Australia further in the grip of the USA, with the Amazon data spy hub – paid for by Aussie tax-payers!
Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles was ecstatic as he announced the secret deal now organised for Australia to pay for Amazon to set up secret spy databanks, just as he was ecstatic about the government’s AUKUS deal for buying nuclear submarines from USA and UK.
It’s not as if the public knew about either of these decisions beforehand, (the AUKUS one being largely arranged with scandal-ridden consultancy PWC). It’s not as if these matters were discussed in Parliament. On both occasions, the government just did it.
Points that haven’t been addressed:
Australian taxpayers again foot the bill to an America private company
Amazon private staff will be running the operation – with access to the data?
The whole thing perpetrates the lie about the data being “in the cloud” – but there is no “cloud”. The data will be in gigantic steel containers, set out on a large area.
The data containers will require massive amounts of electricity. ? supplied by nuclear power
The data containers will require massive amounts of cooling water, in this dry, water-short country..
The whole set up, just like the now-being expanded Pine Gap. will form a dangerous target for terrorists, or for enemies of the USA.
Like Pine Gap, it is probable that Australian authorities will have limited access to the information. And as artificial intelligence is involved – who IS goig to be in control?
The whole set-up will be the servant of the Five Eyes, secret intelligence of five English-speaking countries, ( no trust in Europe, or any non-anglophone nation) but controlled by the USA.
The vast amount of tax-payer money going to all this means the money is not going to Australians’ health, welfare, education, environment, climate action – in other words to the common good.
As the USA Supreme Court has just made the U.S. president effectively above the law – this secret deal with Amazon and the USA puts Australia more firmly in the grip of the USA – (and God help us if Trump wins)
Former New Brunswick energy minister joins nuclear industry after resigning in June
Mike Holland will be joining AtkinsRéalis, formerly SNC-Lavalin
CBC News · Jul 05, 2024
A former New Brunswick cabinet minister who resigned in June is joining AtkinsRéalis, a Montreal-based company previously known as SNC-Lavalin Group.
Mike Holland, who was natural resources and energy development minister and MLA for the riding of Albert, announced at the end of June that he was quitting to pursue a job in the private sector.
Holland will be joining the AtkinsRéalis team as the director of business development for North America.
The company told Radio-Canada the reason it recruited the former minister was to help increase sales of its nuclear reactor models and invest in the development of small modular reactors.
In a statement, the company said it’s “working to accelerate” sales of its Candu reactors in Canada and internationally.
…………………….When Holland announced his resignation from the New Brunswick government, he said the company he accepted an offer from is not a company he dealt with in his role as a minister, nor as an MLA.
However, AtkinsRéalis, then known as SNC-Lavalin, announced a partnership with Moltex Energy Canada in 2022 and Holland was quoted in the news release at the time.
“This agreement contributes not only to the growth of long-term, high-quality jobs in New Brunswick’s energy sector, it also recognizes the leadership role of both Moltex and the province in advancing the next generation of nuclear technology,” he said in the 2022 release.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/energy-minister-nuclear-resignation-1.7255601
Why Julian Assange couldn’t outrun the Espionage Act
the grave threat the Espionage Act poses to journalism and the First Amendment
SOTT, Jordan Howell The FIRE, Wed, 26 Jun 2024
Julian Assange spent seven years in self-exile in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy avoiding arrest, and five more in prison, for publishing classified documents on WikiLeaks.
Julian Assange is a free man, and one of the most contentious press freedom controversies in living memory may finally be coming to a close.
The WikiLeaks founder reached a plea deal with the Department of Justice on Monday after spending five years in an English prison fighting extradition to the United States. Federal officials sought to charge Assange with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national security information under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Assange and WikiLeaks shocked the world in 2010 by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret military documents and diplomatic cables related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were leaked by Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Months later, Assange was on the run and Manning was in jail.
Assange claimed that by receiving and publishing confidential information, what he did was no different than the type of routine news reporting that journalists around the world engage in every day. As the Supreme Court ruled in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), better known as “The Pentagon Papers” case, publishing leaked documents is protected under the First Amendment.
FIRE has long opposed use of the Espionage Act to curtail the rights of journalists to source information. And in December 2022, FIRE signed an open letter organized by the Committee to Protect Journalists along with 20 other civil liberties groups calling on the federal government to drop its charges against Assange.
“We are united . . . in our view that the criminal case against him poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad,” we argued. “[J]ournalists routinely engage in much of the conduct described in the indictment: speaking with sources, asking for clarification or more documentation, and receiving and publishing official secrets. News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance.”
Assange’s 12 year ordeal, including seven years in self-exile in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London before his arrest and imprisonment, underscores the continued threat that the century-old Espionage Act still poses to civil liberties today — and not just in the United States. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, nor was he ever a resident. But because of modern extradition treaties, there were few places in the world where he could travel to escape the Act’s reach,
Under the terms of Monday’s deal, Assange pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 62 months incarceration, but with credit for time served, according to documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
Ultimately, freedom of the press is what was at stake with the government’s case against Assange. It was never only about him. The precedent that would have been set by his extradition and trial would have sent a chilling message to journalists across the country and the world: You can run, but you can’t hide from the Espionage Act.
What is the Espionage Act?……………………………………………………………………………………….Based on the Defense Secrets Act of 1911, the Espionage Act of 1917 included much stiffer penalties — including the death penalty — for sharing secret or confidential information or otherwise interfering with the operations of the U.S. military.
The Espionage Act made it a crime to obtain information regarding national defense “with intent or reason to believe” that doing so would hurt the U.S. or to advantage another country. While subsequent amendments and court decisions have refined its language and scope, its core purpose remains the same.
Espionage Act and the Supreme Court
The law was immediately controversial because its use was not limited to actual acts of espionage. Rather, the Espionage Act allowed the government to clamp down on anyone who opposed the war effort.
In Schenck v. United States, in 1919, the Supreme Court upheld the conspiracy conviction against socialist Charles Schenck under the Espionage Act for distributing anti-war leaflets that urged people to boycott the draft.
The problem with the Court’s ruling in Schenck, as subsequent decisions would affirm, is that Schenk’s speech was not calling for violence or even civil disobedience. Rather, his speech was precisely the kind of political expression that decades of subsequent Supreme Court decisions would ultimately uphold. Numerous convictions under the Espionage Act would make their way to the Court, including that of socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was arrested for giving a speech opposing the war.
Since then, one of the most nefarious uses of the Espionage Act has been to silence journalists. At least insofar as publishing the leaked documents on the Wikileaks website, what Assange did was little different than what The New York Times and The Washington Post did in 1971 when they published and reported on thousands of pages from a classified report about the war in Vietnam.
……………………………………….As the Supreme Court has ruled, freedom of the press is a foundational principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. And though Julian Assange is finally free, FIRE continues to have serious concerns about the grave threat the Espionage Act poses to journalism and the First Amendment. https://www.sott.net/article/492768-Why-Julian-Assange-couldnt-outrun-the-Espionage-Act
The State Failed to Break Assange
Julian Assange has not been freed, passive voice, the beneficiary of decisions taken by the American and British judiciaries — and almost certainly in the Biden regime’s upper reaches. Julian Assange has achieved his freedom, actively. Even during the darkest moments of his years under house arrest, in asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, and at Belmarsh, he never surrendered his sovereignty. He remained ever the captain of his soul, and never did he allow his captors entry onto his ship.
SCHEERPOST, JULY 1, 2024 Patrick Lawrence
After apparently lengthy negotiations via Julian Assange’s attorneys, the WikiLeaks founder agreed to plead guilty to one felony charge of illegally obtaining and publishing U.S. government documents of various kinds — many standing as evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses, others exposing the Democratic Party’s corruptions during the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Assange was sentenced Wednesday to a term of five years and two months, precisely the time he spent at Belmarsh, the maximum-security prison in southeast London. It was from Belmarsh that Assange fought requests for his extradition to the U.S., where he would have faced multiple charges and a lengthy sentence under the 1917 Espionage Act. When he departed for Australia at the conclusion of the proceeding in Saipan, the largest of the Northern Marianas and also the capital city, he became a free man for the first time in 14 years, counting from his time under house arrest in 2010.
Let us take the utmost care with our diction at this surprising and welcome turn. This will enable us to fathom the moment clearly.
Julian Assange has not been freed, passive voice, the beneficiary of decisions taken by the American and British judiciaries — and almost certainly in the Biden regime’s upper reaches. Julian Assange has achieved his freedom, actively. Even during the darkest moments of his years under house arrest, in asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, and at Belmarsh, he never surrendered his sovereignty. He remained ever the captain of his soul, and never did he allow his captors entry onto his ship.
It was for this, most fundamentally, that Assange has suffered these past years, especially the five he spent in a cell at Belmarsh. The project was precisely to destroy his sovereignty, to break him one way or another, and he refused to break. His will — and I simply cannot imagine the awesome muscularity of it — has seen him through to victory.
When news of his impending freedom arrived with us last Monday evening, I reacted without hesitation, “It is not a bad deal. Everyone knows the truth and worth of what Assange did. Nothing lost. A good man’s life hung in the balance — this a gain.”
“Everyone” seems already an overestimation, but I will get to this in a moment.
Among the curious details of Assange’s plea is the choice of the federal courthouse in the Northern Marianas, a U.S. possession, for the denouement of his case. Assange’s legal team requested this peculiar location, let us not miss. It is remote from the U.S. mainland but close to his native Australia. There are two things to surmise from this, I think.
One, it is likely Assange’s attorneys thought it a very bad idea for their client to set foot on American soil anywhere near the court in Washington’s environs where cases of this kind, national-security cases, are customarily tried — tried before jurors drawn from a pool well populated with active and retired national security operatives, bureaucrats and assorted apparatchiks.
That the locale for the final settlement was negotiated away from the District Court of Eastern Virginia indicates that Assange’s lawyers remained mistrustful of U.S. assurances of a fair treatment under the law even while their talks proceeded.
Two, and the larger point here, moving the case to so out-of-the-way a courtroom indicated that Assange and his legal defense almost certainly had considerable leverage in determining the terms under which he achieved his freedom. This tells us something important about the years Assange spent at Belmarsh subjected to disgracefully punitive conditions and the circus various judges, Vanessa Baraitser high among them, made of the British courts.
I have long assumed, as many others may have, that the Biden regime and its predecessor simply did not want Assange extradited because it did not want to take up a trial that would more or less automatically lead to a sentence of 170 years. Too potentially messy, too politically risky, too harsh a light on this administration’s hypocrisies in the matter of press freedom and its indifference to, if not its approval of, the British authorities’ inhumane treatment of a man whose organization exposed war crimes.
How else to explain the lengthy delays in the London courts these past five years? And I cannot but think with something close to conviction that the corporate press in America, chiefly The New York Times, had some modest voice in the decision to negotiate a plea that reflects to some extent the Assange side’s terms?
The Times has avoided serious reporting of the Assange case for years. Embarrassing it would have been for the paper to report proceedings in Eastern Virginia, as it would have been obliged to do. We all remember that The Times made full use of WikiLeaks releases until, in April 2017, Mike Pompeo denounced Assange as “a state actor of Russia.” It was at that point Washington turned frontally against the organization and its founder, and the corporate press dutifully followed the lead of Trump’s egregious secretary of state.
The Biden regime has managed at last to drop a hot potato, but it is a stretch to assume it has not burned its fingers. As others have remarked, it could have vacated its case entirely and, indeed, gone so far as to offer Assange compensation for his suffering while facing unjust charges.
That would have marked a dramatic redemption. Instead, it leaves the door still wide open to pursuing cases such as Assange’s whenever a reporter’s truths are similarly inconvenient. This is self-inflicted damage atop years of self-inflicted damage, in my read. The Biden government’s exit from this case more or less mutilates any claim it will henceforth assert to respect press freedom and First Amendment rights.
Sheer Endurance
I measure the magnitude of Julian Assange’s triumph not in passing political terms, although the politics of his achievement of freedom are important. I view it in more personal terms. His greatest victory lies in the strength and sheer endurance he summoned and consistently displayed as the machinery of two sovereign states attempted to destroy him.
Several years ago, readers will recall, Nils Melzer testified in Baraitser’s court that Assange’s treatment met official definitions of psychological and physical torture. Not long after the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture gave his testimony, I began an essay on the Assange case for Raritan, the cultural and political journal. It came to me as I wrote “Assange Behind Glass,” which I reproduce here from my web site archives, that we had to see it in the context of the “total domination” Hannah Arendt explored in The Origins of Totalitarianism, her look back, in 1951, at the horrors of the 20th century’s first half. “Its intent is to strip humanity of all identity and individuation,” I wrote of Arendt’s theme. And from her text:……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
…………….Are there undisclosed codicils attaching to the Assange’s camp’s plea agreement? Will his professional activities henceforth be curtailed by agreement? These are inevitable questions, even if one does not care to pose them. The answers are unclear and may never be clear. Out of respect and admiration for a man who has just won his freedom after paying a very high price in his fight for it, I leave these matters to him and those around him. https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/01/patrick-lawrence-the-state-failed-to-break-assange/
The Suspect Body Count: The Death Toll in Gaza is Much Higher Than We’re Being Told
Seymour Hersh Substack Thu, 27 Jun 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/492600-The-Suspect-Body-Count-The-Death-Toll-in-Gaza-is-Much-Higher-Than-We-re-Being-Told
The number of slain Palestinians in Gaza, including those believed to be Hamas cadres, has gone through a series of public recalibrations in recent weeks, as Israel’s reshuffled war cabinet has struggled to minimize international rage at the slaughter there. The reduced body count was little more than a sideshow because the Israeli offensive is continuing in Gaza with no signs of the ceasefire that the Biden administration has been desperately seeking.
Hamas triggered the war last October 7 with a surprise attack — there is so far no official explanation for Israel’s security failure that day — that killed 1,139 Israelis and injured 3,400 more. Some 250 soldiers and civilians were taken hostage.
Comment: There is plenty of evidence to strongly suggest that Israel allowed the incursion on Oct. 7th to happen and that parties unknown carried out most of the killing. This strategy fits with Israel’s decades-long goal of creating the right ‘conditions’ to justify implementing a final solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’.
The expected Israeli response began within days, with the bombing of the Gaza Strip. Some Israeli ground operations inside Gaza began on October 13, and two weeks later the expected full-scale offensive began. The war still rages, with one estimate concluding that by the beginning of April 70,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on targets throughout the 25-mile long Gaza, more tonnage than was dropped by Germany on London and by America and the United Kingdom on Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, combined.
The Gaza Health Ministry, which is under Hamas control, estimated as of Tuesday that the death toll from the Israeli attacks stood at 37,718, with more than 86,000 Gazans wounded. Last month the Israeli government issued a much lower estimate of the casualties, stating that its planes and troops had killed 14,000 “terrorists” — Hamas fighters — and no more than 16,000 civilians.
The Biden administration, on the eve of the first presidential debate, has said nothing about the new numbers, but there are many senior analysts in the international human rights and social science community who consider these numbers to be hokum: a vast underestimate of the damage that has been done to a terrorized civilian population living in makeshift tents and shelters amid disease and malnutrition, with a lack of sanitation, medical care, and medicines as well as increasing desperation and fatigue.
In days of telephone and email exchanges with public health and statistical experts in America I found a general belief that the civilian death toll in Gaza, both from the bombings and their aftermath, had to be significantly higher than reported, but none of the scientists and statisticians — appropriately — was willing to say so in print because of a lack of access to accurate data. I also asked one well-informed American official what he thought the actual civilian death count in Gaza might be and he answered, without pause: “We just don’t know.”
One public health expert acknowledged: “No clear and definite body count is possible, given the continuing Israeli bombing.” He added, caustically, “How many bombs does it take to kill a human being?”
Gaza was an ideal target for an air attack, he said. “No functioning fire department. No fire trucks. No water. No place to escape. No hospitals. No electricity. People living in tents and bodies stacked up all over . . . being eaten by stray dogs.
“What the fuck is wrong with the international medical community?” he asked. “Who are we kidding? Without a ceasefire, a million people are going to starve. This is not a debating point. How can you count something when the system is biting its own tail.” He was referring to the fact that the health system in Gaza — its hospitals and service agencies — “is being targeted and shattered” by Israeli aircraft and those responsible for the counting of the dead and injured “are themselves dead.”
The expert added that the lack of better casualty statistics is not only the fault of Israel. “Hamas has a vested interest in consistently minimizing the number of civilians killed “because of a lack of planning over the years when it was in charge of Gaza.” He was referring to ordinary Gazan citizens’ lack of access to Hamas’s vast underground tunnel complex that could have served as a bomb shelter for all. In Gaza during the Israeli bombing raids, “Is Hamas going to say that Israel” was able to kill all in Gaza “because we started a war without being able to fully protect our people?” His point was that Hamas has every reason, as does Israel, to minimize the extent of innocent civilians who have become collateral damage in the ongoing war.
Comment: Hamas did not start this most recent round of mass slaughter by Israel on Oct 7th. Hamas has never provided Israel with the justification it always sought to massacre Gazans wholesale. On Oct. 7th, Israel provided itself with that justification.
A prominent American public health official who spoke to me acknowledged that he was also concerned about the numbers of unreported dead in Gaza. In a crisis, he said, “we can start with a name-by-name count, but pretty soon the numbers of killed and missing exceed the capacity of any such approach, especially when the counters are being killed and the records [are] at risk.” He said that various postwar academic studies of mortality during the siege of Mosul — when a US-led coalition fought a door-to-door fight in 2017 against the Islamic State in Iraq, killing as many 11,000 civilians — “showed the large loss of life from the use of high-velocity weapons in urban areas. So we should expect similar in Gaza.”
Other data suggest that the published death figures are seriously misleading. Save the Children, an international child protection agency, issued a report this month estimating that as many as 21,000 children in Gaza are “trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” Other children, the agency said, “have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza” with their whereabouts unknown to the families “amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.”
Comment: As if the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is not enough, it is highly likely that a large number of Palestinian children have been abducted by Zionist state forces, likely to be tortured and killed or otherwise used for the depraved pleasures of some of the people that inhabit that “shitty little country”.
Jeremy Stoner, the charity’s regional director for the Middle East, said: “Gaza has become a graveyard for children, with thousands of others missing, their fates unknown. . . . We desperately need a ceasefire to find and support the missing children who have survived, and to prevent more families from being destroyed.”
Warnings about the inevitability of far more deaths among the ordinary citizens of Gaza have been around since last winter. In December, Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in the Guardian that the Gaza war was “the deadliest conflict for children in recent years” with as many as 160 children being killed daily. The surviving children do not have “the basic needs that any human, especially babies and children, need to stay healthy and alive. . . . Unless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population — close to half a million human beings — dying within a year.
“It’s a crude estimate,” Sridhar wrote, “but one that is data-driven, using the terrifying real numbers of death in previous and comparable conflicts.”
The New York Times and the Washington Post reported Wednesday that a new study endorsed by the United Nations found that as many as half a million Gaza residents are facing imminent starvation because of “a lack of food.” The study also said that more than one half of the surviving residents of Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.”)
One of the most avid early critics of the official statistics published by the Gaza Health Ministry and accepted by most in the American media, has been Ralph Nader. On March 5, he wrote a column in the Capitol Hill Citizen, a monthly newspaper he founded, about what he called “the undercount” of Palestinian casualties in Gaza. He quoted Martin Griffiths, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs: “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”
In my years as a journalist, I have often found an oddball story that says more with each retelling. Something like that happened in February when Al Jazeera ran an interview with a 64-year-old Gazan undertaker named Saadi Hassan Sulieman Baraka, whose nickname is Abu Jawad. He complained of working almost constantly since the Israeli invasion of Gaza began.
“I’ve buried about ten times more people during this war than I did across my entire 27 years as an undertaker,” he said. “The least was 30 people and the most was 800. Since October 7, I’ve buried more than 17,000 people.” He especially remembered the day he buried the 800 dead. “We collected them in pieces; their bodies so riddled with holes it was like Israeli snipers used them for target practice; Others were crushed like . . . like a boiled potato, and many had huge facial burns.
“We couldn’t really tell one person’s body from the other, but we did our best. We made one big deep grave, probably 10 meters (30 feet) deep and buried them together.”
It could be propaganda — of course, it could. But Abu Jawad made no mention of anyone from the Gaza Health Ministry coming to collect the names of the dead. He made no mention of any government official being involved in the process at all.
UK government hires scandal-ridden Fujitsu company to account and track its nuclear waste!
Government Hires Fujitsu to Account and Track Dangerous Nuclear Wastes from Dounreay – Are they Laughing at Us?
At the same time folk at Glastonbury Festival are saying No to New Nuclear Wastes and the Post Office Inquiry is Live , Government have hired the company at the centre of the Post Office scandal to account for and track the UK’s most dangerous nuclear wastes. The £306K Fujitsu contract has been awarded by Nuclear Restoration Services (former Magnox) for Fujitsu’s ATOM application: “A contract has been awarded by NRS
Dounreay as a result of a direct award through the Crown Commercial Services
RM6194 Back Office Software Framework, for the provision and support of ATOM Application.”
Dounreay was the test site of the UK’s experimental Fast Breeder nuclear reactors. “EARLY in the morning of Tuesday 10 May 1977 there was a loud explosion at the Dounreay nuclear plant on the north coast of Scotland. The UK Atomic Energy Authority, which runs the plant, had dumped at least 2 kilograms of sodium and potassium down a 65-metre shaft packed with radioactive waste and flooded with seawater.”
Fujitsu’s ATOM stands for Accountancy and Tracking Of Material – “a comprehensive track and trace application, specifically designed for the processing, movement and reporting of nuclear and radioactive materials throughout the supply chain right up to nuclear decommissioning”. According to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 2008 Fujitsu’s ATOM employed over ” 2,000 people • Manages over 115,000 radioactive item records in the UK.” In 2008 Dik Third, Nuclear Materials Advisor, UKAEA, worked closely with Fujitsu and said “…one of the problems with radioactive materials is that they have properties that computer-based logistics packages don’t handle. Unlike tins of beans, radioactive materials with short half-lives can transform into another isotope entirely.”
Fujitsu are now in control of the accounting and tracking of radioactive materials ie of nuclear wastes from the UKs failed fast breeder reactor at Dounreay. They will be allocating wastes to the nuclear “waste hierarchy’ that means sorting wastes to go landfill, to incineration, to the Low Level Waste Repository at Drigg, to Cyclife (radioactive scrap metal plant) and to Sellafield. The nuclear waste hierarchy has been criticised for reducing the levels at which waste can be designated for “free release” and other “disposal” routes which increasingly mean dumping into the public domain. There is a precedent for radioactive material ending up in the wrong place even without the services of Fujitsu.
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE
Assange Is Free, But US Spite Will Chill Reporting for Years
ARI PAUL, 26 June 24 https://fair.org/home/assange-is-free-but-us-spite-will-chill-reporting-for-years/
In some ways, the nightmare for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is coming to an end. After taking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, he was arrested in 2019 by Britain, who have since been trying to extradite him to the United States on charges that by publishing official secrets he violated the Espionage Act (FAIR.org, 12/13/20; BBC, 6/25/24). Once he enters a guilty plea, he will be sentenced to time served and walk away a free man (CBS, 6/25/24).
Assange’s case has attracted the attention of critics of US foreign policy, and those who value free speech and a free press. His family has rightly contended that his treatment in prison was atrocious (France24, 11/1/19; Independent, 2/20/24). A group of doctors said he was a victim of “torture” tactics (Lancet, 6/25/20). In 2017, Yahoo! News (9/26/21) reported that the “CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation” and that CIA and Trump administration insiders “even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.”
His supporters noted that the charges against him came after he harmed the US imperial project, particularly by leaking a video showing US troops killing Reuters journalists in Iraq (New York Times, 4/5/10). Under his watch, WikiLeaks also leaked a trove of diplomatic cables that the New York Times (11/28/10) described as an “unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.”
Press freedom and human rights groups like the International Federation of Journalists and Amnesty International had long called for his release. Several major news outlets from the US and Europe—the New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País—signed a letter calling for his release (New York Times, 11/28/22). They said his “indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.
Hostility toward press freedom
Assange’s loved ones and supporters are certainly glad to see him come home (Guardian, 6/25/24). But let’s be perfectly clear-eyed: The entire ordeal and his plea deal are proof of a hostile climate toward a free press in the United States and the wider world, and its chilling effect on investigative journalism could substantially worsen.
Assange’s deal has echoes of the end of the West Memphis Three case, where three Arkansas men were wrongfully convicted as teenagers of a heinous triple homicide in 1993 (Innocence Project, 8/19/11). The three re-entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. They won their freedom, but their names were still attached to a terrible crime, and the state of Arkansas was able to close the case, ensuring the real killer or killers would never be held accountable. It was an imperfect resolution, but no one could blame the victims of a gross injustice for taking the freedom grudgingly offered.
Something similar is happening with Assange. It compounds the persecution already inflicted on him to force him to declare that exposing US government misdeeds was itself a high crime.
“On a human level, we’re thrilled that he’s out of prison, including the time in the embassy,” said Chuck Zlatkin, a founding member of NYC Free Assange, a group that has held regular protests calling for his release. “We’re thrilled for him personally.”
But the deal shows how eager the US government is to both save face and remain a threatening force against investigative reporters.
‘Criminalization of routine journalistic conduct’
As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24), said in a statement:
It’s good news that the DoJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.
The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case, but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.
And that is all happening while threats against leakers and journalists remain. Edward Snowden, the source in the Guardian’s investigation (6/11/13) into National Security Agency surveillance, still resides in Russia in order to evade arrest. I recently wrote about the excessive sentencing of the man who leaked tax documents to ProPublica and the New York Times showing how lopsided the tax system is in favor of the rich (FAIR.org, 2/2/24). NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking documents to the Intercept on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 US election (Vanity Fair, 10/12/23)
Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who brought Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance to light, said that Assange’s conviction could silence reporters doing investigative reporting on the US government (New York Times, 12/21/20). Chelsea Manning, Assange’s source for these investigations, spent only seven years in prison out of the 35 years of her sentence thanks to presidential clemency, but that is still a harrowing experience (NPR, 5/17/17).
‘Not transparency’ but ‘sabotage’
Worse, some in the so-called free press have rallied behind the government. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/11/19) cheered the legal crusade against Assange, arguing that the leaks harmed national security. “Assange has never been a hero of transparency or democratic accountability,” the Murdoch-owned broadsheet proclaimed.
The neoconservative journal Commentary (4/12/19) dismissed the free press defenders of Assange, saying of Wikileaks’ investigations into US power: “This was not transparency. It was sabotage.”
And the British Economist (4/17/19) said, in support of Assange’s extradition to the US:
WikiLeaks did some good in its early years, exposing political corruption, financial malfeasance and military wrongdoing. But the decision to publish over 250,000 diplomatic cables in 2010 was malicious. The vast majority of messages revealed no illegality or misdeeds. Mr. Assange’s reckless publication of the unredacted versions of those cables the following year harmed America’s interests by putting its diplomatic sources at risk of reprisals, persecution or worse.
Unsurprisingly, Murdoch outlets gave the plea deal a thumbs down. “Don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted ‘publisher,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) warned.
The New York Post editorial board (6/25/24) disparaged Assange’s motives, saying he “wasn’t interested in justice or exposing true abuse; he simply relished obtaining and releasing any secret government or political material, particularly if US-based.” Alleging that the documents he published were sensitive, the paper argued in favor of government secrecy: “Uncle Sam needs to keep some critical secrets, especially when lives are on the line.”
In reality, US intelligence and military officials have never been able to trace any deaths to WikiLeaks‘ revelations (BBC, 12/1/10; Guardian, 7/31/13; NPR, 4/12/19)—and certainly have never identified any damage anywhere nearly as serious as the very real harms it exposed. (NPR did quote a former State Department lawyer who complained that WikiLeaks‘ exposes “can really chill the ability of those American personnel to build those sorts of relationships and have frank conversations with their contacts.”) Alas, some publications side with state power even if journalistic freedom is at stake (FAIR.org, 4/18/19).
‘Punished for telling the truth’
Assange’s case is over, but he walks away a battered man as a result of the legal struggle. And that serves as a warning to other journalists who rely on brave people in high levels of power to disclose injustices. Stern is right: Another Trump administration would be horrendous for journalists. But the current situation with the Democratic administration is already chilling.
“All he was being punished for was telling the truth about war crimes committed by this country,” Zlatkin told FAIR.
And without a real change in how the Espionage Act is used against journalists, the ability to tell the truth to the rest of the world is at risk.
“We’re still not in a situation where we as a general population are getting the truth of what’s being done in our name,” Zlatkin said. “So the struggle continues.”
The US, Russia, and Ukraine: 75 Years of Hate Propaganda
Zelensky: The “Winston Churchill of Our Time” (George W. Bush)
In the Western symphony of propaganda, the hated Putin, the “autocrat,” is contrasted with the heroic Zelensky the “democrat” (Time magazine’s 2022 “person of the year”). But how democratic is Zelensky?
His man-of-the-hour image had help from international friends. Zelensky’s global perception management team is run by a well-connected London-based British firm, The PR Network, that helps him prepare messages for global consumption.
BY GERALD SUSSMAN APRIL 18, 2023, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/18/the-us-russia-and-ukraine-75-years-of-hate-propaganda/
“It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”
– Henry Kissinger
“But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
– Adolf Hitler
“We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on deceiving the public].”
– Mike Pompeo on his time as CIA director
What is state propaganda? It is a disciplined and coordinated discourse using mass persuasion on behalf of state interests. It’s one instrument of what’s called realpolitik – foreign policy designed to advance “national interests,” which in a neoliberal economy like the US means corporate interests. The oligarchs, the billionaire class in the age of neoliberalism, in their unfettered greed have employed both US political parties and their accessories in the media, the intelligence community, and Congress and turned them into a collective ministry of (dis)information and subalterns of empire. Propaganda as a tool in foreign policy commonly relies on hate-laden ideology to mobilize public consensus.
Enemies
A key to successful mass mobilization of the public mind is the enemy construct. One of the key studies on the subject found that the US has had a permanent need for enemies, and when not “readily available, we have created them” (Finlay, Holsti, and Fagen, cited in Murray & Myers, 1989, p. 555). Russia as enemy (Russophobia) works just as well if not better when it’s conceived in demeaning ethnic rather than political economic terms. That’s because hierarchical race and ethnicity ideas are closer to the surface of public prejudice than those focused on, for example, effigies of socialism or communism. In other words, it is easier to orchestrate hatred toward Russia and Putin when there preexists a deep distrust of Russians, their history, and (orthodox religious) culture and its people based on “difference” and a perceived civilizational threat to the West. Under such collective psychological conditioning, this has led to a rejection of Russia membership in the congregation controlled by white European Christian nations.
The US has manufactured innumerable enemies during the course of its existence, and it has had to in order to become a world superpower. Since 1776, there have been only 16 years when the country was not at war. In the pantheon of America’s villains during its 247-year history, one of the most prominent portraits is that of the demonic Vladimir Putin, whose “enemy” status among Americans was pumped up to 70% by March 2022, soon after the start of Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine.
The “liberal” Democrats are found to be far more inclined to carry out a proxy war against Russia than Republicans and much more supportive of supplying Ukraine with advanced weapons and US troops: tanks (67% to 48%), long-range missiles (60% to 41%), fighter jets (56% to 39%), direct invasion (33% to 22%) (Frankovic and Orth, 2023). Former CIA director and defense secretary under Obama, Leon Panetta bluntly declared, ‘It’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not” (Bloomberg, 2022).
The massive US “proxy” assault on Russia, more like a full-scale invasion but without its own troops physically on the ground and in the air, is only the latest episode of a hundred-year-old effort to impose Western hegemony over that country. It started with the joint “expedition” that the sanctimonious Woodrow Wilson (“I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men”) sent to Siberia and northern Russia in a failed attempt, along with mainly European allies, to back the White Russians in the civil war and overthrow the Bolshevik government. Anti-communism was toned down during the Second World War, as it was the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, tactically allied with the US and the British Empire, that bore by far the heaviest burden, suffering 27 million deaths, in defeating the Nazi regime. It’s a sobering reality of historical proportions that is rarely acknowledged in the US. Immediately following the war, the US quickly converted the USSR/Russia from ally to enemy (and their enemies to allies) and worked closely with anti-communist groups in Ukraine and the larger Soviet region in efforts to break apart the Soviet state.
The then newly formed CIA, established in 1947, covertly supervised underground far right organizations in Ukraine, in particular the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the anti-Soviet Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA), as part of its “psychological warfare activities
Continue readingLeaked doc reveals Israeli military KNEW of Hamas plan to raid and take hostages 2 weeks before Oct 7, Israeli news reports
SOTT, Grace Eliza Goodwin, Business Insider, 2024-06-18
The Israeli military knew about Hamas’ plans to attack southern Israel weeks before October 7 — even how many hostages the militant group planned to capture, according to a report from Israeli public broadcaster Kan.
The Israel Defense Force’s Gaza Division reportedly distributed an internal intelligence document on September 19, 2023, outlining the details of Hamas’ planned raid, according to Kan.
The document, which Kan reportedly saw, states that the IDF had observed Hamas conducting a series of trainings where militant fighters practiced attacking both Israeli military stations and civilian kibbutzim communities.
The IDF also knew, according to the document viewed by Kan, that Hamas trained its units on how to capture hostages and how to guard them once they were taken back to the Gaza Strip.
Comment: The following is a AI dubbed translation of the report: English dub of an Israeli news report about a document the IDF distributed internally on September 19th, 2023, titled “Detailed End-to-End Raid Training” — it described the impending 10/7 attack in close detail, down to the number of hostages and how Hamas planned to handle them. https://x.com/BoltzmannBooty/status/1802780095934796125?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1802780095934796125%7Ctwgr%5E03c00f0d7a7896eeb5714ea82f7f7840b511a996%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sott.net%2Fembed%2FrqC_5-5FwJyE6YzTfNGB8znT2Ak
The IDF’s Southern Command and Gaza Division also wrote in the document, according to Kan, that they expected Hamas to take between 200 and 250 hostages. The officials even had intel on how Hamas intended to treat the hostages in certain extreme circumstances and what rules Hamas set for executing hostages, Kan reported.
Comment: The recent hostage ‘rescue’ (and ensuing massacre) reveals that Hamas has been treating the hostages very well.
Israel mistakenly believed, the Times of Israel reported, that Hamas would never be able to get past its high-tech border security — an “Iron Wall” composed of concrete, tunnels, and razor wire, complete with remote-controlled machine guns, that was installed two years before the attack.
That oversight prevented top Israeli intelligence leaders from doing anything about the internal report detailing Hamas’ plans, Kan News reported.
And it wasn’t just a few weeks before October 7 that Israel reportedly knew about Hamas’ plans.
More than a year before the attack, Israel had a 40-page document detailing, play-by-play, exactly how Hamas would attack the southern border, The New York Times reported last year. But, Israel never took Hamas’ plans seriously, assuming the militant group would never get past Israel’s defenses, the Times reported.
Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage, many of whom are still being held in captivity.
The exact number of hostages Hamas took is unclear, but Israel has estimated it was around 240, with about 116 still in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Israel’s subsequent airstrikes and war against Hamas in Gaza have killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, many of whom are women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities…………………………………https://www.sott.net/article/492398-Leaked-doc-reveals-Israeli-military-KNEW-of-Hamas-plan-to-raid-and-take-hostages-2-weeks-before-Oct-7-Israeli-news-reports
Unveiling Cosmic Secrets: Black Budget Tech and UFOs with Aerospace Expert Michael Schratt
The U.S. military and intelligence agencies have billions of dollars’ worth of secret projects they don’t want you to know about. These billions have funded a secret world of advanced science, technology, weapons, and various covert activities, which have always been shielded from congressional oversight and public scrutiny. Back in the 90s, Members of the House Armed Services Committee once said that 70 percent of the black budget could be declassified at no risk to national security. Our taxpayer dollars are funding these black budget programs, and we have a right to know what we’re paying for. So why the secrecy? What is being kept hidden from the public?
To investigate this further, we recently interviewed private pilot and military aerospace historian Michael Schratt, who’s studied top secret advanced technologies buried deep within the military-intelligence complex for over 25 years. He alleges to have first-hand experience with classified government black budget programs, with access to former US Air Force pilots, retired Naval personnel and former aerospace engineers with top-secret clearance. He’s one of the leading authority voices in investigating government programs involving the recovery and study of off-world technology, also known as UAP/UFO crash retrieval programs. He’s author of DARK FILES, which brings to life historically significant and credible UFO cases obtained from university archives, research centers, and private collections using carefully re-constructed illustrations of the events. Whether it’s advanced military aircraft or serious signs of extraterrestrial life, the implications are too profound to ignore. Michael is suggesting that publicly known technology and weapons programs might be fronts for black budget operations dealing with technologies way more advanced than the public is aware of.
Join us in this fascinating 38-min video interview, with many images and videos throughout to verify and illustrate the points being discussed.
- 00:00:00 Introduction to the military-industrial complex and the black budget world 00:03:54 Interview begins
- 00:06:00 What drew Michael Schratt to studying advanced black budget technologies and UFO phenomena
- 00:07:22 If you could declassify one technology developed under a black budget program, what would it be and why?
- 00:10:20 Out of all the advanced technologies in use on Earth, how much has ET influence?
- 00:11:39 UFO/UAP crash retrieval programs
- 00:18:05 Top secret technologies 101 00:22:32 The infamous Tic Tac video: a UFO, reverse-engineered craft, experimental military tech, or all of the above
- 00:26:32 The military bases that are purported to study ET tech and house advanced technologies
- 00:29:25 How can the most powerful technologies help humanity instead of harm?
- 00:30:37 How to balance disclosure with national security obligations
- 00:33:01 Michael’s thoughts on the UAP Disclosure Act
- 00:36:32 What keeps Michael inspired and hopeful
Uncle Sam cool with arming, training Neo-Nazi Azov Brigade in Ukraine.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 16 June 24
Back in 2018, the US banned military assistance to the Azov Brigade due to its neonazi and white supremacist ideology.
Azov was founded by Andriy Biletsky in 2014 to assist Kyiv’s destruction of Ukraine’s breakaway Donbas region, Biletsky also led related group Social National Assembly whose goal was “to prepare Ukraine for further expansion and to struggle for the liberation of the entire White Race from the domination of the internationalist speculative capital…and to punish severely sexual perversions and any interracial contacts that lead to the extinction of the white man.” Ouch.
But with Ukraine near collapse from America’s proxy war against Russia, the Biden administration decided that Azov wasn’t that bad after all. Doesn’t matter that current head Denis Prokopenko has been associated with its neonazi idology since its founding, not that Azov still uses the Wolfsangel neonazi symbol
When the US initially banned Azov, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) praised the decision: “I am very pleased that the recently passed omnibus prevents the US from providing arms and training assistance to the neonazi Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine.”
But that was before the US provoked an unnecessary war in Ukraine, spiraling it into a failed state. Desperate to achieve victory without shedding any US blood, the Biden administration, with not of peep of protest from Khanna, has suddenly turned neonazi Azov into the Sons of Liberty
From the Hiroshima bomb to Israel’s nuclear weapons, the path leads back to Congo’s uranium
Conspiracies in the Congo Linda Pentz Gunter 16 June 24 https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/06/16/conspiracies-in-the-congo/
It involved the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); a Belgian mining company; a fictitious Liberian trading company; a German-named ship — the Scheersberg A; a Spanish crew; a German petrochemical official; an Italian paint company; an Israeli freighter; the Greek island of Crete; a Turkish port; and a confession made in Norway.
If this sounds like the plot for an elaborate work of fiction, it was — it formed the basis of Ken Follett’s 1979 thriller, Triple. But it was also all true. The clandestine operation, which took place in November 1968, smuggled an estimated 200 tonnes of uranium yellowcake out of the DRC, transporting it to Israel. It was orchestrated by Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence service and came to be known as Operation Plumbat, since the illicit cargo was marked as lead.
The scheme was set in motion when, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, France curtailed its weapons supplies to Israel and likely the uranium fuel as well needed for Israel’s Dimona reactor, believed then and still to be at the heart of the country’s nuclear weapons program. The operation concluded with an exchange of ships and cargos on the high seas, the Scheersberg A eventually docking empty in Turkey while the uranium, now aboard an Israeli freighter, made its way to Haifa and eventually to Dimona.
The Plumbat operation was first exposed in April 1977 at a non-proliferation conference in Salzburg, Austria by Paul Leventhal, who went on to found the Nuclear Control Institute in 1981.
Israel officially denies that any of this took place, despite ample documentation and the later confession of one of its Mossad officers after his arrest in Norway. This was yet another bizarre twist in the tale when a Mossad operation in Lillehammer to assassinate one of the 1973 Munich Olympic attackers instead mistakenly took out an innocent Moroccan waiter on his way home from work. One of the agents, in order to prove to Norwegian authorities that he was indeed with Mossad, related the story of Operation Plumbat.
Of course, Israel also officially denies the existence of its nuclear weapons arsenal.
The uranium bound for Israel came from the Shinkolobwe mine in DRC’s Katanga province. The veins of uranium that run through Shinkolobwe bleed everywhere. And so do its victims.
The DRC is the site of the present day genocide that no one talks about. As many as six million people have now died in the ongoing fighting there, mostly over mineral rights. That long and bloody history began in the 1880s when the despotic Belgian king, Leopold II, enslaved and brutalized the country’s population, violence that continued under the subsequent Belgian government that took control in 1908.
The Belgians first began mining uranium at Shinkolobwe in 1921. In 1939, Albert Einstein, by then aware that a nuclear bomb could potentially be built and that Nazi Germany might be pursuing one, alerted President Roosevelt to the need for access to a rich uranium supply. The best such, Einstein said, could be found in what was then known as the Belgian Congo.
Once Nazi Germany had occupied Belgium in 1940, concerns grew that the uranium stockpiled at Shinkolobwe could fall into Hitler’s hands. A plan was quickly developed to ship 1,200 tons of uranium ore to the US where it was first stored on Staten Island and eventually transported to the Manhattan Project’s nuclear bomb factory at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
As recounted in Susan Williams’s non-fiction book, Spies in the Congo, US agents in various guises slipped in and out of the Congo, secretly shepherding the uranium back to the Manhattan Project. A second shipment of 1,000 tons of stockpiled ore soon followed. Wrote Williams, citing Gabrielle Hecht’s book, Being Nuclear, Africans and the Global Uranium Trade: “The miners sorted and packed up the uranium ore by hand and, according to estimates, they could have been exposed to a year’s worth of radiation in about two weeks.”
Seventy percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima atomic bomb came from Shinkolobwe and another ten percent was used in the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
However, the colonialist skulduggery didn’t end there. When the DRC gained its independence in June 1960 and Patrice Lumumba became the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Katanga province abruptly seceded from the country. In an effort to quell the rebellion, Lumumba appealed to the United Nations but was rebuffed. He then turned to the Soviet Union for help, sealing his fate.
The assassination of Lumumba on January 17, 1961 after barely six months in office, appears to have come on direct orders from President Eisenhower, officially out of concerns that Lumumba’s association with the Soviets would create a communist stronghold in the region.
But uranium was also at the heart of the plot and the US may not have acted alone. UK Labour Party peer, David Lea, reported in 2013 that a former MI6 operative, Daphne Park, told him she and MI6 orchestrated the assassination to protect the uranium supply. “Lumumba would have handed over the whole lot to the Russians,” said Park according to Lea.
All of these schemes and intrigues have come about at the price of peace and stability for the Congolese people. Contamination from the radioactive and heavy metals left behind at the mine site continues to poison people and the environment. Other minerals, especially cobalt and copper, have invited further plunder and conflict.
And there could soon be renewed interest in Shinkolobwe’s uranium. “At a time when many nations are engaged in an arms race, stockpiling weapons of mass destruction to prove their ‘strength’, Shinkolobwe mine still risks being seen as an attractive prospect,” wrote young Congolese climate activist, Remy Zahiga in a paper for the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.
Renewed interest may be coming from countries such as France (which inked a deal, thus far unexploited, in 2008) and China, eager to continue and expand their nuclear power programs under the false premise of climate mitigation. China already owns other mines in the DRC. “The existence of hidden entrances and ownership of all surrounding infrastructure would make the Shinkolobwe mine an attractive location should China decide to supplement its current uranium imports,” writes Daniel Allen in his 2024 paper, Uranium Security in the DRC.
And yet, the world looks away.
During an online event hosted by the Peace & Justice Project, an initiative of former UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his wife Laura Alvarez, Congo-born London councillor, Michelline Safi-Ngongo, asked with rightful indignation and somewhat rhetorically why the media never talked about the on-going genocide in her country?
The answer was sadly all too obvious, including to her. Black faces. Far away places. Africa, where these things “happen all the time”. Worthy of a shrug, then forgotten. When the West needs uranium or cobalt or copper, workers in the Congo and their families become suddenly expendable.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. You can learn more about the Congo’s uranium history in her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/06/16/conspiracies-in-the-congo/
Top civil servant joins EDF after running department that struck nuclear deal
Alex Chisholm, who led business office during Hinkley Point C negotiations, appointed UK chair of energy firm
Rowena Mason Guardian, Whitehall editor, Wed 12 Jun 2024
One of the UK’s most senior civil servants, Alex Chisholm, has been revealed as the new UK chair of the energy company EDF, after having previously run the department that struck a deal for it to build a new nuclear power station.
Chisholm was permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, and before that led the business department, which worked on the government deal for EDF to go ahead with the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant in Somerset. The agreement was struck in 2016 with UK bill payers bearing the cost of the construction over a 35-year period.
The long-delayed project’s costs have soared from an estimated £18bn to at least £31bn and it is due to be completed in 2031 – about 14 years after EDF thought it would be up and running.
The French state-owned company is a specialist in nuclear power, and one of the “big six” energy providers that have been criticised for huge profits during the energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine.
Chisholm’s departure is one of a number of high-profile exits from the civil service before a likely change of governing party. Alex Aiken, a former longstanding head of government communications, recently left Whitehall for a job as an adviser on communications to the government of the United Arab Emirates.
There is also speculation about the future of Simon Case, the cabinet secretary and former royal aide installed by Boris Johnson, given incoming prime ministers often want their own preferred candidate in the job.
Chisholm’s EDF role was approved by the watchdog on post-government jobs, known as the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. But the watchdog said he must wait three months after departing government to take up the job and observe a ban on lobbying the government or involvement in negotiating government contracts for two years after leaving office.
The watchdog said: “In 2016, his department was responsible for the decision on finalising the first contract for difference [a pricing mechanism], with respect to EDF and the construction of Hinkley Point C. However, this was ultimately a decision for the secretary of state and followed the 2014 approval from the European Commission and was based on terms agreed then, 10 years ago.
“Significantly, due to the period of time that has elapsed, the committee did not consider Sir Alex could reasonably be seen to have influenced this decision in anticipation of an offer of work a decade later.”
Chisholm said his appointment came “at a time of great change and opportunity in the energy sector”……….https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/11/top-civil-servant-edf-department-nuclear-deal-alex-chisholm
Biden hits ‘new low’ in arming ‘pro-Nazi’ Azov: US Congressman
ByAl Mayadeen English, Source: Agencies, 12 Jun 2024 https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/biden-hits–new-low–in-arming–pro-nazi–azov–us-congressm
Paul Gosar says the Biden administration’s decision to lift a ban on arms supplies to Ukraine’s Azov battalion prolongs the war.
US President Joe Biden has reached a new low after his administration decided to remove restrictions on arms supplies to Ukraine’s Azov battalion, US Congressman Paul Gosar pointed out on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post, citing the US State Department, reported that the Biden administration has lifted the ban on arms supplies to and training of the Azov battalion.
Established in 2014 by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in the wake of the Western-backed Maidan riots, the Azov Battalion was included in the National Guard of Ukraine in November of that year.
The battalion has come under severe criticism for its support of Nazi ideology and symbols, as well as its human rights violations against the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine.
Russia’s Supreme Court designated Ukraine’s Azov Battalion as a terrorist organization in August 2022.
Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov called the reported decision by the United States outrageous, adding that it raises serious concerns about US readiness to fight terrorism.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office last year accused Azov militants of employing prohibited means and methods of warfare, including the torture of civilians and the killing of children.
The battalion’s symbol is the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel, a black swastika against a yellow background. Founded by Andriy Biletsky, who vowed to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen,” the group is a pack of neo-Nazis working with the US-backed Ukrainian military.
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