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
