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With Control of Government, Joe Biden and Democrats Must Deliver for the People |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Saturday, 09 January 2021 13:22 |
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Reich writes: "We can't lose sight of this: Millions of Americans are suffering and on the brink of financial devastation."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
With Control of Government, Joe Biden and Democrats Must Deliver for the People
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
09 January 21
 e can’t lose sight of this: Millions of Americans are suffering and on the brink of financial devastation. The economy lost 140,000 jobs in December — the first drop since April, after gains slowed for three months. As the pandemic surges to its deadliest peak yet, the economy will continue its downward spiral and people’s livelihoods hang by a thread.
With control of Congress and the presidency, Joe Biden and Democrats must pass sweeping relief within his first month in office. First up: $2,000 survival checks to every American. And do not give in to faux deficit hawks claiming we can’t afford to spend more. We’re the richest country in the history of the world, and a crisis of this magnitude requires massive relief. We can’t afford anything less — the government must deliver for the people.
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For Julian Assange, Freedom Is in View |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 09 January 2021 09:32 |
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Kiriakou writes: "A court in London ruled on January 4 that, while the US government had 'made its case' for the extradition of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder would not be sent to the United States to stand trial because he was 'likely to kill himself if held under harsh US prison conditions.'"
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
For Julian Assange, Freedom Is in View
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
09 January 21
 court in London ruled on January 4 that, while the US government had “made its case” for the extradition of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder would not be sent to the United States to stand trial because he was “likely to kill himself if held under harsh US prison conditions.” British judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected Assange’s attorney’s contentions that the US prosecution was politically-motivated. But she called Assange “a depressed and sometimes despairing man” who had the “intellect and determination” to circumvent whatever suicide prevention measures US authorities might implement. Assange has been held in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison for more than 18 months awaiting the ruling.
The decision raises several different issues. First, it was narrowly defined on two points. The British government in the past has refused to extradite prisoners to the United States because the US practice of solitary confinement constitutes torture, according to Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture. That was not the reason the judge decided to use in denying Assange’s extradition. It had nothing to do with solitary confinement or torture. It had to do with suicide. Second, the judge said that the US had “made its case” for Assange to be charged with espionage. But it hadn’t made a case. It argued only that Assange had “provided national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it,” a precedent set in my own case in the notorious Eastern District of Virginia, where Assange also has been charged. This is not generally-accepted law and has never been ruled on by an appeals court. But it is the definition used by the British judge.
The Justice Department has two weeks to appeal the decision and prosecutors have indicated that they would do so. The judge in the meantime is refusing to release Assange, and an appeal won’t be scheduled for another two or three months. But that appeal will be solely over the issue of whether or not the US federal prison system’s use of solitary confinement and administrative segregation units is humane and within the letter and spirit of international law and whether the way US prisons are run does not encourage suicide. That’s a losing argument. I’m no expert on the British appellate process, but I can tell you about solitary confinement in the United States, and I can confirm that it is indeed a form of torture and that people in US prisons commit suicide literally every single day.
The solitary confinement that Julian Assange would have faced at the “Supermax” federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado (ADX Florence) is hell on earth. There is no human contact for prisoners. The prisoner is kept alone in a seven-foot by eleven-foot cell for 23 hours a day. On five of those days, he is allowed to walk through a small door at the back of the cell that leads into an outdoor seven-foot by eleven-foot cage, where he can walk in circles for an hour. On the remaining two days, he’s allowed a brief shower. Visitors are limited solely to the prisoner’s attorneys, and those meetings are through thick glass and with the use of a telephone intercom. The prisoner is allowed to write one letter per week, up to three pages long, but it can be sent only to attorneys or to immediate family members pre-approved by the Bureau of Prisons. All outgoing mail is censored by an FBI agent. Letters can be received, but not physically. Each cell has a computer monitor mounted along the ceiling, out of reach. When a prisoner receives a letter, its text is put on the monitor for five minutes so that the prisoner can read it. It is then deleted. Doors are opened and closed electronically. Prisoners speak with guards only through intercoms. Again, there is no human contact.
Imagine living like this for years at a time. And remember that the United Nations has deemed treatment like this for more than two weeks as a form of torture. The New York Times in 2016 wrote about ADX Florence and the US Penitentiary at Pelican Bay, California. It noted that some prisoners were so desperate for human contact that one ate the glass of a broken window just so that he could injure himself enough to be taken to a doctor. That prisoner said that he had not spoken to another human being in years. He couldn’t even remember the last time. One prisoner, when he came into only momentary contact with another prisoner, killed him so that he could get the death penalty, which he said was more humane than solitary confinement.
As things stand, and as they’re likely to play out, Julian Assange won’t be subject to this kind of sick treatment. It was a close call. But freedom is in view. The Mexican government has offered Julian asylum. In the meantime, it’s up to the rest of us to make sure that the world doesn’t forget how the US treats its prisoners and what the inhumanity of our system looks like.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Donald Trump's Parting Gift to the World? Signs Suggest It May Be War With Iran |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=57857"><span class="small">Daniel Ellsberg, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Friday, 08 January 2021 14:02 |
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Ellsberg writes: "I will always regret that I did not do more to stop war with Vietnam. Now, I am calling on whistleblowers to step up and expose Trump's plans."
U.S. Central Command shared pictures of the locked and loaded planes. (photo: U.S. Air Force)
Donald Trump's Parting Gift to the World? Signs Suggest It May Be War With Iran
By Daniel Ellsberg, Guardian UK
08 January 21
I will always regret that I did not do more to stop war with Vietnam. Now, I am calling on whistleblowers to step up and expose Trump’s plans
 resident Trump’s incitement of criminal mob violence and occupation of the Capitol makes clear there is no limitation whatever on the abuse of power he may commit in the next two weeks he remains in office. Outrageous as his incendiary performance was on Wednesday, I fear he may incite something far more dangerous in the next few days: his long-desired war with Iran.
Could he possibly be so delusional as to imagine that such a war would be in the interests of the nation or region or even his own short-term interests? His behavior and evident state of mind this week and over the last two months answers that question.
The dispatch this week of B-52’s nonstop round-trip from North Dakota to the Iranian coast – the fourth such flight in seven weeks, one at year’s end – along with his build-up of US forces in the area, is a warning not only to Iran but to us.
In mid-November, as these flights began, the president had to be dissuaded at the highest levels from directing an unprovoked attack on Iran nuclear facilities. But an attack “provoked” by Iran (or by militias in Iraq aligned with Iran) was not ruled out.
US military and intelligence agencies have frequently, as in Vietnam and Iraq, provided presidents with false information that offered pretexts to attack our perceived adversaries. Or they’ve suggested covert actions that could provoke the adversaries to some response that justifies a US “retaliation”.
The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, in November was probably intended to be such a provocation. If so, it has failed so far, as did the assassination exactly a year ago of General Suleimani.
But time is now short to generate an exchange of violent actions and reactions that will serve to block resumption of the Iran nuclear deal by the incoming Biden administration: a pre-eminent goal not only of Donald Trump but of the allies he has helped bring together in recent months, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Evidently it would take more than individual murders to induce Iran to risk responses justifying a large-scale air attack before Trump leaves office. But US military and covert planning staffs are up to the task of attempting to meet that challenge, on schedule.
I was a participant-observer of such planning myself, with respect to Vietnam half a century ago. On 3 September 1964 – just a month after I had become special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John T McNaughton – a memo came across my desk in the Pentagon written by my boss. He was recommending actions “likely at some point to provoke a military DRV [North Vietnam] response … likely to provide good grounds for us to escalate if we wished”.
Such actions “that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction” (sic), as spelled out five days later by McNaughton’s counterpart at the state department, the assistant secretary of state William Bundy, might include “running US naval patrols increasingly close to the North Vietnamese coast” – ie running them within the 12-mile coastal waters the North Vietnamese claimed: as close to the beach as necessary, to get a response that might justify what McNaughton called “a full-fledged squeeze on North Vietnam [a progressively all-out bombing campaign]”, which would follow “especially if a US ship were sunk”.
I have little doubt that such contingency planning, directed by the Oval Office, for provoking, if necessary, an excuse for attacking Iran while this administration is still in office exists right now, in safes and computers in the Pentagon, CIA and the White House. That means there are officials in those agencies – perhaps one sitting at my old desk in the Pentagon – who have seen on their secure computer screens highly classified recommendations exactly like the McNaughton and Bundy memos that came across my desk in September 1964.
I will always regret that I did not copy and convey those memos – along with many other files in the top-secret safe in my office at that time, all giving the lie to the president’s false campaign promises that same fall that “we seek no wider war” – to Senator Fulbright’s foreign relations committee in September 1964 rather than five years later in 1969, or to the press in 1971. A war’s worth of lives might have been saved.
Current documents or digital files that contemplate provoking or “retaliating to” Iranian actions covertly provoked by us should not remain secret another moment from the US Congress and the American public, lest we be presented with a disastrous fait accompli before January 20, instigating a war potentially worse than Vietnam plus all the wars of the Middle East combined. It is neither too late for such plans to be carried out by this deranged president nor for an informed public and Congress to block him from doing so.
I am urging courageous whistleblowing today, this week, not months or years from now, after bombs have begun falling. It could be the most patriotic act of a lifetime.
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Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52352"><span class="small">Sam Biddle, The Intercept</span></a>
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Friday, 08 January 2021 14:02 |
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Biddle writes: "The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech's attempt to pantomime principles."
Trump's Facebook page. (photo: iStock)
Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump
By Sam Biddle, The Intercept
08 January 21
The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles.
 he swirling of the last dregs of the Trump administration around the drain has given some prominent Americans one last chance to prostrate themselves before the outgoing president. Facebook and Twitter’s decision to place the president in a temporary internet timeout following his incitement of a violent mob that trashed the U.S. Capitol is the perfect capstone to four years of appeasement and corporate cowardice.
The advertising industry is generally acknowledged as one of the most risk-averse and craven industries on the planet, with decision-making guided largely by attempting to be as inoffensive as possible to as many people as possible, taking a position on an issue only in the weakest, safest, most carefully hedged terms available. Though companies like Facebook and Twitter hold the unfathomable power to control the distribution of information to billions of people around the world and like to think of themselves as helping bring humankind to some next level of consciousness, they are still very much in the advertising business.
As advertising companies, cowardice runs deep in the souls of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, companies that have spent the past four years looking the other way, equivocating, and contorting themselves into pretzels in an attempt to justify Trump’s unfettered access to the most powerful information distribution system in world history. Despite perennial speculation in the press as to what might psychologically or ideologically explain Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s total unwillingness to meaningfully act, there is just one factor: money. Twitter and Facebook are only worth anything as businesses if they can boast to advertisers of their access to an enormous swath of the American market, across political and ideological lines, and fear of a right-wing backlash has been enough to keep Peter Thiel on Facebook’s board and Trump’s voter suppression dispatches on Twitter’s servers.
According to a Facebook moderator who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of employer retaliation, watching the company drag its feet, yesterday in particular, has been excruciating. According to internal communications reviewed by The Intercept, the Capitol break-in is now considered, for purposes of Facebook’s willy-nilly application of the rules, “a violating event,” and any “praise,” “support,” or even friendly “representation” is banned on the basis of the company’s “Dangerous Organizations” policies, which this moderator explained is typically applied to posts celebrating terrorist attacks, drug cartel murders, and Aryan street gangs. The policy update was relayed to moderators, this source said, around 4:30 p.m. in Washington, by which point the Capitol had already been violently occupied for hours and a woman shot dead. Just today, as the broken glass is being swept up in the Capitol, Facebook blasted out another moderator update, informing them that the company was “internally designating” the entire United States as a “temporary high risk location,” which adds heightened restrictions to posts inciting violence, backdated to yesterday and effective through the end of Thursday.
As some Facebook observers have pointed out, had the company cared to look, it could have easily found that its platform was being used to plan an event it would eventually categorize alongside the Lockerbie bombing. Instead, fearful of Trump even on his shameful way out, Facebook did the bare minimum when it was too late to mean much. “Facebook treated this event correctly but Facebook is also complicit in this event,” the moderator said. “It’s all so blatantly obvious.”
The president’s past half-decade of incitement against the perceived ethnic enemies of his base have been met with nothing more than risible warning labels and worthless “fact checks,” as have his more recent efforts to dupe his already deeply confused supporters about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. There’s no reason to believe these barely-there penalties did anything at all to chasten Trump or deter his message; their utility existed only to the companies themselves, who could no longer be accused of doing literally nothing. Just as Facebook put off acknowledging its role in the genocide in Myanmar until it was too late to matter, and just as the company built an election interference “war room” and quickly disbanded it after some photo ops, the recent decisions to mildly inconvenience the world’s most powerful living person when he has 13 days left in power is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles, halfheartedly pointing to the void where a conscience would be.
“Slightly more than literally nothing” has been the unifying theme of big tech’s response to years of public concern that Trump would eventually use the platforms to get people killed, and yesterday, as his most rabid supporters puttered around the Capitol aimlessly pushing over chairs and reading House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s mail, represented the appeasement strategy’s ultimate failure: Four people are dead following a mob that Trump incited and directed. Hours after it would have made any difference, Facebook and Twitter, his two favorite platforms, did what they were previously unwilling to do: risk upsetting the president by temporarily restricting his ability to broadcast.
In a stirring gesture of corporate bravery, Twitter put Trump in the penalty box for 12 whole hours, suggesting that if perhaps 8 people had been killed in the Capitol melee, or if he’d encouraged the mob to brawl its way into a second federal landmark, he may have gotten a whole day’s suspension. Facebook, also true to form, has banned Trump from posting “indefinitely,” a word that means absolutely nothing and will give the company the freedom to change its mind at any point in the future, in accordance with the shifting tides of governmental power and public opinion.
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