Why Biden Wants Assange in Jail: Case at the Tipping Point
15 Jun 2023 A London High Court judge rejected Wikileaks editor Julian Assange’s appeal against his extradition to the United States. He now faces up to 175 years in prison — despite public opinion around the world and in his home country, Australia. The UN has declared his detention “arbitrary,” which usually results in the release of the detainee, but not so far. The fate of the man who revealed so many of the hidden crimes of the US empire hangs in the balance. Brian Becker is joined by Joe Lauria, editor in chief of Consortium News
Democracy out the window in USA – as teachers and others punished for making pro-Russian comments
Tammy, 17 June 23
Three St. Louis residents indicted on charges of illegally pushing pro-Russian propaganda
First of all Russia is not a socialist country and being a socialist in the usa is not a crime. Bernie sanders is a democratic socialist. The biden administration, is behind these prosecutions.
https://news.yahoo.com/substitute-teacher-suspended-remarks-supporting-004938324.html
Substitute teacher suspended for remarks supporting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
Other teachers in Florida, Utah, and Idaho have been suspended or fired for similar views.
Not democratic. Semi totalitarian.
People from across the usa, have complained about FBI interrogations about, their views on Russia and the Ukraine. Some taken from social media. This is totalitarian at many levels.
CIA: Black Market of Arms Trade. Part 1
CIAGATE, MAY 26, 2023
We can see that the CIA controls a significant part of the arms trade black market. Millions of dollars are being spent on financing terrorist groups and political radicals around the globe. Biden has already allocated more than $50 billion for purchasing weapons for Ukraine.
We know that the vast part of this money ends up in the pockets of corrupt CIA agents and officials bribed by them, and are also spent on other illegal activities.
In the first part of our investigation, we publish a list of the CIA agents who are involved in corrupt schemes for weapons supply to hotspots all around the world. We want their activity to become public and be thoroughly investigated. The U.S. foreign policy should emphasize peace with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
List of persons involved in the weapons supplies to Ukraine.…………………………… more https://ciagate.substack.com/p/cia-black-market-of-arms-trade-part
Stealth actions by SpaceX, as 36 space launches approved by California Coastal Commission without a vote, public hearing, or public notice
Nina Beety, 11 June 23
June 7, the California Coastal Commission approved 36 SpaceX launches at
Vandenberg AFB per year without a vote, public hearing, or public notice
in the agenda. SpaceX presently launches 6 rockets per year.
The proposal was hidden in a staff report which the Commission merely
concurred with. The public did not know it was proposed. Fortunately, a
commissioner commented on it during the meeting, and a member of the
public caught it and investigated. She and another person then spoke
during public comments the following day June 8 against this possibly
unlawful action, and hearing about it for the first time, I joined them.
If this attendee had not caught it, the action would not have come to
light.
Stealth actions are being repeated by agency after agency, exempting
projects from review, environmental evaluation, hearings, public notice,
and laws, and this must be exposed and contested very publicly whenever they
occur.
Below is the link to the agenda. Item #10 “Energy, Ocean Resources and
Federal Consistency” report.
Also, U.S. Department of the Air Force propose a new space complex at
Vandenberg Air Force Base
for private company Phantom Space Company for up to 48 launches per year
and 48 rocket tests per year. This was scheduled on the June 7 agenda
but was postponed until probably the July meeting. The staff report for
it is linked in the June agenda.
10 Energy, Ocean Resources & Federal Consistency
https://www.coastal.ca.gov/meetings/agenda/#/2023/6
Report by the Deputy Director on permit waivers, emergency permits,
immaterial amendments & extensions, negative determinations, matters not
requiring public hearings, and status report on offshore oil & gas
exploration & development. For specific information contact the
Commission’s Energy, Ocean Resources, and Federal Consistency Division
office at (415) 904-5240.
Judge orders the Crown Prosecution Service to come clean about the destruction of key documents on Julian Assange
WIKILEAKS – After years of running up against a brick wall, the first crack has appeared with the latest ruling on our FOIA case issued by Judge O’Connor. In addition to the ruling, British Labour MP John McDonnell has just obtained new information from the Crown Prosecution Service. McDonnell is calling for an independent inquiry into the CPS’s role in the Assange case.
DI STEFANIA MAURIZI, 31 MAGGIO 2023, https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/in-edicola/articoli/2023/06/01/judge-orders-the-crown-prosecution-service-to-come-clean-about-the-destruction-of-key-documents-on-julian-assange/7179642/
For the last six years, they have rejected all of our attempts to shed light on the destruction of key documents in the Julian Assange case, even though the emails were deleted when the high-profile, controversial case was still ongoing.
But now the British authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service have to come clean: they must declare whether they hold any information as to when, how and why that documentation was deleted, and if they do hold it, they must either release it to us or clarify the grounds for their refusal.
This order was just issued by the London First-tier Tribunal, chaired by Judge O’Connor, in response to our litigation based on the UK Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in which we are represented by top-notch FOIA specialist Estelle Dehon, of Cornerstone Barristers in London.
READ THE RULING ISSUED BY JUDGE O’CONNOR
The Crown Prosecution Service must comply with this judicial order by June 23, and any failure on their part to do so could lead to contempt proceedings.
Ever since 2017, when we first discovered that documents had been destroyed, we have consistently run up against a brick wall: the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has always maintained that deletion of those documents was in conformity with their standard operating procedure. A previous ruling issued in 2017 by the London First-tier Tribunal – chaired by a different judge, Andrew Bartlett – averred that there was “nothing untoward” about their deletion, and the British body instituted to uphold information rights, the Information Commissioner (ICO), has always been pleased with the decision that there was “nothing untoward” about it.
This new ruling by judge O’Connor is the first crack in the brick wall.
Judge O’Connor has also confirmed that “WikiLeaks is a media organization”, though he rejected all of our requests to access the full correspondence between the Crown Prosecution Service and the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Swedish Prosecution Authority and the Ecuadorian authorities on the Julian Assange case from 2010 to 2019.
Relative to the correspondence between the CPS and Ecuador, the judge ruled in favour of the Crown Prosecution Service, maintaining an exemption to “neither confirm nor deny” that the British and the Ecuadorian authorities exchanged emails on the case.
As for the case of all other correspondence between the CPS and the Swedish authorities, between the CPS and the U.S. Department of Justice, and between the CPS and the U.S. State Department, Judge O’Connor ruled that if released, the documentation would risk damaging the relationship of trust and confidence that underlies information sharing between prosecuting authorities, and that it would be likely to have a chilling effect on the relationship with both the Swedish and US authorities, as well as with other foreign authorities.
The ruling was issued in two forms: a decision available to the public, and a separate closed decision which can be accessed only by the UK authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service and by ICO.
The documentation on which the closed ruling is based includes, among other documents, over 552 pages of correspondence between the CPS and the U.S. Department of Justice and between the CPS and the State Department between 2010 and 2019, including “the provision of legal advice and queries on wider strategic matters relating to Mr. Assange’s extradition to that country”.
This correspondence is part of the documentation which we have been requesting under FOIA for years, and which has always been denied to us. And yet accessing it would be crucial, as the British authorities are assisting the U.S. government in extraditing a journalist for revealing war crimes and torture, as if he was a mafia boss or drug dealer. From Amnesty International to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), all major organizations for the defense of human rights and freedom of the press have called for the extradition case to be dropped and Assange freed.
Assange remains in prison, however, waiting for British justice to decide on his appeal against extradition to the United States, where he risks 175 years in prison for obtaining and publishing classified U.S. government files.
All requests to drop the charges and free Julian Assange have been ignored by the British and U.S. governments. And all decisions and opinions of highly respected UN bodies like the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) or the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2016 to 2022, Nils Melzer, have been completely ignored by the British government, if not ridiculed, as occurred with the UNWGAD decision.
Now that Judge O’Connor has rejected our request to access those documents, in particular the correspondence between the U.S. and the U.K., the oversight role that the Fourth Estate should play also risks being severely undermined. And yet we are not alone in our call for public scrutiny.
In addition to the authoritative report by Nils Melzer and our FOIA battle, recently a British Labour member of Parliament, John McDonnell, has also submitted a FOIA request to the CPS, full of detailed questions which were just answered by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Speaking to Il Fatto Quotidiano, John McDonnell told us: “It’s become clear that there must now be an independent inquiry into the role of the CPS in relation to the case of Julian Assange. We need full openness and transparency”.
The role of the Crown Prosecution Service in the Assange case
Continue readingASSANGE JUDGE IS 40-YEAR ‘GOOD FRIEND’ OF MINISTER WHO ORCHESTRATED HIS ARREST
Julian Assange’s fate lies in the hands of an appeal judge who is a close friend of Sir Alan Duncan – the former foreign minister who called Assange a “miserable little worm” in parliament.
MATT KENNARD AND MARK CURTIS, 2 DECEMBER 2021, Declassified UK
Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the judge that will soon decide Julian Assange’s fate, is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan, who as foreign minister arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy.
The two have known each other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan called Burnett “the Judge”. Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a judge at the court of appeal.
Now the most powerful judge in England and Wales, Burnett will soon rule on Assange’s extradition case. The founder of WikiLeaks faces life imprisonment in the US. ……………………………….
Duncan served as foreign minister for Europe and the Americas from 2016-19. He was the key official in the UK government campaign to force Assange from the embassy.
As minister, Duncan did not hide his opposition to Julian Assange, calling him a “miserable little worm” in parliament in March 2018.
In his diaries, Duncan refers to the “supposed human rights of Julian Assange”. He admits to arranging a Daily Mail hit piece on Assange that was published the day after the journalist’s arrest in April 2019.
Duncan watched UK police pulling the WikiLeaks publisher from the Ecuadorian embassy via a live-feed in the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office.
He later admitted he was “trying to keep the smirk off [his] face”, and hosted drinks at his parliamentary office for the team involved in the eviction.
Duncan then flew to Ecuador to meet President Lenín Moreno in order to “say thank you” for handing over Assange. Duncan reported he gave Moreno “a beautiful porcelain plate from the Buckingham Palace gift shop.”
“Job done,” he added. https://declassifieduk.org/assange-judge-is-40-year-good-friend-of-minister-who-orchestrated-his-arrest/
Snowden Warns Today’s Surveillance Technology Makes 2013 Look Like ‘Child’s Play’
“We trusted the government not to screw us,” said Edward Snowden. “But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power.”
by EDITOR, June 9, 2023 https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/09/snowden-warns-todays-surveillance-technology-makes-2013-look-like-childs-play/
By Julia Conley / Common Dreams
With this week marking 10 years since whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed information to journalists about widespread government spying by United States and British agencies, the former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday joined other advocates in warning that the fight for privacy rights, while making several inroads in the past decade, has grown harder due to major changes in technology.
“If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today,” Snowden told The Guardian, “2013 seems like child’s play.”
Snowden said that the advent of commercially available surveillance products such as Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technology has posed new dangers.
As Common Dreams has reported, the home security company Ring has faced legal challenges due to security concerns and its products’ vulnerability to hacking, and has faced criticism from rights groups for partnering with more than 1,000 police departments—including some with histories of police violence—and leaving community members vulnerable to harassment or wrongful arrests.
Law enforcement agencies have also begun using facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects despite the fact that the softwareis known to frequently misidentify people of color—leading to the wrongful arrest and detention earlier this year of Randal Reid in Georgia, among other cases.
“Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we’ve seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies’ ability to collect data.”
Last month, journalists and civil society groups called for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware like Pegasus, which has been used to target dozens of journalists in at least 10 countries.
Protecting the public from surveillance “is an ongoing process,” Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. “And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives and beyond.”
In 2013, Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was broadly monitoring the communications of citizens, sparking a debate over surveillance as well as sustained privacy rights campaigns from groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future.
“Technology has grown to be enormously influential,” Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. “We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power.”
Last month ahead of the anniversary of Snowden’s revelations, EFF notedthat some improvements to privacy rights have been made in the past decade, including:
- The sunsetting of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which until 2020 allowed the U.S. government to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records;
- The emergence of end-to-end encryption of internet communications, which Snowden noted was “a pipe dream in 2013”;
- The end of the NSA’s bulk collection of internet metadata, including email addresses of senders and recipients; and
- Rulings in countries including South Africa and Germany against bulk data collection.
The group noted that privacy advocates are still pushing Congress to end Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the warrantless surveillance of Americans’ communications, and “to take privacy seriously,” particularly as tech companies expand spying capabilities.
“Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we’ve seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies’ ability to collect data… or regulate biometric surveillance, or close the backdoor that allows the government to buy personal information rather than get a warrant, much less create a new Church Committee to investigate the intelligence community’s overreaches,” wrote EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia, executive director Cindy Cohn, and assistant director Andrew Crocker. “It’s why so many cities and states have had to take it upon themselves to ban face recognition or predictive policing, or pass laws to protect consumer privacy and stop biometric data collection without consent.”
“It’s been 10 years since the Snowden revelations,” they added, “and Congress needs to wake up and finally pass some legislation that actually protects our privacy, from companies as well as from the NSA directly.”
AUKUS coming to dinner
AUKUS dinner guests at the Cosmos Club, Washington: US Secretary for Navy, Carlos Del Toro; Republican Congressman Rob Wittman; Labor MP Meryl Swanson; Australian ambassador, Kevin Rudd; Liberal senator James Paterson; ex-Minister for Defence, lobbyist Christopher Pyne. (Photo: Pyne & Partners)
by Kellie Tranter | Jun 10, 2023 https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-coming-to-dinner/
Declassified Australia reveals the feast for lobbyists, US defence contractors and hangers-on which is the AUKUS $370bn submarines deal, Kelly Tranter reports.
The defence lobbying firm Pyne & Partners – chaired by the former Australian Defence Minister Christopher Pyne – co-hosted an AUKUS reception and dinner in Washington at the swanky Cosmos Club on Embassy Row, with Northrop Grumman Corporation, on 3 April 2023.
Northrop Grumman is one of the largest defence companies in the world, and is the parent company to spin-off Huntington Ingalls, the US’s largest naval shipbuilder and one of the builders of the Virginia-class submarines destined to come to Australia.
The meeting was ‘private’ even though it concerned Australian defence contracts and arrangements and was attended by the Australian Ambassador and two Australian MPs, and senior US defence officials. Without public disclosure of what happened at the gathering, the Australian public once again is left in the dark.
However, Declassified Australia has been able to prise open the locked shutters on the private event to shine in some needed light. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake through the AUKUS submarine deal, what calibre of people could be expected to attend such an event and what could possibly be their interest?
Documents produced pursuant to Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, by this writer, confirm that Australia’s Ambassador to the USA, Kevin Rudd, was invited to provide a speech, the contents of which journalists had previously reported to be ‘off the record’.
Declassified Australia has obtained the Ambassador’s briefing notes – though somewhat redacted due to national security considerations, ‘for the security of the Commonwealth’ and to avoid ‘damage to the defence, or international relations, of the Commonwealth’.
Rudd’s address was scheduled to follow those of the US Secretary for Navy, Carlos Del Toro, and Congressional Representative Rob Wittman. Rudd was allowed a period of five minutes for his remarks, ‘in between the main course and dessert’.
Congressman Wittman was among a bipartisan group of members of the US House of Representatives who in January sent a letter to President Joe Biden expressing support for the AUKUS deal. He unsurprisingly welcomed the huge AUKUS submarine spend as ‘a unique opportunity to leverage the support and resources possible under AUKUS to grow our industrial base to support both US and Australian submarine construction’.
In January he also was suggesting sending a jointly operated US submarine to Australia, saying, “I think it would be dual-crewed. I think too, that the command of the submarine would be a dual command”. These remarks, of course, raise sovereign control issues.
Another claim to fame of Representative Wittman was being named in a September 2022 analysis by The New York Times as one of at least 97 members of Congress who bought or sold stock, bonds or other financial assets that intersected with their congressional work or reported similar transactions by their spouse or a dependent child.
Rob the insider trader
Although the Times noted that U.S. lawmakers are not banned from investing in any company, including those that could be affected by their decisions, the report confirmed that Congressman Wittman traded shares of three defence contractors while he was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which incidentally included the AUKUS event co-sponsor, Northrop Grumman
The Congressman’s response to the media revelation was to say: “I have consistently believed members of Congress should not improperly benefit from their role, and I support measures to avoid conflicts of interest.” He went on to say, “This is why I relinquish all control of my investment decisions to my financial adviser to use third-party investment managers who implement trades at their own discretion without my consultation or input,” which, he noted, is allowed under House ethics rules.
The new FOI documents confirm that Congressman Wittman is currently the Vice Chair of the US House Committee on Armed Services, Chair of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Committee and Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, is on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the US and the Chinese Communist Party (sic), and is on the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee of the US Congress.
The FOI documents reference that, ‘Rep Rob Wittman was first elected to serve the first congressional district of Virginia in December 2007. His district is adjacent to Naval Base Norfolk as well as the major shipbuilding facilities in Newport News, Virginia – including one of the shipyards that builds Virginia-class attack submarines (Huntington Ingalls). Many of his constituents are employed either by the shipyards themselves, or by the supporting industry in the region.’
So it’s all just hunky-dory that through his investment advisor he can invest to profit from the success of defence contractors.
As to Secretary of the Navy, The Hon Carlos Del Toro, the FOI document suggests under the sub-heading, ‘Industrial collaboration’, that Ambassador Rudd was specifically tasked to ‘seek Toro’s ongoing support and endorsement’, and to recognise that ‘we continue to work with the US government agencies to overcome barriers to industrial base, supply chain and technology collaboration’.
China’s military modernisation program and its operation of nuclear-powered submarines, including both nuclear and conventionally armed, are mentioned in Ambassador Rudd’s ‘briefing notes’ obtained under FOI, along with this acknowledgement:
‘We do not oppose any nation’s right to invest in and develop defence capabilities. However, a lack of transparency around military capabilities can fuel insecurity.’
Transparency debacle
The stated concern about lack of transparency is at odds with the Australian government’s own lack of transparency to Australian citizens in relation to the entire AUKUS deal. They have yet to make signed copy of the agreement publicly available.
As to the effect of AUKUS on Australia’s defence sovereignty, Rudd’s briefing notes confirm Australia’s generous desire to ‘ease pressure on the US supply chains’ and provide the US submarines with their long-desired Indian Ocean naval base:
‘Australia will build new maintenance and repair capabilities that will directly benefit US submarines rotating through HMAS Stirling [naval base near Perth]’.
The language of the FOI document – ‘aligning national priorities’, ‘collective strength’, ‘mutual strategic benefit’, ‘deeper cooperation’ – all seems to be geared towards a fully integrated strategic and industrial base with little room for Australia’s sovereign defence issues.
And what does it say when a private Australian defence lobbyist funds eight-day international trips for the attendance of two Australian ‘non-Defence’ politicians to a private Washington event it is co-hosting with one of the largest defence companies in the world? And what does it say when the lobbyist invites a US guest speaker who trades in defence company stocks while holding political defence offices? And what does it say when input by senior US military officials and by our own ambassador to the US, until this FOI application, we’re not even permitted to see?
Transparency and integrity of decision-making in relation to AUKUS ought not be shrouded in lavish invitation-only discussions where private interests eye-off the billions in potential profits — and where Australia’s future is on the table.
This story was first published by Declassified Australia
Journalists Are Asking Ukrainian Soldiers To Hide Their Nazi Patches, New York Times Admits
AZOV soldier, UKraine
BY TYLER DURDEN
The New York Times has been forced to very, very belatedly deal with something which had long been obvious and known to many independent analysts and media outlets, but which has been carefully shielded from the mainstream masses in the West for obvious reasons.
The surprising Monday Times headline said that “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” This acknowledgement comes after literally years of primarily indy journalists and geopolitical commentators pointing out that yes indeed… Ukraine’s military and paramilitary groups, especially those operating in the east since at least 2014, have a serious Nazi ideology problem. This has been exhaustively documented, again, going back years.
But the report, which merely tries to downplay it as a “thorny issue” of Ukraine’s “unique” “History” – suggests that the real problem for Western PR is fundamentally that it’s being displayed so openly. Ukrainian troops are being asked to cover those Nazi symbols please!–as Matt Taibbi sarcastically quipped in commenting on the report.
The authors of the NYT report begin by expressing frustration over the optics of Nazi symbols being displayed so proudly on many Ukrainian soldiers’ uniforms. Suggesting that many journalistic photographs which have in some cases been featured in newspapers and media outlets worldwide (typically coupled with generally positive articles on Ukraine’s military) are merely ‘unfortunate’ or misleading, the NYT report says, “In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.”
NATO itself has in the recent past been forced to delete images on its official social media accounts due to Nazi imagery being present among Ukrainian troops during photo shoots.
The following line from the report says everything you need to know about the so-called “paper of record” and its one-sided and ultra-simplistic coverage of what many are finally waking up to realize is a war with a deeply complex reality (to say the least), and far from the MSM’s goodies vs. baddies Hollywoodesque narrative of Putler vs. the free world which is typical of networks from CNN to Fox to NBC…
From the NY Times:
“In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.”
Oops!
…………..The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
Some are writing more appropriate and apt headlines for the NYT story…
Only very recently Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and even President Zelensky’s office was caught in the act:
In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.
The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”
To be expected, the Times still tries to run cover while desperately seeking to ‘reassure’ its audience by writing that “In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be ‘de-Nazified’ — a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.”
New levels of cope indeed…
But then still, the NYT concedes awkwardly, “More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.” https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/journalists-are-asking-ukrainian-soldiers-hide-their-nazi-patches-nyt-admits
Washington Post reported Ukraine conducted a test strike with HIMARS on the Kahovka dam last year
the Washington Post reported in December 2022 that Ukraine had previously carried out a test strike using American HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) on a dam located on the Russian-held side of Ukraine along the Dnieper River in Kahovka. They cited Ukrainian Major-General Andriy Kovalchuk.
Human Events Media Group 06/06/2023
A dam on the Dnieper River was destroyed on Tuesday, flooding a substantial amount of the area where Ukrainian and Russian troops are engaged in fighting, after Ukraine launched their much-anticipated counter-offensive. The dam was in Russian control, and has been since shortly after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Ukraine claimed Russia blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam and said it was a war crime, while Russia has said that it was Ukraine who “sabotaged the dam, to distract attention from the launch of a major counteroffensive Moscow says is faltering,” Reuters reports.
Ukraine’s counter offensive has been in the works for some time, specifically targeting the Russian-held city of Kherson, and was just recently launched.
“Russian terrorists,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram. “The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land.”
However, the Washington Post reported in December 2022 that Ukraine had previously carried out a test strike using American HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) on a dam located on the Russian-held side of Ukraine along the Dnieper River in Kahovka. They cited Ukrainian Major-General Andriy Kovalchuk.
“Kovalchuk considered flooding the river,” the Washington Post reported. “The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages. The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort.”……………….. https://humanevents.com/2023/06/06/wapo-reported-ukraine-conducted-a-test-strike-with-himars-on-the-kahovka-dam-last-year
Leaks reveal FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info
AARON MATÉ·JUNE 7, 2023, The Grayzone,
The FBI aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to ban Twitter users and collect their data, new leaks show. Twitter declined to censor journalists targeted by Ukraine, including The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails reveal.
In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.
The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for “inauthenticity” but raised concerns about the inclusion of me and other “American and Canadian journalists.”
The FBI’s attempt to ban Twitter accounts at the request of Ukrainian intelligence is among the most overt requests for censorship revealed to date in the Twitter Files, a cache of leaked communications from the social media giant.
The FBI’s censorship request was relayed in a March 27th, 2022 email from FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets, the Assistant Legal Attaché at the US Embassy in Kyiv, to two Twitter executives. Four FBI colleagues were copied on the exchange…………………….
If granted, the users on the list would not only have been banned from Twitter but had their phone number, date of birth, and email address disclosed to both the FBI and SBU.
Read the full list of accounts targeted by the FBI and SBU here:
Twitter-Dissinf_20220327 SBU list
In response, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then-Head of Trust and Safety, informed Special Agent Kobzanets and his FBI colleagues that Twitter would “review the reported accounts under our Rules.” But he warned that the list included “a few accounts of American and Canadian journalists (e.g. Aaron Mate).” Therefore, Roth said, Twitter’s review would “focus first and foremost on identifying any potential inauthenticity.”
Roth then suggested that he would be open to suspending authentic accounts if it could be proven that they have a hidden tie to a foreign government. Journalists “who cover the conflict with a pro-Russian stance are unlikely to be found in violation of our rules absent other context that might establish some kind of covert/deceptive association between them and a government,” Roth wrote. “Any additional information or context in those areas is of course welcome and appreciated.”……………………………………………
The Ukrainian nationals targeted by the SBU’s suppression request include Anatoly Shariy, a video blogger and politician who fled Ukraine in 2012 and subsequently received European Union asylum; and Andriy Portnov, a Ukrainian lawyer and politician who served as a senior official under Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych until the latter’s ouster in the February 2014 Maidan coup. (Both Shariy and Portnov’s Twitter accounts remain active).
The disclosure of a collaboration on censorship between the FBI and SBU is the latest documented instance of Ukrainian state-tied attempts to target foreign voices. A Ukrainian website known as Myrotvorets maintains a list of what it calls “enemies of Ukraine.” I was recently added to that list along with The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil, as well as the comedian and YouTube host Jimmy Dore. The Myrotvorets database was co-founded by Anton Gerashchenko, former deputy minister at the Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he now serves as an advisor.
Last year, the global tech/media conference Web Summit withdrew a speaking invitation to The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and me after Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, demanded our cancellation. (Another Grayzone colleague, Kit Klarenberg, was recently detained and interrogated about his journalism by British authorities).
News of the FBI’s work with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Twitter users also follows reporting from journalist Lee Fang that the FBI has pressured Facebook to remove accounts and posts deemed by the SBU to be Russian “disinformation.” According to Fang, a senior Ukrainian official in regular contact with the FBI defined “disinformation” in such broad terms that it could mean viewpoints that “simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.” https://thegrayzone.com/2023/06/07/fbi-ukraine-twitter-users-including-journalists/—
Trump-era officials under fire as nuclear fund for Bikini islanders is squandered
Former staff have criticized the interior department for ignoring the risk of fraud after the Trump administration ceased scrutiny of a $59m fund for nuclear survivors, which is now depleted
Former staff have lashed the US Department of the Interior for failing to predict that a 2017 decision to lift oversight from a $59m trust fund for Pacific Islanders displaced by American nuclear testing would lead to the fund’s exhaustion through mismanagement and alleged fraud.
Tom Bussanich, who in 2017 was a senior official in the department’s Office of Insular Affairs, said that he “would have bet money that there would have been issues with the trust fund and that the money would have been wasted”. Allen Stayman, a former director of the Office of Insular Affairs, dismissed the office as “the agency of acquiescence”.
Meanwhile, confidential bank documents reviewed by the Guardian reveal red flags that could have alerted the department to potential issues had it been scrutinising the fund, including the transfer of millions of dollars to two personal checking accounts over which the fund’s trustees had no oversight……………………………..
Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the fund had been whittled down to about $100,000, largely through extravagant spending by Anderson Jibas mayor of the Bikinian council, on projects including land development in Hawaii, new ships and planes, and an apartment complex in the Marshall Islands………………………………………
The release of large sums to checking accounts that trustees could not scrutinise might have attracted concern from American officials, but by then the interior department was no longer receiving information about the fund from the Bikinian council or bank officials. The department declined to comment on the bank documents…………………….
From 2018, Jibas refused to provide the council’s financial documents to the Marshallese auditor-general, forcing Marshallese police to forcibly seize the documents in 2021. In an interview with the New York Times, Jibas admitted he occasionally used money from the fund to pay for personal items.
Jibas told the Guardian that he had also directed between $200,000 and $250,000 from the fund towards the construction of a two-story house for his personal use. He claimed this project had been approved by the Bikinian council…………………………… more https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/05/bikini-atoll-nuclear-fund-interior-department
Warren Report Reveals Vast Pentagon-to-Defense Contractor Lobbying Pipeline
In 2021, there were at least 672 former government officials working for top defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT April 27, 2023 https://truthout.org/articles/warren-report-reveals-vast-pentagon-to-defense-contractor-lobbying-pipeline/?utm_campaign=Truthout+Share+Buttons
Hundreds of former government officials, including former Pentagon officials, have been funneled through the infamous public-to-private revolving door to take their insider government knowledge to lobby for top defense contractors, a new report from the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) reveals.
According to the report released Wednesday, as of 2021, there were at least 672 former officials who were working for the top 20 defense contractors, with the vast majority — 91 percent — in positions lobbying the very government they formerly worked for. Officials who weren’t lobbyists were in top positions as board members or senior executives. The officials include former members of Congress, senior staffers and military officers.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the companies that employed the most former government officials are also the companies who receive the most from the government in contracts. In 2021 and 2022, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Pfizer were the top 5 federal defense contractors in the U.S. — and in 2021 also employed among the highest numbers of “revolving door hires” out of the top 20 contractors, the report found, each with dozens of former government employees.
Hiring former government employees is extremely lucrative for the private sector. This is especially true for lobbying firms, who can benefit greatly from the knowledge and connections brought by former government employees, but is also true for many industries; for instance, there is a well-established revolving door between jobs at the Treasury Department and other tax-related agencies and top accounting firms, an issue Warren has previously raised.
Defense contractors are especially able to take advantage of such lobbying, as Congress and the president regularly approve huge sums of money for defense each year —– more than half of that money typically goes straight to contractors, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Over the years, this leads to trillions of dollars in profits for defense contractors.
Warren highlighted the dangers of the revolving door in a hearing in the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Wednesday.
“Why is it they want to hire former Pentagon employees to work for them as lobbyists?” Warren asked Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell. “Why is it better to have someone who, for instance, they could hire people whose profession is lobbying, someone who’s lobbied in another field, say for the last 10 years. But they don’t want that — they’ll take somebody who’s never lobbied before, but who’s been employed at the Pentagon. Why is that?”
Wilkerson responded that the former Pentagon official “knows how to work those contacts” within the government and knows what “lies” to tell to sell the company’s services.
“If it’s specific program like the F-35, for example, which I’m somewhat familiar, then you get people who are very familiar with that on the inside, know all about the lies that you’ve been telling the federal government with regard to the program, and will come out and reinforce those lies, deceit, if you will, from their position with your business,” Wilkerson said. “It’s a very insidious, pernicious thing.”
These issues are compounded by the fact that defense spending is rife with fraud and abuse, as those who support reducing the Pentagon budget point out. Despite receiving the vast majority of federal discretionary spending year over year, the Pentagon is the only federal agency to never have passed an audit.
Julian Assange: the plot thickens
The FBI has reopened its case against Wikileaks founder and Australian journalist Julian Assange, the SMH reports, after agents tried to interview his ghostwriter, Andrew O’Hagan, in London.
O’Hagan refused to talk to them because he would never give a statement against “a fellow journalist being pursued for telling the truth”. Badass, particularly as O’Hagan isn’t exactly fond of Assange as a person, as he famously wrote in the London Review of Books.
Anyway, Assange’s lawyer, Stephen Kenny, was taken by surprise by the news — he says it’s been years since the indictment was issued, and he didn’t realise there was an investigation under way. What if they’re gathering evidence to clear Assange’s name, considering there are growing rumours the Albanese government is working on it, as The New Daily’s reporting indicates? It’s not impossible, Kenny says, but it would be “very unusual” if the FBI was trying to help him.
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of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
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