Tag: war on whistleblowers

Julian Assange Loses Appeal: British High Court Accepts U.S. Request to Extradite Him for Trial

In a London courtroom on Friday morning, Julian Assange suffered a devastating blow to his quest for freedom. A two-judge appellate panel of the United Kingdom’s High Court ruled that the U.S.’s request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial on espionage charges is legally valid.

As a result, that extradition request will now be sent to British Home Secretary Prita Patel, who technically must approve all extradition requests but, given the U.K. Government’s long-time subservience to the U.S. security state, is all but certain to rubber-stamp it. Assange’s representatives, including his fiancee Stella Morris, have vowed to appeal the ruling, but today’s victory for the U.S. means that Assange’s freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances.

In endorsing the U.S. extradition request, the High Court overturned a lower court’s ruling from January which had concluded that the conditions of U.S. prison — particularly for those accused of national security crimes — are so harsh and oppressive that there is a high likelihood that Assange would commit suicide. In January’s ruling, Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected all of Assange’s arguments that the U.S. was seeking to punish him not for crimes but for political offenses. But in rejecting the extradition request, she cited the numerous attestations from Assange’s doctors that his physical and mental health had deteriorated greatly after seven years of confinement in the small Ecuadorian Embassy where he had obtained asylum, followed by his indefinite incarceration in the U.K.

In response to that January victory for Assange, the Biden DOJ appealed the ruling and convinced Judge Baraitser to deny Assange bail and ordered him imprisoned pending appeal. The U.S. then offered multiple assurances that Assange would be treated “humanely” in U.S. prison once he was extradited and convicted. They guaranteed that he would not be held in the most repressive “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado — whose conditions are so repressive that it has been condemned and declared illegal by numerous human rights groups around the world — nor, vowed U.S. prosecutors, would he be subjected to the most extreme regimen of restrictions and isolation called Special Administrative Measures (“SAMs”) unless subsequent behavior by Assange justified it. American prosecutors also agreed that they would consent to any request from Assange that, once convicted, he could serve his prison term in his home country of Australia rather than the U.S. Those guarantees, ruled the High Court this morning, rendered the U.S. extradition request legal under British law.

What makes the High Court’s faith in these guarantees from the U.S. Government particularly striking is that it comes less than two months after Yahoo News reported that the CIA and other U.S. security state agencies hate Assange so much that they plotted to kidnap or even assassinate him during the time he had asylum protection from Ecuador. Despite all that, Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced today that “the court is satisfied that these assurances” will serve to protect Assange’s physical and mental health.

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CRT Whistleblower Banned From School Because Staff Have “Clinical Anxiety” Over Working With Him

Tony Kinnett, A public school administrator in Indiana, exposed that critical race theory is being taught in public schools.

According to Kinnett, what is being taught “suggests to all of our students who aren’t black or brown that they are responsible for centuries of horrible oppression that the United States has built.”

He added, “we do have critical race theory in how we teach.”

Now, he’s being punished.

Fox News reported:

A public school administrator in Indiana went viral after posting a video explaining that Indiana schools are teaching Critical Race Theory and intentionally deceiving concerned parents about whether or not their children are being subjected to it.

“When we tell you that our schools aren’t teaching Critical Race Theory, that it’s nowhere in our standards, that’s misdirection,” Indianapolis district science coordinator, instructional coach, and administrator Tony Kinnett posted on Twitter Thursday.

Kinnett explained that he is an administrator in the largest school district in Indiana which means he is present in “dozens of classrooms a week” so he “sees exactly what we are teaching our students.”

“We don’t have the quotes and theories as state standards per se,” Kinnett said. “We do have Critical Race Theory in how we teach.”

Kinnett continued, “We tell our teachers to treat our students differently based on color. We tell our students every problem is a result of ‘white men’ and that everything Western Civilization built is racist. Capitalism is a tool of white supremacy. Those are straight out of Kimberle Crenshaw’s main points verbatim in ‘Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.’”

For exposing this he has been placed on leave and denied access to the school email and all buildings.

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New Files Detail Level Of Julian Assange’s Prison Torment

Documents provided exclusively to The Grayzone detail Canberra’s abandonment of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, and provide shocking details of his prison suffering… Was the government of Australia aware of the US Central Intelligence Agency plot to assassinate Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and journalist arrested and now imprisoned under unrelentingly bleak, harsh conditions in the UK?

Why have the country’s elected leaders refused to publicly advocate for one of its citizens, who has been held on dubious charges and subjected to torture by a foreign power, according to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer? What does Canberra know about Julian’s fate and when did it know it?

The Grayzone has obtained documents revealing that the Australian government has since day one been well-aware of Julian’s cruel treatment inside London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison, and has done little to nothing about it. It has, in fact, turned a cold shoulder to the jailed journalist despite hearing his testimony of conditions “so bad that his mind was shutting down.”

Not only has Canberra failed to effectively challenge the US and UK governments overseeing Assange’s imprisonment and prosecution; as these documents expose in stark detail, it appears to have colluded with them in the flagrant violation of an Australian citizen’s human rights, while doing its best to obscure the reality of his situation from the public.

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US Coverup Of Syria Massacre Shows The Danger Of The Assange Precedent

The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists.

The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

“But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” The New York Times reports. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”

Journalist Aaron Maté has called the incident “one of the US military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.”

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She told the truth about Wuhan. Now she is near death in a Chinese prison.

China committed one act of barbarity when it prosecuted the citizen journalist Zhang Zhan for her revealing look at Wuhan in the first stages of what became a global pandemic. Ms. Zhang was sentenced in December to four years in prison on the specious charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which China uses to suffocate free speech. Now her health has deteriorated, and relatives say she is near death. China will compound the barbarity unless it sets her free and saves her life.

Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, made an indelible contribution to our understanding of what happened in Wuhan. Over three months there, she posted 122 YouTube videos, the first of which she titled “My claim for the right of free speech.” When she got to Wuhan on Feb. 1, 2020, she later recalled, “There was not a single soul. It felt as if I stumbled on a movie set right after the shooting was over and everybody has left the set. The world didn’t feel real.” Her videos confirmed chaos inside a hospital. Ordered to stop filming, she moved around the city in February and March, posting what she witnessed.

Her arrest and imprisonment are part of China’s larger coverup. In December 2019, officials in Wuhan attempted to hide information about the outbreak of a new disease; when eight doctors expressed concern about the sickness, they were reprimanded. A second coverup occurred in early January 2020, when top Chinese officials remained silent, although they knew of human transmission of the virus, and informed the public only on Jan. 20. A third coverup has involved their repeated attempts to frustrate investigation into the origins of the pandemic and their campaign to blame it on sources outside China.

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FBI Searches Homes of Project Veritas-Linked People

Federal agents searched the New York homes of people tied to Project Veritas, according to founder James O’Keefe on Friday.

In a video posted to Project Veritas’ YouTube, O’Keefe said his organization obtained a grand jury subpoena before saying that current and former Project Veritas employees’ homes were searched by federal agents.

“Apartment and homes of Project Veritas journalists and former journalists had been raided by FBI agents,” he said, adding that it appears the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is targeting the group.

Additionally, O’Keefe said that a Project Veritas associate was contacted shortly after the FBI search by a New York Times reporter, despite the grand jury subpoena being issued in secret.

“Within an hour of one of our reporters’ homes being secretly raided by the FBI … the New York Times contacted the reporter to ask for comment,” O’Keefe said, adding that “we do not know how” the NY Times reporter obtained information about the search warrant or the subject matter. Project Veritas sued the newspaper for defamation last year.

In November 2020, Project Veritas sued the New York Times for libel, claiming the paper’s coverage of a Veritas video was incorrect and was partially driven by NY Times reporters’ resentment. Lawyers for the newspaper filed its defense in April 2021, denying most of the allegations.

An FBI spokesman told The Associated Press that agents had conducted a “court-authorized law enforcement activity” at an apartment in Manhattan and an address in Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York. The spokesman did not appear to comment on whether the searches were linked to Project Veritas.

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A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA

The New York Times reported that, “in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama forged with Mr. [John] Brennan,”[5] an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

Obama’s worldview meshed so closely with this “unsentimental intel warrior” and “terrorist hunter” that Obama “found himself finishing Brennan’s sentences.”

An anonymous Cabinet member explained that “presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community [but] Obama was more smitten than most—this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.”[6]

The consequences could be seen in Obama’s boosting funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which promotes regime change in countries defiant of the New World Order, and his drastic expansion of the use of drones—for both surveillance and targeted killings.

The Obama administration further; a) backed coups in Ukraine and Honduras; b) pivoted the U.S. military to Asia, ramped up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and expanded military bases in Africa; c) helped suppress evidence about CIA torture, d) refused to pursue a criminal case against the CIA’s money laundering bank, HSBC, e) eavesdropped on U.S. allies and a U.S. congressman (Dennis Kucinich) who opposed his administration’s illegal invasion of Libya that devastated that country, f) stepped up surveillance and efforts to destroy Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, and g) presided over the prosecution of a record number of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917.

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‘Another nail in the coffin of democracy’: Tulsi Gabbard slams Biden administration’s ‘crusade’ against Julian Assange

Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has called out the “Biden-Garland administration” for its “vindictive retaliatory crusade against Julian Assange,” warning it was a slippery slope to the demise of American democracy.

“If they succeed in [extraditing Assange], this will be yet another nail in the coffin of democracy here in our country and around the world,” Gabbard warned in a video posted to social media on Thursday. 

The Democratic representative slammed what she referred to as the “increasingly authoritarian Biden-Garland administration,” dodging any mention of Vice President Kamala Harris in favor of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Gabbard’s dislike of the VP is well known and her debate-stage takedown of Harris’ controversial record as attorney general of California is pointed to by some as the moment the senator’s own presidential campaign went up in flames.

In its continued persecution of Assange, Gabbard declared, the Biden administration was “doubling down on its crusade against our constitutionally protected rights,” specifically those protected by the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press. 

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The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent

The first day of the US appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the US government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats its other prisoners.

I wish I was kidding.

In their write-up on Wednesday’s proceedings, The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that “the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the U.S. government offered ‘assurances’ that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado.”

What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange’s health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer “assurances” that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

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