deviation from the constitutional system as codified in the APA that the Supreme Court intended to rectify. Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the dissenting opinion, stated that “the majority’s decision today will cause a massive shock to the legal system, ‘cast[ing] doubt on many settled constructions’ of statutes and threatening the interests of many parties who have relied on them for years.”  But Justice Roberts made clear that prior decisions relying on Chevron were not automatically nullified but stood under stare decisis (to “stand by things decided”). The issues could be challenged in new cases, but the challenged rules had to be shown to exceed the mandate of Congress.

    The Question of Corporate Capture

    No doubt the floodgates to new cases will be opened, as other critics have stated; and it will be a major burden for the court system, which is already backlogged. But it is actually a democratic development. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explains on X:

    The Chevron decision cuts both ways. The original ruling allowed agencies to function effectively, which they cannot if every interpretative gray area in the law requires a court decision. If the agency is working in the public interest, we definitely want it to exercise broad interpretive leeway. For instance, almost every important environmental decision in federal court over the past 40 years is based upon Chevron. Without it, the EPA (not an entirely captured agency) is virtually powerless. But when corporate interests have captured a federal agency, then the same interpretive leeway gives the agency even more power to serve their corporate masters at the expense of the public interest. Thus we have the FDA sending armed police to shut down Amish farmers and grocery stores for selling raw milk, while they allow into our food supply hundreds of harmful but profitable chemical additives that are banned in other countries. The Chevron controversy is therefore a false dilemma with no solution. The real issue is corporate capture. If federal agencies served the public interest, then no one would want to hamstring them.

    Although critics say the ruling is a boon to corporations, it is the agencies themselves that are notoriously susceptible to “corporate capture.” As explained in Investopedia:

    Regulatory capture is a process by which regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be scrutinizing.

    It is that sort of corporate capture that Chevron deference protected from the reach of the courts, and that the Supreme Court’s latest ruling has opened to private challenge. The APA tells agencies they cannot act illegally, arbitrarily, or without letting the public meaningfully participate in the creation of new rules. Many agency rules are now vulnerable to judicial review for violating those standards.

    Agency Overreach: Some Areas of Vulnerability

    Technically, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the Treasury, the State Department, the IRS and even the Defense Department are agencies falling under the Administrative Procedure Act and its rules. Even those secretive, non-transparent, unaccountable intelligence agencies sometimes called the “deep state” could be subject to APA review. But as detailed in a Vanderbilt Law School article titled “The Politics of Deference,” “national security” has its own special deference under separate case law, so it probably cannot be reached.

    The more likely initial targets will be agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

    MSNBC experts expect electric vehicles to be most at risk. A Reuters article titled “Biden Tailpipe Emission Rules on Shakier Ground after Supreme Court Ruling” explains, “That’s because the rules target mobile sources of greenhouse gas rather than stationary ones like power plants, even though environmental laws are ambiguous on whether regulators have the mandate to do that.” Another expert says the controversial tailpipe regulations “will eliminate most new gas cars and traditional hybrids from the U.S. market in less than a decade.”

    Steve Forbes argues that Congress would not have passed such a prohibition because of intense public opposition, so it got kicked over to the EPA, which was thought to be untouchable under Chevron. But Chevron deference is no more. On July 3, 26 states filed suit against the Administration over EV mandates. The Petition for Review states, “the final rule exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law.”

    Other agency regulations expected to be the subject of lawsuits include the SEC’s imposition of civil penalties without the benefit of a jury trial, and FDA and CDC regulations involving vaccines, pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements.

    The administrative law system does not follow constitutional principles, which it must if it is ruling on regulations having the force of law. Removing some of the arbitrary red tape hampering small business, local politicians, schools and families by holding administrative regulations up to Constitutional standards can not only stimulate economic productivity and lower inflation and taxes but can help restore the system of checks and balances so important to our country’s founders.

    • This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.

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  • Courting in the Courtroom: Here Comes the Judge!

    “Clare, my friend, I know you’re in the hot seat these days, but do you think you can find it in yourself do one more little favor for the boys; I mean, if it’s not too much trouble?”

    “What’s up, boss?”

    “It’s that damn gun thing again: an infringement on the Constitutional right to sell patriotic weapons. A lot of the guys are still grousing about the stupid bump stock law that Trump got conned into signing. They’re saying if we sit back and let the wing nuts have their way with that one, then what will they try to screw us with next? Somebody has to make a stand, or the Libs will pass another one and then another one, and pretty soon there’ll be so may damn rules and regulations in place that the only kind of weapons we can sell will be the ones made for killing animals! And Clare, how much money or patriotism is in that?”

    “Yeah, I hear you. Tell you what, just give me some time to poke around a little and I’ll get right back to you; don’t worry; shouldn’t take long.”

    *****

    “Tony, you’re going to like it; I have the usual work-around, and the boys will love it. Back in 1934, when they described, or defined a machine gun, it did address what they knew to be true at the time: a machine gun was a gun that could rapidly shoot a hell of a lot of bullets with just a single pull of the trigger. As you probably know, it wasn’t designed for killing a herd of deer or a flock of geese; it was intended for efficient military use. Its main function was to enable the killing of a whole bunch of enemy soldiers in just a few quick seconds. Later on, when it began to find its way into criminal hands, Congress decided to codify and outlaw it because they thought that doing so would protect law-abiding citizens and be in the best public interest.”

    “But Clare, how does that help us today?”

    “It’s in the wordage, Tony; it’s always in the wordage. In 1934 they thought the ‘single pull’ phrase was sufficient to define any conceivable automatic weapon. Little did they know that 90 years later, some patriotic-minded genius would invent a ‘bump stock’ gizmo that turns a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon. It works just like a machine gun, but circumvents the machine gun definition and is thereby still lawful.”

    “Yeah, exactly, and how could they have known way back then what the public interest would be today?”

    “Right boss, but anyway it’s the finger-pull thing that gives us the out”

    “Pull my finger?”

    “Hah! Not that one … but close. Back in 1934, what they outlawed was an automatic weapon that could repeatedly fire bullets with just a single pull of the trigger. The beauty of the bump stock invention is that it actually utilizes your finger as part of the mechanism. You consciously pull the trigger just once, and then the machine takes over and bypasses your brain. The recoil from the first, or previous shot, pulls or pushes your finger on the trigger again, and again, and again, and it does it so fast that you don’t even have time to think about it. The gun does it for you! It’s moving your finger faster than your brain could ever tell it to move! In essence, the shooter becomes part of the gun, or maybe it’s vice versa; either way, it doesn’t really matter.”

    “So, where’s the out?”

    “I just told you, Tony. The machine gun was described or defined as a weapon that requires a single pull of the trigger to fire repeatedly. With a bump stock, your finger repeatedly pulls the trigger, even though your brain isn’t telling it to. So, by proper definition, it’s not really a machine gun; it just works like one!” Get it? Your finger is still pushing the trigger over and over; you just don’t have to think about it. It’s, ‘quick-pull trigger time,’ while your brain takes a holiday!”

    “That’s awesome, Clare! You did it again, my friend; the boys will love it. How about the optics, though? Any concern about how the media will play it? The Libs will probably jump all over you – and the Court, too. Won’t they pompously accuse you all of just parsing old words and putting innocent lives at risk.”

    “Hah! Order in the courtroom, Tony! Here comes the judge!”

    “Clare?”

    “Just parsing words? Are you kidding me? Tony, it’s what we do! It’s what we always do! Isn’t that why you and the boys put us here? We are the word; the last word! We’re lifers, Tony! It doesn’t matter what the Libs think; it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, because the buck stops here. Who cares about optics? If they don’t like it, they can go ask Congress to change it, and if they ever manage to do that, then maybe we’ll take another look somewhere down the road.”

    “Yeah, you’re right Clare; good work all around. I think maybe you’ve earned yourself a little break. Got anything planned for you and the missus this summer? How about a nice little RV trip to get away from the hubbub?”

    “Nah, it’s already looking like a super hot summer. We’re thinking more like ‘waterfront’ and a cool ocean breeze. Got any suggestions?”

    “I hear you, Clare. Tell you what, just give me some time to poke around a little and I’ll get right back to you; don’t worry; shouldn’t take long.”

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  • The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies

    One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus.  That is, if you believe in final chapters.  Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative.  His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice.  Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

    Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information.  At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment.  It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

    As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

    Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC).  The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

    The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

    Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication.  WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport.  Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199.  In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

    As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family.  He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process.  It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on.  This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

    There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny.  These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

    One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal.  They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.”  Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

    From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality.  While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate.  It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

    Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

    From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing.  He gave the game away.  He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

    To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom.  It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled.  While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.  The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

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  • Victory for the Disposables: The Sentencing of the Hindujas

    In his seminal work on modern slavery, Kevin Bales does away with certain, antiquated concepts.  In its insidious, older form, one focused on the concept of natal alienation, slaves were chattels and assets, outrightly owned.  Each slave system was distinct and protean, if marked by certain universal features.

    The universal feature of ownership, at least when it comes to its modern iteration, has little role to play in the modern slave system.  The modern slave can be found in abundance.  Disposability is its vital feature, abundance of vulnerable persons its source.  Care for human welfare is of secondary concern.  Bales, in Disposable People, offers up five studies with a specific focus on a relevant industry or trade: prostitution in Thailand; the water sale market in Mauritania; the charcoal industry in Brazil; brickmaking in Pakistan; and indentured farm labour in India.

    Such work, for all its stately horror, focuses on the dynamics and practices of specific industries in selected countries.  Another feature, as terrifying, is the international market for such disposable people, who pullulate the economies of developed countries, working in conditions unseen and undocumented.  The modern slaver, in such instances, is obscured behind regulatory opacity, a hidden puppeteer often protected by a vast fortune and public ignorance.

    On June 21, four members of the Hinduja family, the UK’s wealthiest according to the 2024 Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated value of £37.196 billion, were convicted in a Swiss court of first instance for exploiting staff at their Geneva mansion with “slave like treatment”.  They include Prakash Hinduja and his wife Kamal, their son Ajay and his wife Namrata.  The first two received sentences of 4.5 years; the latter, sentences amounting to 4 years.  The family business manager, Najib Ziazi, faces an 18-month suspended sentence.

    The convictions arise from a case stretching back to 2018, when Swiss prosecutors raided the Hinduja villa in Geneva’s Cologny municipality, offices of the Hinduja Bank, and various associated local businesses belonging to the Hinduja group.

    A number of accusations were levelled against the family in exploiting the workers.  Passports had been seized.  They were confined to the villa.  They laboured for long hours with minimal pay (less than one-tenth the standard rate for equivalent local jobs) – in some cases up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week.  The Hindujas, claimed prosecutor Yves Bertossa “spent more for one dog than one of their servants.”  The budget with the title “Pets” was allocated somewhere in the order of 8,584 Swiss Francs a year.

    Speaking only Hindi, the workers were paid in rupees wired to Indian accounts inaccessible to them in Switzerland.  They had little in terms of vacations and were accommodated in rudimentary conditions.

    Lawyers representing the Hinduja family were keen to point out that the convictions were not commensurate with the findings.  Their clients had been “acquitted of all human trafficking charges”.  For that reason, they were “appalled and disappointed by the rest of the decision made in this court of first instance, and we have of course filed an appeal to the higher court thereby making this part of the judgment not effective.”

    Other qualifying points were also noted.  The Hindujas had not been detained and should still be presumed to be innocent pending final judgment by the highest adjusting authority in the country.  Various plaintiffs had also withdrawn their complaints expressing the view that they had never intended to be involved in the legal proceedings.  (A confidential out-of-court settlement has been reached with three of them.)

    One of the lawyers representing the Hindujas, Robert Assael, proposed that the exploited employees “were grateful” for the offer of “a better life” by the family.  Yaël Hayat, who represents Ajay Hinduja, further argued that using discrepant salaries as a measure of ill-treatment said little about the perks of board and lodgings.

    In a clumsy attempt to diminish the serious conditions afflicting the workers in the villa, Hayat casuistically suggested that “When they sit down to watch a movie with the kids, can that be considered work?  I think not.”  With the vulgar callousness of a neoliberal economist, she further pointed out that the staff pay for one of the villa employees was “good” relative to what she received in India.  The prosecutors had conflated the goals of justice with social justice in attempting to “break the rich to make the poor less poor”.

    No finer, odious statement can be made about the modern, exploitable conditions of the disposables.  They are mistreated, but things can always be worse.  And if they are willing to present their labour to parties keen to exploit them, why the fuss?

    Thankfully, at last when it comes to conditions in Switzerland, the Hindujas are not the only ones being placed under prosecutorial scrutiny.  Last year, four domestic workers from the Philippines took legal action against one of Geneva’s diplomatic missions to the United Nations, claiming non-payment over a number of years.  It was a brutal reminder that migrant domestic workers remain a seemingly endless quarry of the disposable and exploitable.

    Such cases also bring to mind the wisdom noted in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835): “The secret of a great success for which you are a loss to account for is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”

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  • Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates

    It was given top billing, a near absurd show intended to rope in content on a global social media platform, thereby denying all outside Australia access to it.  Because an Australian official had deemed a video too disturbing and offensive for Australians of ordinary sensibility (the standard remains opaquely absurd), the world’s citizenry were also to be barred from viewing it.  It did not matter that those in the US, for instance, could readily digest the same, unabridged content, or that news networks in that country could readily broadcast the material in its entirety.

    On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, smacked X (formerly known as Twitter) and Meta with legal notices to remove links to a video within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The video featured a livestreamed church service at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church, which was abruptly interrupted by a stabbing assault.  The perpetrator was a 16-year-old youth.  Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.

    X Corp’s erratic, truculent CEO thought differently about this overly generous extension of Australia’s Online Safety Act.  Elon Musk found Inman Grant’s demand insensible, calling her a “censorship commissar” in her insistence on global content bans.  While he was happy to acquiesce to restricting access to the video in Australia, the world was quite something else.

    The issue wound its way to the Federal Court.  On May 15, the Commissioner’s case received something of a sinking blow.  Justice Geoffrey Kennett pondered the “potential consequences for orderly and amicable relations between nations, if a notice with the breath contended for were enforced”.  It would, for instance, “be ignored or disparaged in other countries”.  In the United States, no court would agree to enforce any relevant injunction requiring X Corp to take down the relevant URLs, numbering 65.

    The judge acknowledged that the Online Safety Act covered “acts, omissions, matters and things outside Australia” but did not stipulate what “all reasonable steps” were in the context of removing material.  “A clear expression of intention would be necessary to support a conclusion that Parliament intended to empower the Commissioner to issue removal notices with the effect for which she contends.”  It followed that she had failed to establish “that compliance with the removal notice entails blocking access to the 65 URLs by all users of X Corp.”

    The matter should have ended there, but the regulatory instinct of condescending officials is often obstinate.  As proceedings continued through the month, more opposition manifested.  On May 27, Justice Kennett granted orders permitting the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) leave to intervene.  The intervention, reasoned FIRE, sought “to focus the court’s attention on how a global takedown order would disregard the strong free speech protections of countries like the US and lend an air of legitimacy to repressive regimes’ efforts to assert control over online content everywhere.”

    On June 5, the Commissioner finally filed a notice of discontinuance in proceedings against X.  The EFF stated with much satisfaction “that the Commissioner saw the error of her efforts”, reasoning that such global take down notices “threaten freedom of expression around the world, creating conflicting legal obligations, and lead to the lowest common denominator of internet content being available around the world”.  Doing so permitted “the least tolerant legal system to determine what we all are able to read and distribute online.”

    Very true – except that the Commissioner showed few signs of enlightenment, and certainly nothing in mending her crypto-authoritarian ways.  A statement from Inman Grant showed that her program of infantilisation and regulation of the Internet is an ongoing one.  “Our sole goal and focus in issuing our removal notice was to prevent this extremely violent footage from going viral, potentially inciting further violence and inflicting more harm on the Australian community. I stand by my investigators and the decisions eSafety made.”

    In Inman Grant’s mind, Australians generally accepted (very good of her to think so) that such “graphic material should not be broadcast on television, which begs an obvious question why it should be allowed to be distributed freely and accessible online 24/7 to anyone, including children.”  As the country’s online safety regulator, she expected “reasonable companies to be taking action in relation to this type of content.”

    Unfortunately for free speech advocates and information libertarians, the Commissioner’s paranoia does have an audience. Ever since its creation, the Australian Commonwealth has shown a parental obsession with censorship.  And now, we have such sentiments as those of Michael Miller, Executive Corp Australasia Executive Chairman, lecturing the public about the need for big tech companies to pay “a social license” should they “want access to Australian consumers”.

    Such an encumbering license would permit the Australian government “to make the platforms liable for all content that is amplified, curated, and controlled by their algorithms or recommender engines”.  It would also grant the government powers to “ultimately block access to our country and our people if they refuse to play by our rules.”

    When an entity such as News Corp gives advice on what should or should not be accessible to the broader citizenry of any country, the bells should be going off.  The Big Tech behemoths have much to answer for – the destruction of privacy, the ruthless monetisation of user data, behavioural modification and hypnotic seduction.  But governments of all hues always cling to the same logic: the public is a dangerous beast best fed morsels of information rather than the whole buffet.  Ignorance breeds manageable docility.

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  • The Assange Case: A Flicker of Hope in the UK High Court

    It was faint, but there was more than just a flicker of hope.  In the tormented (and tormenting) journey the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange, has endured, May 20, 2024 provided another pitstop.  As with many such stops over the years, it involved lawyers.  Many of them.

    The occasion was whether the UK High Court of Justice would grant Assange leave to appeal his extradition to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 hewn from the monstrous quarry that is the Espionage Act of 1917.  He is wanted for receiving and publishing classified US government materials comprising diplomatic cables, the files of those detained in Guantanamo Bay, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Any computed sentence, glacially calculated at 175 years, would effectively spell his end.

    News on the legal front has often been discomforting for Assange and his supporters.  The US has been favoured, repeatedly, in various appeals, chalking up the lion’s share of victories since successfully overturning the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser to bar extradition in January 2021 on mental health grounds.  But Justice Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp of the High Court of Justice in London promised to keep matters interesting.

    A key sticking point in the proceedings has been whether the First Amendment would protect Assange’s publishing activity in the course of any trial in the US.  The attitude from the central US prosecutor in the extradition proceedings, Gordon Kromberg, and former Secretary of State and ex-CIA director Mike Pompeo, has been one of hearty disapproval that it should.

    Pompeo’s remarks in an infamous April 2017 address as CIA director to the Center for Strategic and International Studies openly branded WikiLeaks “a hostile intelligence service” that proselytised in the cause of transparency and aided such powers as Russia.  Assange “and his kind” were “not in the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom.  They have pretended that America’s First Amendment freedom shield them from justice.”  They were “wrong” to have thought so.

    On January 17, 2020, Kromberg submitted an affidavit to the UK district court that was eye opening on the subject.  The following remains salient: “Concerning any First Amendment challenge, the United States could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information, and even were they so entitled, that Assange’s conduct is unprotected because of his complicity in illegal acts and in publishing the names of innocent sources to their grave and imminent risk of harm.”

    In March 2024, the High Court curtly dismissed six of the nine arguments submitted by Assange in part of his effort to seek a review of the entire case.  The judges, anchoring themselves in the initial reasoning of the district court judge, refused to accept that he was being charged with a political offence, something barred by the US-UK Extradition Treaty, or that the CIA had breached lawyer-client privilege in having spied on him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, not to mention the serious thought given to abduction and assassination.

    The judges gave the prosecution a heavy olive branch, implying that the case for extradition would be stronger if a number of assurances could be made by the US prosecution.  These were, in turn, that Assange be offered First Amendment protections, despite him not being deemed a journalist; that he not be prejudiced, both during the trial and in sentence, on account of his nationality, and that he not be subject to the death penalty. The insistence on such undertakings had a slightly unreal, woolly-headed air to them.

    On April 16, the US State Department filed the fangless assurances in a diplomatic note to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).  “Assange will not be prejudiced by reason of nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing.”  If extradited, he could still “raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.  A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.”

    The US authorities further undertook to avoid seeking or imposing the death sentence. “The United States is able to provide such assurance as Assange is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.”  This can only be taken as conjecture, given the latitude the prosecution has in laying further charges that carry the death penalty should Assange find himself in US captivity.

    In court, Edward Fitzgerald KC, representing Assange, explained with cold sobriety that such an assurance made no guarantee that Assange could rely on the First Amendment at trial. “It does not commit the prosecution to take the point, which gave rise to this court’s concerns, i.e. the point that as a foreign citizen he is not entitled to rely on the First Amendment, at least in relation to a national security matter.”  In any case, US courts were hardly bound by it, a point emphasised in the statement given by defence witness and former US district judge, Professor Paul Grimm.  It followed that the assurance was “blatantly inadequate” and “would cause the applicant prejudice on the basis of his nationality.”

    Written submissions to the court from Assange’s legal team also argued that discrimination “on grounds that a person is a foreigner, whether on the basis that they are a foreign national or a foreign citizen, is plainly within the scope of the prohibition [against extradition under the UK Extradition Act 2003].  ‘Prejudice at trial’ must include exclusion on grounds of citizenship from fundamental substantive rights that can be asserted at trial.  On the US argument, trial procedures could discriminate on grounds of citizenship.”

    In response, the US submitted arguments of a headshaking quality.  Through James Lewis KC, it was submitted that the High Court had erred in its March judgment in equating “prejudice on grounds of foreign nationality with discrimination on grounds of foreign citizenship”.  The UK Extradition Act mentions “nationality” in preference to “citizenship”.  These terms were not “synonymous”.

    According to Lewis, Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) protecting journalists and whistleblowers was qualified by conduct “within the tenets of reasonable and responsible journalism”. One factor in this context “whether it is reasonable and responsible is where the publication took place – inside a member state’s territory or outside a member state’s territory.”

    The prosecution’s written submissions summarise the points.  The First Amendment’s applicability to Assange’s case depended on “the components of (1) conduct on foreign (outside the United States of America) soil; (2) non-US citizenship; and (3) national defense information”. Assange, Lewis elaborated, “will be able to rely on it but that does not mean the scope will cover the conduct he is accused of.”

    The prosecution suggested that former US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a vital source for WikiLeaks, had been unable to rely on the First Amendment, limiting the possibility that its protections could extend to covering Assange.

    Mark Summers KC, also representing Assange, was bemused. “The fact that Chelsea Manning was found in the end to have no substantial First Amendment claims tells you nothing at all.  She was a government employee, not a publisher.”

    He also made the point that “You can be a national without being a citizen [but] you cannot be a citizen without nationality.”  It followed that discrimination arising out of citizenship would result in discrimination based on nationality, and nothing adduced by the prosecution in terms of case law suggested otherwise.

    Unconvinced by the prosecution’s contorted reasoning, Dame Victoria Sharp agreed to grant leave to Assange to appeal on the grounds he is at risk of discrimination by virtue of his nationality, in so far as it affects his right to assert protections afforded by Article 10 of the ECHR and the First Amendment.

    It remains to be seen whether this legal victory for the ailing Australian will yield a sweet harvest rather than the bitter fruit it has.  He remains Britain’s most prominent political prisoner, held in unpardonable conditions, refused bail and subject to jailing conditions vicariously approved by those in Washington.  In the meantime, the public campaign to drop the indictment and seek his liberation continues to ripen.

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  • A Brutal Punishment: The Sentencing of David McBride

    Sometimes, it’s best not to leave the issue of justice to the judges.  They do what they must: consult the statutes, test the rivers of power, and hope that their ruling will not be subject to appeal.  David McBride, the man who revealed that Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan had dimmed and muddied before exhaustion, committed atrocities and faced a compromised chain of command, was condemned on May 14 to a prison term of five years and eight months.

    Without McBride’s feats, there would have been no Afghan Files published by the ABC.  The Brereton Inquiry, established to investigate alleged war crimes, would most likely have never been launched.  (That notable document subsequently identified 39 instances of alleged unlawful killings of Afghan civilians by members of the special forces.)

    In an affidavit, McBride explained how he wished Australians to realise that “Afghan civilians were being murdered and that Australian military leaders were at the very least turning the other way and at worst tacitly approving this behaviour”.  Furthermore “soldiers were being improperly prosecuted as a smokescreen to cover [the leadership’s] inaction and failure to hold reprehensible conduct to account.”

    For taking and disclosing 235 documents from defence offices mainly located in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), the former military lawyer was charged with five national security offences.  He also found Australia’s whistleblowing laws feeble and fundamentally useless.  The Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 (Cth) provided no immunity from prosecution, a fact aided by grave warnings from the Australian government that vital evidence would be excluded from court deliberation on national security grounds.

    Through the process, the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, could have intervened under Section 71 of the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth), vesting the top legal officer in the country with powers to drop prosecutions against individuals charged with “an indictable offence against the laws of the Commonwealth”.  Dreyfus refused, arguing that such powers were only exercised in “very unusual and exceptional circumstances”.

    At trial, chief counsel Trish McDonald SC, representing the government, made the astonishing claim that McBride had an absolute duty to obey orders flowing from the oath sworn to the sovereign. No public interest test could modify such a duty, a claim that would have surprised anyone familiar with the Nuremberg War Crimes trials held in the aftermath of the Second World War. “A soldier does not serve the sovereign by promising to do whatever the soldier thinks is in the public interest, even if contrary to the laws made by parliament.” To justify such a specious argument, authorities from the 19th century were consulted: “There is nothing so dangerous to the civil establishment of the state as an undisciplined or reactionary army.”

    ACT Justice David Mossop tended to agree, declaring that, “There is no aspect of duty that allows the accused to act in the public interest contrary to a lawful order”. A valiant effort was subsequently made by McBride’s counsel, Steven Odgers SC, to test the matter in the ACT Court of Appeal.  Chief Justice Lucy McCallum heard the following submission from Odgers: “His only real argument is that what he did was the right thing. There was an order: don’t disclose this stuff, but he bled, and did the right thing, to use his language, and the question is does the fact that he’s in breach of orders mean that he’s in breach of his duty, so that he’s got no defence?”  The answer from the Chief Justice was curt: Mossop’s ruling was “not obviously wrong.”

    With few options, a guilty plea was entered to three charges.  Left at the mercy of Justice Mossop, the punitive sentence shocked many of McBride’s supporters.  The judge thought McBride of “good character” but possessed by a mania “with the correctness of his own opinions”.  He suffered from a “misguided self-belief” and “was unable to operate within the legal framework that his duty required him to do”.

    The judge was cognisant of the Commonwealth’s concerns that disclosing such documents would damage Australia’s standing with “foreign partners”, making them less inclined to share information.  He also rebuked McBride for copying the documents and storing them insecurely, leaving them vulnerable to access from foreign powers.  For all that, none of the identifiable risks had eventuated, and the Australian Defence Force had “taken no steps” to investigate the matter.

    This brutal flaying of McBride largely centres on clouding his personal reasons.  In a long tradition of mistreating whistleblowers, questions are asked as to why he decided to reveal the documents to the press.  Motivation has been muddled with effect and affect. The better question, asks Peter Greste, executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, is not examining the reasons for exposing such material but the revelations they disclose.  That, he argues, is where the public interest lies.  Unfortunately, in Australia, tests of public interest all too often morph into a weapon fashioned to fanatically defend government secrecy.

    All that is left now is for McBride’s defence team to appeal on the crucial subject of duty, something so curiously rigid in Australian legal doctrine.  “We think it’s an issue of national importance, indeed international importance, that a western nation has such as a narrow definition of duty,” argued his defence lawyer, Mark Davis.

    John Kiriakou, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency, was the only figure to be convicted, not of torture inflicted by his colleagues during the clownishly named War on Terror, but of exposing its practice. McBride is the only one to be convicted in the context of alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, not for their commission, but for furnishing documentation exposing them, including the connivance of a sullied leadership.  The world of whistleblowing abounds with its sick ironies.

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  • Israel’s Battle Against Free Speech: The Shuttering of Al Jazeera

    “Politics,” as the harsh, albeit successful German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck claimed, “is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.”  To that hould be added the stark awareness of being prudent, gingerly wise, appropriately cautious.  Mind how you go in avoiding any foolishness on the way.

    Going after the motley press and news outlets while claiming to be a card-carrying member of the democracy club is far from prudent and more than a touch foolish, bound to make the critics croak and other fellow members decry.  And this is exactly what has happened in the context of Israel’s decision to shut down the Qatar-backed station Al Jazeera.

    On May 5, police raided the offices of the network at the Ambassador hotel in Jerusalem.  According to Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, equipment had been seized in the raid.

    Al Jazeera duly released a statement strongly condemning and denouncing “this criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access of information.”  The network went on to affirm “its right to continue to provide news and information to its global audiences.”  Oddly enough, the ban is far from being a watertight one, as the channel remains accessible in Israel via Facebook.

    Al Jazeera has had a troubled relationship with Israel.  Sounding like paranoid family members who have imbibed a bit too much, accusations have frothed from various politicians accusing the network of being a Hamas front.  In a dubious honour, the network’s name became associated with a law passed by the Israeli Knesset on April 1.

    The instrument authorises the Minister of Communication, with the consent of the Prime Minister and the Ministerial Committee on National Committee, to shut down foreign news outlets operating in Israel deemed a national security threat.  This entails halting broadcasts by Israeli content providers, restricting access to the relevant provider’s website, shutting down transmitters in Israel and the seizure of devices used in supplying the channel’s content, including mobile phones.  Betraying the Netanyahu government’s continued suspicion of the country’s judicial process, the law shackles the judiciary from overturning such a decision, notwithstanding any belief that it should be.

    The dust had barely settled on the vote before Minister Karhi revealed plans had been hatched to shutter Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel on the grounds that it “promotes terrorism”.  According to a statement from the Israeli Communications Ministry, “There will be no freedom of expression to Hamas mouthpieces in Israel.”

    Akiva Eldar, a political scribe who pushes pieces for Haaretz, suggested that the closing of the network was “a very populistic move to feed the beast of the public opinion that is very disappointed from the conduct of the government in Gaza and in the international arena”.  The tail-end of the remark did little to stir convention, as the move was designed “to please the partners from the radical right”.

    The passage of the law prompted a High Court of Justice filing by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) on April 4.  The petition argues for the cancellation of “the temporary order allowing sanctions to be imposed on foreign broadcasting channels from Israel.”  On May 2, with rumours of imminent action being taken against the Qatari broadcaster, the same organisation sought an interim injunction, refused by the court, to instruct the government to refrain from issuing orders to a foreign broadcaster till the petition was decided.  The ACRI had every reason to be disappointed with the ruling, given that Al Jazeera had been refused a prior right of plea and denied effective judicial review.

    On May 6, a further filing was made to join a separate proceeding in the Tel Aviv District Court regarding the sanctions imposed on Al Jazeera, with the ACRI challenging the propriety of the administrative process involved and whether there was, in fact, a “real security risk” posed by the network.

    The Al Jazeera law is not a singular instance of state repression regarding matters of free speech. The signs point to a chronic ailing in the Israeli polity.  Adalah, a Palestinian-run non-profit NGO advocating for the rights of Palestinians in Israel has noted, by way of example, the “severe crackdown on the freedom of expression rights of Palestinian students seeking to suspend or even expel them for their posts on social media platforms.”  The posts in question “vary widely, ranging from expressions of solidarity with the people of Gaza, to Quranic verses, to scathingly critical views of the Israeli military’s actions, to seemingly arbitrary content unrelated to Hamas or to the war.”

    On April 18, the Israeli police, in all its intimidating glory, entered the home of Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in the Old City of Jerusalem.  Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who holds the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London and a post at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was subsequently detained for comments made the previous month on the Makdisi Street podcast.

    Of particular interest to the authorities were comments purportedly calling for the abolition of Zionism and the uncontroversial call to halt the genocidal actions in Gaza.  She was strip-searched, handcuffed and interrogated, and denied access to such necessities as food, water and medication for a number of hours.  Her frigid cell also lacked blankets, while she was inadequately clothed. Her release on bail precipitated further interrogation sessions, with the police keen to tease out incriminating matters from previously published academic papers.

    From targeting academics, activists and students, to drawing the covers over a network of renown, the Israeli state has made a vulgar statement against the role of free speech.  Such creeping authoritarianism, however, shows itself to be one-eyed and, eventually, self-defeating.  Ultimately, in the gallop, it is bound to fall over itself.

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  • Faulty Assurances: The Judicial Torture of Assange Continues

    Only this month, the near comatose US President, Joe Biden, made a casual, castaway remark that his administration was “considering” the request by Australia that the case against Julian Assange be concluded.  The WikiLeaks founder has already spent five gruelling years in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he continues a remarkable, if draining campaign against the US extradition request on 18 charges, 17 incongruously and outrageously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

    Like readings of coffee grinds, his defenders took the remark as a sign of progress.  Jennifer Robinson, a longtime member of Assange’s legal team, told Sky News Australia that Biden’s “response, this is what we have been asking for over five years.  Since 2010 we’ve been saying this is a dangerous precedent that’s being set.  So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and the US will act on it.” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson found the mumbled comment from the president “extraordinary”,  hoping “to see in the coming days” whether “clarification of what this means” would be offered by the powerful.

    On April 14, the Wall Street Journal reported that Canberra had asked their US counterparts whether a felony plea deal could be reached, enabling the publisher to return to Australia.  “Prosecutors and a lawyer for Assange have discussed a range of potential deals, including those that include pleading guilty to a felony under the espionage law under which he was indicted, and those of conspiring to mishandle classified information, which would be a misdemeanor, people familiar with the matter have said.”

    Last month, the UK High Court gave what can only be regarded as an absurd prescription to the prosecution should they wish to succeed.  Extradition would be unlikely to be refused if Assange was availed of protections offered by the First Amendment (though rejecting claims that he was a legitimate journalist), was guaranteed not to be prejudiced, both during the trial and in sentence on account of his nationality, and not be subject to the death penalty.  That such directions were even countenanced shows the somewhat delusionary nature of British justices towards their US counterparts.

    On April 16, Assange’s supporters received confirmation that the extradition battle, far from ending, would continue in its tormenting grind.  Not wishing to see the prospect of a full hearing of Assange’s already hobbled arguments, the US State Department, almost to the hour, filed the assurances in a diplomatic note to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).  “Assange,” the US Embassy in London claimed with aping fidelity to the formula proposed by the High Court, “will not be prejudiced by reason of nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing.”

    Were he to be extradited, “Assange will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.”  An obvious caveat, and one that should be observed with wary consideration by the High Court judges, followed.  “A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.”

    The US embassy also promised that, “A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange.  The United States is able to provide such assurance as Assange is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.”  This undertaking does not dispel the threat of Assange being charged with additional offences such as traditional espionage, let alone aiding or abetting treason, which would carry the death penalty.

    In 2020, Gordon Kromberg, the chief Department of Justice prosecutor behind the case, told the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales that the US “could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”  There was also the likelihood that Assange, in allegedly revealing the names of US intelligence sources thereby putting them at risk of harm, would also preclude the possibility of him relying on such protections.

    That the zealous Kromberg will be fronting matters should Assange reach US shores is more than troubling.  Lawyers and civil rights activists have accused him of using the Eastern District Court of Virginia for selective and malicious prosecutions.  As Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept observed with bleak accuracy in July 2021, “[r]ather than being pushed into obscurity by these efforts, today he is serving as a key figure in one of the most important civil liberties cases in the world.”

    The High Court also acknowledged Kromberg’s views at trial regarding the possibility that the First Amendment did not cover foreign nationals.  “It can fairly be assumed that [Kromberg] would not have said that the prosecution ‘could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment’ unless that was a tenable argument that the prosecution was entitled to deploy with real prospect of success.”  These latest assurances do nothing to change that fact.

    A post from Assange’s wife, Stella, provided a neat and damning summary of the embassy note.  “The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty. It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a US citizen.  Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can ‘seek to raise’ the First Amendment if extradited.”

    Whether the justices are duly satisfied by the latest diplomatic manoeuvre, one non-binding in any tangible or true sense on prosecutors and judges in the US, awaits testing in the hearing on May 20.  For Assange, the wheels of judicial torture have been prolonged.

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  • Flicker of Hope: Biden’s Throwaway Lines on Assange

    Walking stiffly, largely distracted, and struggling to focus on the bare essentials, US President Joe Biden was keeping company with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, when asked the question.  It concerned what he was doing regarding Australia’s request that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be returned to Australia.

    Assange, who has spent five tormenting years in Belmarsh Prison in London, is battling extradition to the US on 18 charges, 17 tenuously and dangerously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

    The words that followed from the near mummified defender of the Free World were short, yet bright enough for the publisher’s supporters.  “We’re considering it.”  No details were supplied.

    To these barest of crumbs came this reaction from from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on ABC’s News Breakfast: “We have raised on behalf of Mr Assange, Australia’s national interest, that enough is enough, that this needs to be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve raised it at each level of government in every possible way.”  When pressed on whether this was merely an afterthought from the president, Albanese responded with the usual acknowledgments: the case was complex, and responsibility lay with the US Department of Justice.

    One of Assange’s lawyers, the relentless Jennifer Robinson, told Sky News Australia of her encouragement at Biden’s “response, this is what we have been asking for over five years.  Since 2010 we’ve been saying this is a dangerous precedent that’s being set.  So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and the US will act on it.”  Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, also told Sky News that the statement was significant while WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson thought the utterance “extraordinary”, cautiously hoping “to see in the coming days” whether “clarification of what this means” would be offered by “those in power” and the press corps.

    The campaign to free Assange has burgeoned with admirable ferocity.  The transformation of the WikiLeaks founder from eccentric, renegade cyber thief deserving punishment to prosecuted and persecuted scribbler and political prisoner has been astonishing.

    The boggling legal process has also been shown up as woefully inadequate and scandalous, a form of long-term torture via judicial torment and deprivation.  The current ludicrous pitstop entails waiting for a UK Court of Appeal decision as to whether Assange will be granted leave for a full reconsideration of his case, including the merits of the extradition order itself.

    The March 26 Court of Appeal decision refused to entertain the glaringly obvious features of the case: that Assange is being prosecuted for his political views, that due process is bound to be denied in a country whose authorities have contemplated his abduction and murder, and that he risks being sentenced for conduct he is not charged with “based on evidence he will not see and which may have been unlawfully obtained.”  The refusal to entertain such material as the Yahoo News article from September 2021 outlining the views of intelligence officials on kidnapping and assassination options again cast the entire affair in a poor light.

    Even if Assange is granted a full hearing, it is not clear whether the court will go so far as to accept the arguments.  The judges have already nobbled the case by offering US prosecutors the chance to offer undertakings, none of which would or could be binding on the DOJ or any US judge hearing the case.  Extradition, in other words, is likely to be approved if Assange is “permitted to rely on the First Amendment”, “is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality” and that he “is afforded the same First Amendment protection as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty not be imposed”.  These conditions, on the face of it, look absurd in their naïve presumption.

    Whether Biden’s latest casual spray lends any credibility to a change of heart remains to be seen.  In December 2010, when Vice President in the Obama administration, Biden described Assange as a “high-tech terrorist” for disclosing State Department cables.  He failed to identify any parallels with previous cases of disclosures such as the Pentagon papers.

    Craig Murray, former British diplomat and Assange confidant, adds a note of cautious sobriety to the recent offering from the president: “I’m not going to get too hopeful immediately on a few words out of the mouth of Biden, because there has been no previous indication, nothing from the Justice Department so far to indicate any easing up.”

    For all that, it may well be that the current administration, facing a relentless publicity campaign from human rights organisations, newspapers, legal and medical professionals, not to mention pressure from both his own party in Congress and Republicans, is finally yielding.  Caution, however, is the order of the day, and nothing should be read or considered in earnest till signatures are inked and dried.  We are quite a way off from that.

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  • Degenerate Art in New Normal Germany

    One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists running around loose, making fun of you and your propaganda. No, you need to get the culture business under control, and dictate what is and isn’t “art,” and what types of art are “harmful to society,” and demonize them, and the artists who created them, and censor them, or otherwise erase them.

    The Nazis went about this process in their characteristically ham-fisted fashion …

    “In September 1933, the Nazis created the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Chamber oversaw the production of art, music, film, theater, radio, and writing in Germany. The Nazis sought to shape and control every aspect of German society. They believed that art played a critical role in defining a society’s values. In addition, the Nazis believed art could influence a nation’s development. Several top leaders became involved in official efforts on art. They sought to identify and attack ‘dangerous’ artworks as they struggled to define what ‘truly German’ art looked like.” — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

    One of the most ham-fisted events in the course of this process of ideological “synchronization” (a process known as “Gleichschaltung” in German) was the Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich in 1937 …

    New Normal Germany is not Nazi Germany, so there is no “New Normal Chamber of Culture,” and no new “Degenerate Art” exhibition. The New Normal is a new form of totalitarianism, one which can’t afford to be perceived as totalitarianism, and thus the Gleichschaltung process works a bit differently.

    I’m going to use my prosecution as an example, again. I apologize to any regular readers who are sick of hearing me go on about it. I know, I promised not to go all “Late Lenny Bruce,” but the Germans keep providing me with new comedy material. If you’re not one of those regular readers and thus are unfamiliar with the background of my case, you can read about it in The Atlantic, Matt Taibbi’s Racket News, and in various independent media outlets.

    The short version is, back in 2022, I posted two Tweets criticizing mask mandates and making fun of Karl Lauterbach, the German Health Minister. Both Tweets included an image from the cover artwork of my latest book, The Rise of The New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).

    The German authorities did not appreciate those Tweets, so they (1) had them censored by Twitter, (2) had Amazon ban my book in Germany, and (3) dragged me into criminal court and prosecuted me on trumped-up “hate crime” charges. I was acquitted of those charges at my trial in January, but the Berlin State Prosecutor has appealed the verdict.

    The latest bit of comic material the German authorities have provided me with is a copy of the prosecutor’s grounds for the appeal. In it, the Oberstaatsanwältin als Hauptabteilungsleiterin (i.e., “The Senior Public Prosecutor and Department Head”) argues that my Tweets do not express opposition to the Nazis, which … she’s right, they don’t. They express opposition to the mask mandates, and lies of the German authorities, and their violation of the German constitution.

    My Tweets do not express my opposition to the Nazis because my Tweets assume opposition to the Nazis. They assume that all decent people understand and take it for granted that the Nazis were … well, Nazis, vicious, sadistic, mass-murdering fascists, with zero respect for democracy and the rule of law, who were obsessed with imposing their fanatically insane ideology on the entire planet. They (i.e., my Tweets) assume that comparing a contemporary group of power-intoxicated, constitution-violating, official-propaganda-spewing psychopaths — for example, the current German authorities — to the Nazis is not exactly a compliment.

    The Senior Public Prosecutor and Head of Department, who is clearly not only an expert on the law, and political commentary, but is also an expert on art, and subtlety, and other elements of aesthetics, explains the other problem with my art (i.e., in addition to the problem of opposing the German authorities’ unconstitutional dictates when I should have been opposing the Nazis) in her “Revisionsbegründung” (“Grounds for Appeal”) … too much subtlety, not enough “clarity” and “obviousness.”

    Here’s an excerpt from the Revisionsbegründung (translation, clarification, and emphasis mine).

    “The general politically-critical presentation [of the Tweets] does not even begin to express opposition to the NSDAP [i.e., the Nazi Party] and its ideology in an equally obvious and unequivocal way.” […] “Ultimately, the representations express that the accused wanted to emphasize his concerns about the measures in the Corona policy by adding the so-called swastika and the implicit reference to National Socialism. The implication is diametrically opposed to the required obviousness and clarity.”

    If only someone had told me about the importance of “obviousness” in works of art when I was back in film school or starting out as an avant-garde playwright in New York City, who knows, I could have been somebody! Instead, I got myself all confused by artists like … well, for example, John Heartfield. The title of this 1936 piece is “HAVE NO FEAR – HE’S A VEGETARIAN.”

    In light of The Senior Public Prosecutor’s argument, I don’t know what to think about this piece anymore. What was Heartfield trying to say? Was he pro- or anti-Hitler? More importantly, was he pro- or anti-vegetarian?

    And what are we supposed to think about this? Is Barbara Kruger pro- or anti-shopping?

    And here’s an illustration by Anthony Freda, the artist who designed the cover of my book, and who is clearly suffering from a “clarity and obviousness” deficiency!

    Oh, and speaking of inadequate “clarity” and “obviousness,” and the displaying of swastikas on German Twitter, here’s a Tweet by Die Tageszeitung, the big “left” newspaper here in Berlin …

    Back in November, my attorney filed a complaint about that Tweet with the Public Prosecutor, as an experiment, just to see how they would respond. Of course, they declined to investigate, and prosecute, and cited the same exceptions to the ban on displaying swastikas that apply in my case, and which the judge also cited when she acquitted me in January.

    I asked my attorney to carry out that experiment, because, at the time, I was terribly confused about whether Die Tageszeitung opposed the Nazis, or was trying to promote the Nazis, or what, exactly, all those swastikas and smirking Nazis were doing in a Tweet about “German Muslims” and other “migrant people” and how they think about the Holocaust. In the end, I decided the Twitter operators at Die Tageszeitung were probably working under the same assumption about how people view the Nazis as I was when I posted my two Tweets, i.e., the assumption that the Nazis were bad and that you do not have to reiterate that to the general public each and every time you include a photograph of them, or a swastika, in your social-media artwork.

    But, seriously now, as I noted in court, my case has nothing to do with the Nazis or The Senior Public Prosecutor’s understanding of art. It’s part of the crackdown on political dissent that is being carried out, not just here in Germany, but in countries all throughout the West. Yes, it’s particularly fascistic in Germany — if you can read German, here is yet another example of a case like mine, but under a different pretext — and it is absolutely focused on critics of the official Covid narrative and the Covid restrictions, but it isn’t focused exclusively on us. If you can set aside your allegiance to whatever side of whatever you have pledged it to, and have a look at what is coming down the pipe, or is already all the way down the pipe, in the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, France, and various other countries … well, I strongly recommend that you do that, preferably before we all get “gleichgeschaltet.”

    If you need a place to start, I posted links to a few articles on Matt Taibbi’s Notes thing …’

    OK, that’s it … I need to finish this column and go and up my “clarity and obviousness” game. The last thing I’d want to do at this point is post some other non-obvious art and accidentally “delegitimize the state.” I’m already in enough trouble as it is! Thank God I have The Senior Public Prosecutor’s Revisionsbegründung to refer to!

    I tell you, I don’t know where I’d be without these Germans!

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  • Purgatorial Torments: Assange and the UK High Court

    What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to it, notably when it comes to dealing with political charges?  The record is not good, and the ongoing sadistic carnival that is the prosecution (and persecution) of Julian Assange continues to provide meat for the table.

    Those supporting the WikiLeaks publisher, who faces extradition to the United States even as he remains scandalously confined and refused bail in Belmarsh Prison, had hoped for a clear decision from the UK High Court on March 26.  Either they would reject leave to appeal the totality of his case, thereby setting the wheels of extradition into motion, or permit a full review, which would provide some relief.  Instead, they got a recipe for purgatorial prolongation, a tormenting midway that grants the US government a possibility to make amends in seeking their quarry.

    A sinking sense of repetition was evident.  In December 2021, the High Court overturned the decision of the District Court Justice Vanessa Baraitser to bar extradition on the weight of certain assurances provided by the US government.  Her judgment had been brutal to Assange in all respects but one: that extradition would imperil his life in the US penal system, largely due to his demonstrated suicidal ideation and inadequate facilities to cope with that risk.

    With a school child’s gullibility – or a lawyer’s biting cynicism – the High Court judges accepted assurances from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that Assange would not face the crushing conditions of detention in the notorious ADX Florence facility or suffer the gagging restrictions euphemised as Special Administrative Measures.  He would also receive the appropriate medical care that would alleviate his suicide risk and face the prospect of serving the balance of any sentence back in Australia.  The refusal to look behind the mutability and fickle nature of such undertakings merely passed the judges by.  The March 26 judgment is much in keeping with that tradition.

    The grounds for Assange’s team numbered nine in total entailing two parts.  Some of these should be familiar to even the most generally acquainted reader.  The first part, comprising seven grounds, argues that the decision to send the case to the Home Secretary was wrong for: ignoring the bar to extradition under the UK-US Extradition Treaty for political offences, which Assange is being sought for; that his prosecution is for political opinions; that the extradition is incompatible with article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) noting that there should be no punishment without law; that the process is incompatible with article 10 of the ECHR protecting freedom of expression; that prejudice at trial would follow by reason of his non-US nationality; that the right to a fair trial, protected by article 6 of the ECHR, was not guaranteed; and that the extradition is incompatible with articles 2 and 3 of the ECHR (right to life, and prohibiting inhuman and degrading treatment).

    The second part of the application challenged the UK Home Secretary’s decision to approve the extradition, which should have been barred by the treaty between the UK and US, and on the grounds that there was “inadequate specialty/death penalty protection.”

    In this gaggle of imposing, even damning arguments, the High Court was only moved by three arguments, leaving much of Baraitser’s reasons untouched.  Assange’s legal team had established an arguable case that sending the case to the Home Secretary was wrong as he might be prejudiced at trial by reason of his nationality.  Following from that “but only as a consequence of that”, extradition would be incompatible with free speech protections under article 10 of the ECHR.  An arguable case against the Home Secretary’s decision could also be made as it was barred by inadequate specialty/death penalty protection.

    What had taken place was a dramatic and savage pruning of a wholesome challenge to a political persecution garishly dressed in legal drag.  On the issue of whether Assange was being prosecuted for his political opinions, the Court was happy to accept the woeful finding by Baraitser that he had not.  The judge was “entitled to reach that conclusion on the evidence before her, and on the unchallenged sworn evidence of the prosecutor (which refutes the applicant’s case).”  While accepting the view that Assange “acted out of political conviction”, the extradition was not being made “on account of his political views.”  Again, we see the judiciary avoid the facts staring at it: that the exposure of war crimes, atrocities, torture and various misdeeds of state are supposedly not political at all.

    Baraitser’s assessment on the US Espionage Act of 1917, that cruel exemplar of war time that has become peacetime’s greater suppressor of leakers and whistleblowers, was also spared necessary laceration.  The point missed in both her judgment and the latest High Court ruling is a seeming inability to accept that the Act is designed to circumvent constitutional protections, a point made from the outset by the brave Wisconsin Republican Senator Robert M. La Follette.

    On the issue of whether Assange would be denied due process in that he could not foresee being prosecuted for publishing classified documents in 2010, the view that US courts are “alive to the issues of vagueness and overbreadth in relation” to the Act misses the point.  It hardly assures Assange that he would not be subject “to a real risk of a flagrant denial” of rights protected by article 7 of the ECHR, let alone the equivalent Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.

    The matter of Assange being denied a fair trial should have been obvious, evidenced by such prejudicial remarks by senior officials (that’s you Mike Pompeo) on his presumed guilt, tainted evidence, a potentially biased jury pool, and coercive plea bargaining.  He could or would also be sentenced for conduct he had not been charged with “based on evidence he will not see and which may have been unlawfully obtained.”  Instead, Baraitser’s negative finding was spared its deserved flaying.  “We, like the judge, consider the article 6 objections raised by the applicants have no arguable merit, from which it follows that it is not arguable that his extradition would give rise to a flagrant denial of his fair trial rights.”

    Of enormous, distorting significance was the refusal by the High Court to accept “fresh evidence” such as the Yahoo News article from September 2021 outlining the views of intelligence officials on the possible kidnapping and even assassination of Assange. To this could be added a statement from US attorney Joshua Dratel who pertinently argued that designating WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” was intended “to place [the applicant] outside any cognizable legal framework that might protect them from the US actions based on purported ‘national security’ imperatives”.

    A signed witness statement also confirmed that UC Global, the Spanish security firm charged by the CIA to conduct surveillance of Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, had means to provide important information for “options on how to assassinate” Assange.

    Instead of considering the material placed before them as validating a threat to Assange’s right to life, or the prospect of inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the High Court justices speculated what Baraitser would have done if she had seen it.  Imaginatively, if inexplicably, the judges accepted her finding that the conduct by the CIA and UC Global regarding the Ecuadorian embassy had no link with the extradition proceedings.  With jaw dropping incredulity, the judges reasoned that the murderous, brutal rationale for dealing with Assange contemplated by the US intelligence services “is removed if the applicant is extradited.”  In a fit of true Orwellian reasoning, Assange’s safety would be guaranteed the moment he was placed in the custody of his would-be abductors and murderers.

    The High Court was also generous enough to do the homework for the US government by reiterating the position taken by their brother judges in the 2021 decision.  Concerns about Assange’s mistreatment would be alleviated by granting “assurances (that the applicant is permitted to rely on the First Amendment, that the applicant is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same First Amendment protection as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty not be imposed).”  Such a request is absurd for presuming, not only that the prosecutors can be held to their word, but that a US court would feel inclined to accept the application of the First Amendment, let alone abide by requested sentencing requirements.

    The US government has been given till April 16 to file assurances addressing the three grounds, with further written submissions in response to be filed by April 30 by Assange’s team, and May 14 by the Home Secretary.  Another leave of appeal will be entertained on May 20.  If the DOJ does not provide any assurances, then leave to appeal will be granted.  The accretions of obscenity in the Assange saga are set to continue.

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  • Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up

    The interminable and abhorrent saga of Julian Assange’s incarceration for the crime of journalism continues. And once again, the headline news is a lie, one designed both to buy our passivity and to buy more time for the British and US establishments to keep the Wikileaks founder permanently disappeared from view.

    The Guardian – which has a mammoth, undeclared conflict of interest in its coverage of the extradition proceedings against Assange (you can read about that here and here) – headlined the ruling by the UK High Court today as a “temporary reprieve” for Assange. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Five years on, Assange is still caged in Belmarsh high-security prison, convicted of absolutely nothing.

    Five years on, he still faces a trial in the US on ludicrous charges under a century-old, draconian piece of legislation called the Espionage Act. Assange is not a US citizen and none of the charges relate to anything he did in the US.

    Five years on, the English judiciary is still rubber-stamping his show trial – a warning to others not to expose state crimes, as Assange did in publishing details of British and US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Five years on, judges in London are still turning a blind eye to Assange’s sustained psychological torture, as the former United Nations legal expert Nils Melzer has documented.

    The word “reprieve” is there – just as the judges’ headline ruling that some of the grounds of his appeal have been “granted” – to conceal the fact that he is prisoner to an endless legal charade every bit as much as he is a prisoner in a Belmarsh cell.

    In fact, today’s ruling is yet further evidence that Assange is being denied due process and his most basic legal rights – as he has been for a decade or more.

    In the ruling, the court strips him of any substantive grounds of appeal, precisely so there will be no hearing in which the public gets to learn more about the various British and US crimes he exposed, for which he is being kept in jail. He is thereby denied a public-interest defence against extradition. Or in the court’s terminology, his “application to adduce fresh evidence is refused”.

    Even more significantly, Assange is specifically stripped of the right to appeal on the very legal grounds that should guarantee him an appeal, and should have ensured he was never subjected to a show trial in the first place. His extradition would clearly violate the prohibition in the Extradition Treaty between the UK and the US against extradition on political grounds.

    Nonetheless, in their wisdom, the judges rule that Washington’s vendetta against Assange for exposing its crimes is not driven by political considerations. Nor apparently was there a political factor to the CIA’s efforts to kidnap and assassinate him after he was granted political asylum by Ecuador, precisely to protect him from the US administration’s wrath.

    What the court “grants” instead are three technical grounds of appeal – although in the small print, that “granted” is actually subverted to “adjourned”. The “reprieve” celebrated by the media – supposedly a victory for British justice – actually pulls the legal rug from under Assange.

    Each of those grounds of appeal can be reversed – that is, rejected – if Washington submits “assurances” to the court, however worthless they may end up being in practice. In which case, Assange is on a flight to the US and effectively disappeared into one of its domestic black sites.

    Those three pending grounds of appeal on which the court seeks reassurance are that extradition will not:

    • deny Assange his basic free speech rights;
    • discriminate against him on the basis of his nationality, as a non-US citizen;
    • or place him under threat of the death penalty in the US penal system.

    The judiciary’s latest bending over backwards to accommodate Washington’s intention to keep Assange permanently locked out of view follows years of perverse legal proceedings in which the US has repeatedly been allowed to change the charges it is levelling against Assange at short notice to wrong-foot his legal team. It also follows years in which the US has had a chance to make clear its intention to provide Assange with a fair trial but has refused to do so.

    Washington’s true intentions are already more than clear: the US spied on Assange’s every move while he was under the protection of the Ecuadorian embassy, violating his lawyer-client privilege; and the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him.

    Both are grounds that alone should have seen the case thrown out.

    But there is nothing normal – or legal – about the proceedings against Assange. The case has always been about buying time. To disappear Assange from public view. To vilify him. To smash the revolutionary publishing platform he founded to help whistleblowers expose state crimes. To send a message to other journalists that the US can reach them wherever they live should they try to hold Washington to account for its criminality.

    And worst of all, to provide a final solution for the nuisance Assange had become for the global superpower by trapping him in an endless process of incarceration and trial that, if it is allowed to drag on long enough, will most likely kill him.

    Today’s ruling is most certainly not a “reprieve”. It is simply another stage in a protracted, faux-legal process designed to provide constant justifications for keeping Assange behind bars, and never-ending postponements of judgment day, when either Assange is set free or the British and US justice systems are exposed as hand servants of brutish, naked power.

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  • Complicity in Gaza: Holding US Foreign Policy Legally Accountable

    On March 15, the next stage of an intriguing legal process seeking to hold the Biden administration accountable for its failure to prevent, as well as being complicit in, alleged acts of genocide taking place in Gaza, was taken.  It all stems from a lawsuit filed last November in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a number of Palestinian human rights organisations including Palestinians in Gaza and the United States.

    The lawsuit sought an order from the court “requiring that the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense adhere to their duty to prevent, and not further, the unfolding genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.”  The relevant duty arose by virtue of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, which made obligations under it “judicially enforceable as a peremptory norm of customary international law.”

    The complaint further alleged that the genocidal conditions in Gaza had “so far been made possible because of unconditional support given [to Israel] by the named official-capacity defendants in this case,” namely, President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

    Such legal challenges can face challenges.  Can the foreign policy of a state, which is the purview of the executive, fall within the scope of judicial review?  In some countries, this has been shown to be the case – consider the Dutch appeals court decision compelling the government of the Netherlands to halt the transfer of F-35 parts to Israel for fear it would fall foul of the Genocide Convention.  “The Netherlands,” the court found, “is obligated to prohibit the export of military goods if there is a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

    In the US, the separation of powers walls off judicial interference in matters of foreign policy.  Jeffrey S. White, in dismissing the case at first instance, admitted it was the “most difficult” of his career, conceding that the factual grounds asserted by the plaintiffs seemed largely “uncontroverted”.  He also acknowledged the legal noise and interest caused by South Africa’s action in the International Court of Justice against Israel, one contending that Israel’s conduct against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip satisfied the elements of genocide.

    While the ICJ is unlikely to reach a conclusion on the matter any time soon, it issued an interim order of provisional measures explicitly putting Israel on notice to comply with the Genocide Convention, punish those responsible for directly and publicly inciting genocide, permit basic humanitarian assistance and essential services to the Gaza Strip, preserve relevant evidence pertaining to potential genocidal acts and report to the ICJ on its compliance within a month.

    In White’s words, “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.”  But to compel the US government to cease aid to Israel of a financial and military matter were matters “intimately related to foreign policy and national security”. The judiciary was, reasoned White, “not equipped with the intelligence or the acumen necessary to make foreign policy decisions on behalf of the government.”

    On March 8, an appeal was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-counsel Van Der Hout LLP in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit arguing that aiding and abetting genocide can never be seen as a legitimate, unquestioned policy decision. The federal judiciary was duty bound to uphold the Genocide Convention, one that had taken on “an urgent, even existential dimension when the legal violation at issue is facilitating and even accelerating the destruction of an entirpeople.”

    Within a matter of days, eight amicus briefs were submitted supporting the Palestinian plaintiffs.   In one brief, eleven constitutional, federal courts and international law scholars submit in severe fashion that “affirming the district court’s decision would create serious mischief and uncertainty by contradicting this Court’s and the US Supreme Court’s political question jurisprudence and degrading the essential judicial role in interpreting and applying the law, including norms of international law, treaties, and their implementing statutes.”

    While Justice White had noted the obvious proposition that foreign policy remained a matter for the political branches of government, with disputes on the subject being nonjusticiable, “that principle was not actually at issue in this case.”  The Supreme Court had recognised that “legal disputes that touch on foreign affairs are not automatically policy disputes or political questions.” In this instance, the district court had “eschewed its responsibility to closely analyze the actual issues presented in favor of abstraction, generality, and already rejected misconceptions about what is and is not a political question.”

    Another brief from seventeen former diplomats, service members and intelligence officers argues that “courts may decide whether an act violates a law, and that a finding that they cannot would harm US foreign policy.”  The authors accepted “for present purposes that the district court’s factual finding, that the Israeli military’s conduct may plausibly constitute genocide, accurately reflects the record and controls at this juncture.” Again, White was taken to task for not appreciating the distinction between the “wisdom” of foreign policy – a nonjusticiable issue – and “cases that question the legality of foreign policy, because applying the law to determine the legality of government action is the judiciary’s responsibility.”

    Most impressive for the plaintiffs was the filing by 139 human rights organisations, bar associations and social justice movement lawyers reiterating the point that “allegations of the United States’ violations of the duties to prevent genocide and avoid complicity in its commission are clearly justiciable.”  International law, by virtue of its “decentralized” nature, placed reliance upon States “to enforce the obligations to which they have consented, imposing a primary duty to the domestic courts of each State to ensure the compliance of their executive and legislative bodies with international law.”

    Oral arguments will be heard in San Francisco in June 2024.  By that time, the killing, starving and displacement of the Palestinian populace in Gaza will have further crystallised in its horror, leaving the legal fraternity dragging their feet.  But over the cadaverous nature of this conflict, litigants in the US may be clearer about whether courts can hold the government to account for aiding and abetting the commission of alleged acts of genocide.

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  • Imperial Venality Defends Itself: Day Two of Julian Assange’s High Court Appeal

    On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security.  Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such as what has just been concluded at the High Court.

    How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion and expression?

    Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp got the bien pensant treatment of the national security state, dressed in robes, and tediously inclined.  Prosaic arguments were recycled like stale, oppressive air.  According to Clair Dobbin KC, there was “no immunity for journalists to break the law” and that the US constitutional First Amendment protecting the press would never confer it.  This had an undergraduate obviousness to it; no one in this case has ever asserted such cavalierly brutal freedom in releasing classified material, a point that Mark Summers KC, representing Assange, was happy to point out.

    Yet again, the Svengali argument, gingered with seduction, was run before a British court.  Assange, assuming all the powers of manipulation, cultivated and corrupted the disclosers, “soliciting” them to pilfer classified government materials.  With limping repetition, Dobbin insisted that WikiLeaks had been responsible for revealing “the unredacted names of the sources who provided information to the United States,” many of whom “lived in war zones or in repressive regimes”.  In exposing the names of Afghans, Iraqis, journalists, religious figures, human rights dissidents and political dissidents, the publisher had “created a grave and immediate risk that innocent people would suffer serious physical harm or arbitrary detention”.

    The battering did not stop there.  “There were really profound consequences, beyond the real human cost and to the broader ability to the US to gather evidence from human sources as well.”  Dobbin’s proof of these contentions is thin, vague and causally absent: the arrest of one Ethiopian journalist following the leak; unspecified “others” disappeared.  She even admitted the fact that “it cannot be proven that their disappearance was a result of being outed.”  This was certainly a point pounced upon by Summers.

    The previous publication by Cryptome of all the documents, or the careless publication of the key to the encrypted file with the unredacted cables by journalists from The Guardian in a book on WikiLeaks, did not convince Dobbin.  Assange was “responsible for the publications of the unredacted documents whether published by others or WikiLeaks.”  There was no mention, either, that Assange had been alarmed by The Guardian faux pas and had contacted the US State Department of this fact.  Summers, in his contribution, duly reminded the court of the publisher’s frantic efforts while also reasoning that the harm caused had been “unintended, unforeseen and unwanted” by him.

    With this selective, prejudicial angle made clear, Dobbin’s words became those of a disgruntled empire caught with its pants down when harming and despoiling others.  “What the appellant is accused of is really at the upper end of the spectrum of gravity,” she submitted, attracting “no public interest whatsoever”.  Conveniently, calculatingly, any reference to the enormous, weighty revelations of WikiLeaks of torture, renditions, war crimes, surveillance, to name but a few, was avoided.  Emphasis was placed, instead, upon the “usefulness” of the material WikiLeaks had published: to the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden.

    This is a dubious point given the Pentagon’s own assertions to the contrary in a 2011 report dealing with the significance of the disclosure of military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks.  On the Iraq War logs and State Department cables, the report concluded “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq.”  On the Afghanistan war log releases, the authors also found that they would not result in “significant impact” to US operations, though did claim that this was potentially damaging to “intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population,” and intelligence collection efforts by the US and NATO.

    Summers appropriately rebutted the contention about harm by suggesting that Assange had opposed, in the highest traditions of journalism, “war crimes”, a consideration that had to be measured against unverified assertions of harm.

    On this point, the prosecution found itself in knots, given that a balancing act of harm and freedom of expression is warranted under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  When asked by Justice Johnson whether prosecuting a journalist in the UK, when in possession of “information of very serious wrongdoing by an intelligence agency [had] incited an employee of that agency to provide information… [which] was then published in a very careful way” was compatible with the right to freedom of expression, Dobbin conceded to there being no “straightforward answer”.

    When pressed by Justice Johnson as to whether she accepted the idea that the “statutory offence”, not any “scope for a balancing exercise” was what counted, Dobbin had to concede that a “proportionality assessment” would normally arise when publishers were prosecuted under section 5 of the UK Official Secrets Act.  Prosecutions would only take place if one “knowingly published” information known “to be damaging”.

    Any half-informed student of the US Espionage Act knows that strict liability under the statute negates any need to undertake a balancing assessment.  All that matters is that the individual had “reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the US,” often proved by the mere fact that the information published was classified to begin with.

    Dobbin then switched gears.  Having initially advertised the view that journalists could never be entirely immune from criminal prosecution, she added more egg to the pudding on the reasons why Assange was not a journalist.  Her view of the journalist being a bland, obedient transmitter of received, establishment wisdom was all too clear.  Assange had gone “beyond the acts of a journalist who is merely gathering information”.  He had, for instance, agreed with Chelsea Manning on March 8, 2010 to attempt cracking a password hash that would have given her access to the secure and classified Department of Defense account.  Doing so meant using a false identity to facilitate further pilfering of classified documents.

    This was yet another fiction.  Manning’s court martial had revealed the redundancy of having to crack a password hash as she already had administrator access to the system.  Why then bother with the conspiratorial circus?

    The corollary of this is that the prosecution’s reliance on fabricated testimony, notably from former WikiLeaks volunteer, convicted paedophile and FBI tittle-tattler Sigurdur ‘Siggi’ Thordarson.  In June 2021, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin, now publishing under the name Heimildin, revealed that Assange had “never asked him to hack or to access phone recordings of [Iceland’s] MPs.”  He also had not “received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained.”  Thordarson never went through the relevant files, nor verified whether they had audio recordings as claimed by the third-party source. The allegation that Assange instructed him to access computers in order to unearth such recordings was roundly rejected.

    The legal team representing the US attempted to convince the court that suggestions of “bad faith” by the defence on the part of such figures as lead prosecutor Gordon Kromberg had to be discounted.  “The starting position must be, as it always is in these cases, the fundamental assumption of good faith on the part of those states with which the United Kingdom has long-standing extradition relationships,” asserted Dobbin.  “The US is one of the most long-standing partners of the UK.”

    This had a jarring quality to it, given that nothing in Washington’s approach to Assange – the surveillance sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency via Spanish security firm UC Global, the contemplation of abduction and assassination by intelligence officials, the after-the-fact concoction of assurances to assure easier extradition to the US – has been anything but one of bad faith.

    Summers countered by refuting any suggestions that “Mr Kronberg is a lying individual or that he is personally not carrying out his prosecutorial duties in good faith. The prosecution and extradition here is a decision taken way above his head.”  This was a matter of “state retaliation ordered from the very top”; one could not “focus on the sheep and ignore the shepherd.”

    Things did not get better for the prosecuting side on what would happen once Assange was extradited.  Would he, for instance, be protected by the free press amendment under US law?  Former CIA director Mike Pompeo had suggested that Assange’s Australian citizenship barred him from protections afforded by the First Amendment.  Dobbin was not sure, but insisted that there was insufficient evidence to suggest that nationality would prejudice Assange in any trial.  Justice Johnson was sharp: “the test isn’t that he would be prejudiced.  It is that he might be prejudiced on the grounds of his nationality.”  This was hard to square with the UK Extradition Act prohibiting extradition where a person “might be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained, or restricted in his personal liberty” on account of nationality.

    Given existing US legal practice, Assange also faced the risk of the death penalty, something that extradition arrangements would bar.  Ben Watson KC, representing the UK Home Secretary, had to concede to the court that there was nothing preventing any amendment by US prosecutors to the current list of charges that could result in a death sentence.

    If he does not succeed in this appeal, Assange may well request an intervention of the European Court of Human Rights for a stay of proceedings under Rule 39.  Like many European institutions so loathed by the governments of post-Brexit Britain, it offers the prospect of relief provided that there are “exceptional circumstances” and an instance “where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.”

    The sickening irony of that whole proviso is that irreparable harm is being inflicted on Assange in prison, where the UK prison system fulfils the role of the punishing US gaoler.  Speed will be of the essence; and the government of Rishi Sunak may well quickly bundle the publisher onto a transatlantic flight.  If so, the founder of WikiLeaks will go the way of other prestigious and wronged political prisoners who sought to expand minds rather than narrow them.

    The post Imperial Venality Defends Itself: Day Two of Julian Assange’s High Court Appeal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • When Courts Intervene: Halting the Transfer of F-35 Parts to Israel

    Legal challenges regarding the Israel-Gaza War are starting to bulk lawyers’ briefs and courtroom proceedings.  South Africa got matters underway with its December application before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in its campaign against the Palestinians.  While determining whether genocide has taken place, the ICJ issued an interim order warning Israel to prevent genocidal acts, preserve evidence relevant to the prosecution of any such acts, and ease the crushing restrictions on humanitarian aid.

    In the United States, a valiant effort was made in the US District Court for the Northern District of California to restrain the Biden administration from aiding Israel’s war efforts.  The application, filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, argued that President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, had made genocidal conditions possible “because of unconditional support given [to Israel] by the named official-capacity defendants in this case”.

    The troubled judge, while citing the convention that foreign policy could not be the subject of a court’s jurisdiction, nonetheless implored President Biden and his officials to observe the obligations of the UN Genocide Convention.  As justice Jeffrey S. White declared, “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.”

    A Dutch appeals court in The Hague has further added its name to this growing list of interventions.  Judge Bas Boele, in siding with the human rights groups making the application including Oxfam Novib, had no such quibbles with questioning government policy towards Israel and the shipping of parts vital for the F-35 fighter. While the Netherlands does not assemble or produce the F-35, it houses at least one storage facility at Woensdrecht, where US-made components are stored for shipping to various countries.

    Despite the ongoing conflict in Gaza, which commenced after the attacks by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023 on Israel, the Dutch government had not discontinued deliveries under a permit granted in 2016.  This is despite the monumentally lethal nature of a war that has left 28,100 Palestinians dead, and the decision by the ICJ.

    The lower court had, in a similar vein to their US counterparts, adopted the position that decisions regarding export permits of weapon components tended to be of a political and policy nature, warranting wide executive latitude.  The judge duly held that the Minister of Foreign Trade and Cooperation had weighed up the relevant interests in the case in deciding to continue with the exports.

    Such an artificial distinction – one that finds political acts that may lead to complicity in genocide armoured, if not above legal challenge – was not persuasive to the higher court.  “It is undeniable that there is a clear risk that the exported F-35 parts are used in serious violations of international humanitarian law,” the appeals court found. “Israel does not take sufficient account of the consequences for the civilian population when conducting its attacks.”  Such attacks had “resulted in a disproportionate number of civilian casualties [in Gaza].”

    It followed that, “The Netherlands is obliged to prohibit the export of military goods if there is a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law.”  The export and transit of all F-35 parts with Israel as their final destination would cease within seven days.

    In responding to the ruling, Oxfam Novib Executive Director Michiel Servaes called it “an important step to force the Dutch government to adhere to international law, which the Netherlands has strongly advocated for in the past.  Israel has just launched an attack against the city of Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population are sheltering, the Netherlands must take immediate steps.”

    Immediate steps have been duly taken, but not along the lines advocated by Oxfam; the Dutch government is appealing to the country’s Supreme Court to return to the status quo.  It was always likely to happen and was timed with the February 12 visit by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to Israel and the Palestinian territories.  “In the government’s view,” went the official statement, “the distribution of American F-35 parts is not unlawful.  The government believes it is up to the State to its [sic] determine foreign policy.”

    The statement also goes on to reveal the sheer scope of the F-35 supply program and its relevance to the Dutch defence industry.  Whatever the humanitarian considerations about the devastation caused by Israel’s F-35 fighters, no participant wants to miss out.  “The government will do everything it can to convince allies and partners that the Netherlands remains a reliable partner in the F-35 project and in European and international defence cooperation.”

    Being part of the program was also vital to the country’s own security, and that of Israel’s “in particular with regard to threats emanating from the region, for instance from Iran, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.”

    The Palestinian civilians hardly figure in these considerations, though Gaza warrants the briefest of mentions.  “The Netherlands continues to call for an immediate temporary humanitarian ceasefire, and for as much humanitarian aid as possible to be allowed to reach the suffering people of Gaza.  The situation is extremely serious.  It is clear that international humanitarian law applies in full and Israel, too, must abide by it.”  As, indeed, Israel implausibly claims to be doing so, even as the starving continues and the graves fill.

    The post When Courts Intervene: Halting the Transfer of F-35 Parts to Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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