A few days after a massive power outage in North Carolina in early December, Margaret Killjoy shared a thread on preparedness in response to the outages. Alongside the usual emergency supplies like extra water, batteries, medicine, heat sources, and food, Killjoy noted something not usually included in preparedness toolkits: “organize against the far right so that they are less capable of shooting up power stations.”
Killjoy, an author and musician who lives in the mountains of West Virginia, hosts the anarchist prepping podcast Live Like The World Is Dying. Since its creation just before the pandemic began, it has grown into a valuable and widely-accessed resource for people wondering how to deal with any number of emergencies in their communities.
The recent sabotages of power stations across the United States, along with increasing rates of climate-related infrastructure devastation, have prompted people to wonder: what do we do if the lights go out in our community? Killjoy says the answer is simple. We need to embrace preparedness culture.
Alleged Right-Wing Attacks On Infrastructure
The reasons behind the North Carolina power outage are still officially unknown, but some locals believe that it was part of a far-right protest against a drag show in nearby Southern Pines. (LGBTQ+ people in the area reported feeling a heightened sense of fear after the blackouts.) The outages are part of an uptick in targeting of energy infrastructure across the United States, responsibility for some of which has been taken by neo-Nazi and far-right groups.
Killjoy says that intentional attacks on utilities infrastructure from fascist groups can be understood as “an accelerationist technique” and part of a far-right strategy of pushing society to a breaking point to encourage social collapse. In the vacuum and chaos, she says, these groups believe they can seize power.
While Killjoy says it’s unlikely these tactics would succeed given how extreme they are and modern America’s tactical preference for systemic disenfranchisement over racist violence, the tenor and visibility of fascism in America via culture war attacks on marginalized communities suggests a need for heightened vigilance.
The Prepper in Pop Culture
For decades, the pop culture archetype of the prepper has been colorfully right-wing and individualist: a paranoid, libertarian recluse stockpiling weapons, ammunition, and canned beans while waiting for some cataclysmic event. Killjoy says we’ve built up a “mythos of the loner who builds and hides in a bunker and eats camp food until their appendix bursts and they die.” In this scenario, virtually all other people are viewed as a threat because of either malicious intent or desperation for access to resources.
This association has prevented people on the political left from engaging with preparedness culture, says Killjoy. “I think people are way too quick to give up cultural terrain to the right-wing,” she says. “People are way too quick to be like, ‘Oh, a right-wing person is interested in the following thing so I cannot be,’ instead of saying, ‘How is our take on this different?’”
Killjoy says the popular portrayal of prepping has also led people to neglect the real and worsening conditions of emergency around us. “We tend as a society to look at preppers as people who are waiting for nuclear winter or zombies, but by and large preparedness is about responding to disaster, and disaster is happening, even just in the United States, always,” says Killjoy. “More people are starting to realize that they are less insulated from disaster than they grew up thinking that they are.”
Individual and Community Preparedness
Killjoy says that even more than a bug-out bag packed with survival supplies, the single most important thing someone could consider doing is knowing who their neighbors are. That could mean being friends with them, or just being cordial, but it could also mean marking which ones aren’t safe and who to avoid.
“During times of disaster, each other are the main things that we have,” she says. “Knowing that ahead of time is at least as important as knowing where your secondary source of potable water is.”
Similarly, Killjoy notes that halting the advance of the far-right is a communal task, not an individual one. That’s why community defense is as critical as personal defense. Personal defense, says Killjoy, includes those things that an individual does to keep themself safe. For Killjoy, who has been doxxed and threatened by the far-right, that includes a handgun and concealed carry permit.
Community defense is a larger and more difficult project, but also a potentially more effective one. Fascist movements often move to shut down cultural and social infrastructure, so when far-right mobs crash Pride rallies, Black churches, or abortion clinics, community organization is the only viable protection. Killjoy points to recent community defenses of drag shows, including large crowds of supporters flanked by allies open-carrying long rifles, as an example of community preparedness.
Killjoy says that while the rifles demonstrate to armed far-right crowds that “we can’t be fucked with,” they’re just a small piece of community preparedness. There’s also keeping track of each other and what issues we’re dealing with—for example, threats from bigots or police harassment—alongside monitoring and exposing white supremacist groups organizing in your area.
“Possibly nothing has been more effective at pulling the rug out from underneath far-right organizing in this country than exposing people for not just being a regular right-wing person, but a bonafide Nazi,” says Killjoy. “All of that falls under community defense.”
Most right-wing prepping culture tends to depict the ideal survival situation as rural and isolated from other people, and while Killjoy lives rurally, she says urban and suburban spaces are at least as good for preparedness due to proximity to community and infrastructure.
Prepping For The Worst
Killjoy says that while society encourages a division between these things—the right insisting on the importance of the individual, the left on the importance of the community—they strengthen one another when both are tended to in prepping culture. When the pandemic hit, a friend of Killjoy’s had to caretake for an elderly person but couldn’t find any suitable masks. Killjoy had a supply of P100 masks for her earthquake preparedness kit, and shared them.
“Having resources available to you means you’re in a better place to help other people,” she says. “By being able to take care of ourselves, we’re able to require less from the mutual aid networks that we might build. By requiring less from those networks, we’re better able to help them.”
It’s these qualities of prepping culture that Killjoy says move people toward engaging more deeply with their own lives and their communities. Acknowledging the stakes and what could happen will, ideally, push people to fight to avoid worst-case scenarios.
“We can all wish things were like they used to be, but they’re not,” says Killjoy. “I think people are used to avoiding taking responsibility for what happens in the world, and assuming that experts will handle whatever the problem is. We’re all waiting for the government to save us, and I don’t believe that’s a rational way to survive any crisis. Any look at history shows that very clearly.”
Attacks on power infrastructure and anti-LGBTQ+ hate both spiked in 2022, and while it’s possible those facts are coincidental, it might pay off in the long run to treat them as correlated. Killjoy says that after decades of comparable stability, people have grown accustomed to things working as they should. Prepping is a long term investment in making sure that when the lights go out, we’re ready to take care of ourselves and each other.
Incarcerated Georgians and their loved ones have struggled to stay in touch after the Georgia Department of Corrections began switching communications services from JPay to Securus, as the former merges its systems with the latter. This change was accompanied by the emergence of a more stringent and increasingly punitive prison communications policy.
While the Georgia Department of Corrections’ (GDC) policy was written in 2018, it is only now being enforced, according to incarcerated people and their loved ones. Under the policy, people who wish to communicate with someone inside must submit an application and submit to government screening. Additionally, a prisoner may only have 12 people on this approved communications list.
Prisoners and their advocates say this process is meant to gate-keep and surveil prisoners’ communications. It also limits the means through which prisoners and loved ones can expose abhorrent, brutal prison conditions.
The timing of this transition is particularly distressing because of a wave of killings and unrest affecting incarcerated people. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating soaring violence in GDC facilities and yet prison administrators have refused to provide federal investigators with basic data on the number of incarcerated people murdered within their facilities.
Many Georgia prisoners have been without electronic communication with their loved ones for over six months at the time of this reporting. In Georgia, most communication between prisoners and those on the outside occurs via correctional tablet devices and in-dorm kiosks. They could exchange emails, pictures, and short videos over this system. This has been the case for over seven years.
Pointing to a gross understaffing crisis and the prolificacy of drugs, many facilities have stopped physical mail delivery via the U.S. Postal Service. Any mail that does enter the facility is scanned and a copy is provided in print or on the electronic tablet devices. Most facilities lack the staff to adequately receive, process, and disburse mail to prisoners or make electronic copies accessible via the tablets and dorm kiosks. Prisoners have reported missing mail at some institutions for months at a time since COVID collided with the staffing crisis. This includes legal mail, the disruption of which presents its own grave concerns for prisoners’ defense and the ability to secure release.
In mid-October, this reporter’s inbox was flooded with messages from Georgia prisoners and their friends and family complaining about email communications. Prisoners reported being told that it would no longer be permissible to have contact with anyone not on their “approved contact list.”
Emily Shelton of Ignite Justice, a prison reform nonprofit, says she reached out to both Securus and JPay after receiving numerous appeals from Georgia prisoners and their loved ones. “I spoke with Securus and was told that GDC sent Securus/Jpay a message stating that no one is allowed to message an inmate unless they’re on the approved visitation list for them,” says Shelton.
Advocates Shadowproof spoke with say this could be a First Amendment mail/communication violation, arguably curtailing or, at the very least, failing to provide meaningful communication between prisoners and the general public. With the in-dorm kiosks out of service as well, prisoners have been unable to submit institutional grievances and health service request forms – an additional First Amendment and Eighth Amendment violation, respectively.
“This drastic change in policy blocks the way nearly 50,000 incarcerated people communicate with their family, including their children, other loved ones and advocates, hurting them and their communities,” said Gerry Webber, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights. “In effect, countless people who used to be able to communicate with folks on the inside now cannot, with no justification from GDC for this dramatic and inexplicably punitive revocation of vital connection with community supports.”
Shadowproof spoke with people incarcerated in no less than six facilities who say that, as far back as July, all digital or electronic communication with their friends and family via Jpay services was terminated.
“The kiosks were shut off for the entire compound here when Securus reps came in to begin installing the new kiosks and their hardware,” said Zombr3x, a prisoner housed at a Middle Georgia men’s prison. We are withholding his identity to protect him from possible retaliation by prison staff for speaking to the press.
“The kiosks are in now, turned on and running, and have been for the entire compound for weeks,” he said. “Yet we still don’t have login credentials or anything, and we’re being told that anyone who wants to communicate with us must submit to the usual visitation background check procedure.”
A.J., whose real name is also being withheld for his protection, is a prisoner at Smith State Prison. He says that family members and friends who are not entering the facility for physical visitation sessions shouldn’t be subjected to this degree of government scrutiny.
“It’s invasive,” he said. “The process to get someone approved for visits is outrageous. In addition to the criminal records check, our families and friends have to send in their ID, birth certificate, and social card.”
“This is a hassle and GDC treats our families like they are under investigation for being related to an inmate. My family cannot pass drugs or anything else through a screen. Due to this process they are keeping us isolated from our families when these tablets and video visits are meant to keep us together.”
In addition to this information, loved ones are asked to submit background checks and submission of all telephone numbers, emails and addresses. Others will be disqualified from communicating with incarcerated people because of felony convictions, as the GDC doesn’t permit people with felony records to be on a prisoners’ visitation or financial list for a period of time post-conviction.
The lack of email also has a negative impact in terms of access to culture, the press, penpals, external services, advocacy projects, and civil rights organizations.
Susan Burns is the founder and chief administrator of THEY HAVE NO VOICE, a Facebook watchdog group for prisoner rights and conditions. Burns and her group vociferously advocate on behalf of the incarcerated, regularly flooding GDC officials with open letters, chain emails, petitions boasting hundreds of signatures, and phone call campaigns.
Burns told Shadowproof, “I have been blocked at the behest of GDC officials via JPay and Securus. I cannot speak with or e-mail the very people for whom I advocate.”
“They have intentionally maneuvered to stop me from being a voice for those who most need it,” Burns argued. “This is affecting the work of other non-profits also and obstructing our attempts at holding GDC accountable to the public.”
The lack of communications means prisoners aren’t able to maintain and nourish meaningful connections, which negatively impacts their lives post-incarceration. Numerous studies have found that contact and connection with those in the community is powerful in terms of successful reentry. Those prisoners who are pursuing postsecondary education (believed in some cases to to lower recidivism rates by 48 percent), are unable to easily and meaningfully communicate with their educational institutions and professors in a way that facilitates their success.
Amy Ard is the founder of Motherhood Beyond Bars, a nonprofit with the particular mission of working with incarcerated mothers in order to enable and empower them for successful reentry, as well as the responsibilities and joys of motherhood after incarceration. For months now, Ard’s organization hasn’t been able to speak with their clients, assist with reentry planning, or ensure that pregnant mothers are receiving proper care.
Ard says that “cutting off communication with support on the outside does a real disservice not just to the women and the men who are in prison coming home. This negatively affects the communities on the other side of those prison walls that are going to be receiving them because they’re gonna start receiving people who have no preparation, who have no connection to outside organizations or agencies, and who haven’t built relationships with those they have on the outside.”
Despite these byzantine GDC policies, there are little benefits to anyone who is impacted. There isn’t a legitimate justification for this pernicious act of government overreach by the state prison agency. Not only will prisoners and their loved ones suffer from such harmful policies that serve absolutely no sound penological interest, but so too will communities.
“Part of our job is just to rock you, and part of our job is to be like troubadours, carrying the news from one town to another, like town criers,” singer-songwriter David Crosby declared in an interview in 2006.
Crosby took his responsibility as a prominent musician seriously, and when he made this comment, he was on the Freedom of Speech tour with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young, where they performed songs from Young’s “Living With War” protest album, called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, and spoke out against the Iraq War.
He co-authored a book, Stand and Be Counted: Making Music, Making History, that was released in 2000. It recounted antiwar demonstrations, civil rights marches, and music benefits from the perspective of artists.
“Nobody kids themselves into believing that they can solve the world’s problems,” Crosby wrote. “We’re just trying to make a difference, to change things for the better wherever we can. And if it takes a long push, then we’re in it for the long haul.”
“A lot of times this isn’t about the genius of the moment. It’s about persistence. It’s about being in there and staying in there.”
On January 18, 2023, Crosby died after battling what his family described as a “long illness.” Though he was in poor health, he still was working on another album and thinking about touring again.
In 1971, when Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) organized the “Winter Soldier” investigation to call attention to war crimes by the United States military in Vietnam, Crosby (and Nash) performed two concerts to help raise funds in support of the event. The investigation emphasized the role of U.S. generals and commanders, who were responsible for the My Lai Massacre.
Up to the final years of his life, Crosby visited the wall at the Vietnam War memorial to remind himself of the “awful price we pay when we let our politicians drag us into wars for profits going to the giant [corporations].”
Profiteering in the Iraq War deeply upset Crosby. He cared about young people who joined the US military and risked their lives, and it disgusted him how Halliburton, Bechtel, and ExxonMobil, etc, were benefiting from the carnage.
He was part of the Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) collective that performed in concerts after the Three Mile Island disaster to demand an end to nuclear energy.
Crosby joined Nash in 2011 to support Occupy Wall Street in New York. They visited the site of the encampment and performed several songs for the people of Liberty Plaza that had gathered to stand up for the 99 percent.
As Crosby described the influence of money over politics, “A senator has to spend more than half his time whoring himself out to get money. And of course, there are all those guys in the $2,000 suits just standing around dying to stuff it in his pockets, you know, from the corporations, because they want to buy a senator, they want to buy a congressman, they want that contract, and that takes our representative democracy out of your hands and my hand. It means it disenfranchises us, and I don’t feel that that’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
Crosby never accepted the official US government narrative around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He shouted at multiple concerts, “The Warren Report was a lie.”
“It was, you know, a hit, and it certainly was no lone gunman. You know, if you watch the Zapruder film, [Kennedy] got hit from two directions. There’s no question about it. Also, I’ve been there and stood in Dealey Plaza behind the fence, and I could’ve hit him with a handgun. It’s not very far,” Crosby contended.
Until his death, Crosby maintained that Kennedy had pissed off those in the power structure, and that was why he was assassinated.
Now here are six protest songs that David Crosby wrote or co-wrote.
“Long Time Gone” (1969)
The liner notes for the 1991 box set version of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the group’s debut album, features Crosby’s explanation for what inspired this song.”
“It was written the night Bobby Kennedy was killed,” Crosby shared. “I believed in him because he said he wanted to make some positive changes in America, and he hadn’t been bought and sold like Johnson and Nixon—cats who made their deals years ago with the special interests in this country in order to gain power.”
Yet in later interviews, Crosby also said that Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was just the “penultimate trigger.” He was also had the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. in mind while writing the tune.
The song is both about the importance of dissent, even when it feels like it will not make any difference. “Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness,” Crosby sings. “You got to speak your mind, if you dare.”
“But don’t, no, don’t now try to get yourself elected. If you do, you had better cut your hair, Crosby adds.
The lyrics recognize that one could no longer be part of the counterculture and independent of the establishment if they were in political office. They would gradually become more implicated in the madness and forced to give up their identity.
“It appears to be a long time before the dawn” represents the very impatience any person feels in the never-ending struggle for truth, peace, and justice.
The song took on a kind of legendary status, when it was included in the introduction for Michael Wadleigh’s “Woodstock” documentary. But it was nearly scrapped after Crosby struggled with it for several weeks while the band was recording their debut album.
According to CSNY: The Wild & Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup by David Browne, Stephen Stills stayed up all night perfecting the instrumentation. Writer Ellen Sander, who was present, recalled that Stills gave Crosby a look that appeared to say: “I arranged your song better than you could have in a thousand years. And don’t forget it.”
“Almost Cut My Hair” (1970)
Even David Crosby recognized that the song was rather adolescent, but its defiance represented the rebellious spirit of the late 1960s.
“We were the counterculture so the idea was, ‘Don’t give in, stay with it, don’t cop out from the attitude that we’re different and want it another way,’” Crosby recalled in Browne’s book. “Hair was only a symbol. It was a statement of independence. We’re not going to shave it and put on a button-down shirt and become like you.”
“Almost cut my hair. It happened just the other day,” Crosby sings. He says he often feels like letting his “freak flag fly.” But now the pressure to conform has added to his paranoia, “like looking at my mirror and seeing a police car.”
That fear is the fear of being singled out because you are fighting for the world to be organized differently. It stems from a recognition that hose wearing a badge or acting under the banner of the law may try and stifle you to preserve a certain order.
The song appeared on the first album that included Neil Young, Déjà Vu. It’s considered one of Crosby’s finest songs, and for what it’s worth, Crosby lived his entire life with long hair and let his freak flag fly.
“What Are Their Names” (1971)
From Crosby’s debut solo album, the song featured Jerry Garcia on guitar and Graham Nash on guitar and piano. The instrumental opening crescendos to the song’s powerful indictment of the men who really run the US government.
“I wonder who they are,” Crosby sings. “The men who really run this land, and I wonder why they run it with such a thoughtless hand.”
“What are their names and on what streets do they live? I’d like to ride right over this afternoon and give them a piece of my mind about peace for mankind.”
“Peace is not an awful lot to ask,” Crosby concludes.
It was rarely performed live, according to Browne, but the song was part of the setlist for CSNY’s Freedom of Speech tour in 2006.
The version performed in the midst of the Iraq War was a shorter a cappella version similar to Stephen Stills’ “Find The Cost of Freedom,” which was also featured in shows.
When Crosby appeared on “Democracy Now!” with Nash after visiting Occupy Wall Street, they recited the poem.
“Nighttime For the Generals” (1988)
The Iran-Contra scandal was fresh in the minds of the nation, and George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director, had become president after Ronald Reagan completed his second term in the White House.
“Nighttime For the Generals” appeared on the CSNY album, American Dream. David Crosby’s song is another one of his songs about the faceless and unknown men who rule the country. This time he explicitly referred to those who plot covert and lawless operations in the shadows.
“And it’s nighttime for the generals, and the boys at the CIA,” Crosby sings. “Power gone mad in the darkness. Thinking they’re God on a good day. They giveth, they taketh, but they like to take it away.”
The boys at the CIA think they know what’s best for the population. At least that’s what they tell themselves. But they “shot blind Lady Liberty in the back of the head,” he adds, a nod to the disregard for how their actions endanger freedom.
Unfortunately, the song has not aged well. An artist like Peter Gabriel may have been able to make it work, but it has too much of a tacky ‘80s sound that is particularly discordant to our ears because it differs from that transcendent folk-rock sound, which defined CSNY and helped make them a supergroup.
“They Want It All” (2004)
David Crosby performed this song with Graham Nash at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and it’s a searing indictment of the one percent and crooked and greedy capitalist executives, who hold too much power and influence over government.
“They want it all, they want it now. They want to get it and they don’t care how,” Crosby sings.
The faceless men, who are the subject of the song, want our life savings, our mother’s ring, and another mansion. Enough is never enough. A piece of the pie will not do. They want the whole pie. And “they always have a president or two” to help them “get away with what they do.”
As the song progresses, Crosby paints a picture of corruption engaged in to avoid any accountability. Executives make wire transfers in Jamaica. They’ll “sacrifice” their lawyer just to be certain that they’re never prosecuted.
“If you want us to believe in justice, justice better be real,” Crosby adds.
The song was actually recorded for Crosby and Nash’s 2004 album, which received lackluster reviews.
Graham Nash said in one interview that the lyrics were inspired by the Enron scandal. “It’s about all corporate malfeasance, but inspired by the outrage that David felt about the way that Enron treated its employees and ruined countless thousands of lives, destroying their life savings and their IRAs and their 401s. But at the same time, making billions for themselves.”
Performed at Zuccotti a decade after that major scandal, Occupy protesters must have thought the song was written specifically for the moment in which they mobilized against the class warfare fueled by corporations on Wall Street.
“Capitol” (2017)
David Crosby’s son James Raymond co-wrote this song with his father, which was released on Sky Trails. It sounds nothing like any classic Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, but the music production is much better than the songs on American Dream.
By the time Crosby recorded Sky Trails, it was apparent that the acrimony between Crosby and Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young would prevent any further reunion tours from happening. So he focused on projects like this one and Lighthouse (2016).
“Capitol” is about the scene of the crime, the building where members of the US House of Representatives and Senate meet regularly, and what it is like to realize as one tours the premise that this is where all the most impactful decisions get made.
Crosby sings, “This is where it happens. They run the whole damned thing from here. Money to burn, filling up their pockets, where no one can see and no one can hear.”
Once again, it’s about a cabal that is shrouded in secrecy. They ignore the constitution. They hide from the public, where no one can hear what they do. All they care about is staying a part of the machine.
And the votes are just pieces of paper And they sneer at the people who voted And they laugh as the votes were not counted And the will of the people was noted And completely ignored
Over a lush composition, Crosby articulates what it’s like to observe daily that there is a big elite club in Congress, which has the ear of lobbyists from corporate and special interest groups, while the most important people of them all—the bottom 90 percent of citizens—are shut out of decisions.
Remarkably, the song was released after President Donald Trump’s election. It distinguishes itself from the many, many songs recorded during that era by staying focused on the real center of power rather than the personality of Trump.
As Crosby described, “‘Capitol’ is an indictment of our Congress. It’s me saying this is a scam. They’re tricking you with all that white marble and all that pomp and circumstance that they’re showing you. They’re really a grubby bunch of thieves, lowest kind of people.”
Chris Hedges, longtime journalist and host of “The Chris Hedges Report,” had Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola on his show to discuss his book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.
The book can be pre-ordered from Seven Stories Press. It will be released on February 21.
As Chris said in the introduction, “I think your book and Nils Melzer’s book are books I would recommend for people who don’t understand the case.”
Chris and Kevin go issue by issue, like the book, which is not a chronology but a meticulously organized guide to all aspects of the United States government’s charges and allegations.
Prior to the interview, one of the endorsements that Kevin received for his book came from Chris. “Kevin Gosztola has doggedly done what most of the press has not, cover in exacting detail the long persecution of Julian Assange and the judicial farce that passes for Julian’s trial.”
You may have seen—or heard—this interview already. In two days, it has over 20,000 views and has been shared widely on social media and republished to several independent media sites.
Thanks again to Chris Hedges and the crew at The Real News for giving Kevin a platform to share his book with a wide audience.
Shadowproof’s Kevin Gosztola, along with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Steven Donziger, Stella Assange, Jeffrey Sterling, and several other distinguished panelists, will be speaking as part of the Belmarsh Tribunal. The event on the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will take place at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, at 2pm ET.
It is sponsored by Progressive International, and the tribunal will be chaired by Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” and Srećko Horvat.
The tribunal is modeled after the Russell-Sartre tribunals that were convened by activists during the Vietnam War to call attention to war crimes committed by the US government. (See this video for example.)
This article was funded by paid subscribers of Shadowproof’s Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.
The Central Intelligence Agency and former CIA director Mike Pompeo notified a federal court in New York that they intend to push for the dismissal of a lawsuit that alleges that they were involved in spying against attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy.
Both the CIA and Pompeo maintain that the “allegations in the complaint do not establish a violation of the Fourth Amendment [right to privacy].”
In August 2022, four Americans who visited Assange in the embassy sued the CIA and Pompeo in his individual capacity: Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney; Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer, represented Assange or WikiLeaks; journalist John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks; and journalist Charles Glass, who wrote articles on Assange for The Intercept.
The filed complaint alleged that as visitors Glass, Goetz, Hrbek, and Kunstler were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to employees of a private company called UC Global that was contracted to provide security for the embassy. What they did not know was that UC Global “copied the information stored on the devices” and allegedly shared the information with the CIA, and Pompeo allegedly authorized and approved the action.
Security contractors required the attorneys and journalists to leave their devices with them, which contained “confidential and privileged information about their sources or clients.”
On January 13, 2023, a letter [PDF] was filed in the United States Court for the Southern District of New York that laid out the CIA and Pompeo’s basic arguments for seeking dismissal of the lawsuit.
The CIA and Pompeo maintain that the alleged acts detailed in the lawsuit involve “intelligence gathering and implicate national security.” They further insist that the alleged acts also “took place outside the United States.” Both of these factors supposedly prevent anyone from suing them for alleged misconduct.
Since the CIA and Pompeo were sued under what is known as the “Bivens doctrine,” the CIA claims that it cannot be sued because the doctrine is only to be applied to “federal employees in their individual capacities, and any such claims are otherwise barred by sovereign immunity.”
The allegations of privacy violations were not only submitted against the CIA and Pompeo but also UC Global and its director, David Morales. In Spain, Morales faces criminal charges for his role in targeting Assange, however, the United States Justice Department has hindered the investigation by issuing unreasonable demands to the court.
A hearing in the case was already scheduled for February 21, and the government proposes that they discuss the motion to dismiss during those proceedings.
Richard Roth, the lead attorney representing Americans who claims their privacy rights were violated, was frustrated. “[The government] was required to file a motion today and instead filed a letter, which is ineffective and weak.”
Previously, he stated, “The United States Constitution shields American citizens from US government overreach even when the activities take place in a foreign embassy in a foreign country. Visitors who are lawyers, journalists and doctors frequently carry confidential information in their devices.”
“They had a reasonable expectation that the security guards at the Ecuadorian embassy in London would not be US government spies charged with delivering copies of their electronics to the CIA,” Roth added.
In 1971, a Supreme Court case known as Bivens created a process for bringing cases against federal government officials for violating a person’s constitutional rights. However, courts have been extremely reluctant to allow plaintiffs to pursue damages when a case may set a precedent or lead to a court intruding upon national security and foreign policy matters.
Pompeo was summoned by the Spanish court to provide testimony back in June. It is unknown if he has acknowledged or rebuffed the court’s request.Reporting from the Spanish newspaper El País previously corroborated many of the claims in the complaint. Their journalism was based upon primary source materials shared by whistleblowing UC Global employees.
In September 2021, Yahoo! News published a bombshell report on “secret war plans” against Assange that involved proposals for kidnapping and assassinating Assange after Pompeo became obsessed with the WikiLeaks founder following the media organization’s publication of CIA hacking materials, which became known as the “Vault 7” materials.
Pompeo labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” and in April 2017, he made it the focus of his first speech as CIA director. “The one thing [current] whistleblowers don’t need is a publisher,” since the internet already enables enough sharing of information, he proclaimed.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, a whistleblower and known supporter of Assange, reacted, “What the CIA did to Julian Assange is in opposition to everything that we should stand for as Americans. On the other hand, and this is what’s wrong with our country, the Supreme Court has ruled that foreign nationals who are located abroad do not have Fourth Amendment protections.”
Because the attorneys and journalists who brought this case against the CIA were visiting a foreign national, Kiriakou suggested the CIA might claim—if they even confirmed the agency’s involvement—that Americans’ privacy rights ended when they met with an intelligence target.
The spying lawsuit is unrelated to the criminal charges and extradition case against Assange, which is in limbo as the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom considers whether to grant Assange an appeal hearing.
Black Belt Eagle Scout is the alias of Katherine Paul, an indigenous multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. Her third studio album, “The Land, the Water, the Sky,” will be released on February 10.
In a press statement, she declared “I created The Land, the Water, the Sky to record and reflect upon my journey back to my homelands and the challenges and the happiness it brought.”
Three singles from the album were released. “Don’t Give Up,” according to Paul, is a song about mental health awareness and the importance that her connection to the land plays within her own mental health journey. Spending time with the land and on the water strengthened her connection to her ancestors and her culture.
The lyrics ‘I don’t give up” mean staying alive. I wrote this song for me but also for my community and anyone who deals with challenging mental health issues to remind us just how much of a role our connection to the environment plays within our healing process,” she added.
The second single, “My Blood Runs Through This Land,” also connects to Paul’s ancestors.
“When I run my hands through the rocks at Snee Oosh Beach and dip my fingers into our waterways, I am reminded of where I come from,” Paul shared. “Paying attention to all of the sounds and the feelings I get when I am immersed in trails of cedar trees and canoeing out on the water deeply grounds me and strengthens my bond to my lineage of the Swinomish tribe.”
As Paul described, “I wanted the delicateness of these moments to meet the intense reality of the history of my people. I like to imagine my blood—all of my ancestors—running through our homelands freely and powerfully.”
The third single is “Nobody,” a poignant tune about the importance of representation.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t have very many Native role models to look to on TV or the radio,” Paul recalled. “It was within my own community that I found inspiring role models through our elders and our community leaders.”
“With Native representation in music and television slowly growing, I often ask myself where I stand within representation in music and how I want to be seen. This song is about the relationship I have with my own representation in music.”
The video for this single was directed by indigenous filmmaker Evan Benally Atwood. The visuals beautifully depict a day in the life of an Indigenous family, displaying the moments of kinship that they share with the land and each other.
*The following is a collection of some of the best albums of protest music released in 2022. They were selected by Kevin Gosztola and C.J. Baker, who publishes writing regularly at Ongoing History Of Protest Songs. They are in alphabetical order by artist.
Hailing from Glasgow in Scotland, the lads of Ashenspire make progressive metal for the working class that is grandiose and theatrical. The lyrics are largely delivered as spoken word over instruments that amplify the dark storytelling and agitation of the narrator.
The story told, as the band puts it, is about “hostile architecture” under late capitalism, which refers to the “design elements in social spaces that deter the public from using the object for means unintended by the designer, e.g. anti-homeless spikes.” Each song draws inspiration from the post-industrial landscape of cities, “hauntological in nature,” that are so often unfit for housing due to cost-cutting.
For example, the “Law of Asbestos” refers to the cancer-causing mineral that was incorporated into electrical insulation for many buildings, especially before the 1980s. Asbestos continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. A metal-sounding saxophone accentuates Ashenspire’s rage: “A corner cut, a penny saved, Grenfell burns again and again and again!”—a reference to the Grenfell Tower fire that resulted in 72 deaths. “Tragic Heroin” has a kind of anthemic quality to it. At the end, Ashenspire proclaims: “Fueled with your labour. Built with your bones. There are no great men. Only the great many.”
Then there’s the sprawling “Cable Street Again.” A tapestry of darkness percolates, sounding almost jazz-like in sections. Ashenspire warns the dispossessed and disposable human beings faced with hostile architecture that is part of the threat of fascism. “You cannot fix that which is working as intended.”
In a final call to action, Ashenspire belts out, “Get down off the fence before the barbed wire goes up.”
(Kevin Gosztola)
Jake Blount – The New Faith
Sometimes it is necessary to look to the past to learn about the future. That is the case with Jake Blount, a singer, multi-instrumentalist, and scholar whose stunning concept album weaves a compelling Afrofuturist narrative.
The album’s premise is similar to Octavia Butler’s influential 1993 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower, an apocalyptic tale of Black American refugees struggling to survive ecological collapse.
Blount reworks ten traditional Black spirituals, along with two original spoken word compositions, and imagines what Black religious music would sound like in a future ravaged by climate disruption. Three of the tracks feature rousing verses from rapper Demeanor.
“Take Me To the Water,” a traditional hymn and first track on the album, morphs into an ominous prayer for those seeking to “be washed for the sins of humanity.” It is a call “to reject the greed of our forefathers,” who “melted the ice at the ends of the earth, drowned the coast, emptied the seas and forests of life, filled the very ocean with fire.”
Not only does Blount prove he is a skillful musician, but in developing these themes throughout his album, he proves that he is also an archivist, historian, and prophet capable of sounding an alarm for humanity.
(CJ Baker)
Bob Vylan – Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life
UK grime-punk and hip hop duo Bob Vylan storm their way through a crash course on underclass survival in a capitalist world, where one’s life could be snuffed out at any moment without any remorse.
“The BBC are talking about the GDP. That means fuck all to me,” Bob Vylan raps. “I gotta eat.”
How the underclass lacks access and cannot afford healthy food is the subject of “Health is Wealth.” Bob Vylan states, “The killing of kids with £2 chicken and chips is a tactic of war waged on the poor.” But the damage done by junk food can also be self-inflicted, as the duo acknowledges, and the track develops into sound advice for eating right to survive.
Take note of the album cover. It’s a dark and brilliant nod to the way society dupes people into believing they may escape poverty if they could just win the lottery.
Several of the songs incorporate thick guitar riffs to make the rhymes more potent. That’s especially true on “Phone Tap (Alexa),” a fierce assessment of the role that lower class people play in enabling a police state.
Bob Vylan raps, “If somebody’s getting bodied, watch the ratings hit the roof. I was there, I was there, gather ’round and gather proof.” Then the cops come to the door, and the doorbell rings. “Our babies” are taken.
“Alexa, take me to prison,” the duo roars at the end of their gutting indictment.
(Kevin Gosztola)
Fantastic Negrito – White Jesus Black Problems
Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, who performs under the pseudonym Fantastic Negrito, recently discovered that his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were a white Scottish servant named Elizabeth Gallimore and a black slave whose name has been erased in the annals of history. This lineage inspires Fantastic Negrito’s compelling concept album, which he released as a multimedia project with a companion film.
The album reclaims the story of the courageous forgotten, as emphasized on the “Man with No Name.” It contains a galvanizing message of hope and perseverance, particularly as he sings, “I keep moving on.”
“There’s a feeling out there right now that we can’t get anything done because we’re so polarized, so entrenched in our ideologies and unmoved by facts or logic, but I wanted to share this story because I think it smashes that narrative to pieces,” Fantastic Negrito shared. “I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors, both Black and white, who showed me that anything is possible.”
From the ugliness of injustice to the beauty of what can be gained in the struggle, Fantastic Negrito grapples with it all in his music.
(C.J. Baker)
Ezra Furman – All Of Us Flames
Ezra Furman breathes new life into a stale and largely heteronormative art form by incorporating themes of queerness into her timeless-sounding rock music. The album is the third in a trilogy of albums that includes 2018’s “Transangelic Exodus” and 2019’s “Twelve Nudes.”
On “Book Of Our Love,” Furman expresses a desire to forever remember those who historically tend to have their identities erased. On “Lilac and Black,” Furman dreams of “my queer girl gang,” whose enemies will eventually “bow down before our wrath.”
“It’s a queer album for the stage of life when you start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding your family, your people, how you work as part of a larger whole,” Furman declared. “I wanted to make songs for use by threatened communities, and particularly the ones I belong to: trans people and Jews.”
Furman succeeds in crafting a vision of a world, where everyone may feel that they belong.
(C.J. Baker)
Hurray For The Riff Raff – Life On Earth
Puerto Rican singer-songwriter and self-described “nature punk” Alynda Segarra’s album is a worthy follow-up to their exceptional 2017 album, “The Navigator.” It explores themes of immigration, the environment, and other social ills.
One of the album’s many highlights is “Precious Cargo,” where Segarra sings, “We made it to the border. I jumped and I was detained. Split me from my family. Now the light begins to fade. They took me to the cold room, where I sat down on the floor. Just a foil for a blanket. For 17 days or more.”
“I don’t know why he would lie on me. The man from the I-C-E. And I don’t know why he hate on me. The man from the I-C-E,” Segarra adds, as she grapples with cruelty of immigration agents.
The album’s title track gorgeously acknowledges the peril from man-made climate change and other societal ills. Yet despite the despair, throughout each song Segarra approaches the subject matter with an embrace of beauty and hopeful yearning.
Segarra shows that she has the gift of being able to express the humanity of the downtrodden. Thankfully, they shared this precious gift with the world. (C.J. Baker)
Leyla McCalla – Breaking The Thermometer
“In 1980, Radio Haiti was shut down and all of its journalists were either executed, jailed or exiled alongside many of Haiti’s most prominent artists, intellectuals and academics,” recalled Haitian American multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla.
McCalla’s “Breaking The Thermometer” project combines audio from the Radio Haiti archives to create Afro-Caribbean music that honors those who rebelled against the United States-backed dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, as well as Jean-Claude’s father, François Duvalier. The songs are in English and Kreyòl, a native language in Haiti.
Over banjo and soft percussion, “Fort Dimanche” features a Kreyol radio clip that leads into McCalla singing about the prison, where François Duvalier had entire families executed. A Haitian man describes when their family was killed at the prison and how it inspired him to become a journalist. (Note: At one point, the fort was a military facility for US Marines in the 1920s.)
The song, “Ekzile,” is a somber melody mixing several string instruments over soft percussion. It features a Haitian woman who recounts fleeing brutal repression and ending up in New York. McCalla movingly grapples with what it is like for someone to have to leave their home because they are no longer safe.
“Le Bal est Fini” (“The Party is Over”) stands out among all the tracks. It is an invigorating tribute to the journalists who defied dictatorship. All the percussive elements of the project shine, culminating in a solo that ends with dogs barking.
Jean Dominique, Radio Haiti’s owner, was murdered, and McCalla developed a close relationship with Michèle Montas, Dominique’s widow. The project honors their resistance. “A big part of their connection and their love for each other was their love for journalism and their vision for what this could do to transform their country,” McCalla told the Guardian. “It’s a really hard thing to have faith in, but that faith held them together.”
(Kevin Gosztola)
Samora Pinderhughes – GRIEF
Our annual list, given Shadowproof’s journalism on prison abolition, would not be complete without this collaborative album from singer, songwriter, pianist, and scholar Samora Pinderhughes.
For “GRIEF,” a part of the Healing Project, Pinderhughes interviewed around 100 people of color who shared their experiences with incarceration or “structural violence.” The online archive of interviews features includes insights on abolishing prison, but the album is more introspective than essayistic and draws from the well of emotions that come from prison life and life in a world of prisons.
Through the harmony of “Holding Cell,” Pinderhughes sings, “Holding cell, I can’t get well while you hold me.” The slave labor, or slaving for the tiniest of wages, comes through on, “Hope,” as Pinderhughes, Nio Norwood, and Jehbreal Jackson sing, “While we try to build a room for our freedom (for our freedom). We build what they destroy.”
“Masculinity” is a profound inward examination from the perspective of a man grappling with their incarceration or carceral past. “If I feel these things, is it gonna hurt me?” Pinderhughes wonders. The lyrics eventually give way to an ethereal alto sax outro from Immanuel Wilkins.
Pinderhughes told the New York Times that he intended to explore how the machinery of incarceration operates and ask, what is the system doing to people? What can be done to fight back? And then, from a more personal perspective, “How am I a part of that? How am I implicated, and how am I doing something against it? What does that make me feel like?”
You feel every word of the experiences that flow through the music, as well as the spirituality of interrogating a harmful system that has impacted so many lives.
(Kevin Gosztola)
Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems
Since their formation in 2014, Soul Glo has built a reputation for their ferocious musical attack and radical political lyrics. The hardcore punk band is made up of Black musicians who share their experiences as artists in a genre dominated by white groups.
On the album, the band dispels the myth that lasting change can come from continuing to prop up the two-party system. For example, lead singer Pierce Jordan derisively snarls on “John J,” “It’s been ‘fuck right wing’ off the rip. But still liberals are more dangerous.”
Elsewhere, with the incisive “Fucked Up If True,” Soul Glo address the fallacy that voting is enough to enact meaningful change.
“So we just gon always vote in false elections and accept each result and it’s effects as though people were powerless. Do you feel supportive care? How do you wake up everyday? What enforced your belief that you can vote their power away?”
The album is filled with killer anthems of righteous indignation that continue punk’s tradition of confronting racial and social injustice, and it is the band’s first release on renowned punk label Epitaph.
(C.J. Baker)
Tanya Tagaq – Tongues
Canadian Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq aims “to repair the damage” from trauma inflicted by centuries of colonial repression.
Over 10 tracks produced by Afrofuturist and poet Saul Williams, the album spits in the face of her oppressors then shifts away from their savagery to what gives Tagaq empowerment, joy, and strength. “Teeth Agape” bares a maternal instinct to protect her child from further trauma from colonizers while “Earth Monster” celebrates the creation of life. “Today is for her, and today is for me. For choosing to make her, to keep her, and to love her.”
“They took our tongues,” declares Tagaq on the album’s title track. She vows, “You can’t have my tongue,” and later adds, “I don’t want your shame.” Her vocals grow more guttural as she confronts the loss of language that came as a result of white colonial settlers, who committed cultural genocide.
“The Canadian government took Indigenous children away from our families for many generations in the residential school system,” Tagaq told NPR. “All of us know who didn’t come home.”
Tagaq’s vocal artistry is a dagger aimed at the hearts of those complicit and responsible for all the pain and terror. But the power in her voice also carries a sense of pride. She does not want anyone’s sympathy or guilt in order to live life on her own terms—free of the legacy and influence of colonizers.
(Kevin Gosztola)
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Jimmy Cliff – “Refugee” | Dropkick Murphys – “This Machine Still Kill Fascists” | Moor Mother – “Jazz Codes” | Mali Obomsawin – “Sweet Tooth” | Special Interest – “Endure” | SAULT – “11”/”Earth”/”Today & Tomorrow”/”Untitled (God)”/”Air”
Hundreds of supporters of incarcerated Native American rights activist Leonard Peltier rallied at the nation’s capital on Sunday to demand President Joe Biden grant clemency to the long-held prisoner.
“He’s 78-years-old, he has type 2 diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm that’s fatal if it ruptures. He had a stroke where he lost 80 percent of the vision in one of his eyes,” Rachel Thunder, one of the organizers for the rally, told Shadowproof. “He should be spending the remainder of his life with his family, not locked up in a cage.”
Thunder was one of many Peltier supporters who walked across the country to raise awareness of his incarceration as part of a national ‘Walk To Justice’ that began earlier this year. The march started on September 1 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and took nearly three months to complete. Participants covered over 1,100 miles before arriving at their final destination of Washington, D.C on November 13.
This public spectacle by Peltier’s supporters is just the latest development in an half century-long international campaign advocating for his release. Nelson Mandela, The Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa are among the figures who have petitioned for Peltier’s freedom throughout his 47 years of imprisonment.
Supporters of Native American rights activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier march toward the Lincoln Memorial, waving flags for the American Indian Movement, to demand President Joe Biden grant his release from federal prison. (Photo by Sam Bishop.)
The high-profile prisoner was originally convicted in 1977 for the murder of two FBI agents after a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Peltier was, at the time, a member of the American Indian Movement. The organization was formed in 1968 as a Native American civil rights group and subsequently became famous for their high profile political protests in the 1970s, such as their occupations of Alcatraz Island in 1969 and the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in 1971.
Peltier was invited to the Pine Ridge Reservation by locals who claimed that a corrupt tribal official named Dick Wilson and his cronies were responsible for the unsolved deaths of several dozen political opponents. Wilson had allegedly operated a private militia, known as the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), to terrorize anyone on the reservation critical of his administration.
Wilson was unpopular among many in the tribe after becoming chairman in 1972. Soon after, his most vocal critics found themselves targeted with violence. Those who spoke out against Wilson found their homes shot up in drive-by shootings or set on fire in the dead of night. This string of violent incidents left over 60 dead with all of the killings labeled as unsolved. Finally, when a team of white lawyers came to the reservation to investigate the attacks, their plane was riddled with bullets and they were ambushed and beaten by Wilson and his men.
Peltier was hoping to counter the violence and oust Wilson by organizing local residents on the reservation. On June 26, 1975 while driving to the home where he and other AIM activists had been staying, he found himself pursued by two unmarked cars. The cars belonged to FBI Special Agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, who began following Peltier while attempting to locate a man named Jimmy Eagle who had allegedly stolen a pair of boots.
Despite Peltier having no connection to Eagle, the agents followed him from the main road of town onto private property until he stopped in the middle of his driveway and exited his car to confront them.
Peltier alleges the agents began shooting at him the moment they saw he was armed, and never identified themselves as law enforcement. Peltier returned fire and two AIM members, Robert Robideau and Darrelle Butler, rushed from the home and opened fire on the agents from the ridge top, mortally wounding them.
Both Robideau and Butler were acquitted of murder after arguing they had acted in self defense. Peltier, whose gunfire had never actually struck the agents, was tried separately. Once the trial began, a number of witnesses came forward to testify against him. Their testimonies made up the bulk of the prosecution’s case, alleging Peltier had confessed to the murders while others who testified claimed to have witnessed the murders themselves.
Peltier’s supporters point out that witness testimony contradicts the ballistic evidence, and that a number of witnesses who testified against Peltier have since recanted their statements. Today, most of those who originally testified for the prosecution now publicly say that they were coerced by the FBI, and in some cases had never actually met Peltier or even knew who he was before testifying against him. One witness even admitted during trial that she was paid $42,000 by the FBI in exchange for her cooperation on the case.
“I looked at this [case] as a member of the federal judiciary and what happened was clear to me,” Kevin Sharp—a former federal judge that came to lead Peltier’s legal team—told the crowd.
“The constitutional violations that occurred to convict this man were clear to me. The violations were so open and obvious but, wasn’t clear to me was the why,” he said. “I’ve spent the last few years slowly uncovering that.”
Former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, whose office originally prosecuted Peltier, also spoke at the rally, sharing similar statements while calling for the activist’s sentence to be commuted.
“Years ago, I wrote a letter to President Obama, joining Leonard in asking for clemency, and I did that because I thought it was my duty in the name of justice—because justice in this case is clemency for Leonard.” Reynolds explained during the rally.
Climate lawyer Steve Donziger, who last year was sentenced to 6 months in prison for contempt of court in a case which, like Peltier’s, has earned him the title of political prisoner, also spoke in favor of clemency.
“What’s happening to Leonard in my view, yes it’s persecution, yes it’s oppression but it’s also really really weak.” Donziger told the crowd. “When a person has a message that’s so threatening to these entrenched interests of power, they will mobilize the judicial system and other levers of governmental power to try and silence that person, and weaponize that person to scare everyone else who will do work on that kind of level.”
While many advocates called for Peltier’s release on the grounds of his innocence, members of his family are demanding his freedom for more personal reasons.
“I’ve only known my father through stories,” Kathy Peltier said of her father. “Everyone would tell me what a funny guy he was. I never saw that. The only time I ever saw him he was always serious and it was when I was visiting him in jail.”
President Joe Biden’s administration is the fifth to face pressure from Peltier supporters petitioning for his release. During previous clemency talks during the Clinton Administration, 500 FBI Agents picketed the White House in an unprecedented protest by federal law enforcement to demand that Peltier stay in jail. His supporters hope they can mount more pressure on the administration than their opponents this time around.
Organizers say they will stay in Washington, D.C to meet with government officials over the next few days regarding the possibility of President Biden granting clemency on compassionate grounds. So far, 11 members of Congress have signed an open letter to the administration asking for Peltier to be released.
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In August, a lawsuit against the CIA, former CIA director Mike Pompeo, UC Global, and UC Global director David Morales was filed that alleged Americans who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange when he was living in the Ecuador embassy had their privacy rights violated.
Attorney Richard Roth filed a complaint on behalf of two attorneys, Deborah Hrbek and Margaret Ratner-Kunstler, and two journalists, Charles Glass and John Goetz. They say they were spied upon by the CIA-backed operation when they met with Assange.
The lawsuit will be deliberated over in a United States court in the Southern District of New York. It was assigned to Judge John Koeltl.
Kevin Gosztola recently spoke with Richard about the status of the lawsuit and what happens next.
ROTH: The current status is we have filed a complaint, which has received a tremendous amount of attention (for good reason). And we are in the process of serving the summons and complaint. We served it on Mike Pompeo. We served it on the CIA, which is the United States’ Attorney’s Office which represents the CIA. And we are in the middle of serving it on two Spanish—one entity and one individual—but the two defendants who live in Spain.
Once we do that, we have a conference schedule. I think it’s January 17, and we will set a roadmap for discovery and ultimately the trial of this case.
GOSZTOLA: I know one of the issues for this case when you are proving that people’s rights were systematically violated. Particularly, when you are involving the Central Intelligence Agency, you have to have standing. If you went into court tomorrow and you had to prove to the judge you had standing, what would you say to the judge?
ROTH: So great question. I like how you artfully asked it. The bottom line is that I would say the following. I would say we have four US individuals, all of whom were on embassy soil. That is diplomacy soil. And each of them are protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment provides protection from any search and seizure—whether you’re in the US or whether you’re in Bangladesh—for any US citizen.
Here they happen to have been in London at the Ecuador embassy, and they because they’re US citizens have that right to not be violated, not be invaded by the CIA or any governmental entity. There’s a process, Your Honor, and the process essentially requires the CIA, or whoever it may be that wants to tape record conversations, to go and get a search warrant. They have to show probable cause. They have to go before a judge. They have to get an order.
Only upon those events can they go and actually listen in on conversations or copy conversations. Without that, it gives us standing, and it’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
GOSZTOLA: Just to make sure I cover all the bases, up to this point are there any responses from the lawyers or attorneys that will be representing the CIA? I know you issued a complaint to Mike Pompeo in his private capacity. Have you received any response?
ROTH: We have not. They have been radio silent. One thing we know, which gives us tremendous confidence, is that there’s a lawsuit pending in Spain, and El País, which is the largest newspaper reports on it frequently. And we’ve amassed a series of information from that Spanish lawsuit. So we’re very comfortable in our position. We believe that we can prove what we need to prove, but to date, nobody has given a response.
GOSZTOLA: Part of the lawsuit that you have filed is enabled by some of that journalism that has been done, as you’re saying. We have El País who has investigated. We have the Yahoo! News from September 2021 that laid out some details; actually made Mike Pompeo a central figure. So a lot of evidence that you’re bringing into court, a lot of it’s public now. But by bringing this lawsuit, you believe that there will be an opportunity for a discovery phase in order to investigate and uncover even more detail on the violations of people’s privacy rights.
ROTH: We believe there’s a tremendous amount of discovery. We believe that there are hundreds of communications by and between the defendants, which went into the New York and Washington offices of the CIA (at minimum). We believe we’re entitled to all those communications. We believe we’re also entitled to what they actually imaged.
Remember, the allegations are that when you went to the embassy, you gave the embassy personnel every computer device you had, whether it be a phone, an iPad, a laptop. And they imaged everything while you were meeting Assange.
So, we will be able to get a tremendous amount of information, and we are looking forward to the judge giving us an opportunity to get that.
GOSZTOLA: You believe that this could have potentially affected over a thousand of people from the US, who you could consider US persons in one way or another. Put that in perspective. In terms of a case involving people’s privacy rights, what does that really mean? What does that number mean?
ROTH: The number is for anyone that visited embassy. Remember, Julian Assange was in there for seven years. He had friends. He had family. He had doctors. He had journalists. He had people that he worked with visited him, and he had lawyers visit him. So that number is not all US citizens, meaning they can’t all be plaintiffs, but people have come forward since the filing of the complaint saying hey, I’m a US citizen. I want to be a plaintiff.
It means a lot because not only did the CIA violate the Fourth Amendment by wrongfully taking information of everyone, but there’s a lot of other things they violated, like for example, every attorney has attorney-client privilege. If I represented you, any communications we would have either oral or in writing are privileged. By going in and listening to the conversations between Assange and either Ms. Hrbek or Ms. Kunstler, the CIA essentially violated the sanctity of attorney-client privilege.
Not only that, but if they went in and imaged, as we alleged, the computers of these lawyers, then they have attorney-client privileged information of the lawyers, which doesn’t even relate to Assange. So Deborah Hrbek has a memo to a client, to her client in her computer, and the CIA actually imaged it. Then they have additional information, which has nothing to do with Assange.
Add to that [Assange] saw doctors so they have doctor-patient information. So there’s a lot of information that we think they have, all illegally, which we want.
GOSZTOLA: Then, of course, there’s the two journalists. You’ve got Charles Glass and John Goetz, and those two individuals as journalists—at least as far as the norms that are accepted within the society in the United States—is that you should not be explicitly targeting those individuals.
And I suppose it’s worth pointing out while this lawsuit is unfolding that it’s now been codified by the Justice Department that they are not supposed to target journalists. That is to allow them to become collateral damage in prosecutions, whether those involve leaks or other criminal investigations. So there could not be a justification for targeting your two journalist clients.
I suppose they could argue in retrospect they did have the justification if they think they were spying on them in the context of a criminal investigation. But by and large, we accept those people are entitled to their privacy.
ROTH: Absolutely. So we have journalists that went in and interviewed Assange, and they went in and the CIA went and took that. Can you imagine what that does to investigative journalism, if an investigative journalist that he’s being tape recorded by the CIA?
And on top of that even, the doctors, there are doctors that went to visit Julian Assange. There’s a doctor-patient privilege, which he has. If he is going to see a doctor for an ailment or illness, why in god’s name would the CIA be entitled to that information?
Yes, the journalists, the doctors, the lawyers. It’s just really, really inappropriate. And it’s overreaching, and the irony is that the US has indicted Julian Assange for essentially wrongfully disclosing information. In the meantime, what is the CIA doing? They are worse than Assange because they are wrongfully taking information. So, yeah, it’s interesting how what’s good for the goose as they say is not necessarily good for the gander.
GOSZTOLA: You mention there are people who have come to you who say they’ve been spied on too. Is there any likelihood that this gets certified as some kind of a class action because there are a number of people who have been targeted allegedly?
ROTH: There are people who have come to us. Some of them we exclude because they are not US citizens. Tomorrow I’m meeting with somebody else. There is a chance that it goes to a class action lawsuit, although the goal is not to complicate the litigation. Class action lawsuits by definition complicates it because you got to certify the class, and there’s motions over that.
Our goal here really is to essentially seek grievance for the four people who did come to us, and say listen, you just can’t do this. So right now, our only clients are these four, but there’s a likelihood it will expand.
GOSZTOLA: It’s worth pointing out that what you’re doing is a valuable check on the power of the executive branch when in fact what we’ve seen is an incredible lack of interest and action on the part of the legislative branch in order to investigate. Which is to say that we know that the House intelligence committee, or the Senate intelligence committee, could find that this is very troubling that the CIA engaged in this activity against a diplomatic outpost or an embassy.
I can’t imagine what would happen if we found out that a country was targeting explicitly [a United States] embassy while they were hosting somebody who was an asylum seeker, say a rival power was targeting people as they came in and out, and they investigated those visitors. That they violated their privacy. We know the outrage that we would hear from the US State Department, and yet there hasn’t been any public assessment or address when it comes to this issue.
Your lawsuit is very important I think for forcing that out into the open. Because even if for some reason the CIA is able to stifle this lawsuit—or Pompeo is able to stifle your lawsuit, you’ve at least made this a public issue.
ROTH: That’s correct. And let’s not forget, not only did they go in and image each of the plaintiffs’ computers, laptops, and phones while they left it with security. The CIA actually had recording devices, audio and video recording devices, in the conference room where they met Assange. So they have everything, and what we learn in the Spanish case, these individuals that worked for UC Global essentially were asking their bosses, why am I tape recording and sending these tapes back to Washington? I don’t understand what Washington had to do with it.
There were individuals who were employees of this company that were stuck in the middle. They wanted to keep their job, and they couldn’t understand why information about Julian Assange would go to the CIA. So, we have some very, very damning information against the CIA and Pompeo, and we intend on pursuing it.
GOSZTOLA: One of the final questions I have for you is to point out that, yes, people might be cynical. If they are following this Assange case closely and if they are following things related to this spying operation, they might have seen that the Spanish court has had some significant difficulties when it comes to getting information from the Justice Department, to get compliance. I know they want to know the IP addresses, who was making those connections, where were those computers, what were those computers that were receiving this data.
But why don’t you take a moment just to point out what you’ll be able to do as somebody who is a US lawyer and in a US court in order to force the discovery of this information. It won’t be as easy to not comply and deny you information that the Spanish court is not able to get.
ROTH: That’s absolutely right. What we’ve learned from the Trump era, four years, is that they are masterful at avoiding processes. They have avoided everything that the Spanish court has sought, even by subpoena. We know what they did with the January 6th committee, where they wouldn’t produce documents and testify. We know what happened with the impeachment proceedings and the entire presidential organization.
So, they essentially are very good at either stonewalling or refusing to produce documents. Recently, when the tax documents were ordered to be produced, Trump appealed that again.
To your point, [the Spanish court does] not have the federal authority of a federal court judge. A federal court judge was appointed to the case, a guy by the name of Judge Koeltl. As is true of all federal court judges, he was appointed by the President of the United States. They have tremendous power. They can compel Mike Pompeo and the CIA to produce documents. If they don’t, they could be held in contempt of court and could go to jail.
When you have federal court judge, someone you don’t mess with, whoever it may be, you can’t play the games that they played in Spain with the Spanish court. They played with the January 6th committee. They played with other organizations. This is the judge, and the judge is going to say to them I want you to produce it and I want you to produce it now. That’s going to help us out much more than any other dispute before another foreign organization.
GOSZTOLA: It’s important to mention that Judge Koeltl already had a case before him that involved WikiLeaks and already came down on the side of protecting freedom of the press when the Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez tried to lump WikiLeaks with alleged Russian agents and with the Trump campaign, when it came to their alleged examples of interference in the 2016 election. He said no, if you obtain hacked materials, which is what WikiLeaks did, then they have an absolute right to publish just as anybody in the United States does under the First Amendment.
You must feel pretty good knowing that you’ve got somebody who is going to preside over this case, who has a history with WikiLeaks and isn’t going to see just see that this involves Julian Assange and have some kind of irrational response to your efforts.
ROTH: I think we are very fortunate to get Judge Koeltl, not necessarily because of that prior decision but because of his experience. He’s a Harvard grad. He worked at a major law firm. He was involved with the Watergate prosecution team. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. So, he’s been at the federal court bench almost thirty years.
You don’t say no to a federal court judge that’s been there for a year. He’s been there for twenty-eight, I believe. Certainly, it’s a really great force that we have, and if the federal government wants to reckon with it, then Judge Koeltl will definitely be on our side.
Listen, he’s very unbiased. He very professional. He’s unbelievably experienced. Nothing is going to slip past him. So, we’re lucky we have a judge with such experience and stamina.
GOSZTOLA: The last thing I’ll ask, I think we have to make clear that you’re not on Julian Assange’s legal team. You’re representing these people that are coming before court or will come before the court and argue that their privacy rights were violated and present the evidence as best possible. But that extradition case and the potential for Julian Assange to be put on trial in the United States is going to be a backdrop and could potentially be happening at the same time that this moves through the court.
Is there anything that you want to say about this dynamic and what it means for your lawsuit?
ROTH: You hit it on the head. There’s not much more to say except that, think about this. If the CIA is in Assange’s conference room, listening in on conversations that he had with his lawyer for that case—Remember, years ago he brought a very experienced DC lawyer to help him defend against this indictment, which was released three years ago, but it was sealed initially.
Could you imagine if the CIA, the government prosecuting Assange already has conversations between Assange and his lawyer? And even documents? So, there really is a stink to it.
In the other case, we don’t represent Assange in the other matter, but I have even as a lawyer and American, I have a problem with the government going in and actually taking information against if you will its adversary in that case.
We’ll see how it plays out. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. He’s probably going to be extradited. He’ll probably be tried in Virginia. It is a very complicated case. It’s a difficult case. The First Amendment cries out in that case. So, we will see what happens in that case, and this is somewhat intertwined to the extent that the government, his adversary, went and took information from him—which is a subject matter of this case—for that case.
GOSZTOLA: It’s kind of intertwined because your lawsuit is going to hopefully succeed in proving even more than we already know. That the CIA was connected to this private security company. I think it’s like a half dozen or so people. It’s a small outfit that was engaged in providing the security for the Ecuador embassy.
But hopefully we’ll be able to actually, truly through your lawsuit connect that, and then I imagine even though that’s not the goal of your lawsuit immediately, it might open some doors for the Assange defense because they’ll be able to introduce that into their evidence.
In fact, I imagine the cases move in the same way that the extradition proceedings have in some ways been affected and influenced periodically by what’s happening in Spain. Just because you cannot separate these issues. Like you’re saying, if the CIA is targeting the person who the US is trying to prosecute, it’s hard to believe that you could get fair justice.
ROTH: That’s exactly right. And we will see how this plays out. They’re very important cases, both of them, in our country. They have tremendous significance. Listen, we all believe in the CIA and its powers, and we believe it’s a necessity to know what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia, to know what’s going on in the Middle East. But every federal government, every organization, every branch of government has to stay within its boundaries. And our lawsuit really tests those boundaries to see whether or not the government, the CIA in particular and Mike Pompeo, are really going way over the line.
GOSZTOLA: You mentioned that your judge was involved in the Watergate prosecution, and it seems like we’re looking at similar excesses here. And so, it’s not unheard of. Americans are pretty familiar with the periods in history when their government agencies acted out of line, crossed into trampling on rights, and they know that it’s the job of people, whether it be attorneys, journalists, or elected representatives, judges and courts, to rein those people in.
ROTH: That’s right. It’s interesting. It’s not going to be easy. We’re going to have a lot of obstacles. We’re going to have a lot of road blocks. But we will get there.
On October 31, 2022, trailblazing singer-songwriter and activist Patrick Haggerty died at the age of 78. A few weeks earlier he suffered a stroke. He fronted Lavender Country which is widely believed to be the first openly gay country band. In 1973, they released their self-titled debut often cited as the first gay-themed country album.
Initially, there were only 1000 copies printed. The album later garnered interest from historians, music journalists, and record collectors. In 2014, the album was reissued by the Paradise of Bachelors label. Haggerty also embarked on a nationwide tour, which introduced a new generation to his music.
Paying tribute to Haggerty, Paradise of Bachelors co-founder Brendan Greaves wrote: “He was more than a hero; he was also a friend, mentor, comrade, and fatherly figure for us and our families. He was hilarious too; it was always an adventure spending time with him.”
In 2019, Lavender Country released their long-awaited sophomore album, Blackberry Rose. Three years later, the album received increased exposure when it was reissued by Don Giovanni Records.
“Patrick Haggerty was one of the funniest, kindest, bravest, and smartest people I ever met,” Don Giovanni Records stated. “He never gave up fighting for what he believed in, and those around him who he loved and took care of will continue that fight.”
As an openly gay artist in a conservative genre, simply creating music was a political statement, especially back in 1973 during the wake of Stonewall uprising. But Haggerty took it further by using his lyrics to address social issues.
One notable example is “Waltzing Will Trilogy” off the 1973 self-titled album. Haggerty directly calls out the “pack of straight white honky quacks” who administer shock treatment to homosexuals (“they call it mental hygiene but I call it psychic rape”). The tune also addresses how young gay men were beaten to death by police and sodomized by prison guards.
In the liner notes to Strong Love, a 2012 compilation of early gay artists, musician Richard Dworkin wrote: “One could argue that Patrick Haggerty … was as in-your-face shocking and transgressive as anything the [70s] would produce—up to and including the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys.”
RIP Patrick Haggerty (September 27, 1944-October 31, 2022)
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A National Security Agency whistleblower unearthed a hot-shot analyst’s unauthorized “project” that targeted the communications of citizens or persons in the United States, according to a top secret inspector general report from 2016.
The project, or “experiment,” was not approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the attorney general, the NSA director, or the director for the division that handles signals intelligence. It was also not vetted by the analyst’s chain of command or any NSA officers responsible for oversight.
Journalist Jason Leopold obtained a highly censored version of the 2016 report through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit and co-authored a paywalled article about what that report revealed for Bloomberg.
On March 18, 2013, only a few months before NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed several of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, a whistleblower stumbled upon a colleague who was collecting or attempting to collect a “large volume of telephone numbers without any foreign intelligence purpose.”
The whistleblower, or “source,” who was a “global network analyst,” complained to several offices tasked with oversight. They then shared what they found with the inspector general’s office in May, and on June 18, while the NSA reeled from the unprecedented scrutiny brought about by Snowden’s disclosures, they contacted the Office of General Counsel, which is the NSA’s legal office.
A group of “management officials” at the NSA considered the whistleblower complaint in several meetings and email exchanges, but even with the fallout from Snowden, they largely maintained that the concerns were unfounded.
The unauthorized project started collecting—or attempting to collect data—that included US persons’ communications as early as 2012.
According to the whistleblower, multiple people in NSA oversight positions lacked the technical expertise to understand what the analyst was doing with their project. They did not understand why the analyst’s collection was in violation of clear procedures.
The inspector general concluded, “Although [the analyst] was told by different supervisors, oversight officials, and attorneys that his activities were acceptable, he was told by others to stop immediately.”
“[The analyst] acted with reckless disregard of the regulations, policies, and procedures that governed the use of the SIGINT system,” the inspector general added, which essentially means he abused his access to programs that enabled mass surveillance.
It is unclear if the analyst who acted recklessly suffered any consequences. He obviously was not prosecuted for engaging in misconduct.
“When I said in 2013 that while I was at the NSA I could pull the communications of anyone who passed through our net—including Americans—officials hotly contested the claim and a lot of folks believed them,” Snowden told Bloomberg. “But it was true, as the NSA itself secretly acknowledges.”
Snowden continued, “Defenders of broad surveillance authorities always insist that Americans don’t have to worry because our intelligence agencies are tightly constrained by law and policy. But time and again we’ve seen that when laws are violated and powers are abused, no one is held legally accountable.”
In fact, as Leopold highlighted, on April 21, 2014, a year into the investigation by the inspector general, the whistleblower contacted the office again to allege that the analyst was still targeting US communications.
“I wasn’t sure whether to report it or wait till he actually gets collection (if any),” the whistleblower wrote. “Also wasn’t sure whether to send the information to you or file a new report with the IG hotline.”
The NSA employee who abused his access was interviewed for the inspector general’s investigation and asserted that his “project” fell under Executive Order 12333, which is a toothless presidential order that US security agencies have invoked to justify the expansion of mass surveillance.
Asked about the “foreign intelligence purpose” of the project, the analyst told the inspector general that it was to “make the collection system healthier, the analytic powers richer, and the system more efficient.” (Part of his response was censored in the declassified report.)
One official claimed that the analyst had not asked for permission to pursue the project and had been told to “stop the project.” At least a few NSA employees saw it as an “experiment.”
There was no audit mechanism for ensuring the project was compliant with NSA procedures. The inspector general’s report said, “He was the only person working on the project, and each day he did not know what he might try to do, what made sense, was easily sustainable, repeatable, and defensible.” He proceeded “[kind of] by the seat of his pants.”
As Demand Progress, an advocacy organization which has challenged abuses of power that threaten civil liberties, noted, the investigation pointed to Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that contains “Section 702,” which the US government has “abused for years to knowingly access Americans’ communications without a warrant.”
“The congressional intelligence committees have claimed to be robust overseers of intelligence agencies. If accurate, this inspector general report should not only be known to them, but also the subject of serious investigation,” declared Sean Vitka, a senior policy council for Demand Progress. “We call on the House and Senate intelligence committees to release what they know, including how many people this illegal activity impacted, what punishments the people involved faced, and what the committees have done to ensure this never happens again.”
“The government has abused its surveillance powers for too long and blatantly disregarded the privacy rights of the American people. Like the FBI’s recent wrongful spying on business, religious, civic, and community leaders, this adds to the mounting evidence that Title VII is simply too dangerous to reauthorize,” Vitka concluded.
In Virginia, back in 1759, a white Scottish servant named Elizabeth Gallimore fell in love with a black slave whose name had been lost over time. Their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, who performs under the pseudonym Fantastic Negrito, has released a compelling concept album, “White Jesus Black Problems,” based on his recently discovered lineage.
The ambitious multimedia project includes a companion film, and Fantastic Negrito says the project was produced to challenge a popular narrative around polarization.
“There’s a feeling out there right now that we can’t get anything done because we’re so polarized, so entrenched in our ideologies and unmoved by facts or logic, but I wanted to share this story because I think it smashes that narrative to pieces,” Fantastic Negrito declared. “I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors, both Black and white, who showed me that anything is possible. There was a lot of ugliness in their story, but there was a lot of beauty, too, because in the end, perseverance overcame.”
“Man with No Name,” which appears on the album, is a painful reminder that often the identity and experiences of the oppressed are erased.
With the song (and album), the stories of the courageous forgotten are reclaimed and finally told. The message, “I keep moving on,” encourages perseverance even when it is difficult to be hopeful.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter and first published at TheDissenter.org. Become an annual paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.
In the United States government’s case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, prosecutors claim that he communicated with US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning through an encrypted chat client known as Jabber.
Prosecutors highlight several alleged exchanges between Manning and a username, or handle, associated with Assange. Yet they have never been able to definitively prove that Manning was chatting with Assange, and Manning’s new book, README.txt, further complicates their case.
Manning recalls in February 2010 that she told a chat room with individuals she believed to be associated with WikiLeaks that they could expect an “important submission.” She received a response from someone with the handle “office,” who changed their handle to “pressassociation.”
At this time, Manning had prepared what became known as the “Collateral Murder” video for submission to WikiLeaks. The video showed an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad by US soldiers that killed two Reuters journalists, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, and Saleh Matasher Tomal, a good Samaritan who pulled up in a van and tried to help the wounded.
“We eventually began to talk on another encrypted chat client, Jabber, and I saved the person in my contacts as ‘Nathaniel Frank,’ a decoy that was an homage to the author of a book I’d read the previous year (Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America),” Manning writes.
Consistent with the statement she delivered during her court-martial in February 2013, she adds, “I never knew for sure who the real person was behind the ‘Nathaniel Frank’ handles. Over time, and from the role he played in the chat room, I came to understand this was an important person in the group.”
“I guessed it was likely Julian Assange, or maybe Daniel Schmitt (now known as Daniel Domscheit-Berg), another central figure in WLO [WikiLeaks]. Or else it was someone representing them. To this day, I can’t say with absolute certainty who it was; that’s the point of having a handle online, of course. There are no driver’s licenses presented in the hacking world.”
Manning mentions that she used a “random name generator” to get her handle: DawgNetwork.
In the indictment against Assange, prosecutors state, “No later than January 2010, Manning repeatedly used an online chat service, [Jabber], to chat with Assange, who used multiple monikers attributable to him.”
“The grand jury will allege that the person using these monikers is Assange without reference to the specific moniker used,” according to the indictment.
This illustrates the intent of US prosecutors to rely upon circumstantial evidence to tie Assange to the account, like they did during Manning’s court-martial. However, as was true during the court-martial, the government still cannot prove Assange was the WikiLeaks associate chatting with Manning under a “specific moniker.”
During a four-week extradition hearing in September 2020, Assange’s legal team had Patrick Eller, a command digital forensic examiner responsible for a team of more than eighty examiners at US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters, provide testimony to the UK district court. He had access to the court-martial record.
Eller said that he was unable to find any evidence that linked Assange to the “Nathaniel Frank” account.
Now, in a government affidavit from 2019, assistant US attorney Kellen Dwyer claimed the US has a witness that the FBI interviewed in 2011, who will testify that Assange used the pressassociation account. The witness is a woman who was “romantically involved” with Assange and met him in Berlin in 2009.
Dwyer also indicates that Siggi Thordarson, an FBI informant from Iceland who is a diagnosed sociopath and serial criminal, will testify that Assange used “pressassociation” as “one of his online nicknames.”
None of this featured in the extradition proceedings, and Crown prosecutors did not contest Mark Summers QC, an Assange attorney, when he had Eller address the lack of proof that Assange used the account that chatted with Manning.
Prosecutors subpoenaed Manning to testify before a grand jury in January 2019, and they likely hoped they could coerce her into answering questions about her chats with this particular account. But Manning was steadfast, maintained her grand jury resistance for nearly a year, and prosecutors were never able to elicit any testimony that could be used against Assange.
Her book should help Assange’s legal team establish reasonable doubt that Assange used the name, especially if they can show that other WikiLeaks associates had access to the account for chatting with potential sources.
Contesting The US Government’s Theory In The Assange Case
The US government’s theory of the case against Assange depends upon a narrative that involves Assange recruiting Manning to leak documents to WikiLeaks. Facts of the case have always conflicted with this conspiracy theory, and Manning raises a few of these facts.
“[Major Ashden] Fein tried to make it seem like I’d started hunting around explicitly on behalf of WikiLeaks as soon as I got to Iraq. He pointed to a list they posted of they ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ for 2009, and tried to claim that I’d been looking for the Garani video in November, just two weeks after I’d gotten to Iraq.”
This backfired, according to Manning. “First of all, we has evidence that I hadn’t uploaded the Garani video until the spring of 2010. Second, the video wasn’t even on the ‘Most Wanted’ list. Third, the vast majority of things I’d posted weren’t on it either.”
“In late March,” as Manning details, searching through the CENTCOM directory for information I needed for my job, I discovered a video of a 2009 air strike in Garani, Afghanistan. More than one hundred Afghani civilians, mostly women and children, were accidentally killed, and the air strike had been covered all over the world.”
“It was chilling to see death on that scale, and the conclusions of the report that accompanied it were even more disturbing to me than the ones for the video that became known as ‘Collateral Murder.’”
Manning adds, “What I was saw indelible and awful: graphic footage of women, children, and old people dying the most painful kind of death, a result of munitions containing white phosphorus hitting an extremely flammable structure.”
She submitted the Garani video to WikiLeaks, but the video was never published. The US government’s report on what resulted in the deaths of so many innocent civilians remains “highly classified.”
An exchange with “Nathaniel Frank” about the detainee assessment briefs, which were published as the “Gitmo Files,” is highlighted in the book. In the indictment against Assange, this exchange is the first alleged exchange between Manning and the person who prosecutors insist—without proof—was Assange.
“I asked ‘Nathaniel Frank’—on March 7, the day of the Iraqi elections—what he thought. Were they worth publishing?” Manning shares. “He told me that it probably wouldn’t change much politically, but that perhaps they could be of use to the individual detainees in their legal battles, and that they seemed important for filling out the general historical record of the Guantanamo detainments.”
What Manning writes aligns with the indictment, although the indictment is more vague. “Manning asked Assange how valuable the Guantanamo Bay detainee assessments would be,” and the account that prosecutors associate with Assange confirmed they had value.
Manning engaged in chats with “Nathaniel Frank” because she yearned for a personal connection with anyone who would discuss topics that were of interest to her. They exchanged messages on politics and information technology.
“Soon, we were talking almost every day, sometimes for almost an hour at a time, about a range of topics, not just whatever publications WikiLeaks was preparing,” Manning recounts. “I felt freer to be myself thanks to the cloak of anonymity the encrypted chat provided, and that was a lifeline to me then. It was an escape from the pressure and anxiety of the deployment.”
“In retrospect, I realize that this meant more to me than it did to ‘Nathaniel Frank,’ and that our closeness was an artificial, circumstantial one. But I so badly needed an escape valve, and some semblance of friendship and trust.”
This is the first in a series of articles at The Dissenter on Chelsea Manning’s new book.
In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Change, bell hooks warns that it isn’t true that men are unwilling to change; they are actually afraid to change.
“It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving,” hooks writes in the 2004 edition of the book. “To know love, men must be able to let go of the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.”
In 2014, Charles Berry and Richie “Reseda” Edmond-Vargas put hooks’ words to the test by co-founding the Success Stories Program at the California Training Facility prison. The program is dedicated to treating some of the root causes of harm and violence—patriarchy and toxic masculinity—among people who are criminalized and incarcerated.
Also known as “The Feminist on Cellblock Y,” after being featured in a CNN documentary of the same name, Edmond-Vargas noticed an oversight in the programs offered to prisoners in California. Though there were instructional workshops on topics like anger management and substance abuse, none of the education on offer actually got to the heart of the problem: patriarchy.
“Most behavioral issues, they’re all steeped in patriarchy, but nobody was talking about it [in prison].” Mannie Thomas III, Coach and Growth Coordinator of Success Stories and a previous participant of the program, said. “Richie really saw that oversight—we know everybody’s bouncing around the idea of masculinity and patriarchy, and no one’s really talking about it.”
Edmond-Vargas took that oversight as an opportunity to speak about patriarchy at the gym, where he was laughed out of the room. He persisted, and through trial and error and conversation with Transformational Coach and Growth Coordinator Chris Johnson, came up with a method of sharing experiences in a conversational setting that started reaching incarcerated men and encouraging them to change.
“Once we started to share very real stories, what we’ve seen is people’s ability to relate to the topic, the topic became real, right?” Thomas explained. “When you’re talking to a group of cisgender men about how patriarchy informs their life, and how it may keep them from being the highest version of themselves, or how it’s harming their community—before we told our stories, they couldn’t really make the correlation.”
Success Stories became a 12-week program where men are encouraged to reassess how they live their lives, and discover how to live more fully through the rejection of patriarchal values and toxic masculinity. The participants of the program meet once a week for two hours at a time and go through myriad topics.
Through exchanging stories and experiences on what matters most in the lives of the participants, participants redefine what’s most important to them. After exploring the root causes of male violence, facilitators offer what they see as the remedy for patriarchy: integrity and relearning how to feel emotions.
“We realized that while participating in patriarchy, men as a whole don’t have complex language to express complex emotions because we don’t do it often,” Thomas said. “So we have a conversation about love and what it means, because we realize that most of us grew up with the definition of love that may not actually be that. And then we’ll talk about our belief system and how it influences our behavior.”
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In many ways, Success Stories is deconstructing and reconstructing the ways marginalized men relate to the world and to the people in their lives. Edward Munsuer, who attended the program while incarcerated, says that he learned another way to be a man through the workshops.
“Most men focus on violence, money, and women, as well as repressing and covering up their true emotions,” Munsuer said. “The world makes us think that if we have the hottest girl, or the most money, or we are the toughest and punk people, or beat people up, then we are the coolest and everybody will like us. But when we treat people with love and equality, the world becomes a better place.”
The program also powerfully teaches men how to love in healthy ways, recognizing that patriarchy and toxic masculinity might have hindered their ability to give and receive love. In a page of Munsuer’s notes during the program, he wrote down the “seven A’s of love” taught in the course: action, attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, affirmations and actualization. Next to each word, Monsuer noted what made sense to him, and today he puts the lessons in practice.
“My experience with Success Stories was quite profound,” he said. “It truly opened my eyes to focus on what’s important in life, as well as love for others.”
The program also has a recommended list of books to accompany the conversations and learning experiences. All About Love, The Will to Change, and We Real Cool—all by bell hooks—are a few of the readings recommended to participants. According to Thomas, the reading is not a requirement but it can help men understand they are operating within a system of patriarchal capitalist exploitation.
“The thing that we’ve noticed about patriarchy and misogyny is that men feel like that we’re the only ones going through this,” Thomas said. “And a lot of us don’t even recognise that we’re working within a system. So when you have the opportunity to read the literature, it makes it more real, because it’s like—oh, this isn’t just me.”
The transformative power of the program is that it’s designed to reach all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, and lead them to understand, together, that patriarchy and toxic masculinity have been imposed onto their lives from an early age. The collective discovery fosters a feeling of comradery and companionship that is the polar opposite of the isolation of patriarchy.
“We were all given this template about masculinity and because we are part of this patriarchal system, we’ve experienced a lot of the same things right,” Thomas said. “This opens up the door for people to be more truthful and vulnerable, because they’re seeing somebody who’s experienced the same thing. And it alleviates this isolation that we feel as men because, as men, we’re not told to help each other out. Some of the participants are doing that for the first time, it’s not comfortable for them, but it’s relieving and it’s healing.”
The program has faced resistance and challenges since its inception. Thomas himself says he was skeptical of Edmond-Vargas when they first met in the prison yard. Thomas made a comment about Edmond-Vargas tattoo being gay, and his response was so non-accusatory and open-ended that Thomas became intrigued.
“He was like: ‘Have you ever considered that the way that you use language perpetuates the oppression of other people?’ I was like, bro, you’re doing too much. And I was arrogant at the time. But then it was just eating at me, like, wait a minute, what am I missing? So I asked him about the group.”
The resistance Thomas described in himself, often held by some participants of the program, is overcome through the sharing of personal experiences with other men. This exchange exposes the similarities of the participants’ stories, and how patriarchy encouraged them to be violent to prove themselves as men.
From that point on, ignoring patriarchy as an active force in their lives becomes impossible, and so the work begins.
But the most impactful part of Success Stories, which has an abolitionist politic behind its work and scope, is that it’s helping men be released from prison early with a better perspective on how to live a full life. While Thomas doesn’t have data to share on the program’s success yet, he says most of the core members of the organization were sentenced to life in prison and got out early largely due to the program.
“We went from a program inside prison that nobody wanted to talk about to now a program that’s not only inside, but is being taught in multiple prisons,” Thomas said. “The prisons gave us rehabilitative achievement credits, which means people who go through our program actually earn time off their sentence. That was huge.”
Punishment and imprisonment, Thomas says, is not the solution for patriarchy and the harm caused by toxic masculinity — indeed, the current solutions we have for male violence generally result in recidivism and more harm instead of helping men of color find better ways to live in community. Still, he believes the program can be expanded beyond prison to prevent incarceration through educating boys before they offend.
“We hope to be the alternative to the punishment culture,” Thomas said. “Don’t send people to jail, send them to our program because we believe true transformation is possible while people are still in our community without having to subjugate them to further isolation.”
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
At Washington’s Stafford Creek Corrections Center, a group of incarcerated organizers have built community with local youths to fight for sentencing reforms, grappling with what it means to organize through an abolitionist lens from inside.
The Cultural Collective at Stafford Creek is a grassroots organization comprised of leaders from various independent cultural groups that include the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Awareness Group, Black Prisoners Caucus, Nuestro Grupo Cultural (formerly Hispanic Cultural Group), and Native American Circle. Together, they are using every tool at their disposal—from building relationships around art with youth in the community to fighting for legislative change—that could potentially free people.
While prison has widely been regarded as a place that thrives on violence, isolation, and division, the Cultural Collective transcends negative stereotypes by working in solidarity to uplift the voices of those most marginalized, and empowering those directly impacted by an unjust system.
Although the organization has been guided by the legacies of the community and prison organizers who came before them, each respective group, despite the lack of support from local administration, has been dedicated to serving their community and building life affirming institutions. These groups organize youth summits, immigration seminars, cultural classes, social justice forums, and provide platforms for their peers to contribute positively to their communities.
Community organizing has always been essential to survival for the incarcerated. Whether folks are getting together to demand better medical treatment and living conditions, pushing for access to quality education and resources, striving for space to keep cultural traditions alive, or fighting for sentencing relief through legislation, prison organizing has always been a struggle borne out of necessity.
As prison organizing for criminal justice reforms flourished over the last decade, the Cultural Collective demonstrated that reforms within the current system will never be enough: that true change can only come from a movement that is of and by the people — a movement grounded in abolishing the prison industrial complex and cultivating a caring society.
Leading up to Washington state’s 2022 legislative session, members of the Cultural Collective were approached by several of their peers for updates on upcoming bills that could potentially affect prisoners, and asked what work was being done to pass these bills.
As outlined in a Change.org petition, there were four bills in particular that Cultural Collective members decided to push forward. The first, HB 1413, would have retroactively eliminated juvenile felonies in the calculation of adult sentences and ensure adults were eligible for resentencing if they had juvenile felonies factored into their sentences.
SHB 1282 was intended to expand “earned release time” to 33 percent of the total sentence that an individual serves. Currently, earned time is capped at 10 percent for violent convictions.
A third bill, HB 1344, would expand the pool of people eligible to have their sentences reviewed by the Washington State Indeterminate Sentencing Review Board. People who were under the age of 25 when their crime was committed could have their sentence reviewed after they served 15 years, or 25 years for those convicted of aggravated murder.
Finally, SHB 1169 would have significantly altered guidelines around the application of sentencing enhancements and provide judges greater sentencing and resentencing discretion, which could have also applied retroactively.
Because Washington state has some of the strictest sentencing laws in the nation and eliminated its parole system back in 1984, a change in the law may be the only hope at freedom for multitudes of prisoners stuck behind bars facing significant time.
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Although legislative work does not traditionally align with the Cultural Collective’s abolitionist principles, this interaction with other prisoners curious about these bills prompted the organization to at least have a conversation about possible steps moving forward, and what they could do to still be a voice and presence for their peers.
Some abolitionists are wary of legislative reform approaches because of their propensity to be co-opted or watered down by legislators. Major reform efforts, like the First Step Act, are seen as too piecemeal or failing to go far enough. Often more organized and law enforcement-adjacent groups can create devastating exemptions and loopholes in these efforts that fail to address core issues or, even worse, entrench them. Instead, some abolitionist organizers have prioritized other approaches, like community building and mutual aid, clemency campaigns, prisoner defense committees, and more.
While those organizing from the inside with the Cultural Collective align more with the latter, they also believe that any changes that do not shift power away from the system and back to the community are shortsighted and have the potential to only strengthen a system that must be dismantled.
As the former president of the Clallam Bay Corrections Center’s APICAG and a current advisor to the SCCC chapter, I have argued for a more traditional approach. I’ve contended the group should be more focused on dismantling the whole system. And that by dedicating limited group resources to a legislative process that has a history of deliberately excluding us, we would not only be stretching thin our resources, but legitimizing an inequitable and racist system.
Showing the complexity of abolition, other members like 31 year old Billy Gumabon, who currently serves as SCCC’s APICAG president, explained that remaining grounded in traditional abolitionist principles is a lot more complicated when you’re “literally in the eye of the storm.”
Gumabon, a Filipino-American incarcerated since he was 18 years old, spoke from his own experience and demonstrated the realities of being trapped in the system.
“There are inner contradictions that must be addressed while striving for a better society,” he said.
“I believe that most folks who disagree with legislation or believe that legislation is contradictory to abolition are [oftentimes] those who aren’t directly impacted,” Gumabon continued. “I personally see abolition as a process. [Positive legislation] can help us take steps towards it.”
Cyril Walrond, the 33 year old president of SCCC’s chapter of the BPC who was recently released from prison, suggested that the organization did not have to be one dimensional and that the organization’s approach should be as nuanced as the oppression they endure. There were opportunities through the legislative process, he said, to “educate the community that reform does not go far enough… it never has, and it never will.”
“As directly impacted people, organizing from within prison, and suffering under the oppressive and inhumane conditions of the carceral system, our organizing remains rooted in abolition,” Walrond said.
The Cultural Collective decided to advocate and support the four bills that their peers identified and felt would make the most impact and still align with their mission to undo the harms of disproportionate sentencing as a result of institutional racism. They agreed that they would do so only by centering the voices of those directly impacted, and working accountably and according to their abolitionist principles.
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At a later APICAG board meeting, leaders discussed how they could contribute to the broader Cultural Collective agenda, and what steps needed to be taken in order to center the voices of those directly impacted. Because the four bills mainly focused on those convicted as youth/young adults—primarily those from black and brown communities—it was imperative that whatever steps were to be taken, they had to include youth of color. This sentiment was shared with the broader Cultural Collective, and everybody agreed that this was the best strategy moving forward.
Although there were many nonprofit organizations and sentencing coalitions in the community that were already working on legislation, they were not necessarily accountable to the incarcerated people who they would ultimately impact. The Cultural Collective decided to bypass those “professional” lobbyists and began reaching out directly to youth organizations in the community to discuss a possible collaboration.
One of the organizations that responded to the invitation was the Youth Consortium (YC), which, like the Cultural Collective, consists of young activists from various independent youth groups out of the greater Seattle area. This includes Creative Justice, Community Passageways, and the Rainier Beach Action Coalition.
These youth have been working to better their own future, fighting for, and eventually procuring resources last year, to build a Youth Achievement Center. It is currently under construction in Seattle.
While each individual member of YC has their own unique story, one thing is clear: these young leaders are a force to be reckoned with, and have demonstrated that they are the future of the movement.
During a preliminary conference call with YC staff and youth leadership, I pitched the idea to collect personal stories from prisoners about how their incarceration has affected them and their families and how the legislation could potentially provide them with sentencing relief. We turned those stories over to YC youth, and eventually collaborated on a visual arts project that could be shared with the community and legislators.
The intention was to bring life to statistics and humanize bills that have oftentimes only been used as political bargaining chips.
In the following months, leaders of the Cultural Collective held weekly calls with YC leadership, giving prisoners the opportunity to engage directly with the youth and answer any questions they may have had.
While many of the conversations were centered around prisoners’ stories, there were opportunities for youth who had experienced the incarceration of a family member to ask questions about what life was like on the inside, and unpack some of the trauma this situation creates. These organic exchanges made space for prisoners to share their experiences in their hopes of preventing more youth from following in their footsteps.
“Youth Consortium is not just a group, but a family to me,” said one YC leader, who goes by the name Carmeezzy. “When I first joined, I was welcomed with open arms. It’s a safe place to me, but also somewhere where I feel comfortable that my voice will be heard.”
“YC is a place where we can talk about many issues in our community—for example, problems in prisons. We got to hear stories from people who are actually in prison who [in my opinion] got sentenced wrongly. We really got to hear from them and their stories, rather than what the system just tells us [about them],” they said.
“I learned so much at YC. You really get the opportunity to be a leader and a listener. You get to grow together with [other] youth as a family. We help each other… even our family in prison because we all are family.”
This unique process created space for intergenerational conversations about current social issues and possible solutions grounded in abolition. In some of the calls, there was also a lot of past trauma that was unpacked and real connections were made. The experience also inspired the youth to write their own stories to share.
Dawit, a 20 year-old member of YC by way of Community Passageways, said he “noticed a similarity between youth and incarcerated organizers.”
“Legislators and other powerful people use our voices only until they get our stories [and support] to help them with a particular agenda. Then they forget about us,” Dawit argued. “However, with this project, the youth and organizers at SCCC were in control of our stories and the organization of events. In doing so, we amplified our own voices with our own capacities to achieve our own goals.”
For Dawit, a major lesson of the collaboration was “that our struggles are all connected. From the side of the youth, we’ve realized that the stories of the organizers inside aren’t very different from ours. Poverty, violence, and toxic upbringings have touched us all, although some more than others.”
“I’ve learned that we, the youth, need to work together and draw inspiration from the strong organizers inside in order to battle these issues as we come of age.”
Throughout the process, the project grew and evolved to be much more than creating art or just a material product. It built community connections, promoted youth leadership, addressed injustices, and centered the voices of those most impacted and marginalized in an effort to truly bring about change. It has been about creating a platform for imaginations to grow, while also growing what abolition could truly look like right now.
Things didn’t always move as smoothly as they could have. A few unexpected obstacles due to COVID-19 and a simultaneous Tuberculosis outbreak at SCCC presented many challenges for the men on the inside.
“We were subjected to inhumane living conditions everyday,” said Billy Gumabon. “Our mental and physical health was being negatively impacted. [Because of this], the youth from YC stepped up for all of us in a big way in taking the lead in this project.”
But with obstacles came creative ingenuity and strength. “We had to find new ways of communicating and coordinating,” said Cyril Walrond. “We would go outside [when allowed to] in the cold and rain to strategize across razor-wired fences. We did what we had to because we knew this work was bigger than us.”
“It was deeper work rooted in abolition and liberation aimed at building and empowering community in order to challenge the existing oppressive and dehumanizing white supremacist power structure,” Walrond said.
“I’d say the biggest output is the relationship formed between the organizers and organizers inside,” Dawit remarked. “Throughout our calls, we’ve planned and executed several things. We’ve also laughed, shared stories, and formed relationships that we won’t forget. Although we mostly met online and over the phone, we’ve grown to know each other’s names, voices, and work.”
“I think it’s these relationships that [will] carry on and have a more immediate effect on the the next generation,” he said.
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On February 19, 2022 YC hosted a virtual event to provide an opportunity for more people in the community to be a part of, and contribute to, this unique experience. They shared recordings and pictures of prisoners, who submitted stories and testimony of how the project has impacted them. The youth read stories from the inside, as well as recordings of prisoners reading youth stories.
T-shirts designed by incarcerated artists embodied the spirit of the collaboration between prisoners and youths on the outside. (Credit: Felix Sitthivong)
It was at this virtual event where YC youth unveiled t-shirts they had printed that were designed by incarcerated artists with messages that embodied the spirit of the program. Some read “Liberation” to remind the community of what the groups were all striving for. Others had pictures of cracked microphones and slogans that read “Project: Broken Mic” to symbolize the marginalization of prisoner and youth voices, and their intention to uplift these voices by repairing their “mics” and making all their voices heard.
Nathan, a 19 year-old member of YC who also MC’d the virtual event, said, “[Our] hope was to bring awareness to our community. [We wanted] to break the silence and disprove any lies and myths [about our incarcerated family] created by the people from the top, and give folks [trapped] by the system a second chance.”
“Letting them tell their stories and speak from experience to give future generations a new perspective on their lives, to improve themselves and the people around them,” he said.
The virtual event, although a tremendous success, also dealt with some unexpected setbacks. The forum was briefly hijacked by a “Zoom-bomber” spewing hateful rhetoric and displaying inappropriate images. But organizers thought quickly on their feet, and handled the tomfoolery with the class and elegance of the well-seasoned organizers they’ve proven to be.
“Some things didn’t entirely go as planned, but some quick thinking brought us back onto the right track,” Nathan explained. “Even though we had some unexpected guests and some changes to the script, the whole team clutched the event and managed to pull it off.”
At the conclusion of the event, there was a call to action for the community to support the legislation prioritized by the Cultural Collective. The youth shared what came of the process thus far, and there was a consensus commitment to continue to build and expand to other prisons, and include more youth moving forward.
As the Washington State legislative session came to a disappointing close, and none of the bills were passed, all participants of the project understood that what they created was more meaningful than any bill—that abolition is a living and breathing process. That change does not come from a few reformist bills, but rather the connections made between those most marginalized in order to rebuild and reimagine community.
Currently, plans are still being discussed to continue connecting, and utilizing this model to address broader social issues plaguing the community. Zines, documentaries, liberation art, community organizing classes, and other uplifting projects are all on the table as the groups continue to meet inside and out. Both groups are also devising a plan to garner more support and possibly support resurrecting the bills that were not passed during the 2022 session.
The collaboration between YC and the Cultural Collective continues to demonstrate that abolition is not just about tearing down prisons—although that is an essential part of it. Abolition is also about building meaningful relationships that empower those directly impacted by State oppression, uplifting the voices of those most marginalized, and creating a sustainable system in which all our needs are met.
By embracing each others experiences and histories, YC and the Cultural Collective are making sure that their people are surviving today–while also laying the foundation for a brighter future.
Special thanks to Youth Consortium staff and coordinators for making this project possible.
Singer-songwriter Rain Perry recently released “A White Album,” a concept piece that addresses white privilege. She is also working on producing a stage version of the album.
One of the album’s highlights is “The Money,” which skillfully weaves the narrative of two GIs returning from war, one white and one black. It examines the inequality when it comes to home ownership and generational wealth.
In an interview with Americana Highway, Perry said the song is about the real estate process of “redlining.”
“I knew nothing about that, and then when I researched it, I realized why wealth inequality has persisted,” Perry added. “It caused problems then and continues to cause problems now. That made me look at the world in a different way, but the next step is: What can I do to mitigate it? Who can I vote for? What can I donate to?”
“I’m hoping that the next step is tangible action that helps mitigate the problems that the record brings up, but I can’t control what people do.”
Solutions to systemic ills will only come from awkward conversations. This includes white people acknowledging their privilege and the role that they play. Rain Perry is doing her best to add her voice to the discussion.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become an annual paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.
A whistleblower protection bill containing access to jury trials, which has long been a priority for advocates, passed in the United States House of Representatives on September 15.
The legislation, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act (WPIA), was sponsored by Representative Carolyn Maloney, who is the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
It allows whistleblowers to have their claims heard by a jury in a US district court if the Merits Systems Protection Board (MSPB), an administrative body largely unknown to most Americans, does not rule on their case within 180 days (or 240 days if the MSPB certifies that a case is “complex”).
The MSPB has a backlog of at least 3,000 cases as of June 2022, according to the Federal News Network. If this bill were to pass in the US Senate and be signed by President Joe Biden, it would break a major logjam that has blocked whistleblowers from obtaining a review of their claims.
Furthermore, the bill grants “any employee or applicant for employment adversely affected or aggrieved by a final order or decision of the Merit Systems Protection Board may obtain judicial review of the order or decision.”
Research by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) showed [PDF] in the first six months of 2021 that MSPB judges “ruled against whistleblowers in fifty of the past fifty-one retaliation cases.”
“Federal employees are the only major labor group of whistleblowers in the country who don’t have access to a jury trial to challenge retaliation against their free speech rights,” GAP legal director Tom Devine declared. “Instead of being able to seek justice from a jury of the citizens who they are reporting to defend when they risk their careers, their day in court is limited to administrative judges who rule against whistleblowers in 96 percent of cases and are extremely vulnerable to political pressure.”
Devine also said, “It is ironic and indefensible that federal employees, whose whistleblower disclosures are the highest stakes for our country, have the weakest due process rights to defend themselves.”
Significantly, the bill recognizes the impotency of the MSPB by making whistleblower access to a jury trial “retroactive for claims filed to MSPB for up to five years prior to the date of enactment.”
This means whistleblower complaints from as early as the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, which are still pending before the MSPB, could be submitted to a federal court.
Whistleblower complaints in a US district court, particularly those involving discrimination, would fall under the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), or the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938).
Congress was urged in 2012 to include access to jury trials in the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). The Justice Department aggressively fought the provision. President Barack Obama ultimately caved.
According to Devine, Jeff Sessions, who was a US senator and later became attorney general under Trump, also threatened to put a hold on the legislation if it included court access. Staff for Senator Susan Collins suggested the bill may not pass at all if whistleblower advocates did not back down.
Stephen Kohn of the National Whistleblower Center previously stated, “Federal employees need the same access to US courts as corporate employees, government contractors, truck drivers, food service workers, state and local government employees, Dodd-Frank Act whistleblowers, False Claims Act whistleblowers, whistleblowers who file state common law claims, and the vast majority of all other whistleblowers.”
Only two House Republicans voted for the bill. GAP noted Republicans claimed “whistleblowers already have more rights than they need,” and the legislation would “make it impossible to fire incompetents and wrongdoers.”
“However, whistleblowers routinely wait three to five years to lose over 95 percent of decisions on the merits,” GAP responded. “Rather than creating an insurance policy, the legislation transforms fraudulent rights into genuine ones.”
The bill does not cover intelligence agency employees, contrary to what several Republicans suggested in their attacks on the bill.
It does not appear that similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate, but Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, a longtime supporter of whistleblowers, previously introduced legislation that would establish basic protections for FBI whistleblowers.
Yet the expanded protection for FBI whistleblowers would not include access to a jury trial.
Originally published at The Dissenter, a Shadowproof newsletter
In 2019, longtime national security journalist William Arkin appeared on “Democracy Now!” and spoke out against liberals in the United States who believed the FBI (and CIA) could save the country from President Donald Trump.
“The FBI, in particular, has a deplorable record in American society, from Martin Luther King and the peace movements of the 1960s all the way up through Wen Ho Lee and others who have been persecuted by the FBI,” Arkin stated. “And there’s no real evidence that the FBI is that competent of an institution to begin with in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it’s pursuing.”
“But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth-tellers, that they’re the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there’s just no evidence that that’s the case,” Arkin added.
Arkin has a proven record of speaking out against perpetual war and challenging the immense power of the national security state. He co-authored the 2011 book, Top Secret America: The Rise of the American Security State and also wrote the book American Coup, which he describes as documenting the “creeping fascism of homeland security.”
When Arkin appeared on “Democracy Now!”, he had just left NBC News and circulated a letter that criticized the media organization for “emulating” the national security state in the era of Trump.
I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars.
I recount all of the above to show you why I setup an interview with Arkin about the Justice Department and FBI’s handling of the investigation into Trump and his possession of documents at Mar-a-Lago. He has the credibility to offer important insights into what pursuing an Espionage Act prosecution against a former US president may mean for the United States.
Arkin is currently the senior editor for intelligence at Newsweek. He has written multiple reports related to the Justice Department’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified information. His reporting revealed that the FBI had an informant, who had knowledge of what documents Trump had in his possession and where they were located. He later reported more details on Trump’s “private stash” of documents.
In the 30-minute interview, which was recorded on August 19, Arkin outlines the timeline of events, what the DOJ investigation may mean for Trump’s potential 2024 presidential campaign, and why he believes the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago has sparked one of the biggest political disasters in the history of the bureau.
*Below is a transcript of the interview with minor edits to improve clarity.
WILLIAM ARKIN: It’s important to just talk about the background of what happened at Mar-a-Lago because this has been going on since Trump left office. So even though most people were not aware, there’s been a battle between the Trump camp and the National Archives since January 2021 about this whole question of what records the Trump administration had taken with them from the White House.
If you talk to Trump people, they’ll tell you, oh, we had such a rushed departure—and of course the reason is because Donald Trump did not accept the terms of the election—that we by mistake took boxes to Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, in January of this year the Trump camp delivered 15 boxes of presidential records to the National Archives, and it was in the course of that delivery that I think the National Archives came to see that these were not complete sets of records, that there were a lot of presidential records which were still being held by the Trump camp, and they requested additional records.
And basically this has been going on now since January 2022 this year and that culminated by a grand jury subpoena, which was delivered to the Trump camp in the end of May, and that subpoena basically said here are specific documents and types of documents that we would like you to return and the next step essentially was that three FBI agents and a Justice Department official visited Mar-a-Lago on June 3, and they retrieved some documents. But they also in the process of that inspected the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump was keeping his presidential materials and recognized that there were additional materials with additional classified information.
Now the FBI knew that there were additional materials. They asked the Trump [camp] to put better locks on the door of the storage room. They knew that they were there. So when the search occurred on August 8, it was a surprise to most people. Maybe not so much to the people who had been following this back and forth. But it does raise the question as to whether or not what Merrick Garland, the attorney general says, is true, which is did they in fact exhaust all the possibilities for getting the additional documents.
Now we know that they took 27 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago last week. So that’s a total of 42 boxes of documents, and the 27 boxes of documents that they took under this search warrant included 11 sets of classified documents and an additional leather box that they had retrieved that contained top secret sensitive compartmented information.
Mar-a-Lago (Photo: Government Accountability Office)
I reported earlier last week that the FBI had a confidential human source inside the Trump camp that essentially let them on to the fact that Donald Trump was secreting additional documents away. And at this point based upon my reporting, it looks like the FBI had two targets in their raid on Mar-a-Lago. One was to retrieve the additional boxes that they knew were in the storage room, and two was to find this stash of documents that Donald Trump was evidently segregating from those 27 boxes, which the FBI concluded as part of their investigation that Donald Trump had no intention of returning.
I wouldn’t say that the search at Mar-a-Lago was a cover for the fact that they knew that Donald Trump had additional material, but Donald Trump himself has given us clues to the fact that there were two separate searches. Because we know that the storage room was entered. We know that they entered the bedroom in the presidential office. Donald Trump is the one who said that they broke into his personal safe. And in fact when the FBI returned Donald Trump’s passports earlier this week, it was evident that they had gotten them from somewhere that wasn’t the storage room. It pretty much confirmed what Donald Trump had claimed—that his personal safe had been broken into.
It’s kind of a game of chicken between the FBI and the Trump camp. Right, Donald Trump can’t say, oh, I was secreting away particular documents, and that’s what the FBI is really going after. He’s just going to go on this straight I’ve-been-politically-persecuted line, and that’s what he’s going to stick with. And of course once the Trump camp gets their act together and figures out what they’re actually going to say, the reality is they’re probably going to argue, why did [the FBI] execute the search warrant at all because we were cooperating with the National Archives? And if they had asked us for additional boxes, we would have returned them.
So, yes, it’s true that Trump has kind of argued they were my private papers. They weren’t belonging to the National Archives. But it’s sort of irrelevant because if you don’t consider what it was that the FBI really going after, you wouldn’t understand why they would have thought it necessary to execute this extraordinary and unprecedented of a personal residence of a former president, which has never been done in our history.
If you understand that the FBI obviously felt that Donald Trump was not planning to return everything, that they knew from their confidential human source and their investigation that it existed (and more or less where it existed), and that they were concerned that Donald Trump would weaponize that material. And that could be using it for monetary gain or using it as part of his election efforts. We don’t really know the answer there.
But if you consider all of those, then the search begins to make some sense, even though I think politically it’s been a disaster for the FBI, and as much as the mainstream might be rallying around the FBI and saying, oh, poor FBI, the truth of the matter is that it seems like this is another naive investigation on the part of the FBI and Justice Department that thinks that because we have all of the paperwork in order that it makes sense to execute this but I think in fact it’s probably strengthened Donald Trump’s hand within the Republican Party and also within the electorate, who feel like in fact after six years of investigations if they haven’t indicted him yet that it is persecution.
And there’s some validity to that. Let’s just imagine for a moment that Bernie Sanders was president, and that the FBI was going after him for six years. I mean people would be screaming bloody murder. Either indict him or stop it. And so I imagine in the coming weeks we are either going to see Donald Trump indicted finally for a peripheral question, which is possession of these documents. Not the content of the documents, but possession of them.
Or we’re going to see a political disaster in the making, which is that everyone is going to rally behind Donald Trump within the Republican camp and basically say this is an outrageous act on the part of the Biden administration, even though I believe that it didn’t have political overtones to it or undertones to it. That they inadvertently stepped into something like the Mueller investigation or like Comey talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails, where they just didn’t understand what the political fallout of their actions were going to be.
FBI Director Christopher Wray (Photo: Federal Bureau of Investigation)
KEVIN GOSZTOLA: What is your assessment of the divisions or factions or the nature of the FBI or Justice Department—not necessarily just right now but in the FBI or Justice Department up to this moment—and their relationship to Donald Trump?
Because I think it’s so important for people to know the deeper context, and since you’ve done this reporting on administrations for so long, how extraordinary it was that they had such a different posture to the president than some of the more recent previous presidents in history. Because this relationship is completely unlike Obama. It’s completely unlike George W. Bush. It’s completely unlike what we have with Joe Biden. There’s no reason for antagonism to exist between those prior presidents.
ARKIN: Well, we’ve never had a Donald Trump before. That’s the most important ingredient here. The FBI has always been a political organization, though it would like to portray itself as not one. During the civil rights era or during the communist scare of the 1950s or doing the period of time where it was basically persecuting those who were against the war in Vietnam, etc, the FBI has always hewed in the direction of being a right-wing institution with an antagonism towards the left.
With Donald Trump, the shift began to be apparent that the FBI, in fact, had a lot of people within its ranks who were anti-Trump. In fact, the long bipartisan era of the FBI was over. We live in a topsy-turvy world where the Rachel Maddows of the world are cheering the FBI on and the right-wing hates them. That’s unprecedented in modern history, that the left somehow thinks that the CIA and FBI are going to protect us from Donald Trump rather than the right [supporting these agencies]. Even like the left is quasi-cheerleaders for perpetual war and for the continuation of the war in Syria and for the war in Ukraine, etc. Whereas the right is much more of a traditional American isolationist entity.
Look, Donald Trump isn’t smart enough to articulate and/or represent the actual currents, which exist within American society, but there are currents that exist within American society. It’s Washington DC, and the New York bubble and the LA bubble versus the rest of the country, or urban versus rural. Whatever way you want to describe it. Donald Trump was elected because of that divide. Because of that increasing divide between officialdom and the rest of the American population.
So the FBI, which has always been seen in the mainstream’s eyes as being a neutral party, became a very political party. They just did. They became a political party. And at the same time that Barack Obama was being criticized during the 2016 presidential election cycle for not doing about the accusations vis a vis Russian collusion and Russian intervention—Obama said, well, I’m not going to do more because I don’t want to put my finger on the scale of the election. It’s up to the American people to decide who is the next president.
But they wanted the FBI to put their finger on the scale, and that was what happened when Comey had a press conference right prior to the election and stated Hillary [Clinton] broke the law but we’re not going to indict her. That just pissed everybody off on both sides, but most importantly, what it did was introduce the idea that Hillary Clinton was a lawbreaker and hadn’t been held accountable whereas Donald Trump was being accused of being lawbreaker and people were assuming that he was guilty.
I’m sorry. I live in a country where I still believe innocent until proven guilty. Donald Trump is innocent. He’s innocent of claims of collusion. He’s innocent of claims of cooperation. He’s innocent of all these claims until he is proven guilty. So while we might be comfortable in the mainstream saying Donald Trump’s lies about the election—I mean, listen to NPR. They say it in that way, and it should be Donald Trump’s claims about the election. By saying the word lies, you are already declaring what your political position is. That’s not impartial journalism as I understand it to be.
So Donald Trump is innocent until proven guilty, and now this search warrant has been executed. I hope as a citizen that either the Justice Department brings charges against Donald Trump or it starts to reevaluate whether it continues to spend its resources and our money in going after this guy.
GOSZTOLA: Let me ask you a few specific questions. Do you actually believe that this is a mistake on Donald Trump’s part that he has these boxes? I seem to get from the way you are setting up the timeline that that seems like a very convenient excuse at this hour. Have you seen any evidence that they really made this mistake with this many boxes of documents?
ARKIN: I mean, Melania’s shoes might have taken 42 boxes themselves. We don’t know how many boxes were actually removed from the White House in that six-hour period on January 20. But I think it’s important that you think because Donald Trump screwed up and didn’t have a normal transition and boxes ended up going to Mar-a-Lago that shouldn’t have gone to Mar-a-Lago, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t Donald Trump’s fault. I mean, this is his trick, right? They were sent by mistake, but if it had been a normal transition, they wouldn’t have been sent by mistake.
You have to ultimately say that this falls on Donald Trump in terms of what direction was given to the White House staff and his subordinates in terms of preparing the White House for the Biden administration to come into the office. So, yes, I can see that the documents might have ended up in Mar-a-Lago by mistake, but the mistake is that Donald Trump didn’t accept the results of the election and didn’t facilitate an ordinary transition.
Why it’s so important then to see the decision-making on the part of the FBI and the Justice Department about this extraordinary search is that it obviously has to be about something bigger than just run-of-the-mill secrets. And I know that some people will think, well wait a minute? Top secret documents are documents that could cause exceptionally grave damage to the United States. But I’ve been in this business a long time, and I also am a former intelligence officer in the US military, and I can tell you there’s a heckuva lot of top secret documents that have no meaning outside of just the source of information that is just describing what we know.
A lot of this [information] is classified because of the possibility that its release would divulge intelligence sources and methods, and some of those intelligence sources and methods, such as our satellite capabilities, are well-known anyhow. But I understand that people have this idea that somehow Donald Trump stole secrets, when I’m kind of doubtful that there was really much material that was in there that was intentional or detrimental to US national security in a specific way.
However, we know that Donald Trump during his entire presidency took documents to his residence, asked for copies of documents, ripped pages out of documents that were delivered to him, squirreled away documents that were interesting to him, and those documents dealt with everything from Russiagate and the political travails of Donald Trump to nuclear capabilities of Iran and North Korea and possibly even Russia and China. So we know that it’s a wide variety of documents—things that Donald Trump found interesting. That’s basically this leather box or this separate stash of documents that were in his personal safe, and that was really the focus.
I think in the end people will be surprised that it’s not really an argument about the sensitivity of the documents per se. It’s just about the documents. It’s just about the documents. They don’t need to argue that the documents are highly classified or whatever. That’s terminology that we use in the news media. And it’s kind of bullshit.
If Donald Trump just had a bunch of personal letters that belonged to the National Archives under the Presidential Records Act, they would still be making the same arguments as to why we need to retrieve those letters from the Trump camp. So I think it was really only in the case of documents that they thought that Donald Trump had personally segregated—and might use in the future, that were the ones that they were concerned about.
Photo: Trump White House Archives
GOSZTOLA: That’s the problem, right? We get this from your reporting. It does a good job of communicating this. It doesn’t seem like the FBI is moved to conduct the search just because Donald Trump has [these boxes]. Because we see the ongoing conversations with representatives over returning the boxes. But there’s something about the stash. There’s some kind of fear that they have that he’s going to do something with the documents that he has privately, and obviously, we’re at an important point in time.
There’s a Trump circus, but there’s also an election circus. We are dominated from 2023 to November 2024 will be primaries and general electon, wall-to-wall media. And you know this better than anyone having survived alongside it—how much elections dominate and overshadow important national security journalism and other stories that should be given attention rather than this horse race coverage.
It’s hard not to think based upon what you’ve been reporting that there is some motivation that, okay, we have a small window of time to do this before Donald Trump might start his campaign. And also these documents, as your sources told you, [Trump] is going to weaponize this information.
So I think it’s worth asking you what your assessment is of the Russiagate counter-investigation. That is the investigation into the people who were investigating Donald Trump and the abuses of power that they were alleged to have committed by people who were empowered, like Durham, to investigate these people and what was happening. There have been some things related to Carter Page, and there’s been some isolated examples. [The Trump camp has] tried to craft a narrative that people within these institutions were trying to, as they would put it, take down Donald Trump. That’s how they present it to the American people.
If the FBI is going in there to take this stash of documents, and it is proven out that there are documents related to the Russia investigation that Donald Trump was keeping because he thought they exonerated him or whatever, that seems pretty bad as far as the FBI and the idea that it’s supposed to be a neutral institution. I mean, obviously, historically it’s always acted politically. But if the FBI is going above and beyond to seem like it’s not a political organization, how do you green light a search when it is going to be so patently obvious later that you are taking this step?
ARKIN: Let’s talk about it in the context of 2024. First of all, we have to understand that what was been revealed as result of the 2016 election and Russiagate is that there was FBI wrongdoing. Whether you consider minor or not, the truth of the matter is that we’ve had FBI agents go to jail already for falsifying FISA applications, for using official email and text to campaign against Donald Trump as a candidate, and even people who were involved in the investigations who are supposed to be neutral parties essentially declaring that they are anti-Trump.
I don’t take from that that it’s big or little. I don’t want to quibble about whether or not the FBI is or isn’t pro- anti-Trump, but what we see is they make mistakes. Tons of them. This is not a perfect institution. We should stop seeing it as a perfect institution.
If you understand that this is a flawed institution, where the lawyers are saying, well, you can do this, you can do that, and you can do this and you can do that, and now the FBI has to decide are we publicly going to be able to do this, that the reality in the end is the FBI seems to operate on the idea that if the paperwork is immaculate that the political consequences are going to be neutral. That’s where the FBI has gotten it wrong over and over again. The paperwork can be immaculate, and yet they can be doing exactly wrong thing politically.
If I’m a smart Justice Department official, I’m going to say we got to let the chips fall where they may. If the raid on Mar-a-Lago helps Donald Trump, we still have to do what’s legally correct to do. Now you might ask, well, did they exhaust all the possibilities in talking to the Trump camp? Did they absolutely have to do this? What evidence did they have that Donald Trump was going to weaponize the information? Was there some imminent reason for them to have to do it now? Etc etc.
In the end, if I’m a Justice Department official appearing before the news media, I might answer every question that I understand that you are arguing the political consequences, but our job is to enforce the law. And Donald Trump was breaking the law, and we needed to enforce the law and it took us this long to get to the place where it was obvious that Donald Trump was not going to return the material that he had in his possession.
All of this is going to come out in the coming weeks or months, but whether or not it is going to benefit Donald Trump in this election cycle, and then specifically, in 2024, we’ll have to see. I’m fearful that the effect of this is going to be that more people will lose respect for the government. More people will see Washington as persecuting Donald Trump, and that the Biden administration and the Biden Justice Department are not going to be able to get off that merry-go-round and that’s going to add to the Trump camp’s constituency.
We already see that prominent Republicans from all walks of life except for two people on the planet (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) have all rallied behind Donald Trump on this issue. I would say that this is perhaps one of the largest crises in the FBI’s history. They may not understand it themselves. They may have made mistakes here in what they did, and they may have been legally justified to do what they did. But politically I believe it will be seen as a disaster.
GOSZTOLA: Finally I want to put to you the issue of the Espionage Act being part of the conversation. A lot of my work has been watching and monitoring and covering the developments in individual Espionage Act prosecutions over the last decade-plus. Those individuals and their attorneys would also say that they were charged for materials that would not cause exceptionally grave damage, and yet the book was thrown thrown at them and they had their lives ruined and their careers ended. So why shouldn’t the same be true for Donald Trump?
I think it presents a crisis. I think it’s part of this crisis of the liberals and the Democratic Party establishment really feeling strongly about pushing forward with whatever the Justice Department is about to do. What’s your sense of the risk if Donald Trump were to be charged with violating the Espionage Act?
You’re talking to people about the potential charges that could be brought. Is this even a distinct possibility? You said unlawful possession, which can be within that law. But there are other laws. Do you think it would be a more minor law to keep the Espionage Act out of the conversation?
ARKIN: We now know that the Espionage Act was only being referenced because of section 793(d) of the Espionage Act, which is an area of the Espionage Act that deals with if you are in possession of classified documents and the federal government asks you to return them, and you don’t return them, you’re in violation of 793(d) of the Espionage Act.
It’s called the Espionage Act, what it’s been called since 1917, but it also happens to be just one of a handful of laws that deal with security classification. The rest of the security classification system exists under executive order. That’s why Donald Trump and his people are arguing that he declassified everything. But it’s not altogether true. Some elements of classified information do fall under statute, such as atomic energy information or information about the identities of CIA sources, etc. Those fall under statute.
So it’s unfortunate that the Espionage Act is the place where this is contained, this provision about returning classified material in your possession, because it’s abused in a way because we don’t have modern legislation. Perhaps one of the solutions will be that we will finally have a law passed, which will specify what is classified and unclassified information and what is the modern security classification system and where are the authorities and what’s against the law and what’s not against the law.
That does influence Julian Assange’s problems in the courts. It influences other whistleblowers who have been charged with the Espionage Act, and even if they were not guilty of espionage, as we think of it, they are charged under the Espionage Act. So we need to clean this up because I don’t think that we have a law in a proper way that really specifies what the true state of play is here.
If I support Julian Assange, I want Donald Trump to spur along a better articulation of what is the actual purpose of the Espionage Act. To have say for instance Julian Assange, a foreign national charged under the Espionage Act—espionage against who? If he committed espionage against Australia, then he should be charged in his own country of his nationality.
In some ways, if I’m a supporter of Julian Assange, I want to see that Donald Trump helps to clarify what is this law and what it can really be used for. Because in the cases of [Chelsea] Manning, in the cases of Tom Drake, in the case of Julian Assange, I think it’s been misapplied. And in the case of journalism, there have been attempts at various times within our recent past going back to the Reagan administration, where the federal government has sought to use the Espionage Act as a way of suppressing a free press.
Again, if I’m really interested in the future, I would want to see Congress step in finally and establish an omnibus law that deals with security classification in this country. That’s more important than Donald Trump.
This article was originally published at our reader-supported newsletter, The Dissenter. Become an annual paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.
A group of journalists and lawyers, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, sued the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo. They allege that the agency under Pompeo spied on them in violation of their privacy rights.
Undercover Global S.L., a private security company in Spain, and the company’s director David Morales are also named as defendants. UC Global ramped up surveillance against Assange and shared audio and video footage from the embassy with “American intelligence.”
“The United States Constitution shields American citizens from US government overreach even when the activities take place in a foreign embassy in a foreign country. Visitors who are lawyers, journalists and doctors frequently carry confidential information in their devices,” declared Richard Roth, who is the lead attorney representing the plaintiffs.
“They had a reasonable expectation that the security guards at the Ecuadorian embassy in London would not be US government spies charged with delivering copies of their electronics to the CIA,” Roth added.
Two of the plaintiffs are attorneys who have represented Assange—Margaret Rather Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney, and Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer.
The other two plaintiffs are journalists Charles Glass and John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks to publish documents on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
The lawsuit comes around two months after United Kingdom Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the US extradition request against Assange. His legal team has submitted two separate appeals in the UK courts, yet it is increasingly evident that Assange could be flown to the US to face Espionage Act charges that civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom organizations around the world have condemned.
According to the complaint [PDF] filed in a US court in the Southern District of New York, Glass, Goetz, Hrbek, and Kunstler, like all visitors, were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to UC Global employees hired by Ecuador to provide security for the embassy. What they did not know is that UC Global “copied the information stored on the devices” and allegedly shared the information with the CIA. Pompeo allegedly authorized and approved the action.
Security required plaintiffs to leave their devices with them, which contained “confidential and privileged information about their sources or clients. This information was copied and allegedly shared with the CIA.
It is estimated that “well over 100 American citizens who visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy” had their privacy rights violated. This includes attorneys who were there to represent Assange, journalists who traveled to interview him, and even doctors who came to the embassy to assess and treat his deteriorating health. Their privileged communications stored on electronic devices were compromised.
The CIA-backed spying operation began around January 2017 and lasted until UC Global’s contract was terminated around April 2018. By that time, the Justice Department under President Donald Trump already had a sealed indictment against Assange.
Pompeo allegedly approved the placement of hidden microphones in new cameras at the embassy. He allegedly approved bugging the embassy with hidden microphones. He allegedly signed off on a plan to allow the CIA to “observe and listen to Assange’s daily activities at the embassy.”
Also, the complaint claims Pompeo approved the copying of visitors’ passports, “including pages with stamps and visas.” He ensured that all “computers, laptops, mobile phones, recording devices, and other electronics brought into the embassy,” were “seized, dismantled, imaged, photographed, and digitized.” This included the collection of IMEI and SIM codes from visitors’ phones.
Morales did not speak very good English, yet as further evidence that UC Global was working for the CIA, the complaint notes that UC Global employees were given “written technology instructions” for live streaming and audio associated with the surveillance” that were in “perfect English.”
There was an “external streaming access point” for “American intelligence” sent from the “Venetian Hotel,” or the Las Vegas Sands, the complaint asserts.
Around January 2017, Morales traveled to the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor (SHOT) convention at Las Vegas Sands. The convention was an expo for the private security industry. Security personnel for Las Vegas Sands spoke with Morales and reportedly recruited Morales to spy on Assange for the CIA.
When Morales returned to Spain, at least one whistleblower from UC Global has said Morales told employees the company was now “in the big league,” and they would be working for the “dark side.” He indicated “the Americans” would help UC Global secure major contracts throughout the world.
The complaint says former UC Global employees believe the “deal included selling information obtained through the illegal surveillance of Assange to the CIA.”
Additionally, the complaint claims that CIA handlers in the US were collecting recordings from Morales either through delivery to Las Vegas, Washington, DC, or New York or through transfers on an FTP server at UC Global offices that gave CIA personnel external access to the material.Tip Jar
Reporting from the Spanish newspaper El País previously corroborated many of the claims in the complaint. Their journalism was based upon primary source materials shared with them by whistleblowing UC Global employees.
Some of these revelations were part of Assange’s challenge to the US extradition request, but a UK magistrates’ court dismissed the allegations as irrelevant to the indictment from the US Justice Department.
In September 2021, Yahoo! News published a bombshell report on “secret war plans” against Assange that involved proposals for kidnapping and assassinating Assange after Pompeo became obsessed with the WikiLeaks founder following the media organization’s publication of CIA hacking materials that became known as the “Vault 7” materials.
Pompeo labeled the organization a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” and in April 2017, he made it the focus of his first speech as CIA director. “The one thing [current] whistleblowers don’t need is a publisher,” since the internet already enables enough sharing of information.
During the speech, Pompeo called Assange a “coward,” a “fraud,” and a “narcissist.” He pledged to pursue a “long term” campaign to neutralize WikiLeaks.
“Assange remained in the embassy in London for 7 years, believing he would face extradition to the US if he left the building,” stated Deborah Hrbek. “He was pilloried as a paranoid narcissist for this belief. As it turns out, he was right.”
The lawsuit is a Bivensaction, which stems from a precedent-setting case that established the ability of US citizens to sue US government officials.
US courts have been historically reluctant to allow plaintiffs to pursue damages, especially if it involves sensitive national security or foreign policy matters.
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Mary McCord, who was the chief of the United States Justice Department’s national security division under President Barack Obama, said that former President Donald Trump may have violated the Espionage Act.
On the “Skullduggery” podcast from Yahoo! News, McCord contended that provisions in the World War 1-era law, which has been applied to the mishandling of classified information, potentially covers what Trump allegedly did—”removing documents from their proper place,” losing or stealing information, and other acts of “gross negligence.”
But the Espionage Act is part of the two-tiered US justice system. Only lower-level federal government employees or contractors are punished with Espionage Act charges. High-ranking officials are able to use their status to avoid charges that would turn them into convicted felons.
It is, however, possible that the FBI invoked provisions of the Espionage Act to secure a warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and reclaim control of classified documents.
A grand jury subpoena for “sensitive documents” was issued to Trump in the spring, according to NBC News. The subpoena related to documents that Trump’s legal team discussed with Justice Department officials around that same time.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) coordinated with Trump representatives in 2021, and in January 2022, 15 boxes were transferred to the National Archives. Some of the records contained classified information so NARA contacted the Justice Department [PDF].
FBI agents raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8, and they reportedly retrieved at least 10 boxes of documents. Some of those files allegedly contain classified information. The fact that those boxes were not turned over when Trump representatives coordinated with NARA likely factored into the FBI’s decision to deploy agents to reclaim the documents.
The Justice Department routinely investigates and prosecutes US government employees and contractors who take classified information and try to keep the records in their home. Such individuals are typically charged with “unauthorized possession” or the “willful retention” of “national defense information.”
On May 18, 2021, Kendra Kingsbury, a 48 year-old FBI intelligence analyst who had a top secret security clearance, was charged [PDF] with willfully retaining national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act. Between June 2004 and December 2017, she allegedly took documents on FBI counterterrorism operations as well as CIA documents on al Qaida in Africa, which she kept at her home in Dodge City, Kansas.
CIA contractor Reynaldo Regis pled guilty to retaining classified information on May 11, 2018. He was accused of copying classified information into personal notebooks. FBI agents found “approximately 60 notebooks containing classified information” when they searched his Maryland home.
Harold Martin was a Defense Department contractor, who was similarly charged with violating the Espionage Act on February 8, 2017 [PDF]. During the span of two decades, Martin took digital and hard copies of NSA documents, US Cyber Command documents, and a CIA document on foreign intelligence collection. They were kept in his Maryland home and his vehicle.
Mohan Nirala pled guilty on September 16, 2016, to willfully retaining national defense information and violating the Espionage Act. He was an imagery scientist at the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). FBI agents found more than 20 secret and top secret documents at his home in Maryland.
Working as a computer systems administrator at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, Chris Glenn faced Espionage Act charges in 2014 after the FBI found that he had encrypted files from the Defense Department and US Southern Command, which he kept on an “internet-accessible network storage device located in his residence in Honduras.”
Mark Unkenholz was an NSA employee in Maryland, who was part of an office that worked with industry partners. On March 29, 2022, he was accused of willfully retaining national defense information and violating the Espionage Act in his personal email account.
As an NSA employee, Unkenholz did not have physical copies of the records in his home. He possessed the files by having the documents in his personal email, and the FBI learned of the retention because he sent the documents to a person at a company who was not authorized to receive the information. (Note: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had classified information on her private email server that created an “increased risk of unauthorized disclosure.”)
Then there is the case of the “collector of rare documents.” In 2012, Secrecy News reported that James Hitselberger, a Navy contract linguist in Bahrain, was charged with violating the Espionage Act because he had a habit of taking classified documents to his “living quarters” to read. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University had a Hitselberger collection that contained “political posters and leaflets that he gathered in pre-revolutionary Iran.”
FBI agents uncovered classified documents in Hitselberger’s possession as well as his collection at the Hoover Institution.
In a rare event, David Petraeus, who was a CIA director and Pentagon chief, faced accusations of unlawfully retaining national defense information when he kept eight “Black Books” in his home [PDF]. The books contained highly classified information with the “identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings,” and notes from discussions with President Barack Obama.
Petraeus later shared the Black Books with Paula Broadwell, who he had an affair with while she was writing a biography, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.
Because Petraeus was a former high-ranking official and a revered US military general in Washington, his attorneys were able to convince the Justice Department to not charge him with violating the Espionage Act.
Petraeus was charged in 2015 with the misdemeanor offense of “unauthorized removal and retention of classified material,” which is part of the criminal code for public officers and employees.
None of the individuals charged with retaining or possessing information unlawfully had the same influence or power as Petraeus or Trump. They were lower class people that were unable to stop the Justice Department from treating them like spies.
Trump’s legal team should be able to learn from Petraeus’ legal team and negotiate with Justice Department behind closed doors so he is not charged with violating the Espionage Act (if the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland is even prepared to charge him with a crime).
Therefore, it will be stunning if the Justice Department pursues an Espionage Act prosecution. No matter what the FBI uncovers and accuses Trump of doing with classified documents, he is still a former US president.
And regardless of the ultimate outcome, the documents that were at Mar-a-Lago belong to the public, not Donald Trump.
In 2021, Mádé Kuti built upon the legacy of his father Femi and legendary grandfather Fela with the release of his debut album “For(e)ward.”
The album was released alongside Femi’s eleventh full-length album “Stop The Hate” as part of the aptly titled double album “Legacy +.”
After completion of a United States tour with his father, Mádé released his latest single “No More Wars,” featuring powerhouse vocals and expert backing from his newly formed band The Movement.
The tune promotes the need to re-evaluate values and to make a conscious effort to pursue peace, and the stirring Afrobeat anthem works on both a personal and political level.
“‘No More Wars’ is entirely about temper, control, and focus,” Mádé said. “It’s about experiences I’ve had that taught me to reflect intentionally before I resort to violent acts.”
“The lyrics are inspired by my father’s consistency in following his path despite dealing with an overwhelming amount of harsh, untrue, and deliberately cruel people inside and outside of his circle,” Mádé added.
We live in a world that demands righteous indignation, but there is a danger that we may be consumed by anger. When that danger arises, we can remind ourselves of the lyrical refrain that recommends we how to deal with negative energy.
“So when dem come with dem trouble All the negativity dem sabi [they know] So when dem come with dem energy Close your ears and sing.”
Shadowproof was launched seven years ago. With many crises facing our world, we are proud to still be publishing independent journalism.
Since our last birthday, Shadowproof has published several articles from freelance journalists at our website and as part of The Dissenter, our newsletter focused on whistleblower stories and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s case.
Thanks in part to the Marvel Cooke Fellowship, we were able to pay writers higher amounts than in previous years. This was made possible by members and donors, who have stepped up to give money in a precarious time, and by journalists, who contributed work and believed we could provide them with a solid platform.
Our members and donors have more or less stuck by us despite the waves of economic despair and instability sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and the US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine.
Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola continued his coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s case and reported on an appeal hearing in the United Kingdom in October 2021. He put out reports when the UK Supreme Court refused to hear Assange’s appeal, when the UK judiciary approved the United States government’s extradition request, and when Home Office Secretary Priti Patel gave extradition her stamp of approval.
While maintaining The Dissenter Newsletter, Kevin wrote his book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, which is scheduled for release from Censored Press and Seven Stories Press in February 2023. It is a thorough analysis of the US government’s case against Assange and the implications for press freedom that will serve as a guide if and when Assange is brought to the US for trial.
Beyond Prisons, which Shadowproof publishing editor Brian Nam-Sonenstein co-hosts, entered its fifth year of publication. The show is currently exploring community-based violence interventions, such as the Creative Interventions Toolkit [PDF].
Shadowproof proudly continued the Marvel Cooke journalism fellowship, which Brian organizes. In 2021, we published eight articles including contributions from two incarcerated reporters at California’s San Quentin prison: Juan Moreno Haines and Rahsaan Thomas.
This year, with the continued generous financial backing of Mariame Kaba and additional donations from our readers, we were able to offer larger fellowships at $2000 each. We are working with a larger group of incarcerated journalists and artists than we did in 2021.
We just published our first fellowship piece of the second round by Vanessa Taylor on how abolitionist organizers see counterterrorism as a response to white supremacy.
The project unfortunately has faced numerous setbacks and delays due to repression, outbreaks of COVID and other infectious illnesses, and mail censorship in prisons. Though we may have to delay publication for work from incarcerated fellows, we remain patient and persistent in our commitment to work through it and support them as best we can in our collaboration.
C.J. Baker, who curates a website called “Ongoing History Of Protest Songs,” kept up his bi-weekly posts featuring the latest protest songs.
What we do is possible because of Shadowproof members and donors. The more recurring monthly contributions we receive, the more independent journalism we can produce. It helps us pay journalists more, and we’re able to expand our work.
We invite readers to become Shadowproof members by donating here. If you would like something in return for your generosity, you can subscribe to The Dissenter Newsletter. (To celebrate, we have a birthday special that will allow you to take $15 off a year subscription.)
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Tens of thousands of media jobs were lost since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020. The impact of the past two years on freelance journalists is incalculable—primarily because layoffs announced by news organizations typically do not include contractors or freelancers.
At Shadowproof, we do our best to push back against a media culture that devalues freelance journalists. Every freelance journalist who comes to us with a pitch for a story sets the amount that they would like to be paid, and then we negotiate from there. We do not take a week, a month, or longer to pay journalists for their work. Our standard is to pay them the day that their work appears on our site.
Many sites are confined to their web address, but we are using Shadowproof as a base of operations that can support the development and distribution of a newsletter, podcasts, and this year, we’re increasing the number of livestreams and content we publish to the Shadowproof YouTube channel.
Every dollar we raise increases the possibilities for what we can do with Shadowproof.
It will not be long before we are in the throes of another presidential election cycle. Yet Shadowproof will remain principled and stick to our coverage of issues and movements that are fighting for environmental, economic, racial, and social justice. We will stay focused on struggles, like the grassroots campaigns to defund the police, abolish the prison industrial-complex, and decriminalize abortion.
If the overturning of Roe taught us anything, it is how Democrats utterly failed us. They promised for at least the last 15 years that if we voted for them they would protect women from losing their right to reproductive health care. But when they had the power to codify that right into law under President Barack Obama, they did nothing.
President Donald Trump energized right-wing forces in the United States. Trump’s bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed Joe Biden to defeat Trump in 2020, and Democrats gained control of the White House and Congress. Yet after once again demanding that vulnerable communities vote for them if they wanted to be protected, Democrats let a cold-blooded minority rule.
Biden and the Democrats did little-to-nothing to protect citizens’ rights and respond to the Republican onslaught. That teaches us to have limited faith in electoralism. What has more chance of delivering gains for people in dire need is direct and open confrontation with those in power. Movements that make demands, block government operations, and wage public demonstrations that refuse to go home when told to disperse are more likely to beat back creeping fascism.
We have us, and the connections we forge, and only we can save us from the existential threats barreling down upon our communities—climate catastrophe, wars for empire, nuclear war, etc.
Thank you again for believing in what we do at Shadowproof.
Here’s to another year of independent journalism.
Kevin Gosztola, Managing Editor Brian Nam-Sonenstein, Publishing Editor
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10 Most-Read Articles On Shadowproof In Our Sixth Year
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States raided the offices and homes of members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement.
At 5 am in the morning on July 29, FBI agents in St. Louis, Missouri, targeted the Uhuru Solidarity Center and the homes of 80 year-old APSP founder Omali Yeshitela and the African People’s Solidarity Committee chair Penny Hess. FBI agents simultaneously busted into the Uhuru House and the group’s radio station Black Power 96.3 LFM in St. Petersburg, Florida.
FBI agents told Yeshitela, the founder of the APSP, that they raided his home in north St. Louis because they had indicted a Russian national named Aleksandr Ionov.
Ionov is a Moscow resident who the U.S. Justice Department claims engaged in a campaign to “influence” U.S. political groups and “interfere” in US elections. He founded a group called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia that hosted international solidarity conferences, which Yeshitela attended.
No one allegedly connected to Ionov was charged with a crime nor were they issued a grand jury subpoena.
Members of the Uhuru Movement and various leaders of other solidarity groups condemned the FBI raids as a continuation of the history of attacks on Black activists, like Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and Marcus Garvey, as part of COINTELPRO under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Armed FBI Agents Deploy A Drone And Flash-Bang Grenades
Uhuru is the Swahili word for freedom or independence, and the Uhuru Movement was founded 50 years ago to complete the Black revolution of the 1960s. Its organizers are involved in the global struggle against white colonialism in the US that goes back centuries. They engage in campaigns for reparations for slavery and education and community development in areas impacted by structural racism.
As Yeshitela recalled, he was in his home with his wife and organizer Ona Yeshitela, when FBI agents alerted them to their presence with a loudspeaker. They were instructed to come out of their home with their hands up and nothing in their hands.
While talking through the loudspeaker, FBI agents set off flash-bang grenades in the neighborhood. They broke a window to the basement.
Omari led the way down the stairs with his wife following him, and as Ona shared, “This big ol’ drone met me coming down the stairs, like it’s going to attack me.”
“When I get outside, what I see is that there was an armored vehicle in front of the house. There are combat-clad FBI agents all over the place carrying automatic weapons. They not only are in front of the house. They are occupying the porch and the yard of the neighbors next door. And this is a really poor and economically depressed community what we live in,” Omari said.
FBI agents handcuffed and detained Omari and Ona. Both were instructed to sit on a curb, but they refused.
Omari was then told that they apparently had a search warrant related to the indictment of a Russian national and somehow his name and his wife’s name were linked to this person. But FBI agents would not show him a search warrant.
It became clear to Omari that the FBI agents did not intend to arrest him, and this was all a “big show” for those in the community who were watching.
Ransacking The Uhuru House And The Group’s Solidarity Center
Omari told the press the FBI agents seized their cellphones and took all of their devices, computers, and other electronics in their home. They also put tape over a doorbell security camera so his neighbors would not have footage of the raid.
FBI agents used a battering ram to bust down the door of the Uhuru House, which is the movement’s office in St. Petersburg, and Omari claimed a 40-year archive on the movement was seized by agents.
A report from the Associated Press indicated, “Akile Anai, who describes herself as director of agitation and propaganda for the African People’s Socialist Party, said agents searched her car and took her cellphone and laptop computer on Friday in addition to raiding the Uhuru House.”
The African People’s Solidarity Committee operates out of the solidarity center in south St. Louis. It is the white arm of the Uhuru Movement that goes “behind enemy lines” to enlist support for black liberation in white communities. They have organized for decades.
“[The FBI] took a battering ram. They also had drones,” when they raided the solidarity center and an apartment above the center, according to Penny Hess, the white chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee.
Jesse Nevelsky is the white national chair of the Uhuru Movement, and he lives with his partner in the apartment above the solidarity center. He said local and county police helped the FBI conduct the raid.
The FBI put Nevelsky and his partner, who also works for the organization, in handcuffs and moved them out of the building while six or seven FBI agents pointed assault rifles at them.
“Then they took five and a half to six hours to ransack both the solidarity center and the apartment upstairs and took computers, cellphones, hard drives, files, notebooks, and a whole long list of things,” Nevelsky shared.
‘All The Makings Of A Witch Hunt’
On September 24, 2010, the FBI raided the homes of 23 antiwar, labor, and international solidarity activists in Chicago, Minneapolis, and other parts of the Midwest. They were issued grand jury subpoenas and informed they were under investigation for “materially supporting” foreign terrorist organizations.
The FBI targeted the activists for their solidarity work with organizers in Colombia and Palestine. They later learned an undercover FBI agent infiltrated their group and attempted to entrap them. None were ever charged with any crimes.
Like the raids against the Uhuru Movement, FBI agents seized notebooks, family photos, membership lists for antiwar groups, and other political documents.
The activists formed the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, and along with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression in Chicago, they put out a statement condemning the latest FBI raids.
“We oppose all efforts by the U.S. government to target activists in any progressive movement in this country. We call for an end to investigations, political harassment, and threats against activists and our movements,” the groups declared.
“The DOJ is alleging that those raided collaborated with a ‘Russian asset’ to spread ‘Russian propaganda.’ At a time when the US is engaged in an imperialist proxy war with Russia in the Ukraine, these raids have all the makings of a witch hunt.”
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) also put out a statement against the FBI’s “repression and intimidation tactics.”
“BAP believes that these raids continue the history of state repression directed against Black people in the U.S.,” the group asserted. “This repression now occurs under the guise of opposing ‘adversary’ nations but regardless of how these actions are characterized, Black people still bear the brunt of surveillance and police violence.”
“The APSP has the right to freely associate with people around the world, to hold any political beliefs it may choose, and to express them without fear of intimidation, persecution, or prosecution,” BAP proclaimed.
US Justice Department Alleges Russian National ‘Directed’ Uhuru Movement
APSP founder Omari Yeshitela attended a conference hosted by Aleksandr Ionov’s organization on September 20, 2015, that was called “A Dialogue of Nations: the Right to Self-Determination and the Construction of a Multipolar World.”
Yeshitela and other Uhuru Movement members are labeled as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the indictment against Ionov. Particularly, it accuses Yeshitela of entering into a partnership with Ionov while knowing he was an agent of the Russian government.
One of the other “unindicted co-conspirators” in the indictment is Louis J. Marinelli, who was the founder of CalExit, a right-wing campaign in the style of Brexit that called for California to secede from the United States.
Marinelli, who is white, was previously linked to the Russian government in US news media reports, but the FBI did not raid Marinelli’s home or the homes of any individuals linked to the secession campaign.
The indictment maintains that Ionov worked with FSB or Russian intelligence officers to “use members of U.S. political groups as foreign agents of Russia within the United States.” He allegedly “recruited members of various political groups within the United States and other countries, including Ukraine, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, to attend conferences in Russia.”
“The purpose of the conferences was to encourage the participating groups to advocate for separating from their home countries,” the indictment further contends. “At these conferences, Ionov entered into partnership with some of the U.S. separatist groups, including groups from Florida and California.”
“Thereafter, Ionov exercised direction or control over these groups on behalf of the FSB. Ionov also monitored and regularly reported on their activities to the FSB.”
But Yeshitela repeatedly stated that he had not received any Russian money, and Ionov never “influenced” the agenda of the Uhuru Movement. “We’re 50 years old. The Russians didn’t create us.”
Kalambayi Andenet, who is the international president of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, was even more pointed in her statement. “Don’t insult our intelligence by saying Russia, China, or anyone will lead the African working class to liberation. The African working class will lead our own struggle.”
Earlier this year, after Russia deployed its military forces and launched attacks in Ukraine, Yeshitela said he participated in a webinar with Ionov that was titled, “Ain’t No Russian Ever Called Me A Ni**er.”
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
In May, a gunman killed ten Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and livestreamed the event on Twitch. While that by itself was horrific, many were further disturbed upon learning that the shooter’s manifesto made references to memes and online platforms where he spent most of his time. It didn’t take long for public figures to demand law enforcement target the online pipeline that “radicalized” him.
It may seem like a win for officials to investigate Twitch, 4chan, Discord, and similar platforms. But this approach—spying on people online in search for ‘pathways to radicalization’—draws from counter-extremism logics built on the ongoing surveillance of oppressed communities worldwide. Amidst rising right-wing mass shootings in the United States, increased funding of counter-extremism, supposedly in this case to prevent white supremacist violence, represents a double-edged sword for communities of color who are most often the target of these programs.
Counter-extremism is shaping the response to mass shootings like the one in Buffalo. Los Angeles, for example, approved a $250,000 grant to the city’s police earlier this year, provided by the Department of Homeland Security’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program. The grant will help fund the Providing Alternatives to Hinder Extremism (PATHE) program, an intervention-based program claiming to help the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) identify individuals on pathways to extremism.
PATHE is touted by media and police as an efficatious way to combat so-called “domestic terrorism.” Yet the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (SLAPD), a community-driven abolitionist organization, condemns it as a “vehicle for LAPD to racially profile youth of color with pseudoscientific ‘risk assessments.’”
In Los Angeles, SLAPD, alongside organizations like Vigilant Love, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and others, have led the charge against the LAPD’s counter-extremism programming for years.
SLAPD told Shadowproof by email that, in 2018, organizers blocked a $425,000 grant to expand the city’s precursor to PATHE. However, city councilors and police “ignored the wishes of Angelenos” three years later, SLAPD said, “in order to prioritize the budget of the LAPD over the well-being of our youth.” PATHE’s expansion eventually came to fruition in 2021 on the tail end of another betrayal, this time on the national level.
In June of that year, President Joe Biden not only abandoned campaign promises to end the Trump administration’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program (TVTP)—a resurrection of the Obama-era Countering Violent Extremism (CVE)—but effectively recreated TVTP with the new Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3).
Today, TVTP lives on as a grant program managed by CP3 and is described as the “only federal grant program dedicated to enhancing the capabilities of local communities to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.” CP3 distributed $20 million in grants nationwide through TVTP in 2021, including the $250,000 grant for PATHE in Los Angeles.
Organizers like those working with SLAPD are urging abolitionists nationwide to explicitly take up and confront the ever-expanding surveillance state.
Abolition Beyond Police Shootings
Abolition was shoved into popular consciousness following the protest summer of 2020. However, media coverage often hyper-focuses on police killings, failing to make important connections as the U.S. pours millions into dangerous counter-extremism programming.
“Surveillance isn’t harmful merely because it’s used by police,” SLAPD wrote. “Intent to harm is an essential part of surveillance and [it] precedes the creation of the police as a distinct institution in North America.”
In the U.S., surveillance has taken different forms at different times, from the early development of biometric identification with slave passes to lantern laws demanding Black, mixed-race, and Indigenous people carry lanterns after sunset if not accompanied by a white person. No matter how it presents itself, though, surveillance is fundamentally “real-time social control” facilitated by a number of organizations.
Through counter-extremism, the U.S. government uses debunked “radicalization” theories to target Muslims — and often Black Muslim youth — and communities of color with increased policing and surveillance. Exported by the United Kingdom’s Prevent, counter-extremism strategies like CVE borrow the underlying assumption that there is an identifiable pathway to “extremism” requiring early intervention through not only watching communities but selectively funding non-profit programming, universities, and more. SLAPD writes that the federal government uses counter-extremism to “export policing and surveillance to social workers, teachers, clergy, community members, and nonprofits.”
For example, TVTP does not limit its funding to law enforcement alone. Vigilant Love’s #ServicesNotSurveillance campaign highlights counter-extremism’s encroachment into “therapy, social work, school counseling, and other related spaces.” Cultural productions have been targeted as well: in 2021, DHS provided $750,000 to the University of Texas at El Paso and $400,000 to Music in Common’s Black Legacy Project. Surveillance is not necessarily about restricting only the actions and movements of targeted communities, but their thoughts, too.
While counter-extremism programs like PATHE masquerade as supportive interventions into communities, SLAPD warned “they greatly expand the power of the police state, which is the primary agent of white supremacy and violence in our lives.”
As a domestic expansion of the so-called War on Terror, counter-extremism programming is part of a “global surveillance infrastructure,” Darakashan Raja, the founding director of Muslims for Just Futures, told Shadowproof by email. That infrastructure “create[s] a global confinement zone where individuals can’t truly be free anywhere they go if they are flagged as a terrorist or potential terrorist.”
Counter extremism and surveillance. Illustration by Paul Lacombe.
Framing The Problem As “Domestic Terrorism”
DHS claims CP3 will combat “domestic violence extremism, including violent white supremacy.” CP3’s formation came alongside the development of a Domestic Terrorism Branch within the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. While the government targeting white supremacy may seem like a positive development, it raises serious questions about the framing of the problem. If the focus is on “violent” white supremacy, for example, what is non-violent or non-extremism white supremacy, and what is being done about it? There are significant reasons to doubt that a “domestic terrorism” framework can confront the problem of white supremacy.
As Nicole Nguyen and Yazan Zahzah noted in a recent report and toolkit, “Focusing on individualized acts of white supremacist violence while failing to respond to structural inequalities that harm communities of color actively contributes to the reproduction of white supremacy.”
To put it another way, counter-extremism’s frameworks reduction of white supremacy to the deeds of a few individual bad actors allows the federal goverment to ignore that “the DHS and the FBI […] have always been intrinsically white supremacist institutions, from the histories of COINTELPRO to the War on Terror,” SLAPD wrote.
”In addition,” Raja warned, “history has taught us that the state’s counterterrorism and national security infrastructure has always been weaponized against Black, Brown, Indigenous communities, and liberatory movements.”
That much is easily found within the Biden administration’s guidelines for combating “domestic violent extremism” released after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. While the guidelines never mention white supremacy explicitly, “advocating for the superiority of the white race” is listed under the Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists category. It’s reminiscent of the FBI’s adoption of the “Black Identity Extremists” category in 2019, which SLAPD argues “paves the way for the administration to equate protesters rising up against the police with Neo-Nazis.”
Abolishing Surveillance
Demanding the abolition of counter-extremism strategies seems like a daunting task especially as the federal government continues to muddy the program’s lineages by restructuring it, and as events like mass shootings create demand for further investment in them. Organizers are making it easier for people to hop onboard with an abolitionist approach, though.
Last year, Raja led the development of the Muslim Abolitionist Futures grassroots policy agenda calling for the abolition of the War on Terror and demanding investments in care infrastructure instead. The project collected oral histories from community organizers, activists, and others, “who led, organized, and participated in social movements to resist the War on Terror.”
“The agenda brought together Muslim-led abolitionist groups in order to build a collective agenda so that we could use it as a movement and advocacy tool,” Raja explained. “It’s easy to dismiss one person or one organization, but when we can back up our demands with people power and the endorsement of multiple groups, it’s harder to ignore us.”
For both Raja and SLAPD, rejecting the false promises of reform is central to their work as abolitionists. “We don’t measure out victories in reformist wins, which often sacrifice communities for the sake of expediency,” SLAPD wrote. “Rather, our goal is to build community power and popular knowledge and build a culture of resistance.” This can look like working directly with community members who have been harmed by the state rather than prioritizing the perspectives of academics, attorneys, and other professionals, who lack those ties to the community.
When it comes to policing, surveillance is sometimes presented as a reform option and is not recognized as harmful and integral to the architecture of policing. As Raja wrote, “One of the biggest trends I have seen within criminal justice reform movements is the push for alternatives to incarceration that places people under state surveillance through parole and probation.” The Community Justice Exchange, for example, highlights that more immigrants are enrolled in ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (one of its Alternatives to Detention programs) than are detained in immigration facilities.
“Not A Moment In Time But A Continuation Of History.”
An analysis of the development of counter-extremism programming in the U.S. illuminates the importance of more complex confrontations with policing. While it is certainly necessary to highlight the $100 billion cities collectively pour into policing each year in general, CP3 distributed $20 million in grants last year alone. Its predecessor, CVE, provided $10 million in grants in 2017. Neither of those numbers account for the funding required to run and house these programs.
Even if police are abolished, the constant evolution of counter-extremism programs shows that, without a direct abolitionist confrontation, surveillance will find a way to survive. The billions of funding currently directed to law enforcement institutions will likely find itself funneled into counter-extremism programs at city, state, and federal levels.
Confronting surveillance, Raja wrote, “allows for us to take a transnational approach to abolition.” While the global counter-extremism industry is one small vein of surveillance as a whole, it is perhaps among the least understood. But it is a perfect representation of SLAPD’s motto: “Not a moment in time but a continuation of history.” The motto not only frames SLAPD’s work as part of a longer struggle but helps to “desensationalize the latest outrageous surveillance technology and ground abolition in decolonization.”
“Understanding our fight as part of a global anti-imperialist struggle has led to our collaboration with orgs like Anakbayan LA and the Palestinian Youth Movement,” SLAPD wrote. “The struggle for abolition is one with the struggle against the US war machine.”
The veteran New York-based singer-songwriter and folk artist Steven Keene has established a reputation for composing timely social critiques.
Keene’s 2020 album featured the galvanizing title track “Them and Us” as well as the stirring tune “Save Yourself.”
He recently released his latest single “Soon”, which is his first release since “Them and Us.” With “Soon,” Keene confronts a numb world sleepwalking toward the third World War and climate extinction.
Like many of the best protest tunes, he successfully balances a sense of mourning with a feeling of hopefulness.
“There’s so much hate going on right now. There’s so much discrimination and so much discord,” Keene stated. “It’s just insane the way the world has become. This song confronts that hate. It talks about getting back to Earth and protecting the planet.”
“It talks about bringing up children to be fair, equal, and inclusive. It talks about initiating that ripple of change that will lead to the inevitability of a better world…someday soon,” he added.
Keene continued, “Everybody can interpret the song in their own way. But I think it’s a pretty easy read because it’s really just about hope. I believe strongly that it’s going to happen; it’s just not happening right now.”
“It may not be tomorrow, but it’s gonna happen, so look what we have to look forward to on this planet. Everybody’s gonna align one day and feel the same way about helping, about not discriminating against race, religion, or sexual preference. One day we’re gonna get there.”
That message of optimism is summed up well in the following lyrics: “Soon, I will return to you. That day is close. That day is soon.”
Katie Alice Greer, the former lead vocalist of Washington D.C. punk band Priests, recently released her full-length solo debut “Barbarism.” Greer wrote, produced, and recorded the entire album herself.
She previously released music using her initials KAG, but in an NPR interview she mentioned the reasons for the change.
“It’s two reasons. The first one being I started getting an uptick in people following me, especially on Twitter, who seemed to be into “MAGA” this, Trump that,” Greer shared. “I was kind of scratching my head because I’m pretty vocally opposed to that stuff, but it’s not like I’m some famous person who might be the target of Trump trolls. I finally realized it’s because #KAG, my initials, for them means ‘Keep America Great.’”
Greer continued, “That coupled with the fact that a lot of times I felt bad about taking individual credit for my creative work. There’s just something about that that’s always made me a little uncomfortable.”
“And I’m often drawn to doing things that make me uncomfortable in my creative work, because that’s one of the best ways for me to figure out what’s going on in my head. The idea that putting it out in my own full name scared me also drew me to wanting to do it,” Greer added.
Greer’s lead single and opening track “FITS/My Love Can’t Be.” The origins of the tune can be traced back to May 2020, at the height of pandemic isolation and Black Lives Matter protests.
“I’d spent something like 70 days mostly alone since the pandemic started. Then one weekend I biked out to Fairfax Avenue and found myself amongst thousands of people. It was jarring,” Greer recalled. “To go from mostly the stillness of a barely-lived-in bedroom to projectile shopping carts, strangers chanting, phalanxes of beige gun toters, and tanks parallel parked outside luxury underwear and grocery shops on Melrose.”
“Stuff was on fire. I think I listened to Exile On Main Street headed home, because it’s similarly contradictory and complicated mixture of emotions felt resonant. I wanted to try and capture all that I was feeling without so much as re-telling events that inspired the emotions themselves,” Greer said.
A video was made for the song, with Greer playing a correspondent on the “Barbarism News Network.” “I’m not a journalist, but maybe to underscore the contrast between a reporter and a storyteller, I wanted to make a ‘Network’ Howard Beale-inspired music video to visually communicate the cacophony of feeling.”
It worked because the video is a potent example of musical journalism.
Watch/listen to Kate Alice Greer’s “FITS/My Love Can’t Be”:
On the latest episode of the “Unauthorized Disclosure” weekly podcast, Andrea Ritchie joins Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola for a conversation about organizing for abortion decriminalization in a post-Roe United States.
Andrea is a Black lesbian immigrant, and the author of the book Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. She is the co-author of the forthcoming book No More Police: A Case For Abolition, as well as the book Queer (In)Justice. And Andrea is the co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization.
First, Andrea assesses the terrain for abortion decriminalization as it exists now that the US Supreme Court abolished federal rights to reproductive health care. She comments on the brewing threat of prosecutions against women and medical providers.
Planned Parenthood in Montana announced they would no longer provide abortion medication to out-of-state patients. Andrea expresses her disgust and frustration with this decision.
Later in the show, Andrea describes what people can do. Many of the ideas outlined stem from recognizing the connections between struggles for gender justice, migrant justice, economic and racial justice, sex workers’ rights, disability justice, etc.
Voting harder in November for Democrats is not a priority. Giving to abortion access funds is what people should do. That can be done by donating directly, or Mariame Kaba has this store where you can purchase the shirt Kevin was wearing. Funds support the West Alabama Women’s Center.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.
The False Claims Act in the United States allows individuals with evidence of fraud against government agencies to bring lawsuits as qui tam whistleblowers. They can bring a case even if the US Justice Department has no interest in fighting the alleged corruption.
But on June 21, Courthouse News reported that the US Supreme Court will determine whether the government has the authority to dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit brought under the False Claims Act when the government has declined to intervene in the case. In other words, the Supreme Court could help corporations shut down independent whistleblower lawsuits that the Justice Department does not want to pursue.
Health care and pharmaceutical corporations, along with their lobbying networks, have ramped up pressure in recent years to stifle the effectiveness of the False Claims Act in holding their industry accountable and prevent the law’s expansion.
Under President Donald Trump, the National Whistleblower Center reported in 2018 that US government recoveries under the law hit a “ten-year low.” Nearly $2.9 billion was recovered, but only $767 million of that money was a result of lawsuits by the government. Whistleblower lawsuits, however, yielded over $2.1 billion.
A network of dark money has transformed the Supreme Court into an illegitimate and partisan institution. The same court that overturned Roe v. Wade—ending nearly 50 years of abortion rights—could gut one of the few laws available to private citizens to challenge corporate corruption.
Pushing Complicit Government Agencies To Act
President Abraham Lincoln signed the first False Claims Act in 1863 during the US Civil War. It became known as the “Lincoln law.” According to Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing In An Age of Fraud, the law was intended to “stop army and navy contractors from stealing taxpayer dollars but also to push complacent or complicit government agencies to act.”
The US did not have a Justice Department, Mueller noted. What the “Lincoln law” did was empower individuals to “prosecute fraud with or without the government’s participation.” Offending contractors could be fined $2,000 for each misrepresentation or false claims they made when requesting payment from the government.
The law was gutted by Congress in 1943 because the Justice Department claimed it did not need the assistance of whistleblowers when prosecutors already knew about the fraud. As Republican Senator Chuck Grassley recalled, this led to “absurd results that only hurt the taxpayer.”Grassley, an advocate for the law, said it “basically meant that all whistleblower cases were blocked, even cases where the government only knew about the fraud because of the whistleblower.”
In 1986, Grassley helped to ensure that amendments to the False Claims Act were passed to restore power to private citizens to bring whistleblower lawsuits. It ensured that whistleblowers would receive a reward in return for risking their career or legal jeopardy. However, in order to convince President Ronald Reagan to sign the amendments into law, Grassley and other senators had to overcome institutional opposition within the Justice Department.
Jay Stephens and Stuart Schiffer, two senior DOJ officials, opposed restoring the False Claims Act. Stephens contended the Justice Department was doing a good enough job against defense contractor fraud and a stronger law would hamper their work, according to Mueller.
“The law,” Stephens said, “was an anachronism from a time when the United States had no central investigative force; now that the DOJ and the FBI existed, most qui tam whistleblowers were parasitic ‘bounty hunters’ who interfered with legitimate law enforcers and ultimately provided little useful evidence of wrongdoing.”
The counter to Justice Department officials was that the restoration of the False Claims Act was necessary to protect whistleblowers from retaliation. The amendments were needed to prevent a complacent and complicit Justice Department from entering into “sweetheart deals with powerful contractors.”
‘Devastating Threat To The Executive’s Constitutional Authority’
Justice Department officials remained opposed, even though Reagan declined to veto the amendments. In 1989, they argued to the US Supreme Court that the law was unconstitutional.
Bill Barr, who later became attorney general under Trump, was the assistant attorney general. He contended the False Claims Act represented a “devastating threat to the executive’s constitutional authority and to the doctrine of separation of powers.” He objected to how Congress empowered citizens to help stimulate government action against fraud.
“There has been a massive upsurge in qui tam actions—over 150 suits have been filed,” Barr cried. “These actions have disrupted the civil and criminal enforcement activities of the Department.”
“They have also undermined the executive’s ability to administer complex procurement contracts and, in some cases, have caused serious national security concerns. The 1986 Amendments have also spawned the formation of full-time ‘bounty hunting’ groups—ersatz departments of justice—that go about prosecuting civil fraud actions in the name of the United States.”
Barr was worried about groups representing whistleblowers, who could collect up to thirty percent of any recovery, because their effectiveness put the Justice Department to shame. He was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading the Supreme Court to neuter the False Claims Act.
However, three decades later, Barr was at it again in his position as Trump’s attorney general. The Justice Department dismissed an increased number of false claims cases for reasons that Grassley believed had nothing to do with the merits of the cases. It seemed prosecutors were intent to discourage whistleblowers and undermine efforts to root out serious fraud.
Bloomberg Law reported that the Justice Department moved to dismiss “at least 14 cases involving pharmaceuticals.” Eleven of the cases were brought by the National HealthCare Analysis Group, which alleged “violations of anti-kickback laws that prohibit improper marketing of drugs to medical professionals.” They were viewed as a “bounty hunting” group.
The National Whistleblower Center called attention to the fact that the Justice Department was attempting to dismiss a case against the pharmaceutical corporation known as Gilead Sciences. A whistleblower accused the corporation of “manufacturing drugs with contaminated ingredients from China” and unusually the Justice Department maintained it would be too costly to pursue the lawsuit.
Grassley and a bipartisan group of senators tried in 2021 to correct the issue of dismissals by the Justice Department by creating a test. Prosecutors would be required to “identify a valid government purpose and a rational relation between dismissal and accomplishment of that purpose.”
A whistleblower would then have the ability to challenge a dismissal by “demonstrating that the dismissal is fraudulent, arbitrary and capricious, or illegal.” But Big Pharma succeeded in blocking the amendments from inclusion in the 2021 infrastructure bill that passed. It was a major loss for whistleblowers.
“By raising false flags about these amendments and locking progress through complex and endless court cases,” the National Whistleblower Center warned, an “anti-whistleblower victory—which could open the floodgates for future attacks on these highly successful whistleblower protections”—was secured by lobbyists.
Record Settlements And Rewards Under The False Claims Act
During the past five years, lawsuits against the False Claims Act that are backed by corporate interests have sought to amplify uncertainty around the Supreme Court and lower courts’ interpretation of provisions in the law. Each million spent on these efforts is intended to stall the progress of whistleblowers courageous enough to take a stand against corporate influence and power.
GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical corporation, was hit with a record $3 billion fine in 2012 after marketing their drugs for “unauthorized uses” and cheating the US government’s Medicaid program. The result was a whistleblower reward of $250 million, which four individuals split.
Faced with “allegations it sold toxic mortgage-backed securities and other financial products” in the run-up to the 2008 economic crash, Bank of America agreed to a record settlement with the US government of $16.65 billion in 2014. Three whistleblowers and one firm shared a $170 million reward.
Pharmaceutical corporation Johnson & Johnson entered into a $2.2 billion settlement with the US government in 2012 to end a lawsuit involving allegations related to fraud and kickback schemes perpetrated to sell three drugs: Risperdal, Natrecor, and Invega. A whistleblower received a $167 million reward.
These are just three examples of how private individuals with evidence and knowledge of fraud can pursue a modest level of accountability against corporations, whether Justice Department officials have the political appetite for such action or not.
The Justice Department’s history of opposition to the False Claims Act does not exactly inspire confidence that the corporate-captured Supreme Court will leave the law alone. If the Supreme Court yet again prioritizes corporations and upends a settled law, their ruling may greatly diminish a tool that whistleblowers have wielded for decades.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.
United Kingdom Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States.
Patel’s decision to hand over a journalist to the US government for prosecution was immediately condemned by human rights and press freedom organizations. The Assange legal team planned to submit an appeal in the High Court of Justice challenging the political nature of the case and how extradition law was interpreted.
Describing it as “shameful,” Reporters Without Borders international campaigns director Rebecca Vincent said the decision represented “another failure by the UK to protect journalism and press freedom, bringing Julian Assange a step closure to extradition.”
The global human rights organization Amnesty International renewed their opposition. “Allowing Julian Assange to be extradited to the US would put him at great risk and sends a chilling message to journalists the world over.”
Don’t Extradite Assange, a campaign which mobilized opposition to the case in the UK, stated, “This is a dark day for press freedom and for British democracy. Anyone in this country who cares about freedom of expression should be deeply ashamed that the Home Secretary has approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, the country that plotted his assassination.”
Assange faces 18 charges brought against him by the US Justice Department, 17 of which fall under the Espionage Act. All the charges relate to documents WikiLeaks released in 2010 and 2011, which were provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Over 300 doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists organized under the banner of “Doctors for Assange” sent a letter to Patel on June 10 that reminded Patel of “serious concerns” related to the WikiLeaks founder’s “deteriorating health,” which has worsened while in UK custody.
“Under conditions in which the UK legal system has failed to take Mr Assange’s current health status into account,” the doctors declared, “no valid decision to approve his extradition may be made by you or anyone else.”The doctors made it clear that extraditing a person with such compromised health was “medically and ethically unacceptable.”
They added, “Should he come to harm in the US under these circumstances, it is you, Home Secretary, who will be left holding the responsibility for that negligent outcome.”Nineteen organizations committed to freedom of expression and press freedom wrote a letter to Patel on April 22, right after the district court ordered Assange’s extradition and sent it to the Home Office for review.
“[Assange] highly likely to be detained [in the US] in conditions of isolation or solitary confinement despite the US government’s assurances, which would severely exacerbate his risk of suicide,” the organizations warned. “[He] would be unable to adequately defend himself in the US courts, as the Espionage Act lacks a public interest defense. His prosecution would set a dangerous precedent that could be applied to any media outlet that published stories based on leaked information, or indeed any journalist, publisher, or source anywhere in the world.”
“We ask you, Home Secretary, to honor the UK government’s commitment to protecting and promoting media freedom and reject the US extradition request. We ask you to release Mr Assange from Belmarsh prison and allow him to return to his young family after many years of isolation. Finally, we ask you to publicly commit to ensuring that no publisher, journalist or source ever again faces detention in the UK for publishing information in the public interest.”
The organizations demanded a meeting with Patel, but it does not appear a meeting was ever granted so advocates could further convey their concerns.
On May 10, Dunja Mijatović, the commissioner for the Council of Europe appealed to Patel. “It is my view that the indictment by the United States against Mr. Assange raises important questions about the protection of those that publish classified information in the public interest, including information that exposes human rights violations.”
“The broad and vague nature of the allegations against Mr. Assange, and of the offenses listed in the indictment, are troubling as many of them concern activities at the core of investigative journalism in Europe and beyond,” Mijatović argued.
“Consequently, allowing Mr.Assange’s extradition on this basis would have a chilling effect on media freedom, and could ultimately hamper the press in performing its task as purveyor of information and public watchdog in democratic societies.”
All of the above overtures to Patel were apparently brushed aside. There is no evidence that any complaints about the Assange case were ever considered by Patel.
The news of the decision did not even come from Patel herself. An unnamed Home Office spokesperson provided remarks that were circulated by UK media.
“Under the Extradition Act 2003, the secretary of state must sign an extradition order if there are no grounds to prohibit the order being made. Extradition requests are only sent to the home secretary once a judge decides it can proceed after considering various aspects of the case.”
“On June 17, following consideration by both the magistrates court and high court, the extradition of Mr. Julian Assange to the US was ordered. Mr. Assange retains the normal 14-day right to appeal.”
“In this case, the UK courts have not found that it would be oppressive, unjust, or an abuse of process to extradite Mr Assange,” the unnamed spokesperson claimed. “Nor have they found that extradition would be incompatible with his human rights, including his right to a fair trial and to freedom of expression.” They further claimed in the US his health would be treated appropriately.
But this was not a fresh statement from a department willing to take public responsibility for approving the request. It was a kind of vulgar paraphrasing of the legal criteria used as a cover to avoid defending or justifying the Home Office’s action.
The spokesperson faithfully parroted the “assurances” that were put forward in diplomatic notes to the UK Foreign Office by the US State Department, which intervened after the Crown Prosecution Service and the US government lost their case at the district court level on January 4, 2021.
The US State Department’s intervention played a critical role in saving the extradition request. The High Court of Justice relied on the assurances when overturning the district court decision in December 2021.
In the end, Patel and the UK government put the UK’s role as a client state of the US government ahead of challenging the case. This is a role the UK has performed consistently and dutifully since supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The US and UK agreed to an alarming and unprecedented extradition request that criminalizes someone for engaging in standard newsgathering activities not only because they share the US government’s disgust for Assange but also because UK officials value the US-UK partnership more than human rights.
Patel and the Home Office supported an expansion of the Official Secrets Laws in the UK while the US extradition request moved through the UK courts. As Mohamed Elmaazi reported for The Dissenter, the proposed expansion would make it possible for the UK government to imprison “leakers, recipients of leaks, and secondary publishers–including journalists—from the current maximum of two years to as high as 14 years in prison.”
The Home Office contended there was no longer much of a difference between “espionage and the most serious unauthorized disclosures.” The department regarded journalism as an act capable of “far more serious damage” than traditional espionage.
Operation Pelican, the name for the pressure campaign to force Assange out of the Ecuador embassy in London, was supported by the Home Office.Declassified UK’s chief investigator Matt Kennard reported that Patel was on the advisory council for a right-wing group linked to the CIA called the Henry Jackson Society, which has attacked Assange several times since 2010.
Without any meaningful objections from within the UK government, if Assange is eventually put on a plane and brought to the US for trial, they, along with the US government, will bear responsibility for any tragedy that occurs while in a US jail or prison.
