23 August 2020

HOW ISRAEL WAGES WAR ON PALESTINIAN HISTORY

From CounterPunch 21 August 2020

HOW ISRAEL WAGES WAS ON PALESTINIAN HISTORY

By Jonathan Cook

Photograph Source: A street in Jenin, 2011 – Almonroth – Template:Hey – CC BY-SA 3.0

When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.

Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.

Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants.

It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse.

The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless legal battles to keep it off screens.

Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high personal price. Deaths threats, loss of work and endless legal bills that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him – this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the next few weeks.

Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples.

For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterise them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone.

The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.

These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.

The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court.

Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history.

Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net.

The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.

In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider population to flee.

Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to return.

Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.

The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.

A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.

Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.

Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.

Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.

Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritised on these digital maps.

Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.

And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognised the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.

Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.

Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.

Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.

The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.

But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

21 August 2020

TORTURING ASSANGE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FOWLER

From CounterPunch 20 AUGUST 2020

Torturing Assange: An Interview with Andrew Fowler

By John Kendall Hawkins

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

“I love Wikileaks.”

– DJ Trump

“Can’t we drone him?”

– Hillary Clinton

Andrew Fowler is an Australian award-winning investigative journalist and a former reporter for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent and Four Corners programs. and the author of The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ Fight for Freedom. This is an updated edition of his 2011 account of the rise and political imprisonment of Assange. Much of that account explained how Assange seemingly inevitably moved toward an adversarial positioning against American imperialism abroad. He was a tonic for the indifference expressed by so many ordinary Americans in the traumatic aftermath of 9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state. Boston Legal’s Alan Shore (James Spader) seems to sum it up succinctly.

His updated version discusses the torture Assange is currently undergoing at Belmarsh prison in Britain. Here is a mut-see film regarding his torture.

His book also contains the latest on UC Global’s comprehensive spying on Assange and his visitors at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in the last year of his ‘refuge’ there. UC Global is a Spanish security company hired to protect the embassy. It has since been revealed that they were passing on data to American intelligence, presumably the CIA. Certainly, Fowler implies such a connection in his updated book, citing two Assange hacking breaches of US government servers, each of which, Fowler writes, the CIA went berserk, as if they’d been hit by a foreign enemy. In the last (new) chapter of the book, “The Casino,” Fowler describes how outraged the CIA was when Assange published their hacking tools, known as Vault 7, on Wikileaks: “Sean Roche, the deputy director of digital innovation at the CIA, remembers the reaction from those inside the CIA. He said he got a call from another CIA director who was out of breath: ‘It was the equivalent of a digital Pearl Harbor.’” Below is my recent interview with the author.

* Note: Upon his release of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg was referred to as “the most dangerous man in the world.”

What is the up-to-date status of Julian’s health?

It seems quite clear that there is an attempt by the British and US administrations to destroy Assange, either driving him to suicide or a psychological breakdown. He has had a lung condition for a number of years, which has not been properly treated, and is clearly suffering from huge stress. During his last court appearance over a video link, there were long pauses between his words, even when speaking his own name.

When Chelsea Manning was imprisoned at Quantico she spent 23 hours per day in solitary confinement and was stripped naked at night. How does Julian’s treatment at Belmarsh compare? Manning’s treatment was said to be an attempt to coerce her into ratting on others, including, presumably Assange. What do you see as the ultimate purpose of Assange’s treatment? And how does it amount to torture?

The ultimate purpose of Assange’s treatment is a warning to others. Particularly other journalists. It’s the modern day equivalent of crucifixion, putting heads of enemies on spikes, or public hangings. The torture of Assange involves two main areas: being confined to three rooms in a single building for 7 years, and unable to leave without fear of arrest and extradition to Sweden which was playing an underhand role to allow Assange to be extrdited to the US. As the UN rapporteur on torture Nils Meltzer wrote that never in the two decades he had spent investigating war crimes had he ever seen such a ganging up of so many powerful nations against one individual. It is a testament to Assange’s mental strength that he resisted at all.

No effort was made by the Swedes to “question” Assange once he was lifted from the Ecuadorian Embassy, suggesting that their purpose all along was, as Assange and his defenders averred, a pretext for hand-over. You’d think there was some way to nix the bail jump charge given this likelihood of intergovernmental collusion. Thoughts?

There are no outstanding allegations for Assange to answer in Sweden. They were always only allegations, rather than charges. It is important to understand that if the Swedish prosecutors had charged Assange, they would have had to reveal the evidence of the ‘offences’ to his lawyers upon which those charges were based. And the evidence was not only thin, it pointed to a conspiracy. So it was possible to keep Assange in the embassy, while the UK prosecuting authority worked at ways of getting him extradited to Sweden. There seems little doubt that the plan all along was to use Sweden as a holding pen for Assange as the US applied for his extradition. It is possible he could take his case to the European Human Court of Human Rights, but the Brexit decision, makes this area extremely murky.

Can you provide more details about the UC Global, the Spanish company brought into the Ecuadorian Embassy to spy on Assange? Do we know more about what data that they gathered? Has a more definitive connection to the CIA been made? Has any further effort been put into place to quash the extradition process based on this fact alone? (He could never expect a fair trial back in the US if such surveillance and potentially framing were done.)

UC Global not only recorded hundreds of conversations inside the Ecuadorian embassy, but also photographed the phones [and] their location identifying IMEI numbers, passports and other documents of everyone who visited Assange in the embassy between 2015 and 2018. It’s my understanding that the case running in Madrid at the moment against the former CEO of UC Global, David Morales, who is charged with illegally spying on Assange and his lawyers (a specifically illegal act in Europe) will be used by the Assange legal team to argue that the US extradition case should be thrown out. It is my understanding that if any material gathered spying on Assange and his lawyers is used, or even known about, by those involved in the US prosecution – the charges must be withdrawn. There has been no definitive connection to the CIA. The closest I have managed to make the link is to the State Department and White House confidantes.

Snowden’s, Permanent Record is one of the best reads I’ve had in quite some time. You could argue that his revelations are equally, if not more significant, than what Assange offers up through Wikileaks. Where do you stand on the difference of value, if any, between Wikileaks and the Snowden revelations?

The main differences are: Assange is a recipient of information which as a journalist he publishes. Snowden is a source. When it comes to quantifying the different values of their work, Assange mainly provided information and analysis, whereas Snowden exposed intelligence gathering systems. In the source-journalist relationship, they both need each other. Both exposed the activities of a war-making machine. Without Assange it is unlikely that we would have had Snowden. It was WikiLeaks that opened up the public on a truly massive scale to a secret world of horror and deception which until then had been largely hidden from view. For Snowden’s part he brought the argument home that it wasn’t just foreign governments who were being spied on, it was the Americans themselves. They both played a significant and at times overlapping role in revealing the truth about the world we’re in.

Assange and Snowden seem to have had their differences over the years. Snowden describes in PR how he chose his nickname: “The final name I chose for my correspondence was ‘Verax,’ Latin for ‘speaker of truth,’ in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called ‘Mendax’ (‘speaker of lies’)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange.” (p.193) There was irritability there between them, and Snowden didn’t trust Assange with his life (fearing that a dump, rather than a journo-processed revelation system, would close off future whistleblower arguments). His first choice had been the NYT, but their suppression of James Risen’s 2004 pre-election piece on STELLARWIND enraged him and he ended up going with Greenwald et al, instead. Snowden suggests character differences between the two, but on the other hand Assange really pissed the US government off when he sent a woman to rescue Snowden from Hong Kong. Some of us thought Obama was going to shoot down Bolivia One with president Evo Morales on board because Obama thought Snowden was onboard.

I see in Permanent Record Snowden says he decided not to go with WikiLeaks because of a change of policy to publish material unredacted, or ‘pristine’ as he calls it. Not sure why he says this because WL policy is to redact. [Here’s Snowden’s explanation.] WL did put all the Iraq/Afghanistan/Cablegate documents online un-redacted, but only after David Leigh of the Guardian published the password — and the material was already out on the internet. I’ve never asked Assange this, but there is another Mendax. In the 1920s an Australian science fiction writer Erle Cox’a Mendax was an eccentric inventor. Mendax experiments with ‘matter transmission’ ‘invisibility’ and ‘extracting gold from seawater’. There is a tension between the two, no doubt about it. Snowden still errs on the side of secrecy and Assange on the side of publication, possibly the difference between an ex-intelligence agent and a journalist.

Covid-19 seems to be the wild card in the deck, vis-a-vis Assange’s extradition to the US. If he doesn’t contract the illness in prison, then his extradition next year could prove problematic — courts, protests, circus. How do you think the virus will affect the legal proceedings? Do you think he’ll be better off under Biden’s DOJ? Or worse, given the perceived threat to the Democrats he represents? Do you see a way for his defense to exploit the DNC/Russia hack dishonesty?

Not sure how Covid will impact anything much, other than slowing down the process, which in itself is extremely problematic for Assange. He’s already been in prison or under house arrest (including the embassy) for nine years. I’m not sure what it takes to embarrass the UK government into refusing the extradition request, but the new indictment is surely turning the political prosecution into a farce. The US now wants to re-arrest Assange to wrap in a new indictment because the first one was likely to fail. In past years it might have been possible for the UK Government to reject this deceptive or incompetent behaviour by the US, but Britain is a spent force now on the world stage, and the US can do whatever it wants.

As for Biden’s DoJ, he’s called Assange a ‘high-tech terrorist’ and has recently said though he favours freedom of the press it should not compromise US national security. Not much hope there.

One hope Assange has is the possible pardoning of Snowden. It plays to Trump’s ‘deep state’ argument that the intelligence agencies are out of control and were involved in the fabrication of Russian collusion. [Here’s Snowden referencing his work for the “Deep State”] Assange’s work has exposed CIA atrocities (which supports Trump’s position) but WikiLeaks has also revealed evidence of war crimes by the US military, an establishment so admired by his core supporters. I fear that a Snowden pardon, much as I would personally welcome it, would only further isolate Assange.

If Assange goes down, do you see a future for journalism in the world — given America’s so-called leadership in this area, by way of the holy first amendment, but with dwindling global newspapers. The Guardian, WaPo and the NYT remain the only papers of record available in every international terminal in the world — and sales falling for them, the fight over what’s real news and what isn’t underway (a proxy war to control the narrative), how do you see the fight for journalism ahead?

If Assange goes down, it will be the third domino. First, the rising power of executive government; second, the destruction of the, at times, countervailing power of the mainstream media, including public broadcasters who draw their political power from their audiences (and thus to a certain extent are independent). The internet has savaged media budgets which has weakened the overall media environment and empowered governments to attack and cut public broadcasters. Assange who used the internet as a weapon for journalism provided a way to re-energise old media structures — engage readers and challenge executive government authority. He provided a way to democratise journalism. It is the reason he is such a threat to the hegemony of the US led five eyes nations, who until recently in a uni-polar political and strategic world, have ruled supreme.

I sometimes marvel at the effect on journalism and even constitutional issues in America that Australians have had. Early on, Assange seems to have declared war on the DoD and, later, the US State Department; John Pilger has, with his interview with the CIA “rogue” Duane Clarridge, exposed the full fuckin hubris of American foreign policy; and, Fox News has so dumbed down the political conversation in America that it may be heading for a fate like that depicted in Idiocracy. Any thoughts?

There’s a strange contradiction in Australia. Australians are very conservative, and cautious, but part of the national identity is tied to the notion of anti-authoritarianism, dating back to the nation’s convict past. The degradation of the mainly poor, transported to Australia from the UK and Ireland two centuries ago for often minor crimes, created a bedrock of antagonism against the ruling ‘elites’. This long history of dissent in Australia has produced outstanding journalists such as Pilger and Assange, Wilfred Burchett and Philip Knightly. I can think of no better way to explain how Assange and Murdoch became two of the most influential global media figures in the past century. Murdoch rose to power as an anti-establishment figure in the UK and Assange has done the same on a global basis.

12 August 2020

GERIATRICS FOR DISPOSAL

Subject:	disposable old people
Date:	Sun, 9 Aug 2020
From:	Mannie De Saxe <redjos30@tpg.com.au>
To:	letters@theage.com.au

Mannie De Saxe

2/12 Murphy Grove,

Preston.

Vic 3072

Phone: 03 9471 4878

9 August 2020

*Geriatrics for disposal*

I am sick and tired of reading letters in The Age every day telling the world that old people should be allowed to be disposed of because they have lived their lives and it is younger people who need to be saved from death by the pandemic.

My partner is 97 and I am 93 and 25 years ago we were carers for people who were living with - and dying from - HIV/AIDS illnesses which were frightening to behold. Most of them were in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s and many of them died before treatments were found which allowed them to live longer and have a quality of life, which no one could envisage in the early to mid-90s. Some of them are still alive today and a few have reached their 80s and are still living useful and productive lives.

We live on our own and although we have all sorts of ailments and illnesses, we are fortunate that our minds are still functioning and we can do most daily tasks without assistance.

What is more we are still able to use our computers and can even write letters to newspapers.

People are people no matter what their ages and whether they are in nursing homes or their own homes they should not be thrown away as some of the letter writers would like to do with us. We still have human rights and I will insist on mine until I am ready to euthanase if life becomes intolerable, at a time of my own choosing.

............and just by the way, Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw were still writing into their 90s .

Mannie De Saxe

Sent to us by Gary Jaynes on 11 AUGUST 2020 from a friend of his.

01 August 2020

LIST OF ISRAELI TARGETS LEAKED: TEL AVIV FEARS THE WORST IN ICC INVESTIGATION OF WAR CRIMES

CounterPunch 31 July 2020

List of Israeli Targets Leaked: Tel Aviv Fears the Worst in ICC Investigation of War Crimes

by Ramzy Baroud

When International Court of Justice (ICC) Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, confirmed last December that the Court has ample evidence to pursue a war crimes investigation in occupied Palestine, the Israeli government responded with the usual rhetoric, accusing the international community of bias and insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’

Beneath the platitudes and typical Israeli discourse, the Israeli government knew too well that an ICC investigation into war crimes in Palestine could be quite costly. An investigation, in itself, represents an indictment of sorts. If Israeli individuals were to be indicted for war crimes, that is a different story, as it becomes a legal obligation of ICC members to apprehend the criminals and hand them over to the Court.

Israel remained publicly composed, even after Bensouda, last April, elaborated on her December decision with a 60-page legal report, titled: “Situation in the State of Palestine: Prosecution Response to the Observations of Amici Curiae, Legal Representatives of Victims, and States.”

In the report, the ICC addressed many of the questions, doubts and reports submitted or raised in the four months that followed her earlier decision. Countries such as Germany and Austria, among others, had used their position as amici curiae – ‘friends of the court’ – to question the ICC jurisdiction and the status of Palestine as a country.

Bensouda insisted that “the Prosecutor is satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine under article 53(1) of the Rome Statute, and that the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza (“Occupied Palestinian Territory”).”

However, Bensouda did not provide definitive timelines to the investigation; instead, she requested that the ICC’S Pre-Trial Chamber “confirm the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in Palestine,” an additional step that is hardly required since the State of Palestine, a signatory of the Rome Statute, is the one that actually referred the case directly to the Prosecutor’s office.

The April report, in particular, was the wake-up call for Tel Aviv. Between the initial decision in December till the release of the latter report, Israel lobbied on many fronts, enlisting the help of ICC members and recruiting its greatest benefactor, Washington – which is not an ICC member – to bully the Court so it may reverse its decision.

On May 15, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, warned the ICC against pursuing the investigation, targeting Bensouda, in particular, for her decision to hold war criminals in Palestine accountable.

The US slapped unprecedented sanctions against the ICC on June 11, with President Donald Trump issuing an ‘executive order’ that authorizes the freezing of assets and a travel ban against ICC officials and their families. The order also allows for the punishing of other individuals or entities that assist the ICC in its investigation.

Washington’s decision to carry out punitive measures against the very Court that was established for the sole purpose of holding war criminals accountable is both outrageous and abhorrent. It also exposes Washington’s hypocrisy – the country that claims to defend human rights is attempting to prevent legal accountability by those who have violated human rights.

Upon its failure to halt the ICC legal procedures regarding its investigation of war crimes, Israel began to prepare for the worst. On July 15, Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, reported about a ‘secret list’ that was drawn up by the Israeli government. The list includes “between 200 and 300 officials”, ranging from politicians to military and intelligence officials, who are subject to arrest abroad, should the ICC officially open the war crimes investigation.

Names begin at the top of the Israeli political pyramid, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his current coalition partner, Benny Gantz.
The sheer number of Israeli officials on the list is indicative of the scope of the ICC’s investigation, and, somehow, is a self-indictment, as the names include former Israeli Defense Ministers – Moshe Ya’alon, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett; current and former army chiefs of staffs – Aviv Kochavi, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot and current and former heads of internal intelligence, the Shin Bet – Nadav Argaman and Yoram Cohen.

Respected international human rights organizations have already, repeatedly, accused all these individuals of serious human rights abuses during Israel’s lethal wars on the besieged Gaza Strip, starting with the so-called ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008-9.

But the list is far more extensive, as it covers “people in much more junior positions, including lower-ranking military officers and, perhaps, even officials involved in issuing various types of permits to settlements and settlement outposts.”

Israel, thus, fully appreciates the fact that the international community still insists that the construction of illegal colonies in occupied Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the transfer of Israeli citizens to occupied land are all inadmissible under international law and tantamount to war crimes.

Netanyahu must be disappointed to learn that all of Washington’s concessions to Israel under Trump’s presidency have failed to alter the position of the international community and the applicability of international law in any way.

Furthermore, it would not be an exaggeration to argue that Tel Aviv’s postponement of its plan to illegally annex nearly a third of the West Bank is directly linked to the ICC’s investigation, for the annexation would have completely thwarted Israel’s friends’ efforts aimed at preventing the investigation from ever taking place.

While the whole world, especially Palestinians, Arabs and their allies, still anxiously await the final decision by the Pre-Trial Chamber, Israel will continue its overt and covert campaign to intimidate the ICC and any other entity that aims to expose Israeli war crimes and to try Israeli war criminals.

Washington, too, will continue to strive to ensure Netanyahu, Gantz, and the “200 to 300” other Israeli officials never see their day in court.

However, the fact that a “secret list” exists is an indication that Tel Aviv understands that this era is different and that international law, which has failed Palestinians for over 70 years, may, for once, deliver, however a small measure of justice.

BRITISH JUSTICE IS BLIND - OR NON-EXISTANT: JULIAN ASSANGE'S POLITICAL INDICTMENT: OLD WINE IN OLDER BOTTLES

.......and the Australian government has done nothing to help its citizen who it is leaving to rot in hell, so Australians overseas should know how its government looks after those citizens who have no significance for them politically.

From CounterPunch 31 July 2020

Julian Assange's Political Indictment: Old Wine in Older Bottles

By Binoy Kampmark

The book of hours on Julian Assange is now being written. But the scribes are far from original. Repeated rituals of administrative hearings that have no common purpose other than to string things out before the axe are being enacted. Of late, the man most commonly associated with WikiLeaks’ publication project cannot participate in any meaningful way, largely because of his frail health and the dangers posed to him by the coronavirus. Having already made an effort to attend court proceedings in person, Assange has come across as judicial exotica, freak show fodder for Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s harsh version of Judge Judy. He was refused an application to escape his glass commode when he could still attend in person, as permitting him to descend and consult his defence team in a court room would constitute a bail application of some risk. This reading by the judicial head was so innovative it even puzzled the prosecutors.

What we know to date is that restrictions and shackles on Assange’s case are the order of the day. Restricted processes that do nothing to enable him to see counsel and enable a good brief to be exercised are typical. Most of all, the ceremonial circus that we have come to expect of British justice in the menacing shadow of US intimidation has become gloomily extensive. On July 27, that circus was given yet another act, another limping performance. As before, the venue was the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.

During the proceeding, Assange did appear via video link from Belmarsh Prison, albeit it an hour late, and only at the insistence of his legal team. The Guardian report on his presence reads like an account of a sporting engagement. “Wearing a beige sweater and a pink shirt, Assange eventually appeared from Belmarsh prison after an earlier attempt was aborted.”

Others were alarmed. During his call-over hearing, noted Martin Silk of the Australian Associated Press, “neither the Australian, nor his guards, were wearing face masks. I don’t understand the reason for that given we have to wear them inside shops.” This point was also made by Assange’s partner, Stella Moris: “Belmarsh hasn’t provided Julian with a face mask throughout this #covid crisis. The prison guards he interacts with don’t wear them either.” WikiLeaks supporter Juan Passarelli also felt that Assange “was having trouble following the proceedings due to the Judge and lawyers not speaking loud enough and into the microphones.”

Arrangements for the hearing for observers proved characteristically sloppy. Freelance journalist Stefania Maurizi was unimpressed by being on the phone for two hours during which she “couldn’t understand more than 20 percent of what has been discussed.” She was adamant that “UK authorities don’t care at all about international reporters covering” the Assange proceedings. “Dial in system is, as usual,” agreed Passarelli, “a shambles!”

The topic of discussion during this administrative hearing was what was announced by the US Department of Justice on June 24, namely the second superseding indictment. That document proved to be a naked exercise of political overreach, adding no further charges to the already heavy complement of eighteen, seventeen of which centre on the US Espionage Act. The scope of interest, however, was widened, notably on the issue of “hacking” and conferencing. Assange is painted as devilish recruiter and saboteur of the international secret order, a man of the conference circuit keen to open up clandestine governments and make various reasons for doing so. “According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.”

Edward Fitzgerald QC, in representing Assange, fulfilled his norm, submitting that the recently revised document did little to inspire confidence in the nature of clarified justice. “We are concerned about a fresh request being made at this stage with the potential consequences of derailing proceedings and that the US attorney-general is doing this for political reasons.” Fitzgerald reminded the court that US President Donald Trump had “described the defence case as a plot by the Democrats.”

This should have been obvious, but Baraitser’s court would have none of it. To admit at this point that Assange is wanted for political reasons would make it that much harder to extradite him to the United States, given that bar noted in the US-UK Extradition Treaty. Whilst it was good of Fitzgerald to make this point, he should know by now that his audience is resolutely constipated and indifferent to such prodding. Assange is to be given the sharpest, rather than the most balanced, of hearings. Accordingly, Baraitser insisted that Fitzgerald “reserve his comments” – she, in the true tradition of such processes, had not been supplied, as yet, with the US indictment. This made the entire presence of all the parties at the Westminster Magistrates’ not merely meaningless but decidedly absurd.

Assange’s defence team could draw some cold comfort from Baraitser’s comments that July 27 was the deadline for any further evidence to be adduced by the prosecution before the September extradition hearing. One exception was permitted: psychiatric reports.

The current chief publisher of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson had a few choice words for the prosecutors of Wikileaks. “All the alleged events have been known to the prosecution for years. It contains no new charges. What’s really happening here is that despite its decade start the prosecution are still unable to build a coherent case.” The scrapping of the previous indictments suggested that they were “flagrantly disregarding proper process.”

Assange is facing one of the most disturbing confections put together by any state that claims itself to be free. Should this stratagem work, the publisher will find himself facing the legal proceedings of a country that boasts of having a free press amendment but is keen on excluding him from it. What is even more troubling is the desire to expand the tent of culpability, one that will include press outlets and those who disseminate classified information.

To the next circus instalment we go: a final call-over hearing in Westminster Magistrates’ Court on August 14, then the September 7 extradition hearing, to be held at the Central Criminal Court most of us know as the Old Bailey. Will justice prove blind, or merely blinded?

31 July 2020

DEMOCRACY IN THE UK HAS COME TO A GRINDING HALT: UK GOVERNMENT REFUSES TO RELEASE INFORMATION ABOUT ASSANGE JUDGE WHO HAS 96% EXTRADITION RECORD

UK government refuses to release information about Assange judge who has 96% extradition record

By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis• 31 July 2020

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves Westminster Magistrates Court in London, 13 January 2020. (Photo: EPA-EFE/ Facundo Arrizabalaga) Less

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is blocking the release of basic information about the judge who is to rule on Julian Assange’s extradition to the US in what appears to be an irregular application of the Freedom of Information Act, it can be revealed.

Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis

Declassified has also discovered that the judge, Vanessa Baraitser, has ordered extradition in 96% of the cases she has presided over for which information is publicly available.

Baraitser was appointed a district judge in October 2011 based at the Chief Magistrate’s Office in London, after being admitted as a solicitor in 1994. Next to no other information is available about her in the public domain.

Baraitser has been criticised for a number of her judgments so far concerning Assange, who has been incarcerated in a maximum security prison, HMP Belmarsh in London, since April 2019. These decisions include refusing Assange’s request for emergency bail during the Covid-19 pandemic and making him sit behind a glass screen during the hearing, rather than with his lawyers.

Declassified recently revealed that Assange is one of just two of the 797 inmates in Belmarsh being held for violating bail conditions. Over 20% of inmates are held for murder.

Declassified has also seen evidence that the UK Home Office is blocking the release of information about home secretary Priti Patel’s role in the Assange extradition case.

The only known photograph of district judge Vanessa Baraitser — who will rule on

Julian Assange’s extradition to the US — in the public domain.

Anonymisation by Declassified. (Photo: Instagram)

Request denied
A request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was sent by Declassified to the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) on 28 February 2020 requesting a list of all the cases on which Baraitser has ruled since she was appointed in 2011. The MOJ noted in response that it was obliged to send a reply within 20 working days.

Two months later, on 29 April 2020, an information officer at the HM Courts and Tribunals Service responded that it could “confirm” that it held “some of the information that you have requested”.
But the request was rejected since the officer claimed it was not consistent with the Constitutional Reform Act. “The judiciary is not a public body for the purposes of FOIA… and requests asking to disclose all the cases a named judge ruled on are therefore outside the scope of the FOIA,” the officer stated.

The officer added that the “information requested would in any event be exempt from disclosure… because it contains personal data about the cases ruled on by an individual judge”, and that “personal data can only be released if to do so would not contravene any of the data protection principles” in the Data Protection Act.

A British barrister, who wished to remain anonymous, but who is not involved with the Assange case, told Declassified: “The resistance to disclosure here is curious. A court is a public authority for the purposes of the Human Rights Act and a judge is an officer of the court. It is therefore more than surprising that the first refusal argued that, for the purposes of the FOIA, there is no public body here subject to disclosure.”

The barrister added: “The alternative argument on data doesn’t stack up. A court acts in public. There is no default anonymity of the names of cases, unless children are involved or other certain limited circumstances, nor the judges who rule on them. Justice has to be seen to be done.”

Despite the HM Courts and Tribunals Service invoking a data protection clause, Declassified was able to view a host of cases with full names and details in Westlaw, a paid-for legal database. The press has also reported on a number of extradition cases involving Baraitser.

An internal review into the rejection of Declassified’s freedom of information (FOI) request upheld the rejection.

Identical request

On 10 April 2020 Declassified sent an identical information request to the MOJ asking for a case list for a different district judge, Justin Barron, who was appointed on the same day as Baraitser in October 2011.

This request was answered by the MOJ swiftly, within 17 days, compared to two months with Baraitser. The information officer also noted that it “holds all the information you have requested” rather than “some” in the case of Baraitser. It is unclear why the HM Courts and Tribunals Service would hold only partial information on Baraitser, but not on Barron.

On this occasion, the request was not blocked. Instead, the information officer asked for further clarification about the information being sought, suggesting issues such as final hearing dates, the defendants’ names and what the defendants were charged with.

Declassified clarified that it wanted the list to include “the date, the defendant, the charge and the judge’s decision”.

The officer eventually declined the request, stating that it “would exceed the cost limit set out in the FOIA”, but adding: “Although we cannot answer your request at the moment, we may be able to answer a refined request within the cost limit.”

With Baraitser’s identical records, the possibility of refining the search was never offered – two “absolute” exemptions being applied to the request from the start.

Baraitser’s record

Despite the rejection by the MOJ, Declassified has found 24 extradition cases that Baraitser ruled on from November 2015 to May 2019, discovered using the media archive Factiva and Westlaw. Of these 24 cases, Baraitser ordered the extradition of 23 of the defendants, a 96% extradition record from publicly available evidence.

Baraitser has ordered the extradition of defendants to at least 11 countries in this period, including one person to the US. Six of the extraditions, or 26% of the rulings, were successfully appealed.
In one case, Baraitser’s decision to extradite was overturned because the appeal judge “attached considerable weight to the likely impact of extradition upon the health and wellbeing of the defendant’s wife”, who “will be left with very little support”.

Recently, Baraitser controversially refused to guarantee anonymity to Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, which led her to publicly reveal her relationship with Assange and their two children.

The appointment of Baraitser to preside over the Assange case remains controversial and the decision untransparent. It is likely that Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot was involved in the decision to appoint Baraitser to the case.

A list of all the extradition cases District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled on that are publicly available. (Compiled by Declassified)

The chief magistrate has a “leadership responsibility” for the roughly 300 district and deputy judges across England and Wales. Arbuthnot hears “many of the most sensitive or complex cases in the magistrates’ courts and in particular extradition and special jurisdiction cases”.

Arbuthnot’s role also includes “supporting and guiding” district judges such as Baraitser and “liaising with the senior judiciary and presiding judges” on the cases they are ruling on.

But Arbuthnot’s role in the Assange case is mired in controversy and conflicts of interest due to her family’s connections to the British military and intelligence establishment, as Declassified has previously revealed. Arbuthnot has personally received financial benefits from partner organisations of the UK Foreign Office, which in 2018 called Assange a “miserable little worm”.

Arbuthnot directly ruled on the Assange case in 2018-19 and has never formally recused herself from it. According to a statement given to Private Eye, she stepped aside because of a “perception of bias”, but it was not elucidated what this related to.

Since Arbuthnot has not formally recused herself, Assange’s defence team cannot revisit her rulings while it also could have left open the possibility of her choosing which of her junior judges was to preside over the Assange case.

In a key judgment in February 2018, Arbuthnot rejected the findings of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention – a body composed of international legal experts – that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained”, characterised Assange’s stay in the embassy as “voluntary” and concluded Assange’s health and mental state was of minor importance.

In a second ruling a week later, Arbuthnot dismissed Assange’s fears of US extradition. “I accept that Mr Assange had expressed fears of being returned to the United States from a very early stage in the Swedish extradition proceedings but… I do not find that Mr Assange’s fears were reasonable,” she said.

In May 2019, soon after Assange was seized from his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy by British police, the US government requested his extradition on charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years.

Lady Arbuthnot attends the Queen’s garden party at Buckingham Palace in May 2017 with her husband Lord Arbuthnot, a former Conservative defence minister with links to the British military and intelligence establishment. Anonymisation by Declassified. (Photo: Instagram)

More silence

Declassified also made a request under the Freedom of Information Act for a list of all the cases heard at Woolwich Crown Court, near Belmarsh, for 2019. Baraitser had controversially moved Assange’s hearing to Woolwich — which is often used for terrorism cases — before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. It has now been moved back to the Old Bailey, the central criminal court of England and Wales.

This request, sent on 31 March 2020, was again rejected. The MOJ officer stated: “I can confirm that the MOJ holds the information that you have requested. All of the information is exempt from disclosure under section 32 of the FOIA because it is held in a court record.”

It added that: “Section 32 is an absolute exemption and there is no duty to consider the public interest in disclosure.”

Despite daily lists of the cases heard at Woolwich being freely available online, including names of defendants, an internal review conducted at Declassified’s request reached the same conclusion.
On 15 May 2020, Declassified sent a further FOI request, this time to the Home Office, asking for information on any phone calls or emails made or received by the current Home Secretary Priti Patel concerning the Assange case.

The Home Office replied: “We neither confirm nor deny whether we hold any information, within the scope of your request.” It added that the reason was “to protect personal data”.

But, in January 2020, Declassified had requested the same information for the period when Sajid Javid was home secretary, April 2018 – July 2019. In this case, the Home Office responded: “We have carried out a thorough search and we have established that the Home Office does not hold the information that you have requested.”

The responses from the Home Office appear to indicate that Patel has had communications regarding Assange during her tenure as home secretary, but that the government is reluctant to disclose this information. The Assange case continues to set a legal precedent in being mired in opacity and conflicts of interest.

Patel — who is also linked to Arbuthnot’s husband, Lord Arbuthnot — will sign off Assange’s extradition to the US if it is ordered by Baraitser. DM

Matt Kennard is head of investigations, and Mark Curtis is editor, at Declassified UK.. Sign up to receive Declassified’s monthly newsletter here.

About Declassified UK

Declassified UK is the leading website for in-depth analysis and exclusive news on British foreign policy, investigating the UK military, intelligence agencies and its most powerful corporations.
The UK’s traditional media is increasingly acting as part of the establishment and failing to report independently and critically on Britain’s real role in the world.
By contrast, Declassified UK is independent and produces public-service journalism that informs people about what is being done in their name, without fear or favour.
As well as focusing on current policies, we also uncover historical secrets, by investigating the declassified files in the National Archives in London. And our work is also read beyond the UK—in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States where UK foreign policy is often influential.

The task of uncovering Britain’s role in the world is vital given the UK’s global power:

An arms industry that is one of the world’s largest exporters of weapons
One of the world’s largest networks of overseas military bases, with barracks from Belize to Brunei
A booming cyber warfare industry and hub for private military firms
Permanent member of the UN security council and one of the world’s leading soft powers
Among the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world in the form of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ
Special forces currently operating in at least seven covert wars
An unparalleled archipelago of tax havens stretching across the Atlantic Ocean
Numerous powerful corporations in arms, extractives, mining, and finance

Our first articles revealed a secret British military unit commanded by Saudi Arabian soldiers, how the UK intelligence agencies neutralised the Guardian newspaper after the Snowden leaks, how the intelligence establishment is fortifying the repressive regime in Bahrain, and how the UK legal trial of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange is mired in conflicts of interest.

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Why Declassified is needed

The “mainstream” UK media is not uncovering the reality of Britain’s role in the world and the public is being largely kept in the dark. This means that governments are not being held to account for their policies.
The problem is not just with the UK’s right-wing, billionaire-owned media but also with its more “liberal” outlets and the BBC, the most popular source of news for the British public.
The British media are less and less mainstream – and are if anything becoming even more embedded in the establishment, regularly amplifying extremist policies that support war, human rights abusers and corporations contributing to catastrophic climate change.
The government publishes key information on its policies virtually every day which is often very revealing. But only a tiny proportion of this is ever covered in the establishment media. Those journalists choose not to cover it, or else don’t care. We do.
However, much remains hidden. Britain’s culture of secrecy is deeply embedded in Whitehall. This means that numerous government policies are hidden from the same public who should be able to hold a government to account in a democracy. These hidden policies often need to be exposed, and the secret state challenged.

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Declassified’s staff have written articles for most of Britain’s national media, but the space for independent analysis and critical investigations is ever declining. Perhaps this is not surprising. Britain ranked bottom for press freedom in Western Europe in 2019 and scored lower internationally than South Africa and Australia.
When the Daily Maverick offered to host our stories, we saw it as an ideal opportunity to team up with one of the best investigative and independent news sites in the Global South.
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22 July 2020

PALESTINIAN FREEDOM IS POSSIBLE NOW

PALESTINIAN FREEDOM IS POSSIBLE - Article by Ramzy Baroud - in CounterPunch 21 July 2020

In a recent TV discussion, a respected pro-Palestine journalist declared that if any positive change or transformation ever occurs in the tragic Palestinian saga, it would not happen now, but that it would take a whole new generation to bring about such a paradigm shift.

As innocuous as the declaration may have seemed, it troubled me greatly.
I have heard this line over and over again, often reiterated by well-intentioned intellectuals, whose experiences in researching and writing on the so-called ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ may have driven some of them to pessimism, if not despair.

The ‘hopelessness discourse’ is, perhaps, understandable if one is to examine the off-putting, tangible reality on the ground: the ever-entrenched Israeli occupation, the planned annexation of occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, the shameful Arab normalization with Israel, the deafening silence of the international community and the futility of the quisling Palestinian leadership.
Subscribing to this logic is not only self-defeating, but ahistorical as well. Throughout history, every great achievement that brought about freedom and a measure of justice to any nation was realized despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

Indeed, who would have thought that the Algerian people were capable of defeating French colonialism when their tools of liberation were so rudimentary as compared with the awesome powers of the French military and its allies?
The same notion applies to many other modern historic experiences, from Vietnam to South Africa and from India to Cuba.

Palestine is not the exception.

However, the ‘hopelessness discourse’ is not as innocent as it may seem. It is propelled by the persisting failure to appreciate the centrality of the Palestinian people – or any other people, for that matter – in their own history. Additionally, it assumes that the Palestinian people are, frankly, ineffectual.

Interestingly, when many nations were still grappling with the concept of national identity, the Palestinian people had already developed a refined sense of modern collective identity and national consciousness. General mass strikes and civil disobedience challenging British imperialism and Zionist settlements in Palestine began nearly a century ago, culminating in the six-month-long general strike of 1936.

Since then, popular resistance, which is linked to a defined sense of national identity, has been a staple in Palestinian history. It was a prominent feature of the First Intifada, the popular uprising of 1987.

The fact that the Palestinian homeland was lost, despite the heightened consciousness of the Palestinian masses at the time, is hardly indicative of the Palestinian people’s ability to affect political outcomes.

Time and again, Palestinians have rebelled and, with each rebellion, they forced all parties, including Israel and the United States, to reconsider and overhaul their strategies altogether.

A case in point was the First Intifada.

When, on December 8, 1987, thousands took to the streets of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp, the Gaza Strip’s most crowded and poorest camp, the timing and the location of their uprising was most fitting, rational and necessary. Earlier that day, an Israeli truck had run over a convoy of cars carrying Palestinian laborers, killing four young men. For Jabaliya, as with the rest of Palestine, it was the last straw.

Responding to the chants and pleas of the Jabaliya mourners, Gaza was, within days, the breeding ground for a real revolution that was self-propelled and unwavering. The chants of Palestinians in the Strip were answered in the West Bank, and echoed just as loudly in Palestinian towns, including those located in Israel.

The contagious energy was emblematic of children and young adults wanting to reclaim the identities of their ancestors, which had been horribly disfigured and divided among regions, countries and refugee camps.

The Intifada – literally meaning the “shake off” – sent a powerful message to Israel that the Palestinian people are alive, and are still capable of upsetting all of Israel’s colonial endeavors. The Intifada also confronted the failure of the Palestinian and Arab leaderships, as they persisted in their factional and self-seeking politics.

In fact, the Madrid Talks in 1991 between Palestinians and Israelis were meant as an Israeli- American political compromise, aimed at ending the Intifada in exchange for acknowledging the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a representative of the Palestinian people.

The Oslo Accords, signed by Yasser Arafat and Israel in 1993, squandered the gains of the Intifada and, ultimately, replaced the more democratically representative PLO with the corrupt Palestinian Authority.

But even then, the Palestinian people kept coming back, reclaiming, in their own way, their importance and centrality in the struggle. Gaza’s Great March of Return is but one of many such people-driven initiatives.

Palestine’s biggest challenge in the movement is not the failure of the people to register as a factor in the liberation of their own land, but their quisling leadership’s inability to appreciate the immense potential of harnessing the energies of Palestinians everywhere to stage a focused and strategic, anti-colonial, liberation campaign.

This lack of vision dates back to the late 1970s, when the Palestinian leadership labored to engage politically with Washington and other Western capitals, culminating in the pervading sense that, without US political validation, Palestinians would always remain marginal and irrelevant.

The Palestinian leadership’s calculations at the time proved disastrous. After decades of catering to Washington’s expectations and diktats, the Palestinian leadership, ultimately, returned empty-handed, as the current Donald Trump administration’s ‘Deal of the Century’ has finally proven.

I have recently spoken with two young Palestinian female activists: one is based in besieged Gaza and the other in the city of Seattle. Their forward-thinking discourse is, itself, a testament that the pessimism of some intellectuals does not define the thinking of this young Palestinian generation, and there would be no need to dismiss the collective efforts of this budding generation in anticipation of the rise of a ‘better’ one.

Malak Shalabi, a Seattle-based law student, does not convey a message of despair, but that of action. “It’s really important for every Palestinian and every human rights activist to champion the Palestinian cause regardless of where they are, and it is important especially now, ” she told me.

“There are currently waves of social movements here in the United States, around civil rights for Black people and other issues that are (becoming) pressing topics – equality and justice – in the mainstream. As Palestinians, it’s important that we (take the Palestinian cause) to the mainstream as well,” she added.

“There is a lot of work happening among Palestinian activists here in the United States, on the ground, at a social, economic, and political level, to make sure that the link between Black Lives Matter and Palestine happens,” she added.
On her part, Wafaa Aludaini in Gaza spoke about her organization’s – 16th October Group – relentless efforts to engage communities all over the world, to play their part in exposing Israeli war crimes in Gaza and ending the protracted siege on the impoverished Strip.

“Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists outside are important because they make our voices heard outside Palestine, as mainstream media does not report (the truth of) what is taking place here,” she told me.

For these efforts to succeed, “we all need to be united,” she asserted, referring to the Palestinian people at home and in the diaspora, and the entire pro-Palestinian solidarity movement everywhere, as well.

The words of Malak and Wafaa are validated by the growing solidarity with Palestine in the BLM movement, as well as with numerous other justice movements the world over.

On June 28, the UK chapter of the BLM tweeted that it “proudly” stands in solidarity with Palestinians and rejects Israel’s plans to annex large areas of the West Bank.
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BLM went further, criticizing British politics for being “gagged of the right to critique Zionism and Israel’s settler-colonial pursuits”.
Repeating the claim that a whole new generation needs to replace the current one for any change to occur in Palestine is an insult – although, at times, unintended – to generations of Palestinians, whose struggle and sacrifices are present in every aspect of Palestinian lives.

Simply because the odds stacked against Palestinian freedom seem too great at the moment, does not justify the discounting of an entire nation, which has lived through many wars, protracted sieges and untold hardship. Moreover, the next generation is but a mere evolution of the consciousness of the current one. They cannot be delinked or analyzed separately.

In his “Prison Notebooks”, anti-fascist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, coined the term “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

While logical analysis of a situation may lead the intellect to despair, the potential for social and political revolutions and transformations must keep us all motivated to keep the struggle going, no matter the odds.