1. Tony Bliar and George W Bush walk free - while Julian Assange has languished for 11 years first in asylum and, for the past 3 years, in a British jail for exposing the evils perpetrated particularly by the Americans over this period.
I was deeply moved last week by the testimonies of the witnesses to the Belmarsh Tribunal about his imprisonment which gave the lie to the US assertion that he had endangered the lives of agents. The Chairman was able to testify that he had been with Assange the days Assange spent redacting no less than 10,000 names. If you want gripping television, I would beseech you to watch the proceedings. And be very scared!
2. In September 2021, 30 former US officials went on the record to reveal a CIA plot to “kill or kidnap” Assange in London. In case of Assange leaving the embassy, the article noted, “US officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.” These assurances most likely came from the Home Office.
The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government. The Australian journalist has been in the UK Belmarsh maximum security prison for the past three and a half years and faces a potentia 175-year sentence after the UK High Court green-lighted his extradition to the US in December 2021. Asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case. But the Cabinet Office recently told parliament it had seven officials working on “Operation Pelican” to put an end to his stay in the Ecuador embassy. The department’s role is to “support the Prime Minister and ensure the effective running of government”, but it also has national security and intelligence functions. The then home secretary Priti Patel ordered Assange’s extradition to the US in June. The MoJ is in charge of courts in England and Wales, where Assange’s extradition case is currently deciding whether to hear an appeal. It is also in control of its prisons, including Belmarsh maximum security jail where Assange is incarcerated.
3. On the decision to go to war 20 years ago in Iraq, let Chris Hedges be my first witness
What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China.
The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes.
The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.
Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq. “I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.” Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine. “I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”
The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle Eas cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.
4. Lawrence Freedman is a UK Emeritus Professor of Military history. That means he has been a fully tenured academic for most of his life – and was a member of the Chilcot Inquiry set up in 2009 by Gordon Brown to investigate the run-up to the war, the military action and its aftermath, to establish how decisions were made, to determine what happened and to identify lessons to ensure that, in a similar situation in future, the British government is equipped to respond in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country. It took the Inquiry seven years to report.
I have some respect for Freedman – not least for the superb book he wrote recently "Strategy – a history" (of all sorts) - but he should be ashamed of his expectation of payment for the substack column he runs with his son Sam
5. And here's an up-to-date report about what the West has done to Iraq
