How the pro-Ukraine “North Atlantic Fellas Organization” (NAFO) troll operation crowd-funds war criminals.
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/20/ukraine-nafo-troll-war-criminals/ ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN, OCTOBER 20, 2022
Celebrated in mainstream US media for its anti-Russian trolling, the Twitter operation known as NAFO was founded by a Polish antisemite to raise money for a militia that has hosted war criminals, white nationalists and wanted murderers.
Whether they know it or not, anyone who has checked Twitter for recent coverage of the Ukraine proxy war has likely encountered at least one of the thousands of trolls that comprise NAFO, or the “North Atlantic Fellas Organization.” Thanks to the efforts of NAFO and its “fellas,” any journalist or prominent figure critical of Ukraine or NATO on Twitter is likely to receive hundreds of replies accusing them of being paid by Russian President Vladimir Putin (or even performing fellatio on him) from accounts with Shiba Inu dog avatars.
Since its inception several months ago, NAFO has earned gushing praise from the Washington Post, which hailed it for “show[ing] that the tables could be turned on Russia, when it came to trolling.” The arms industry-funded, Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), meanwhile, hosted an online panel highlighting NAFO as an instrumental weapon in the Russia-Ukraine infowars.
One NAFO founder explained that he chose the Georgian Legion as a funding recipient precisely because of the unit’s reputation as a band of “mercenaries and criminals” that was willing to carry out barbarous acts which could cause foreign governments to shy away from supporting it. Another NAFO founder has praised the Georgian Legion’s leader for “killing Russians since the ’90s.”
Among the Georgian Legion’s most notorious members are US fugitive and murderer Craig Lang, as well as Paul Gray, an American whose past involvement in several neo-Nazi organizations was never mentioned during the friendly primetime interviews he was granted by Fox News and its local affiliates.
While providing a financial feeding tube to a militia that revels in its own atrocities, NAFO continues to attract effusive support from mainstream US journalists and think tankers who portray the operation as little more than a grassroots expression of online solidarity with Ukraine.
Obsessively online interventionists find meaning and purpose as “fellas”
Read more: How the pro-Ukraine “North Atlantic Fellas Organization” (NAFO) troll operation crowd-funds war criminals.Employing cartoon memes of the Shiba Inu dog breed, NAFO’s postmodern aesthetic, irreverent style and dedication to viciously trolling any critic of the Ukraine proxy war has garnered the adulation of Western media and interventionist government officials alike.
To outsiders, the lingo that flows through internal NAFO chats might seem unintelligible: “fellas” refers to members; “nafoarticle5” is a call to action that urges “fellas” to dog-pile on a particular social media post; “vatnik” serves as a pejorative for Russians and virtually anyone critical of the US-backed proxy war. Phrases such as “NAFO expansion is non-negotiable” and sarcastic claims that they are funded by the CIA (which they simultaneously claim “doesn’t exist”) are also ubiquitous.
Behind the anonymously named Twitter accounts of NAFO members lies a base of extremely online, mostly male civilians seeking a sense of purpose and community. Some participants have tattooed Shiba Inu avatars onto their bodies while others have published photos of their newborn babies in the arms of an adult sporting a NAFO shirt.
One member of the troll operation tweeted a photo of an elaborate NAFO tattoo emblazoned on his arm, but has since deleted it.
In public, NAFO leaders market the image of a charity-focused community of do-gooders, however, many posts by its fellas reflect the kind of psychologically deranged outbursts familiar to young adult men who spend endless hours ranting on a messaging platform built for gamers……………
While US corporate media have declared that within NAFO “there is no command structure,” effectively releasing the group’s founders from accountability for the fellas’ behavior, this reporter found all the hallmarks of an organizational hierarchy. The group’s Discord server is run by founders, assigned administrators, moderators, and “forgers” who make memes used for harassing people on social media. “Verified fellas” are granted access to otherwise locked channels, while regular “fellas” are assigned more mundane roles.
“It’s preferred that people who are not heavily involved in the day to day do not speak on behalf of NAFO or what NAFO is to the press,” one administrator wrote in the server’s announcement’s channel.
Inside NAFO’s social media crowdfunding nexus
There are three ways to obtain a NAFO avatar and become a verified “fella.” The first is to make a donation to the Georgian National Legion through an email address attached to PayPal and belonging to Taras Reshetylo, a field commander of the Georgian Legion. Another way to join is by donating to an organization called “Protect Ukraine Defenders,” or a merchandise purchase from a website called Saint Javelin. Saint Javelin’s logo depicts the Virgin Mary bearing a US-manufactured Javelin missile.
Though distinct from NAFO at its foundation, Saint Javelin sold merchandise for the organization and recently incorporated NAFO into its brand. For months, all of Saint Javelin’s proceeds from NAFO merchandise went directly to the Georgian Legion, according to its website. Like NAFO, Saint Javelin estimates that it has raised huge sums for the war — more than a million dollars.
Besides fundraising for the Georgian Legion, Saint Javelin passes on proceeds to United24, an initiative launched by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “as the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine.” It also channels money to the Ukrainian World Congress, an organization which has defended the legacy of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera, branding him “the undisputed symbol of Ukraine’s lengthy and tragic struggle for independence.”
Saint Javelin’s partnership with Zelensky’s United24 aims to help raise funds to build an “army of drones.”
The Saint Javelin website was launched by a former journalist named Christian Borys whose employment history spans NATO state-funded outlets including Canada’s CBC and Britain’s BBC. Borys has also authored articles for the US government-sponsored outlet Radio Free Europe.
One of Borys’ most notorious journalistic escapades consisted of a night of bar-hopping in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he patronized an antisemitic restaurant and returned with a review for Vice News portraying it as one of the city’s many weird and wonderful haunts.
The restaurant converts anti-Jewish tropes into a marketing gimmick; its waiters dress as Orthodox Jews who haggle with patrons over the prices of menu items. “If you play your cards right [it’s] ridiculously cheap,” Borys gushed in his review.
Noting that Lviv “was home to around 220,000 Jewish people,” Borys wrote that “the population now only hovers around 1,100,” Strangely though, he neglected to explain how the genocidal rampage of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists helped violently extinguish the local Jewish population. He merely stated that the restaurant “pays homage [to the local Jewish population] in a weird way.”
The Ukrainian ethnic-owned restaurant contains a terrace that overlooks the ruins of “one of the most important synagogues in Eastern Europe.”
In the same 2015 article, Borys described going to a bar where “you’re served by little people,” visiting another that forces you to recite ultra-nationalist slogans before entering, and emptying an AK-47 clip in a target depicting Putin’s face at a local shooting range.
On Twitter, Borys erupted with glee when a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was spotted wearing a Saint Javelin patch. He seemed equally thrilled when his former employer published photographs from an unstated source of Ukraine’s Defense Minister Olekseii Reznikov handing President Zelensky a Saint Javelin t-shirt.
In the NAFO Discord chat, Borys suggested paying protesters to hold NAFO demonstrations outside Russian embassies.
A retired Marine and amateur conflict pundit named Matt Moores claimed to have established the relationship between NAFO and Borys after co-founding the former organization. On October 7, NAFO was incorporated into the Saint Javelin brand, with the latter becoming the former’s parent company, according to a post by a NAFO administrator in the Discord server’s announcement channel.
The third organization for which NAFO fundraises, Protect Ukraine Defenders, was launched by a well-connected functionary of the Brussels-based intelligentsia named Ievgen Vorobiov. Vorobiov started as an intern for the European Union state-funded Centre for European Policy Studies think tank, then moved on to gigs at the Polish government-founded Polish Institute of International Affairs and Foreign Policy magazine. Before founding Protect Ukraine Defenders, Vorobiov spent nearly four years at the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine.
An anchor for amplifying pro-proxy war Twitter accounts
While Twitter has responded to NATO state pressure to suppress accounts associated with Russian state media, and has banned numerous other users for simply questioning the official Western version of events in Ukraine, organizations connected with NAFO have seen explosive growth since the Ukraine proxy war began. Saint Javelin, for its part, has received verification from Twitter and amassed nearly 70,000 followers since launching an account this February.
A NAFO founder who operates under the pseudonym “Kama Kamilia” had less than 200 Twitter followers in April 2022; today they broadcast to an audience of over 22,000. NAFO co-founder Christian Borys had less than 5,500 followers in February 2022 and now boasts more than 36,000. Similarly, Matt Moores’ Twitter account grew by more than 16,000 followers since January.
“Kama Kamilia” has explicitly linked the Georgian Legion’s follower count to the popularity of his NAFO organization: “I think they had 4,000 followers when we started [now] they have… more than 20,000.” As of early October, that number is more than 110,000
Yet NAFO’s beltway boosters often gloss over its role as a fundraising machine for the Georgian Legion, a US-backed Ukrainian fighting group that stands accused of gruesome battlefield atrocities. Several former members of the Legion have produced first-hand testimony documenting its perpetration of war crimes, including the torture and execution of POWs and civilians.
One NAFO founder explained that he chose the Georgian Legion as a funding recipient precisely because of the unit’s reputation as a band of “mercenaries and criminals” that was willing to carry out barbarous acts which could cause foreign governments to shy away from supporting it. Another NAFO founder has praised the Georgian Legion’s leader for “killing Russians since the ’90s.”
Among the Georgian Legion’s most notorious members are US fugitive and murderer Craig Lang, as well as Paul Gray, an American whose past involvement in several neo-Nazi organizations was never mentioned during the friendly primetime interviews he was granted by Fox News and its local affiliates.
While providing a financial feeding tube to a militia that revels in its own atrocities, NAFO continues to attract effusive support from mainstream US journalists and think tankers who portray the operation as little more than a grassroots expression of online solidarity with Ukraine.
Obsessively online interventionists find meaning and purpose as “fellas”
Employing cartoon memes of the Shiba Inu dog breed, NAFO’s postmodern aesthetic, irreverent style and dedication to viciously trolling any critic of the Ukraine proxy war has garnered the adulation of Western media and interventionist government officials alike.
To outsiders, the lingo that flows through internal NAFO chats might seem unintelligible: “fellas” refers to members; “nafoarticle5” is a call to action that urges “fellas” to dog-pile on a particular social media post; “vatnik” serves as a pejorative for Russians and virtually anyone critical of the US-backed proxy war. Phrases such as “NAFO expansion is non-negotiable” and sarcastic claims that they are funded by the CIA (which they simultaneously claim “doesn’t exist”) are also ubiquitous.
Behind the anonymously named Twitter accounts of NAFO members lies a base of extremely online, mostly male civilians seeking a sense of purpose and community. Some participants have tattooed Shiba Inu avatars onto their bodies while others have published photos of their newborn babies in the arms of an adult sporting a NAFO shirt.
One member of the troll operation tweeted a photo of an elaborate NAFO tattoo emblazoned on his arm, but has since deleted it.
In public, NAFO leaders market the image of a charity-focused community of do-gooders, however, many posts by its fellas reflect the kind of psychologically deranged outbursts familiar to young adult men who spend endless hours ranting on a messaging platform built for gamers. In mid-October, for example, an administrator complained that she was forced to ban two members of the NAFO Discord for publicly plotting the murder of a third member of the community.
While US corporate media have declared that within NAFO “there is no command structure,” effectively releasing the group’s founders from accountability for the fellas’ behavior, this reporter found all the hallmarks of an organizational hierarchy. The group’s Discord server is run by founders, assigned administrators, moderators, and “forgers” who make memes used for harassing people on social media. “Verified fellas” are granted access to otherwise locked channels, while regular “fellas” are assigned more mundane roles.
“It’s preferred that people who are not heavily involved in the day to day do not speak on behalf of NAFO or what NAFO is to the press,” one administrator wrote in the server’s announcement’s channel.
Inside NAFO’s social media crowdfunding nexus
There are three ways to obtain a NAFO avatar and become a verified “fella.” The first is to make a donation to the Georgian National Legion through an email address attached to PayPal and belonging to Taras Reshetylo, a field commander of the Georgian Legion. Another way to join is by donating to an organization called “Protect Ukraine Defenders,” or a merchandise purchase from a website called Saint Javelin. Saint Javelin’s logo depicts the Virgin Mary bearing a US-manufactured Javelin missile.
Though distinct from NAFO at its foundation, Saint Javelin sold merchandise for the organization and recently incorporated NAFO into its brand. For months, all of Saint Javelin’s proceeds from NAFO merchandise went directly to the Georgian Legion, according to its website. Like NAFO, Saint Javelin estimates that it has raised huge sums for the war — more than a million dollars.
Besides fundraising for the Georgian Legion, Saint Javelin passes on proceeds to United24, an initiative launched by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “as the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine.” It also channels money to the Ukrainian World Congress, an organization which has defended the legacy of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera, branding him “the undisputed symbol of Ukraine’s lengthy and tragic struggle for independence.”
Saint Javelin’s partnership with Zelensky’s United24 aims to help raise funds to build an “army of drones.”
The Saint Javelin website was launched by a former journalist named Christian Borys whose employment history spans NATO state-funded outlets including Canada’s CBC and Britain’s BBC. Borys has also authored articles for the US government-sponsored outlet Radio Free Europe.
One of Borys’ most notorious journalistic escapades consisted of a night of bar-hopping in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he patronized an antisemitic restaurant and returned with a review for Vice News portraying it as one of the city’s many weird and wonderful haunts.
The restaurant converts anti-Jewish tropes into a marketing gimmick; its waiters dress as Orthodox Jews who haggle with patrons over the prices of menu items. “If you play your cards right [it’s] ridiculously cheap,” Borys gushed in his review.
Noting that Lviv “was home to around 220,000 Jewish people,” Borys wrote that “the population now only hovers around 1,100,” Strangely though, he neglected to explain how the genocidal rampage of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists helped violently extinguish the local Jewish population. He merely stated that the restaurant “pays homage [to the local Jewish population] in a weird way.”
The Ukrainian ethnic-owned restaurant contains a terrace that overlooks the ruins of “one of the most important synagogues in Eastern Europe.”
In the same 2015 article, Borys described going to a bar where “you’re served by little people,” visiting another that forces you to recite ultra-nationalist slogans before entering, and emptying an AK-47 clip in a target depicting Putin’s face at a local shooting range.
VICE News publishes a “supplied” photograph of President Zelensky being handed a Saint Javelin t-shirt by the country’s Minister of Defense
On Twitter, Borys erupted with glee when a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was spotted wearing a Saint Javelin patch. He seemed equally thrilled when his former employer published photographs from an unstated source of Ukraine’s Defense Minister Olekseii Reznikov handing President Zelensky a Saint Javelin t-shirt.
In the NAFO Discord chat, Borys suggested paying protesters to hold NAFO demonstrations outside Russian embassies.
A retired Marine and amateur conflict pundit named Matt Moores claimed to have established the relationship between NAFO and Borys after co-founding the former organization. On October 7, NAFO was incorporated into the Saint Javelin brand, with the latter becoming the former’s parent company, according to a post by a NAFO administrator in the Discord server’s announcement channel.
The third organization for which NAFO fundraises, Protect Ukraine Defenders, was launched by a well-connected functionary of the Brussels-based intelligentsia named Ievgen Vorobiov. Vorobiov started as an intern for the European Union state-funded Centre for European Policy Studies think tank, then moved on to gigs at the Polish government-founded Polish Institute of International Affairs and Foreign Policy magazine. Before founding Protect Ukraine Defenders, Vorobiov spent nearly four years at the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine.
An anchor for amplifying pro-proxy war Twitter accounts
While Twitter has responded to NATO state pressure to suppress accounts associated with Russian state media, and has banned numerous other users for simply questioning the official Western version of events in Ukraine, organizations connected with NAFO have seen explosive growth since the Ukraine proxy war began. Saint Javelin, for its part, has received verification from Twitter and amassed nearly 70,000 followers since launching an account this February.
A NAFO founder who operates under the pseudonym “Kama Kamilia” had less than 200 Twitter followers in April 2022; today they broadcast to an audience of over 22,000. NAFO co-founder Christian Borys had less than 5,500 followers in February 2022 and now boasts more than 36,000. Similarly, Matt Moores’ Twitter account grew by more than 16,000 followers since January.
“Kama Kamilia” has explicitly linked the Georgian Legion’s follower count to the popularity of his NAFO organization: “I think they had 4,000 followers when we started [now] they have… more than 20,000.” As of early October, that number is more than 110,000.
In September, the Discord tech company granted NAFO “partnered” status, meaning it now serves as a corporate “role model” and is considered one of “the best servers out there.” Yet it is composed of just over 3,000 members, raising questions about the tens of thousands of new followers NAFO has suddenly accumulated on Twitter.
NAFO’s expansion has also driven the growth of hundreds, if not thousands, of otherwise insignificant Twitter accounts which have participated in online harassment and used the group to push crowdfunding efforts.
One NAFO-stylized account which the Georgian Legion follows and at least one administrator of the NAFO Discord boasted that they were able to purchase gear for a Ukrainian soldier named “Igor.” In the photographs attached to the Tweet, Igor can be seen wearing a Nazi Sonnenrad patch.
The war crimes of the Georgian Legion
Behind the goofy Shibu Ina avatars and rambunctious chat sessions lies a mission that defines NAFO: to raise as much money as possible for the Georgian National Legion. One administrator of the official NAFO discord put it succinctly: “NAFO has always been about supporting the Georgian Legion first and foremost.”
Another administrator stated on July 2 of this year that “$43,000 (USD) has been raised by the fellas for the Georgian Legion.” Three months later, a NAFO member estimated the figure to be “likely totaling over $1 million,” a metric of the explosive growth of the group. “It is the most organic movement I’ve been involved with,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
While NAFO fundraises for several allied organizations, supporters are most frequently directed to donate to the Georgian Legion. Matt Moores, the US Marine veteran who co-founded NAFO and describes himself as “very online,” has explained in interviews that NAFO “started as a fundraiser really.”
“Beyond the memes, beyond the jokes, beyond the humor, there is a real component of it with, you know, fundraising. These little cartoon dog avatars that they have, each one of them is made by a volunteer, a fella forger, in our community and these little small donations have raised close to $300,000 so far,” Moores explained.
With an existing Twitter following, Moores reached out to someone who posts online under the Kama Kamilia in May. It was then that NAFO was born.
“I was looking and saw that someone was posting these little cartoon dogs and using them to, you know, mock and to belittle these, you know, propaganda statements and the supposed achievements of the Russian military and just trying to throw these little jabs wherever you could get them in,” Moores said. “One day someone asked Kamil ‘how do I get one of these?’ And he said ‘if you send $20 or whatever it is to the Georgian Legion we’ll make you one of these.’ So from there it has really gotten quite out of hand.”
Little is known about the NAFO co-founder “Kama Kamilia,” as corporate media outlets hyping them as a pro-Ukraine influencer extraordinaire have refused to disclose his real name. However, this reporter and researcher Moss Robeson have determined that he is Kamil Dyszewski, a 29-year-old Polish national and failed criminologist-turned-video game reviewer living somewhere near London.
The NAFO founder has posted a number of antisemitic memes, including some mocking Jewish victims of the Holocaust, seemingly glorifying Adolf Hitler, and calling for the deportation of President Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Tel Aviv.
“I just stumbled my way through life, now into this. What fuels it for me is the absolute hatred and vitriol I have towards the Russians,” Dyszewski has said. “I just found a way which we could expedite the process of getting them [the Russian government] removed.”
Dyszewski explained that he chose the Georgian Legion to be the recipients of the funds he raised because he believed their reputation as “mercenaries and criminals” would preclude them from receiving support from foreign governments.
The fighting group, which was incorporated into the official Ukrainian military, is led by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a Georgian-born veteran of several conflicts against Russia who swore to execute Russian POWs, an act which constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
“We will not take Russian soldiers… we will not take prisoners, not a single person will be captured,” Mamulashvili has said. “Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner.”
Mamulashvili’s comment came in response to a viral video which depicted one of his fighters casually executing wounded Russian POW’s.
Mamulashvili is a key suspect in the massacre by snipers of 49 protesters in Maidan square in 2014, a likely false flag attack designed to intensify opposition to the elected government of Ukraine. At the same time, he has been awarded the National Hero of Ukraine recognition, the highest national title in the country.
In a March 2022 interview with this reporter, Henry Hoeft, an American veteran named who volunteered with the Georgian National Legion, described witnessing war crimes committed by members of his unit. According to Hoeft, two men “blew a checkpoint” after members of the Georgian Legion accused them of being Russian spies. His fellow soldiers “shot their car up [and] black-bagged them.”
Georgian Legion fighters then “fucking slit their throats in the basement of the fucking building,” Hoeft recalled. “We don’t even know if they were actually spies or just people who ran a checkpoint.”
Another former American volunteer in Ukraine known only by the alias Benjamin Velcro described witnessing fellow Georgian Legion volunteers torture and execute a captured teen whom he estimated was “about 18.”
Velcro remarked, “We’d been told to take no prisoners.”
The Georgian Legion veteran continued: “We made a lesson to him. We fucking cut his achilles heels and made him swim across the Severdonetsk river and he drowned. Or he was shot. We were all taking kind of like practice shots at him to see how well our shot was as he swam without achilles heels… either way he’s dead,” Velcro said.
“Of course those fucking Georgian Legion guys did that stuff because they’re Georgians and they’re retards,” Velcro remarked.
The Georgian Legion has hosted two other notorious US foreign fighters profiled by The Grayzone: Craig Lang and Paul Gray. Lang was a member of the group before he returned to the United States, where he is wanted for robbed and murdering a married couple to finance his return trip to Ukraine. The Federal Bureau of Investigations has obtained video showing Lang participating in war crimes in eastern Ukraine, including “beating and drowning a girl after a fellow fighter injected her with adrenaline so that she would not lose consciousness as she was drowned.”
Gray, who is still active with the Georgian Legion, has been involved with multiple US-based neo-Nazi organizations, including Atomwaffen, which is listed as a terrorist organization by several countries. On its Twitter account, the Georgian Legion promoted a Fox News appearance by Gray. Similarly, Mamulashvili has posted Lang’s photograph on his Facebook page.
The Georgian Legion boss, Mamulashvili, has enjoyed close ties to Washington throughout years of low-intensity conflict in the eastern Ukraine, junketing to Capitol Hill for meetings with lawmakers with seats on foreign affairs committees in the House and Senate.
Though NAFO co-founder Moores speaks only infrequently about the Georgian Legion, he makes no secret of his support for the outfit: “Anywho, how about those Georgians,” he has written on Discord. “Boy they sure do kill Russians good, I’ll tell you what.” Similarly, Moores has praised the warlord Mamulashvili, marveling that “this dude has been killing Russians since the 90s.”
On Twitter, Moores posts under the handle “@iAmTheWarax,” where he has discussed Mamulashvili’s surprised reaction to the fact that “cartoon dogs” were raising thousands of dollars for his legion.
Moores, a former banker who joined the Marine Corps to “pursue his childhood dream” of becoming a tank operator, was first deployed to Libya in 2011, where the US and NATO overthrew and murdered the country’s longtime leader, Muammar Gaddafi, instantly transforming a once prosperous African country into a despotic hellhole. Moores has described his experience in Afghanistan, a country occupied, destabilized, and abandoned by the US military, as “based.”
For his part, Kamil Dyszewski – or Kama Kamilia as he is known online – has promoted the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and celebrated the Ukrainian government’s October 8 suicide bombing attack on the Kerch bridge, retweeting several posts from fellow NAFO members that photoshopped Shiba Inu dogs into the scene of the attack. In the Discord server, Dyszewski wrote, “I need Russia to apologize for its audacity to exist. It can do so by ceasing to exist.”
The Grayzone has closely reviewed NAFO’s Discord server and gained access to channels accessible only to verified members. As the second part of this two part investigation will show, the server is a cesspool of hatred, with fellas delighting in videos of wounded and dying Russians and cracking gay jokes at their expense. Prominent journalists can also be found in the chats colluding with NAFO leaders on how to spin their coverage of the troll farm and cultivate support from DC power-brokers.
Russian language should become extinct in Ukraine – security chief
According to the 2001 census, approximately 14.3 million Ukrainians (29% of the population) speak Russian as their first language. Some other estimates put that number even higher.
The language is particularly widespread in the eastern and southern regions of the country.
Rt.com 21 Oct 22,
The language is part of Moscow’s propaganda, Defence Council boss claims
The Russian language should be eradicated in Ukraine as it is allegedly being used as a tool by Moscow to wield influence on Ukrainians, one of the country’s key security officials has claimed.
The Russian language is nothing but an “element of enemy propaganda and brainwashing of our people,” Alexey Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on the ‘Big Lviv Talks’ show on Friday.
The official also spoke in favor of Ukrainians learning English instead. ………
The senior official went on to criticize pundits and experts who speak Russian while appearing on Ukrainian TV.
According to the 2001 census, approximately 14.3 million Ukrainians (29% of the population) speak Russian as their first language. Some other estimates put that number even higher.
The language is particularly widespread in the eastern and southern regions of the country. Ever since the Maidan coup back in 2014, Moscow has been consistently accusing the Ukrainian government of systematically discriminating against Russian-speakers.
The perceived violations of the linguistic minority’s rights were also cited by the secessionist movements in the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions, parts of which went on to become the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, respectively. ………………………. more https://www.rt.com/russia/565118-ukrainian-official-russian-language-eradication—
Scandalous conflicts of interest in Australia’s advice from USA on nuclear submarines.
To an extraordinary degree in recent years, Australia has relied on high-priced American consultants to decide which ships and submarines to buy and how to manage strategic acquisition projects. In addition to the six retired U.S. admirals, the government of Australia has hired three former civilian U.S. Navy leaders and three U.S. shipbuilding executives.
RETIRED U.S. ADMIRALS ADVISE AUSTRALIA ON DEAL FOR NUCLEAR SUBMARINES,
Washington Post, By Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones 19 Oct 22, Since 2015, Australia has hired the admirals and other former Navy officials as high-dollar consultants on shipbuilding,
Two retired U.S. admirals and three former U.S. Navy civilian leaders are playing critical but secretive roles as paid advisers to the government of Australia during its negotiations to acquire top-secret nuclear submarine technology from the United States and Britain.
The Americans are among a group of former U.S. Navy officials whom the Australian government has hired as high-dollar consultants to help transform its fleet of ships and submarines, receiving contracts worth as much as $800,000 a person, documents show.
All told, six retired U.S. admirals have worked for the Australian government since 2015, including one who served for two years as Australia’s deputy secretary of defense. In addition, a former U.S. secretary of the Navy has been a paid adviser to three successive Australian prime ministers.
A Washington Post investigation found that the former U.S. Navy officials have benefited financially from a tangle of overlapping interests in their work for a longtime ally of the United States. Some of the retired admirals have worked for the Australian government while simultaneously consulting for U.S. shipbuilders and the U.S. Navy, including on classified programs.
One of the six retired U.S. admirals had to resign this year as a part-time submarine consultant to the Australian government because of a potential conflict of interest over his full-time job as board chairman of a U.S. company that builds nuclear-powered subs.
Australia has leaned heavily on former U.S. Navy leaders for advice during its years-long push to upgrade its submarine fleet, a seesaw effort that has rattled long-standing alliances and remains beset by uncertainty. After abruptly canceling a pact with France last year, Australia is now trying to finalize a deal with the United States and Britain to build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines that could cost an estimated $72 billion to $106 billion, when adjusted for inflation over the length of the program.1
The outcome will have global ramifications and could alter the military balance of power among the United States, its allies and China. Helping the Australians build nuclear-powered submarines would enhance U.S. national security in Asia overall but could strain U.S. shipyards and delay the Pentagon’s own plans to add more subs to its fleet, according to U.S. military officials and defense analysts.
The Australian government has kept details of the Americans’ advice confidential. The Post was forced to sue the U.S. Navy and State Department under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain documents that shed light on the admirals’ involvement.
Under federal law, retired U.S. military personnel as well as reservists must obtain approval from the Pentagon and the State Department before they can accept money or jobs from foreign powers. The law applies to retirees — generally those who served at least 20 years in uniform — because they can be recalled to active duty. Records show that each of the six retired admirals followed the rules and received U.S. authorization to work for the government of Australia.
Between 2015 and 2021, the Navy received 95 applications from retirees to work for foreign governments — and approved every one, according to the documents that The Post obtained under FOIA. Government lawyers fought the release of the records, arguing that they were of little public interest and that disclosing basic details would violate the retirees’ privacy
For three of the retired admirals on Australia’s payroll, the U.S. Navy spent less than a week reviewing their paperwork before granting permission, the documents show. Two of the admirals applied to work for the Australians within one month of their retirement from the military.
Officials at the White House and the U.S. Navy declined to comment for this article.
Compared with the U.S. Navy, which has about 290 deployable ships and submarines, Australia’s fleet is small, with only 43 vessels. But Australia’s strategic importance looms large because of its proximity to the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as the world’s busiest shipping lanes, near the contested waters of the South China Sea.
If Australia acquires nuclear subs, it will become the seventh country to do so. With only 26 million people, Australia would be by far the least populous member of the club.
To an extraordinary degree in recent years, Australia has relied on high-priced American consultants to decide which ships and submarines to buy and how to manage strategic acquisition projects. In addition to the six retired U.S. admirals, the government of Australia has hired three former civilian U.S. Navy leaders and three U.S. shipbuilding executives.
Since 2015, those Americans have received consulting deals worth about $10 million combined, according to Australian contracting records posted online.
The six retired U.S. admirals who have worked for the Australian government declined to be interviewed or did not respond to requests for comment.
Some Australian lawmakers and defense analysts have expressed doubts about whether the U.S. consultants have been worth the expense. The Americans’ recommendations have influenced a series of ill-fated decisions by Australian officials that could delay the arrival of any new submarines until 2040, almost a decade later than planned.
“We were paying a lot of money [for advice] and it wasn’t obvious to me that we were getting value for money,” said Rex Patrick, a former member of the Australian Senate who has criticized the government’s submarine acquisition plans.
$6.8 million for advice on an aging fleet
In September 2021, after years of futile attempts to replace its aging fleet of six submarines, the government of Australia announced two decisions that surprised the world.
First, it abruptly canceled a long-standing $66 billion agreement to buy a dozen French diesel-powered subs. Then it revealed it had reached a historic accord instead to acquire nuclear propulsion technology for submarines from the United States and Britain……………………………………………….
As Australia negotiates with the United States, it is paying for expert advice from two people who once served in American uniforms: retired U.S. admirals William Hilarides and Thomas Eccles……………………………………….
The influx of American shipbuilding consultants in Australia began eight years ago…………………………………………………………………………………..
The Australian government created additional naval advisory committees — and stocked them with Americans.
In October 2016, Australian officials announced a new Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board with Winter, the former Navy secretary, serving as the chairman. He was joined by three retired admirals: Eccles, Hilarides and Sullivan.13………………………………………
Marcus Hellyer, a senior defense analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Canberra, said the advisory panels could have used more European perspectives to balance out those of the Americans. Unlike the U.S. Navy, he noted, the Australian navy does not design its own ships from scratch and is accustomed to relying on foreign models.
“It’s a very different kettle of fish to the U.S. system,” he said.
A carousel of consultants
By 2019, Australia’s landmark submarine deal with France appeared to be in jeopardy. Delays plagued the design phase. Projected costs rose. Doubts spread about whether the Shortfin Barracudas, which the Australians dubbed their Attack class of subs, would be capable of deterring China’s more imposing undersea fleet.
The American carousel of hired help continued to spin. Sullivan, the retired vice admiral, left the shipbuilding advisory board in 2019. That same year, Johnson resigned as Australia’s deputy defense secretary. But the Australian government added three more U.S. civilian consultants to its advisory panels.
Australian lawmakers grew impatient with the submarine program’s delays and irritated by the Australian government’s unwillingness to let its highly paid U.S. advisers answer questions.
The American carousel of hired help continued to spin. Sullivan, the retired vice admiral, left the shipbuilding advisory board in 2019. That same year, Johnson resigned as Australia’s deputy defense secretary. But the Australian government added three more U.S. civilian consultants to its advisory panels.
Australian lawmakers grew impatient with the submarine program’s delays and irritated by the Australian government’s unwillingness to let its highly paid U.S. advisers answer questions.
‘It’s confidential’
In June 2021, worried about the fate of the submarine agreement with France, the Australian Senate insisted on hearing directly from Hilarides and senior Australian defense officials.
Lawmakers wanted answers: Had the American consultants urged the Australian government to consider modifying, or even killing, the Attack-class submarine deal?
Testifying remotely from the United States, Hilarides was as tight-lipped as Winter had been.
“Because that advice is used to support government decision-making, it’s confidential,” Hilarides said.
Three months later, the Australian government canceled the submarine contract with the French. It also announced a new three-way defense alliance with the United States and Britain, including an agreement to admit Australia to the exclusive club of nations with nuclear-powered submarines.
Only four other countries — China, Russia, France and India — operate nuclear subs. Brazil is trying to develop nuclear reactors for submarines, but its progress has been slow.
Left undecided was whether Australia would buy U.S. or British nuclear subs, and where they would be built. But defense analysts predicted the United States would probably win out.
Australian lawmakers soon began to raise questions about the American consultants and their connections to the U.S. submarine industry.
Donald, the retired four-star admiral on Australia’s Submarine Advisory Committee, has also served as chairman of the board of Huntington Ingalls Industries since 2020. The defense contractor, based in Newport News, Va., is the maker of Virginia-class submarines, the same model that the government of Australia was now thinking about buying.
At a parliamentary hearing in October 2021, a senior Australian defense official acknowledged that Donald’s role with Huntington presented a potential conflict of interest. But the official said the Australian government and Donald hadn’t yet decided if it was necessary for him to resign as a consultant.
Donald remained on the committee for six more months. In his written response to questions, Donald said he resigned in April to avoid any conflicts after “it became evident” his committee “would need to become involved in providing independent critical assessment” on acquiring nuclear-powered subs.
But Australia is still paying other Americans for advice on how to negotiate with the U.S. government.
Winter, the former U.S. Navy secretary, registered with the U.S. Justice Department in September 2021 as a foreign lobbyist working for the Australian prime minister’s office. In his disclosure form, Winter said he would be paid $6,000 a day, plus expenses, to support Australia during its nuclear submarine talks with Washington.15………………………………………………………
Australia will almost certainly have to buy its first nuclear subs off American or British production lines.
U.S. Navy and British Royal Navy officials, however, say their shipyards are booked solid making their own submarines. The only way to squeeze in orders from Australia would be to spend billions expanding U.S. or British shipyards.
Hellyer, the Australian defense analyst, said it is hard to envision a scenario under which Australia would receive its first nuclear submarine before 2040. With the Collins-class vessels scheduled for retirement a decade from now, that could leave Australia without submarines for eight years.
“I can’t really see what the way forward is at the moment,” he said. “The whole thing has been completely disastrous.”
About this story
Photos used in the card illustrations from Department of Defense.
Editing by David Fallis and Sarah Childress. Research by Alice Crites. Copy editing by Martha Murdock and Christopher Rickett. Photo editing by Robert Miller and Wendy Galietta. Video editing by Jason Aldag. Design and development by Frank Hulley-Jones, Stephanie Hays and Talia Trackim. Design editing by Christian Font and Matt Callahan. Project management by Wendy Galietta. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/australia-nuclear-submarines-us-admirals/?itid=ap_craigwhitlock
Elon Musk – arguably the world’s biggest conman and egoist
Earta Caln 19 Oct 22, In addition to being the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk is also the world’s biggest conman and egoist. He lied about providing starlight internet to ukraine. It was completely subsidized, by the US govt.he didn’t pay a dime to get it going as he has said. Musk lies about perfecting completely autonomous cars that continue, to catch fire and cause accidents. His Mars colonization is one of the greatest jokes and cons in history.
Musk has birthed nine children in collaboration with four different uteruses His wife’s, his girlfriend’s, a surrogate’s, and a senior employee.
Elon musk brags about feeding his his babies fukushima applesausce!
This month, Musk diverted additional attention to himself. There haven’t been enough headlines about his on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter, his alleged romantic interludes, his dope smoking on Joe Rogan, his Tesla overpromising and all the other publicity stunts to stoke his overloaded ego. Now he has said he has drafted himself as a citizen-diplomat to end the Russian war on Ukraine. Putin says he is lying.
Musk’s diplomatic grandstand, with putin would be admirable, if there were any substance to it. Putin denies it.
Nobody accused Musk of conducting his own foreign policy in late February when he tweeted the news that he had activated his Starlink satellite internet service over Ukraine that was payed for by the usa govt, not him, as he lied about it. Because he is the ultimate govt welfare parasite who receive billions from the usa military industrial complex from nasa for his self-serving space x projects and finally from his boondoggle Mars colonization lies and tin can Mars rocket, that would not get past the moon.
His peace plan, bs and toadying is simplistic grandstanding that hasnt killed anyone, but will go nowhere like his other conjobs , whereas Starlink’s activation likely sent thousands of Russian soldiers to their graves by giving the Ukrainian military a decided advantage over its Russian invaders.
Radionuclides are the most mutagenic chemicals on earth! Millions of times more genotoxic than their closest, chemotoxic relatives. Elon musk brags about feeding his his babies, fukushima applesausce!
The never-never frontier
Musk will never have colonies in space. First of all, there is too much cosmic radiation, in space. No hull can protect humans from it, from Cosmic radiation. Cosmic radiation is a hundred times more penetrating, than gamma radiation.
Gamma radiation and neutron bursts are the most deadly radiation, on earth. One concentrated burst, of gamma radiation,, will kill you.
Most astronauts are damaged, by their time in space. There are no known propulsion systems, that will feasibly take large groups of people to Mars. Musk is such a liar and con. His tin can Mars rocket will never go much anywhere. Musk wants to develop nuclear fission drive for Mars colonization and use nuclear bombs to geoengineer Mars for hellsake! Musk also proposes nuclear propulsion for Mars colonization.
Nuclear propulsion is a mIndscrewingly evil joke, that would probably irradiate, any passengers to Mars to death, before they got to Mars. Any attempt at space colonization will finish the earths atmosphere, from the massive propellants pollution, needed to multiply shuttle material into orbit for his grandiose schemes. The earths atmosphere is so chemically polluted, it would be ruined ruined not to mention, the accelerating effects on climate change. Atmospheric pollution, is so bad from chemical pollution that it is almost unbreathable in many areas on earth.
Musk wants to put more nuclear reactors in space!
Radionuclides are millions of times more, genotoxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic,.and teratogenic
more so, than the closest nitrogen mustard, or any chemical mutagen and woman’s reproductive systems are a hundred times more sensitive to the than mens.
Musk says people in Japan and the world need to have more babies because, the birth rate is going down. He never brings up the fact about how polluted Japan and the world world are now with hormone interrupting toxic industrial chemicals and radionuclides. Radionuclides are the most mutagenic chemicals on earth! Millions of times more genotoxic than their closest, chemotoxic relatives. Elon musk brags about feeding his his babies fukushima applesausce!
The ongoing fukushima catastrophe, in japan continues to go on spewing radionuclides into the environment and ocean. 1 million snowcrabs just disappeared in the artic this year and their will be no snowcrab harvests in alaska, this year.
In Japan, their solution, and one applauded by this psychotic out of touch billionaires Musk and Bill Gates, is to build more nuclear reactors and flood the already overlooked , nuclearwaste ridden earth, with more nuclear waste .
The old fascist Boobs in Japan that are pushing more reactors, are the ultimate nuclear criminals. They are a scripted part of Japan’s imminent collapse. One more meltdown in Japan, will mean acute radiation poisoning and death for half of Japan. That is because, the radionuclide prevalence will be large and “undiluted” enough, to cause visible and widespread death in Japan.
https://dunrenard.wordpress.com/2022/10/08/japan-set-to-extend-maximum-lifespan-of-nuclear-plants-beyond-60-yrs
The Japanese continue to open air burn nuclear waste from fukishima. In various parts of japan.
Japanese society continues to have serious problems, with the large initial spewing of radionuclides, as far south as Yokohama , as far East as Fukui, as far north as Hokkaido They have actually been burning nuclear waste from fukushima and spreading, the most deadly radionuclides, all over japan since the initial meltdowns occured and now they want to release millions of gallons, of more radionucled water that they have accumulated, since fukushima into the ocean.
Fukushima continues to pour deadly radionuclides into the environment. Birth defect statistics are suppressed. Cancer rates suppressed. There is putrid malaise, in most of japan.
Musk supports fascism in Japan and elsewhere. He wants to put Trump back on twitter. He supported PM Abe the greatest fukushima denier and suppresor of all time. Musk supports nuclear power in China and everywhere! Abe was a nasty fascist nationalist. Bill Gates and Trump were best buds with abe .
Read more: Elon Musk – arguably the world’s biggest conman and egoistModern Fascism, is deeply linked to organized crime and corruption. It is the last stage of political organization, in corrupt, industrial societies. It is antidemocratic. It denies, climate change and industrial pollution. Fascism scapegoats groups of people, as the cause of problems. Fascism ignores the results of climate change, industrial pollution, and declining life expectancies, in declining industrial nations. Fascism denies these industrial ills, that cause climate change and dangerous levels of heavy metal and chemical pollution. In fact, fascists, deregulate toxic substance controls and bans.
Fascists, want to increase fossil fuel extraction and, nuclear energy production.
Suicidal denial, projection, and irrationality, in a very sick society.
Turning to fascism, signals the death-knell, for a decaying, dying nationality, in the anthropocene age because, of it’s reactionary and antidemocratic nature.
Italy’s mafias, have dumped concentrated high-level, nuclear waste, in municipalities dumps in Italy, for the past 4 decades. Heavy metal pollution like lead, arsenic, radionuclides, and mercury is widespread and has high prevalence in all industrial societies. Arsenic and radium, comes from car exhaust, from burning fossil fuels.
Lead and uranium are in water, from fracking and leaded pipes.
Mercury and radiocuclides in foods, comes from years of mercury pollution, nuclear waste, nuclear accidents, and nuclear power.
High toxic pollution levels exist, in most capitalist and mixed-economy consumption-based, societies.
The metals cause physical disability and dementia, in already failing societies.
Western countries descending into fascism already suffer parliamentry stalemate, austerity economics, economic decline, the interference of other countries in their politics and economies. Pollution, climate change, and fascism, are sure to lead to the accelerated, suicidal decline of Italy.
It is a society that will only decline further, with such an irrational political system, until it implodes in this anthropocene age, as Japan is, under the weight of Fukushima. As Ukraine did, under the weight of chernobyl.
Beware of Nuclear False Flag Blaming Russia
The video below – I do find their smart-aleck tone and flippancy rather annoying.
BUT – when you listen to what Zelensky says – these guys making fun of him do have a point.
Zelinsky wants to the US to pre-emptively nuke Russia
E. Michael Jones says if someone sets off a nuke, it will be the US, not the Russians, https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/beware-of-nuclear-false-flag-blaming-russia/ KEVIN BARRETT • OCTOBER 9, 2022,
Dr. E. Michael Jones issued a disturbing warning on this week’s False Flag Weekly News:
Col. (Douglas) MacGregor was on some platform yesterday saying that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Russians are planning to use nuclear weapons. They don’t need to. They have overwhelming military superiority at the moment as they’re building up for the fall offensive. So it seems to me what we’re really talking about here is America setting off a nuclear bomb and attributing it to Russia. In case you didn’t notice, they did this already with the pipeline, so why wouldn’t they do it with a nuclear weapon?
Jones’ warning comes amid signs that the US leadership is actively considering nuclear war. Joe Biden recently announced that the world is on the brink of nuclear apocalypse. His government seems to be preparing for that eventuality:
On Wednesday, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it would spend $290 million to secure an undisclosed quantity of Amgen’s blood disorder drug Nplate, which has been approved to treat blood cell injuries caused by acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in both children and adults.
The Union of Concerned Scientists agrees that a civilization-ending nukefest is closer than ever. Their Doomsday Clock is currently set to “doom’s doorstep”— 100 seconds from midnight. That is the worst “doom setting” since the Doomsday Clock was inaugurated in 1947.
Biden and the mainstream media are pre-emptively blaming Putin. They say that Russia is losing, growing desperate, and likely to resort to a nuclear strike.
But militarily experienced analysts like Col. Douglas MacGregor and Larry Johnson beg to differ. They point out that the vaunted Ukrainian advances are relatively insignificant. As Johnson writes:
Rolling across wide open plains represents a feel good moment, but this territory is not defensible once Russia decides to counter attack…Russia is baiting Ukraine to take territory and then face the task of trying to take a city Russia holds, such as Kherson…Ukraine will have to conduct a frontal assault on the city of Kherson and, in order to do this, will have to mass troops and equipment that will be easy targets for Russian artillery, missiles and bombs.
If Russia were really losing, wouldn’t the sanctions-flouting nations representing 85% of Earth’s population quickly capitulate to the US, cut off their trade with Russia, and beg for Uncle Sam’s forgiveness? And wouldn’t the Saudis and the rest of OPEC+ side with Biden rather than Putin? But that isn’t happening. On the contrary, it seems that most world leaders are betting on the Russians, not the Americans. They know the actual military score. They know that the pre-war Ukrainian military is mostly destroyed, that Ukraine has taken atrocious losses, and that the mad dashes against undefended empty plains are a desperate PR stunt, not a real threat to the success of the Russian SMO. The Russians are currently massing for their winter offensive, and when it comes, Ukraine will lose everything it has gained and then some, setting the stage for a decisive resolution to the conflict.
So it is the Ukrainians and their American neocon backers—not the Russians—who are desperate. How desperate? Well, Zelinsky wants to the US to pre-emptively nuke Russia, that’s how desperate.
US Government Secretly Injected Humans With Plutonium
“Secrets” from the past keep coming to light, but this definitely takes the cake, How the government experimented with plutonium on humans
HISTORY OF YESTERDAY, by Andrei Tapalaga | Oct 14, 2022
he U.S. government had always experimented on its own people with various vaccines, weaponry, or other dangerous materials during the early 20th century. However, one of the most shocking instances that not many people are aware of is the time such innocent citizens were injected with plutonium to see what would happen if a human assimilated such radioactive material.
It all started with the famous and infamous Manhattan Project and with the people working on it. In the effort of building the first atomic bomb, scientists had to understand how radioactive material would affect a human being, this is why they carried out various experiments on labor workers that were part of the project, in most instances without their consent.
he U.S. government had always experimented on its own people with various vaccines, weaponry, or other dangerous materials during the early 20th century. However, one of the most shocking instances that not many people are aware of is the time such innocent citizens were injected with plutonium to see what would happen if a human assimilated such radioactive material.
It all started with the famous and infamous Manhattan Project and with the people working on it. In the effort of building the first atomic bomb, scientists had to understand how radioactive material would affect a human being, this is why they carried out various experiments on labor workers that were part of the project, in most instances without their consent.
A new resource
Plutonium was first introduced on December 14, 1940, by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, Joseph W. Kennedy, Edwin M. McMillan, and Arthur C. Wahl by deuteron bombardment of uranium in the 60-inch cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley. The potential that these new nuclear resources had was incredible but very difficult to control. Experts within the field didn’t yet understand how harmful this material was, that is why they suggested further investigation before being used to produce anything.
An article explaining the discovery was prepared by the team and sent to the Physical Review to be published in March 1941, but the paper was withdrawn after the subsequent discovery that an isotope of the new element, plutonium-239, could undergo fission and be used as fuel for an atomic bomb……………….
The Manhattan project was mainly focused on building atomic weaponry, but a small portion was also dedicated to the effect this new resource had on humans. Historians talking about the Manhattan project never focus on this part, but one has in very small detail. Historian Eileen Welsome had written in her book “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War”(published 2010) the sort of experiments that have been done on U.S. citizens.
Injecting Plutonium into people
Some of the negative effects of this radioactive material were already known, but little caution was taken by those working with plutonium. The constant exposure of some scientists had led to medical implications. A lot of plutonium was carried around which led to a large scale of contamination within public zones.
In order for scientists to know for sure what they are working with, they started new research which planned to find out the negative health effects it can have. They started slowly, using rats to study the toxicity level of the plutonium radiation. The results were quite biased and unreliable, therefore in 1945, they started experimenting on humans.
As not much was known in the world of science about plutonium, the U.S. government decided to keep everything secret by not even telling those tested on about the experiment or what they are tested on. A total of 18 people between the ages of 4 and 69 were injected with plutonium between 1945 to 1947. Every single person injected was shortly diagnosed with a terminal illness!
One of the subjects was Albert Stevens, a painter from Ohio who was in his early 50s. In his late 40s, he was diagnosed with cancer and that is why he visited this new center which he was told was treating cancer. He was told by the medics that he had no chance to survive, but there was a possible cure. The “cure” which they gave him was a huge dose of plutonium (he was never told what was in the syringe).
After some time when the next set of medical analyses were done, the scientists actually thought that the plutonium removed all the cancerous cells, but in fact, Albert never had cancer, just a very bad gastric ulcer. Albert lived until 1966 when he died at the age of 79 from heart disease. It is believed that heart disease was caused by a high dose of plutonium. His corpse was incinerated and the ashes were taken by the scientists for further research………. https://historyofyesterday.com/us-government-secretly-injected-humans-with-plutonium/—
World-Wide Backing as Parliament Encircled for Assange
Protests around the world supported the human chain that formed around the British parliament in support of an imprisoned publisher, reports Mohamed Elmaazi
By Mohamed Elmaazi, in London, Consortium News, 10 Oct 22,
Thousands of supporters of Julian Assange descended upon London’s Palace of Westminster to form a human chain around the Houses of Parliament in support of the embattled WikiLeaks publisher on Saturday.
Meanwhile, the London action was backed up by rallies in Melbourne, Australia, Washington D.C., San Francisco and other locales.
In the British capital, men and women from a myriad of backgrounds attended the demonstration from across the U..K, and beyond, including from France, Germany and the United States. It was the first known human chain to surround the Houses of Parliament.
Stella Assange, wife of the imprisoned publisher, said around 5,000 people showed up to form the chain despite a nation-wide strike announced by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transportation Workers (RMT). Other estimates put the crowd as high as 7,000.
The chain extended over Westminster Bridge to Lambeth on the other side of the River Thames and then along the south bank and over Lambeth Bridge, through Victoria Tower Gardens to the front of Parliament, a distance of about 2.5 kilometers. Hundreds of other supporters also attended the demonstration, albeit without joining the human chain.
“The Human chain is self-proving” Stella Assange said. “Julian has enormous support and much more. He has millions of people around the world who are disgusted by the injustice that is unfolding.”
Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader, British actor Russell Brand, Iraqi-British hip hop artist Lowkey, former counsel to the Ecuadorian Embassy Fidel Narvaez, Craig Murray, the former British diplomat and WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnnson were among those who formed part of the chain. Members of France’s Yellow Vest movement also took part.
Corbyn said:
“Julian Assange is a journalist who told the uncomfortable truth all around the world of what happened in Iraq, what happened in Afghanistan, what happened in Syria, Libya, environmental destruction, the power and interface of big business and arms companies with governments. That truth made a lot of very powerful people very uncomfortable so the U.S. has tried to charge him under the Espionage Act.
If we believe in free speech, if we believe in independent, democratic journalism, then Julian Assange should be freed from Belmarsh and not removed to the United States. Today we’ve shown the levels of public support for Julian by having this huge human chain all around Parliament despite the obvious transport difficulties today because of the rail strike. Internationally there is huge support for Julian Assange. … So my message to journalists around the world is, take up your chosen profession to take on a responsibility to tell the truth without fear nor favor. Tell the truth about Julian and say to the British government, refuse the extradition.”
…………………………………………………………………………………. Radio Silence
The mainstream British media ignored or underreported the extraordinary event. The Independent said only “hundreds” of people showed up, as did The Daily Mail. The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times had no report at all. The BBC hasn’t had a story about Assange since July 1.
Overcoming the Strike
The event was organized by WikiLeaks’ official Don’t Extradite Assange (DEA) campaign with the support of the NUJ as well as the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). The IFJ, along with the EFJ and NUJ, represents “600,000 media professionals from 187 trade unions and associations in more than 140 countries”, its website says……………
The cancellation of trains across England likely reduced the overall attendance figures in the end, with people noting their desire to attend on social media but also the difficulty of getting there and back.
The event was publicized via social media, adverts in widely read newspapers like The Guardian, Evening Standard and Camden News Journal and as well as via volunteers leafleting across the U.K.
Actions Around the World
There were at least 21 other solidarity events held in cities across the world including in Washington D.C.; Ontario, Canada; Rio de Janero, Brazil; Hamburg, Germany; Paris, France; Pretoria, South Africa; Melbourne, Australia and Wellington New Zealand.
In solidarity with the London events, about 5,000 people crowded across Prince’s Bridge in the central business district of Melbourne, where they heard Assange’s father and brother, John and Gabriel Shipton, address supporters. In San Francisco Assange defenders crowded Harry Bridges Plaza to hear speakers support Assange.
In Washington about 300 protestors with a 240-foot yellow ribbon walked around the Department of Justice building, inside of which the prosecution of Assange is being managed.
Speaking at the ensuing rally in front of the DOJ’s doors on Pennsylvania Avenue, former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, said:
“The more you look at this case, the more you become traumatized. This is an assault not only on freedom of the press, it makes a complete mockery of our judicial system, it’s an attack on human rights, it is absolutely unacceptable.”
Ben Cohen, a founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, said: “According to the U.S. government, publishing the truth has become a crime. They are literally killing the messenger.”
Scott Ritter, military analyst, asked: “What has Julian Assange given us?” He has “defined the facts, reported the facts, turned them over to the people so they can judge the facts and hold people accountable for the facts.”
Comic, activist and radio host Randy Credico said, “This is going to be a very tough road to hoe going forward, because there is a lot of apathy and a lot of antipathy towards Julian Assange here in D.C. We are up against a mammoth force. People gotta know how important this is.”
C.I.A. whistleblower John Kiriakou called on the crowd to be outside the courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia every day, should Assange be extradited there.
Where the Case Stands
On Aug. 26 Assange’s lawyers filed Perfected Grounds of Appeal with the High Court and are currently waiting to hear whether they will be permitted to present their arguments that District Judge Vanessa Baraitser erred when ruling against all but one of his grounds opposing extradition to the U.S.
Among the grounds for appeal argued is that Assange is being prosecuted for speech protected under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, that he is being punished for his political views and opinions, that the US government has “misrepresented the core facts” of the case to the UK courts and that the request itself is an “abuse of process.”
The appeal also challenges then-Home Secretary Priti Patel’s decision to grant extradition on the basis that it violates Article 4 of the U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty which prohibits extradition where the prosecution is “politically motivated” or where the alleged crime in question is a “political offense.”
If extradited to the U.S., Assange faces up to 175 years in prison for his role in receiving and publishing government documents without authorization, an act which journalists and publishers around the world engage in on a daily basis.
Joe Lauria in Washington and Cathy Vogan in London contributed to this report. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/09/world-wide-backing-as-parliament-encircled-for-assange/
Julian Assange tests positive for COVID-19
WSWS, Thomas Scripps 10 Oct 22,
Julian Assange has contracted COVID-19. He received the test result Saturday, on the day several thousand people formed a human chain around Parliament in London to protest his persecution.
His wife, Stella, told the press, “I am obviously worried about him and the next few days will be crucial for his general health. He is now locked in his cell for 24 hours a day.” She said Assange had been feeling ill throughout the week and developed a fever and cough on Friday.
Assange’s infection confirms the repeated warnings of medical professionals and his legal team that his health and life are endangered by his wrongful imprisonment. It must lend renewed urgency to the demand for his immediate release.
Just months before the pandemic, over 100 doctors signed an open letter to the British government warning that Assange’s life was at risk while he was kept in HMP Belmarsh—the UK’s top-security prison. When COVID-19 began to spread rapidly throughout Britain, one of the lead signatories, Dr Stephen Frost, told the World Socialist Web Site, “Given what we know about this case, Mrs Assange is right to be concerned. Julian Assange, because he is immuno-compromised, following years of arbitrary detention first in the Ecuadorian Embassy and latterly in Belmarsh prison, is necessarily at higher risk of contracting any viral or bacterial infection, including infection by coronavirus.
“He should be released on bail immediately, so that he can access the health care which he urgently requires. The UK government is effectively playing Russian roulette with Julian Assange’s life.”
Another doctor, Lissa Johnson, explained, “As long ago as 2015 medical and human rights experts warned that anything more than a trivial illness could prove fatal for Julian Assange. His health is even more fragile now, and the coronavirus only renders those warnings more urgent and more dire.”
She added, “If Julian Assange does succumb to coronavirus or any other catastrophic illness in prison, it will not be an accident. It will be a foreseeable result of prolonged psychological torture and wilful medical neglect.”
…………………………. By the end of October 2020, Ministry of Justice figures showed that 1,529 inmates had been infected, 600 in the previous month alone. At least 32 prisoners had been killed by the virus.
In November, a wave of infections hit Belmarsh prison. Stella Assange revealed, “I’ve been told the number of people infected with COVID on Julian’s house block is 56, including staff.” This was on a block with fewer than 200 inmates.
Assange and the other inmates were placed under an indefinite lockdown, kept in their cells 24 hours a day. His lawyer Edward Fitzgerald had warned at his bail application of the “risk to his mental health and his human contact” posed by lockdown procedures. At Assange’s extradition hearing that autumn, his defence team presented extensive medical evidence of the damage done to his mental health and of the risk of suicide.
……………………………. Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, examined Assange with a medical team inside Belmarsh Prison in May 2019 and concluded that he showed symptoms of psychological torture. He commented on his illness, “Assange’s stroke is no surprise. As we warned after examining him, unless relieved of the constant pressure of isolation, arbitrariness and persecution, his health would enter a downward spiral endangering his life. [The] UK is literally torturing him to death
Melzer added, “As Assange clearly was not medically fit to attend his own trial through videolink, how can they even discuss whether he is fit to be exposed to a show trial in the US, a country that refuses to prosecute its torturers and war criminals but persecutes whistleblowers and journalists?”
Saturday’s protest was the largest yet organised in defence of Assange, attracting a broader range of ages and social backgrounds. It indicated the potential that exists for a mass, global campaign to secure the WikiLeaks founder’s freedom and safety. ………… https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/10/picp-o10.html
NYT: Senior Ukrainian official confirms Ukraine orchestrated truck bomb attack on Crimean Bridge
Chris Menahan, InformationLiberation, Oct. 09, 2022,
The New York Times reported Saturday evening that a “senior Ukrainian official” corroborated Russian reports that Ukraine was behind the truck bomb attack on the Crimean bridge which killed at least three civilians.
From The New York Times, “Blast on Crimean Bridge Deals Blow to Russian War Effort in Ukraine”:
The blast and fire sent part of the 12-mile Kerch Strait Bridge tumbling into the sea and killed at least three people, according to the Russian authorities. A senior Ukrainian official corroborated Russian reports that Ukraine was behind the attack. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a government ban on discussing the blast, added that Ukraine’s intelligence services had orchestrated the explosion, using a bomb loaded onto a truck being driven across the bridge.
[…] It was unclear if the driver of the truck, who died in the blast, was aware there were explosives inside. In video captured by a surveillance camera on the bridge, a huge fireball is seen, seeming to consume several vehicles. A small sedan and a tractor-trailer truck driving side by side appear at the epicenter of the blast. The explosion caused two sections of the bridge to partly collapse.
The truck driver was identified by Russian media as 51-year-old Mahir Yusubov of Azerbaijan.
Yusubov reportedly received an order to transport fertilizer through the internet and may have had his truck wired with explosives by Ukrainian special-ops units who used him as an unwitting suicide bomber.…………………………… more http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63391
Ukraine is preparing a law on full control over the media, as the last vestiges of press freedom disappear in Kiev
Rt.com By Olga Sukharevskaya, ex-Ukrainian diplomat, 8 Oct 22,
A bill approved by the Verkhovna Rada will finally finish off freedom of speech in Ukraine.
While fierce battles continue to rage between the Ukrainian and Russian armies in Donbass, Kherson Region, and Zaporozhye, the Kiev regime is busy eradicating the last vestiges of freedom of speech in the country.
On August 30, Ukraine’s rubber-stamp parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed a bill on the media at the first reading. Despite the numerous changes that the 300-page document has undergone since President Vladimir Zelensky’s team developed and submitted it a few years ago, its essence remains unchanged. If it becomes law, the authorities’ power over virtually all outlets will be essentially limitless.
The main danger this bill presents is that it grants government agencies the authority to block internet resources without any court proceedings, and revoke licenses from broadcast and print media solely on the basis of complaints. This huge power would be vested in the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting.
No room in the EU
Ukrainian journalists have been criticizing this bill since the first version appeared in 2018, asserting that it abolishes both freedom of speech and freedom of the press. OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir called that version of the law “a blatant violation of freedom of speech,” stating that its adoption “could jeopardize pluralism in the media market, impose additional costs on the media, and negatively affect the reflection of a diversity of ideas and opinions.”
Criticism of the bill from both the OSCE and Ukrainian journalists had an effect. In 2020, it was sent for revision, but the changes only include some clarifications concerning gender equality and coverage of sexual orientations.
At the same time, it still contains a ban on publishing any messages contradicting the official government line on military issues. It is likewise forbidden to cover speeches made by officials of the ‘aggressor country’ [meaning Russia] or cast former USSR party functionaries in a positive light. For example, including Ukraine’s own Leonid Brezhnev.
The law would also hold foreign media responsible for any of its audiovisual content available in Ukraine. Moreover, social networks, including foreign ones, will be obliged to remove any material the National Council deems undesirable. The deadlines for removing ‘incorrect’ content or replacing it with ‘correct’ material have also been tightened. Among the ‘offenses’ that can get a media outlet banned is distributing programs in which any participant is on the ‘list of persons who pose a threat to the national media space of Ukraine.’ This is compiled by the National Council itself and does not require anyone’s consent.
Otherwise, the essence and spirit of the bill is preserved, including severe censorship of “objectionable” media. The American Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) didn’t call on the Verkhovna Rada to reject Bill No. 2693-D ‘On Media’ for nothing.
Maya Sever, president of the European Federation of Journalists, has bluntly stated that it means compulsory media regulation “fully controlled by the government worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes.” She is convinced that “a state that would apply such provisions simply has no place in the European Union.
From Gongadze to Shariy
Kiev’s war on journalists did not begin today. In 2000, there was the abduction and death of Georgiy Gongadze, the creator of the ‘Ukrainian Truth’ website, who harshly criticized corruption in the country’s highest echelons of power. A number of high-ranking officials were accused of being involved in the murder of the journalist, who then-President Leonid Kuchma viewed as objectionable, but the investigation revealed the involvement of only four perpetrators. One of these was the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ main Criminal Investigation Department, General Pukach, who allegedly gave the order to liquidate Gongadze.
Nevertheless, there are many grey areas in the case. It was highly politicized and used as one of the pretenses for demanding a change of power during the days of the Orange Revolution.
Anatoly Shariy, who was engaged in high-profile investigative journalism for a number of Ukrainian publications from 2008 to 2011, almost shared Gongadze’s fate……………………………..
It is noteworthy that Shariy’s name has also been brought up in current discussions of the scandalous media bill. In justifying her support for the legislation, the head of the Board of the National Association of Ukrainian Media, Tatiana Kotyuzhinskaya, mentioned the authorities’ desire to limit the influence of Shariy and other bloggers in Ukraine’s infosphere.
It’s possible that, among other things, the reason the blogger’s activities have met with such disapproval was his publication of screenshots from messages sent by the Consul of Ukraine in Hamburg, Vasily Marushchinets, which contained calls for “death to anti-fascists,” comments like “it’s honorable to be a fascist,” and statements in the spirit of “Jews declared war on Germany back in March of 1934.” It was only after this that Nazi views in Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry became widely known to the public.
Threats, sanctions, arrests, attacks, and murders
Although the Ukrainian media has always had to fight the authorities’ attempts to restrict its activities, it was the Western-backed 2014 Euromaidan that triggered systematic persecution of press freedom in general, and individual journalists in particular.
Less than a month after the coup the new government tried to close down one of the two most widely read Ukrainian weeklies specializing in news analysis, ‘2000’, which took a negative view of the political forces that had violently seized power. The newspaper’s editorial offices were ransacked, and many left-wing outlets were shuttered. In particular, these included Borotba, as well as Rabochaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief ended up in the dungeons of Ukraine’s secret police, the SBU.
In the same year, Konstantin Dolgov, the editor-in-chief of ‘Glagol’, an online publication based in Kharkov, and Andrey Borodavka, a journalist, were arrested and persecuted by the new authorities. Olga Kievskaya, editor-in-chief of the ‘Anti-Orange’ website, was forced to emigrate due to threats ………………….
The vast majority of these cases were not covered in the Ukrainian media because these people were immediately declared “subversive elements” based on the so-called “moratorium on criticism of the authorities,” which the authorities announced themselves back in March of 2014, long before the start of hostilities in Donbass.
In 2018, Igor Guzhva, the head of the ‘strana.ua’ website, was forced to flee to Austria, where he received political asylum. The authorities’ efforts to prosecute him began after his investigations into Pyotr Poroshenko’s scandalous commercial activities. Later, under Zelensky, Ukraine imposed personal sanctions on Guzhva, and his website was blocked extrajudicially, while he himself, along with one of his journalists, Svetlana Kryukova, were entered into the ‘Register of State Traitors’. According to the head of Ukraine’s Union of Journalists, Sergey Tomilenko, these sanctions are political, and the European Federation of Journalists issued a statement condemning these actions as “a threat to the press, freedom, and media pluralism in the country.”
But not all Ukrainian journalists managed to emigrate, even after surviving prison. In April of 2015, the famous Ukrainian writer-historian and journalist Oles Buzina died at the hands of ‘Patriots of Ukraine’ after receiving threats and attacks due to his views. Despite appeals from the UN, the authorities have hampered the investigation in every possible way, and the murder suspects are still at large, evidence notwithstanding. In July of 2016, another journalist, Pavel Sheremet, was killed by participants in Kiev’s ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ (ATO) and supporters of the “purity of the white race.”
“Government critics, journalists, and non-profit organizations have come under increasing pressure from the authorities and far-right groups, which have embarked on the path of infringing freedom of speech and freedom of association under the pretext of countering Russian aggression,” Amnesty International said in a 2017 report.
No room for foreigners
Since the first half of 2014, even calling for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in the east of the country has been considered a crime in Ukraine. In particular, Ruslan Kotsaba, a journalist who refused to be drafted due to the consequences of a stroke, was imprisoned for this reason. In fairness, it should be noted that he was acquitted by an Appeals Court after a year and a half of imprisonment.
A few years before the start of Russia’s military operation, journalists whose material was published in the Russian media were subject to criminal prosecution…………………………………………….
The OSCE is aware, but Ukraine’s authorities don’t care
In 2018, a report was published by OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir in which he asserts that he had handed the Ukrainian authorities more than 20 statements and appeals collected from July 6 to November 21, 2018, concerning freedom of speech and the rights of journalists in Ukraine. ………………………………………
No room for freedom of speech in Ukraine
We have specifically chosen the report of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, which was published quite some time ago, to demonstrate that the attitude of the Ukrainian authorities towards freedom of speech and the right of journalists to freely express their own opinions have long-standing roots, and their persecution is systemic. Any similar report covering any period from 2014 to the present would contain no fewer instances of violations of these rights and freedoms. The whole list would require a decent-sized book to document………………………………………………………………………….
The fact that the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine supported the bill ‘On Media’ gives reason to fear that the situation for the country’s journalists will become even worse. Once again, the Zelensky regime has confirmed that it’s not building a democratic, but an authoritarian or even totalitarian state, which has no room for such concepts as freedom of speech and the press. https://www.rt.com/russia/564217-ukraine-vs-freedom-of-speech/
7,000 form human chain in London to protest treatment of Assange
WSWS 9 Oct 22, Around 7,000 people formed a human chain around the Houses of Parliament in the UK Saturday, protesting the British government’s persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The chain ran continuously from Parliament Square along the Palace of Westminster, across Lambeth Bridge, along South Bank to Westminster bridge, then back over the Thames river to Parliament Square—roughly two miles. The event was organised by the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign.
Assange is currently held in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London. The United States government is seeking his extradition under the Espionage Act for exposing the war crimes and human rights abuses of US imperialism and its allies. It has plotted his assassination and levelled charges which carry a life sentence in solitary confinement. The WikiLeaks founder is seeking to overturn orders by the British judiciary and the home secretary approving his extradition. His legal team filed an appeal with the High Court in August.
Stella Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher’s wife, told protestors on Saturday, “Julian is suffering and part of the point of making this human chain was to show that what is happening here is not a legal process, it’s not a legitimate process. It is the instrumentalisation of the law in order to persecute a person, a journalist, in order to keep him in prison indefinitely.
“People around the world are witnessing this atrocity and that is what compels them to come here to show their solidarity, to show that they care about Julian. That they believe in justice, that they see what is happening here is a state that has committed crimes against innocent, that is now committing crimes against a journalist who exposed those crimes they committed.
“Let’s not forget that the US planned to assassinate Julian in the UK, while he was in the embassy and now they’ve put him in the harshest prison in the UK for almost four years.”
WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson said proceedings against Assange were “not a legal case,” because of the way the legal system has “bent itself to the demands and requests of the government… it’s appalling.”
He continued, “Julian is a political prisoner. He’s being politically persecuted. The chain around Parliament is sending a message to those inside. They are there to serve the people on the outside. And those are Julian’s supporters. Thousands of them here today, and millions around the world who know that this is a travesty.”
Labour MP and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell had the brass neck to announce, “As we go into the 18 months up to a general election, this will become a general election issue. Every MP will be asked: do you stand up for journalism, do you stand up for the rights of journalist to report freely, do you stand up for his basic human rights, do you stand up for justice?”……………………..
Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with some of the protestors……………………………………………
A number of those protesting travelled to London from other countries to do so. Mantas, who traveled from Lithuania that day to support Assange as part of the chain, told our reporters, “Assange told the truth about war crimes, and he fought for human rights and freedom of the press.”
The US and UK governments “want to make a clear and obvious example of Assange so that no-one attempts what he did. The powers that be are trying to impose their own world view, control how people think, to seduce them into thinking nothing can be done or that the world is as it’s supposed to be, when we are actually entering into wholesale madness in the world.”
He said of the war in Ukraine that the weapons manufacturers and businesses “want to promote a new war, and they don’t care about the consequences for the Ukrainian people or the Russian people. I don’t agree with Putin’s actions, but I think there was another option, but Zelensky was encouraged to take a hard line and oppose any deals from the Russian Federation.”
Listing the crimes exposed by WikiLeaks he said, “Where do you start? You can look at the video of an Apache helicopter shooting civilians. The Afghan and Iraq war logs and so on. People should look into it. There’s too much to go into herethat many crimes have been uncovered. People should look into what WikiLeaks has done what its expose and be objective about the matter.”
Assange’s case “shows that if anyone finds out something like this and tries to tell the public then they can be prosecuted for it. So obviously that can threaten everyone.” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/08/chai-o08.html?fbclid=IwAR0oU-kS9VcRD34qsOcy2SC2BTcKB2CmeY6IwAoPfyc-MniCzPt3xsgXEu4
Chris Hedges: the corporate state, the CIA, and the lynching of Julian Assange
Chris Hedges: The Puppets and the Puppet Masters
The judicial proceedings against Julian Assange give a faux legality to the state persecution of the most important and courageous journalist of our generation.
This is the talk given by Chris Hedges outside the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. on Saturday October 8 at a rally that called on the U.S. to revoke its extradition request for Julian Assange.
https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/09/chris-hedges-the-puppets-and-the-puppet-masters/ By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost, 9 Oct 22,
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Merrick Garland and those who work in the Department of Justice are the puppets, not the puppet masters. They are the façade, the fiction, that the longstanding persecution of Julian Assange has something to do with justice. Like the High Court in London, they carry out an elaborate judicial pantomime. They debate arcane legal nuances to distract from the Dickensian farce where a man who has not committed a crime, who is not a U.S. citizen, can be extradited under the Espionage Act and sentenced to life in prison for the most courageous and consequential journalism of our generation.
The engine driving the lynching of Julian is not here on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is in Langley, Virginia, located at a complex we will never be allowed to surround – the Central Intelligence Agency. It is driven by a secretive inner state, one where we do not count in the mad pursuit of empire and ruthless exploitation. Because the machine of this modern leviathan was exposed by Julian and WikiLeaks, the machine demands revenge.
The United States has undergone a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. It is no longer a functioning democracy. The real centers of power, in the corporate, military and national security sectors, were humiliated and embarrassed by WikiLeaks. Their war crimes, lies, conspiracies to crush the democratic aspirations of the vulnerable and the poor, and rampant corruption, here and around the globe, were laid bare in troves of leaked documents.
We cannot fight on behalf of Julian unless we are clear about whom we are fighting against. It is far worse than a corrupt judiciary. The global billionaire class, who have orchestrated a social inequality rivaled by pharaonic Egypt, has internally seized all of the levers of power and made us the most spied upon, monitored, watched and photographed population in human history. When the government watches you 24-hours a day, you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. Julian was long a target, of course, but when WikiLeaks published the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the hacking tools the CIA uses to monitor our phones, televisions and even cars, he — and journalism itself — was condemned to crucifixion. The object is to shut down any investigations into the inner workings of power that might hold the ruling class accountable for its crimes, eradicate public opinion and replace it with the cant fed to the mob.
I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent on the outer reaches of empire in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. I am acutely aware of the savagery of empire, how the brutal tools of repression are first tested on those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” Wholesale surveillance. Torture. Coups. Black sites. Black propaganda. Militarized police. Militarized drones. Assassinations. Wars. Once perfected on people of color overseas, these tools migrate back to the homeland. By hollowing out our country from the inside through deindustrialization, austerity, deregulation, wage stagnation, the abolition of unions, massive expenditures on war and intelligence, a refusal to address the climate emergency and a virtual tax boycott for the richest individuals and corporations, these predators intend to keep us in bondage, victims of a corporate neo-feudalism. And they have perfected their instruments of Orwellian control. The tyranny imposed on others is imposed on us.
From its inception, the CIA carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including that of U.S. citizens, activities exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee hearings in the House. All these crimes, especially after the attacks of 9/11, have returned with a vengeance. The CIA is a rogue and unaccountable paramilitary organization with its own armed units and drone program, death squads and a vast archipelago of global black sites where kidnapped victims are tortured and disappeared.
The U.S. allocates a secret black budget of about $50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress. The CIA has a well-oiled apparatus to kidnap, torture and assassinate targets around the globe, which is why, since it had already set up a system of 24-hour video surveillance of Julian in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, it quite naturally discussed kidnapping and assassinating him. That is its business. Senator Frank Church — after examining the heavily redacted CIA documents released to his committee — defined the CIA’s “covert activity” as “a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”
All despotisms mask state persecution with sham court proceedings. The show trials and troikas in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The raving Nazi judges in fascist Germany. The Denunciation rallies in Mao’s China. State crime is cloaked in a faux legality, a judicial farce.
If Julian is extradited and sentenced and, given the Lubyanka-like proclivities of the Eastern District of Virginia, this is a near certainty, it means that those of us who have published classified material, as I did when I worked for The New York Times, will become criminals. It means that an iron curtain will be pulled down to mask abuses of power. It means that the state, which, through Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, anti-terrorism laws and the Espionage Act that have created our homegrown version of Stalin’s Article 58, can imprison anyone anywhere in the world who dares commit the crime of telling the truth.
We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight against powerful subterranean forces that, in demanding Julian’s extradition and life imprisonment, have declared war on journalism.
We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight for the restoration of the rule of law and democracy.
We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to dismantle the wholesale Stasi-like state surveillance erected across the West.
We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to overthrow — and let me repeat that word for the benefit of those in the FBI and Homeland Security who have come here to monitor us — overthrow the corporate state and create a government of the people, by the people and for the people, that will cherish, rather than persecute, the best among us.
You can see my interview with Julian’s father, John Shipton, here.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
The great ratepayer robbery: how UK new nuclear rips off its customers
the taxpayer will be liable for the inevitable cost overruns and the RAB scheme itself makes it even less likely that developers will keep within the bounds of their agreements, thereby further increasing costs.
decision on Sizewell C as a stitched up deal behind closed doors, bringing extra cost to the consumer, producing unmanageable waste and squandering our capital on a white elephant scheme.
it is criminal that our time and money is wasted and all our futures thrown away on the back of this scam.
How new nuclear rips off its customers
By Linda Clare Rogers
A recent BBC documentary called Big Oil versus the World exposed the excellent job by oil companies in fending off what could have been an existential threat to their future, at the cost of one for the rest of us. The program revealed how the oil industry brought us near to catastrophe while knowingly lying about the role of fossil fuels in creating global warming.
There are vital lessons to be learned from this about the nuclear power industry. As with the oil industry, the nuclear industry continues to mislead us about the need for nuclear power to save the planet, in order to preserve itself. And, like the oil industry, it contributes to the catastrophe of global warming.
Nuclear power stations take too long to build to help mitigate the effects of global warming, and divert money from renewable power and other more immediate means of doing so.
To add insult to injury, we, as taxpayers, are now being asked to contribute to this catastrophe by paying for the building of yet more destructive nuclear power stations. The astronomical cost of nuclear power means that the industry itself can’t and won’t take on the economic risk.
Instead, money taken from our earnings and our benefits (in the U.K, low-income people on Universal Credit are not to be exempted), to set up new nuclear build, is meant to encourage other investors to take the risk in the future. This is before the plants are actually built.
The name of the UK government scheme , or, more accurately, scam, is the Regulated Asset Base model, known as RAB. (Editor’s note: In the U.S., a similar fleecing of ratepayers exists in some states, known as Construction Work In Progress or CWIP.)
In the introduction to RAB — the Ministerial Foreword to the Statement on Procedure and Criteria for Designation — we are told that the government will be taking one nuclear project to Final Investment Decision this parliament and two projects to Final investment Decision in the next parliament, including small modular reactors. The push for this scenario is undermining safety, fleecing the taxpayers at a time of economic crisis, and disregarding the real problems increasingly associated with nuclear power.
The Nuclear Energy Financing Act 2022 implements the nuclear RAB model and is meant to facilitate investment in the design, construction, commissioning and operation of new nuclear energy generation projects.
There are two criteria that government say have to be met in order that a new nuclear power project should receive RAB funding. But both of these criteria are largely meaningless:
Criterion one: the Secretary of State is of the opinion that the development of the relevant nuclear project is sufficiently advanced to justify the designation of the nuclear company in relation to the project, for instance, that the project has received a Development Consent Order (DCO).
Criterion two: the Secretary of State is of the opinion that designating the nuclear company in relation to the project is likely to result in value for money.
The government draft designation document for the two-reactor EDF project at Sizewell C in Suffolk, emphasizes these criteria. To fulfill the first, it is necessary that a DCO is approved, amongst other markers. The DCO contains evidence about the suitability of the proposed site for the project as well as the impact on the local community and its environment.
The Planning Inspectorate have advised that the DCO for Sizewell C be rejected. This in itself is really important news. Those of us who have been fighting against the building of Wylfa B, or Wylfa Newydd, are familiar with this scenario.
The Planning Inspectorate also advised the Secretary of State to reject the DCO application for Wylfa B. Many of the reasons were on similar grounds as those given for the rejection of the application for Sizewell C. The scheme broke habitat regulations and had detrimental impacts on biodiversity and the environment.
Notably, one of the main reasons for the advised rejection of the DCO for Sizewell C was the impact on the local water supply. We need only see what happened in France this past summer, with the shutdown of nuclear power stations due to the overheating of the rivers necessary for the cooling of the plants, to see that issues over water supply will only get worse as climate change gets worse.
So, for RAB funding to be designated, the DCO has to be granted. The Planning Inspectorate recommended it be rejected, and the government went ahead and passed it anyway. This is a profoundly dangerous decision and needs to be fought.
Hard on issuing the DCO will come the designation of RAB funding. The second criterion to allow for this will also be sure to pass: value for money for the taxpayer. The government explains that RAB will be eliminating significant compound interest on capital invested, thus saving us money. It makes the hopeful statement that, “the RAB model has the potential to reduce the financial cost for new nuclear projects, thereby reducing consumer bills while still preserving incentives for the private sector to complete nuclear projects to time and budget”.
Commentators have made it clear that the taxpayer will be liable for the inevitable cost overruns and the RAB scheme itself makes it even less likely that developers will keep within the bounds of their agreements, thereby further increasing costs.
The model has been criticized by two advisory bodies, the Climate Change Committee and the National Infrastructure Commission.
The draft document for the designation of RAB for Sizewell C would be laughable if it were not so serious in its implications and its precedent for further nuclear developments.
Under the heading —Results: Value for Money for Consumers — we are told, “this has been calculated by comparing the cost of the electricity system with and without Sizewell C….. The modelling compares the cost of an electricity system with a RAB funded Sizewell C against two different net zero compliant counterfactuals.” (These latter are the use of renewables and carbon capture and storage.)
It then provides a chart showing the costings and savings for the taxpayer. All that can be seen in each and every box are a row of the letter x. No figures at all.
When the chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, Tom Greatrex, was asked what he knew about the lack of figures available for the Sizewell C agreement on Radio 4, he could give no answer, but offered that RAB was a “different finance mechanism” that would allow for a very predictable price for electricity for a very long time.
This is another example of the nuclear industry and government getting together to present a false narrative: this one uses the present scandal of the cost of energy to persuade us that nuclear power can give us future security and control over future energy supplies.
It should be noted that Hitachi withdrew its application to build Wylfa Newydd for cost reasons, prior to the advised rejection of the DCO. The £5 billion offered by UK government to subsidize building that project was not enough for the Japanese company. This underlines how little risk developers are willing to take and how much risk government is happy to heap on us.
Another major issue with the RAB funding scheme is that, as government documents delicately put it, “the Secretary of State is aware that there could be a perception of a conflict of interest between his role in determining the DCO application for the Sizewell C project and his role in determining whether or not to designate the nuclear company. To avoid any perceived conflict of interest the Secretary of State will delegate the final decision on the DCO to another BEIS minister.”
Well that sorts that problem out then. Of course, while the taxpayer is paying for a nuclear project, it is unlikely to be halted by government. The overriding of the Planning Inspectorate findings against Sizewell C bears this out. How will the government not grant a Final Investment Decision, due next year?
Greenpeace has described the decision on Sizewell C as a stitched up deal behind closed doors, bringing extra cost to the consumer, producing unmanageable waste and squandering our capital on a white elephant scheme.
We say no to nuclear, no to RAB and will be looking to other allies and partners to fight this scheme. Maybe, like the Peace Tax 7, we can find ways to withhold our payments. Perhaps there are legal ways to stop the self -serving deceptions and corruption.
We need to keep calling out the UK government and the Welsh government on these deceptions. When so many people are in fuel poverty and it is so important that the best is made of our precious resources, it is criminal that our time and money is wasted and all our futures thrown away on the back of this scam.
Linda Clare Rogers is a member of People Against Wylfa B and CND Cymru.
‘Now, All of You Are Azov’: ‘openly neo-Nazi’ Ukrainian delegation meets Congress, tours US
Earlier this year, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) published a detailed report on the “Azov Movement… a far-right nationalist network.”
Earlier this year, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) published a detailed report on the “Azov Movement… a far-right nationalist network.”
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/05/azov-neo-nazi-ukrainian-congress/ MOSS ROBESON·OCTOBER 5, 2022
After meeting with at least 50 members of Congress, soldiers of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment toured the US to auction off swastika-inspired patches and lobby for an end to restrictions on US arms and training.
This article was originally published by Moss Robeson’s Ukes, Kooks and Spooks blog and lightly edited by The Grayzone.
Read part one of Robeson’s series on Azov’s US tour here.
This September, a delegation of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi-led Azov movement arrived in the United States, at a time when myth making about the far-right network’s “depoliticization” had reached a fever pitch. By this time, the New York Times had ceased referring to Azov as “openly neo-Nazi,” and was referring to the ultra-nationalist organization as “celebrated.”
Since news broke of Azov’s US tour, more information has come to light about the ultra-nationalist organization’s outreach in the country, including efforts by Azov to reverse Congress’ ban on supplying it with arms and training.
Continue readingAssange protesters rally for his release
https://www.examiner.com.au/story/7934633/assange-protesters-rally-for-his-release/ By Tara Cosoleto, October 8 2022 ,
Thousands have marched through the Melbourne city centre calling for the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The 51-year-old Australian has been in London’s Belmarsh prison since he was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019.
Assange is fighting a long-running legal battle to avoid extradition to the United States, where he is wanted for espionage offences.
Melbourne protesters marched through the city streets and formed a human chain across a Southbank bridge on Saturday morning as they called on the Australian government to intervene.
“There’s an expectation in the electorate that the prime minister and this government is going to get Julian out of jail,” Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told AAP.
“The prime minister’s statements before the election – enough is enough, he doesn’t see what purpose is served by Julian being kept in prison – those were seen as a commitment.
“It’s been so many days of this government and Julian is still rotting in that prison.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should contact the US president directly and plead Assange’s case, Mr Shipton said.
“They can pick up the phone, call Joe Biden and say, hasn’t Julian suffered enough? Drop the charges and extradition,” he said.
“Julian would walk free.”
In August, lawyers for Assange filed an appeal against his extradition to the US, arguing he is being prosecuted and punished for his political opinions.
Assange was charged by the US with 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse after WikiLeaks published thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents.
Melbourne’s demonstration against Assange’s detention was one of many being held across the world on Saturday.
It was heartening to see such global solidarity for Assange’s cause, Mr Shipton said.
“The movement is growing around the world as evidenced by these protests,” he said.
“We’re not going to stop. We are not going to be quiet.”
Australian Associated Press
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