Thursday, December 23, 2021. The persecution of Julian Assagne, the innocents killed in the US Drone War, and much more.
Let's start with political prisoner Julian Assange. The US government continues to persecute him.
Former US President Donald Trump has revealed in an interview with conservative commentator Candace Owens for the portal Daily Wire that he contemplated the possibility of pardoning the former agent of the CIA and the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, and the founder of the WikiLeaks portal, Julian Assange, but that, in the end, he chose not to do so.
“On the one hand you have a kind of espionage agreement and, on the other hand, you have someone who is exposing the real corruption“said the ex-president, when asked if he considered the possibility of pardoning Assange or Snowden.
“Could have done [perdonarlos]but i will say that there are people on both sides of the question, good people on both sides. And there are bad people on one side. But I decided to let it go, let the courts figure it out. And I suppose the courts are doing it, “said the politician, adding that he was” very close to going in the opposite direction. “
What a cop out. What an embarrassment.
We're not a site of Trump hatred. We didn't go rabid and obsess over his Tweets daily. We saw him as the inconsequential and insignificant figure that he actually was. Pardoning Julian Assange and Ed Snowden would have given him a reason for the history books and something to remember him for.
Now he's got nothing -- nothing positive.
What he could have done? It's what he should have done. His refusal to do so makes him just a blowhard who failed in every way.
Trump supporters believed he was going to take on the Deep State and certainly Trump fed intot hat belief with his remarks both before and after he was sworn in. But he did nothing but mouth words.
I will absolutely agree that he was not given a honeymoon period and that the media and elements of the government (CIA, et al) worked together to try to destroy him.
Guess what?
It wasn't fair but it wasn't unheard of. And, in the end, the one who destroyed Donald was Donald. He could have done something historical but chose to do nothing.
He was the supposed outsider -- despite his family's roots in the establishment that go far back -- even beyond -- even beyond their involvement (and help in the downfall of) Nikola Tesla. But he never bucked the Deep State he repeatedly decried. That's why the JFK records that were supposed to be released still are not released. (At COUNTERPUNCH this morning, Jacob Hornberger covers the continued blockage on releasing those documents.) It's why truth tellers like Julian Assange and Ed Snowden remain persecuted.
He could have made a difference. He chose not to.
Real activists -- not Jane Fonda with her idiotic and anti-woman 'plan' for Trump on the environment -- made appeals to him. Chrissie Hynde made a very public plea to him for Julian Assange. She showed more restraint and tact than I ever could have. And he blew her off.
It's on him. And so is the fact that he has no real accomplishments to speak of with four years as president.
While we're noting Chrissie, let's include this from Joe Vitagliano (AMERICAN SONGWRITER)
Chrissie Hynde announced plans for an upcoming livestream event that’s set to showcase the beloved rock icon covering some of her favorite songs.
Titled Chrissie Hynde & Co. Sing Bob Dylan (And Other Songs), the performance—filmed and recorded live at the Royal Opera House in London—will premiere on December 26 at 3 p.m. EST, and will be available through January 3 at 2:59 a.m. EST.
Notably, Hynde will be pulling songs from her latest record, Standing In The Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan, which garnered wide acclaim when it came out earlier this year. Recorded throughout quarantine with her longtime collaborator and Pretenders bandmate, James Walbourne, the album features homespun arrangements of songs like “In the Summertime,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “You’re A Big Girl Now” and more.
On the topic of Julian, Richard Medhurst and George Galloway discuss the issues in the video below.
Caitlin Johnstone recently pointed out how basic the issue is:
The most powerful regime on the planet imprisoning a journalist for journalistic activity is as brazen and obvious an act of tyranny as you could possibly come up with, and yet you still get pseudoleft pundits acting like you’re some kind of weird freak for expecting them to oppose it.
The Assange issue is not actually complicated. The most powerful government in the world is trying to extradite a journalist and try him under the Espionage Act for exposing its war crimes. It is that simple. This isn’t some super complex subject that you defer to the experts on.
That’s one of the things that’s so frustrating about this case. It’s such a blatant abuse of government power that virtually everyone would normally be ideologically opposed to it, but because there’s been so much media spin on it for so long people don’t see it.
Don’t imprison journalists for exposing the truth. I mean, like, duh. This should really be such a mainstream issue that fringey types like myself would see no need to focus on it, and if the media environment wasn’t being so despicably manipulated it would be.
More basics can be found in Hamaad Habibullah piece for THE INDIA TIMES:
If there is any one case which brings the US under the radar of most criticism with regards to the freedom of expression or press it is Julian Assange case. Be it the Russian President Vladimir Putin asking, “Why is Mr Assange in prison?….Is this democracy?", or the Brazilian President backing Assange or the Azerbaijan President reminding a western reporter of Assange’s treatment.
Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, famous for releasing hundreds of classified documents, exposing numerous scandals and secrets. According to its official website, WikiLeaks, “Is a multinational media organisation and associated library. It was founded by its publisher Julian Assange in 2006. WikiLeaks specialises in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption”.
Assange and WikiLeaks were involved in famous leaks like the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, The United States diplomatic cables leak also known as Cablegate.
The Cablegate documents revealed US spying against the UN and other international leaders, disclosed conflicts between the US and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries around the world as documented by US diplomats, all of which to a great extent contributed to the Arab Spring.
Those are real issues and issues the public -- around the world -- has a right to know. US President Joe Biden doesn't appear to grasp that the world is watching and his hideous first year is probably going to be his best year as president. Smart people would tell him to end the persecution of Julian. At DISSIDENT VOICE, Binoy Kampmark writes:
With Julian Assange now fighting the next stage of efforts to extradite him to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 of which are based on the brutal, archaic Espionage Act, some Australian politicians have found their voice. It might be said that a few have even found their conscience.
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was sufficiently exercised by the High Court judgment overturning the lower court ruling against extradition to demand an end to the matter. In his opinion piece for the Nine newspaper group on December 14, he argued that rights were “not created in some legal sonic boom at one undefined point of our existence nor switched off like the power to a fridge because of a fear or a confusion as to the worth of their contents.”
The deputy PM proved mature enough to admit that “whether you like him or despite him”, the importance of the case transcended his situation. “So we must hope for the British courts to do so, and we will judge its society accordingly.” (They have not and, accordingly, should be judged.)
The Nationals leader has little time for the role of whistleblowing or disclosing egregious misconduct by a State; less time for Assange as the publisher in history, the exposer of crimes by a great power. “They are a separate matter to the key issue: where was this individual when he was allegedly breaking US law for which the US is now seeking his extradition from London?”
Joyce’s reasoning, while jejune on the historical contributions of WikiLeaks, has the merit of unusual clarity. He argues that the UK “should try him there for any crime he is alleged to have committed on British soil or send him back to Australia, where he is a citizen.” Assange never pilfered any US secret files; did not breach Australian laws and was not in the US when “the event being deliberated in the court now in London occurred.” To extradite him to the US would not only be unjust but bizarre. “If he insulted the Koran, would he be extradited to Saudi Arabia?”
The move by the Nationals leader also brought a few voices of support from the woodwork. Liberal backbenchers Jason Falinski and Bridget Archer are encouraging diplomatic intervention. Falinski suggested that the Morrison government “do what it can to get an Australian citizen back to Australia as quickly as possible” though he refused to entertain “a public spat with America”. Archer believed that “he should be released and returned to Australia”.
The announcement that Caroline Kennedy would be heading Down Under as the new US ambassador to Australia was also seen as an opportunity. Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr suggested to that Prime Minister Scott Morrison take the chance to discuss the Assange case with Kennedy. (This, from a man who once claimed that Assange “has had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian” while admitting that he did not “know whether this is the case.”)
Morrison might, suggests Carr, point out that Australia had its own challenges in facing war crimes allegations, notably “war crimes trials pending for Australian troops in Afghanistan who might have done the very things Assange exposed in Iraq.” Washington’s treatment of the publisher could well “turn this guy into a martyr.”
Shirley passed on a question from an e-mail to the public account (common_ills@yahoo.com): "Are you going to keep using space to cover Assange?" Yep. Remember, we have covered him a lot. But, yes, we have had to up the coverage. Why? Because so many refuse to. Do outlets like JACOBIN and IN THESE TIMES really think the world's not watching them -- not watching and recording their silnece on Julian.
They're both laughable, White run, domestic-focused oeprations. They try so hard to prove that they like people of color -- even though they appear to know very few. For example, a November article on Tupac's mother remains on the front page of JACOBIN. A November article. That's outright embarrassing.
But White IN THESE TIMES may actually outdo that. Their front page includes articles like the one from July about the future of Black Lives Matter. From July. And a laughable June article about your 'White nieghbors' yard sign not being enough. Honey, no yard sign is. No yard sign ever is. On any issue. Gro the f**k up.
And grow the f**k up on the fact that you're front paging months old coverage does not make you look friendly to people of color. No, it only underscores how little you actually do to cover racial issues that in December you're having to go back months to try to prove that you're not a White person ignorant of the issues effecting people of color.
Shame on them.
Turning to Iraq, we've been repeatedly noting Azmat Khan's "Hidden Petnagon Records Reveal Patterns Of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes" which went up over the weekend at THE NEW YORK TIMES website:
Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations
forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the
outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported
85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line,
where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime
sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored
vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the
Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been
bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and
their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three
other civilians were killed.
In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy
object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces
struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the
object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in
the strike.
None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.
These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.
The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of
more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York
Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed
intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of
thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the
American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and
precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified
system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and
accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful
of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided
includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a
dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were
left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented
efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that
took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the
deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than
6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its
boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers
sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack
Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow
the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible
care not to harm the wrong ones.
Yesterday, DEMOCRACY NOW! spoke with Khan:
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at how the Pentagon has conducted a vast cover-up of civilians killed in the U.S. air wars in the Middle East. The New York Times has published a remarkable two-part series based on extensive reporting on the ground in Iraq and Syria, as well as 1,300 confidential Pentagon reports on civilian casualties resulting from U.S. drones and other airstrikes.
New York Times reporter Azmat Khan writes, quote, “The documents lay bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, many of them children.”
The reports directly contradict public claims made by successive U.S. presidents and military leaders. In 2016, then-President Obama claimed the U.S. was waging the most precise air campaign in history.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In stark contrast to ISIL, which uses civilians as human shields, America’s armed forces will continue to do everything in our power to avoid civilian casualties. With our extraordinary technology, we’re conducting the most precise air campaign in history. After all, it is the innocent civilians of Syria and Iraq who are suffering the most and who need to be saved from ISIL’s terror.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Azmat Khan, an award-winning investigative journalist, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She spent over five years researching the U.S. air wars. As part of her reporting, she visited dozens of different bomb sites in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Part one of her investigation is headlined “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes.” And part two is “The Human Toll of America’s Air Wars.”
Azmat Khan, welcome back to Democracy Now! Thank you so much for this comprehensive report. I’m wondering if you can start off by telling us the story of Ali Fathi Zeidan and his family.
AZMAT KHAN: Sure. So, Ali Fathi Zeidan and his family had moved from a town, a village called Wana, which was just south of the Mosul Dam. They left it because there was fighting between ISIS and Peshmerga forces, and they were really looking for anywhere where they could be safe. And that often meant, for many families who were fleeing displacement in 2015, in 2016 — it often meant moving to places where you already had family. And Ali Fathi Zeidan’s daughter was married to a young man whose brother lived in West Mosul, and that’s where they wound up living.
They moved into an industrial area in this wheat storage district called Yabisat. And, you know, this was a very large extended family. Ali Fathi Zeidan had many children and grandchildren. And they essentially were unable to afford a nice apartment, but they moved into this kind of storage space, you know, made it home, brought in things to sleep on, brought in a water tank — essentially, you know, tried to get by as best they could during this war.
And one night in March of 2016, they were sitting down to dinner, and there was an airstrike. What they didn’t know at the time was that the United States had been surveilling this house and that particular compound or area that the house was located on, believing it to be the site — or that area to be the site of a chemical weapons production facility and other kinds of structures associated with chemical weapons making and dissemination.
And so, what wound up happening is that the intelligence review before the strike was carried essentially had different people weighing in on this target. You know, the actual intelligence for this site may have come from this human source. And as different people sort of evaluated what they saw, there was one person who was looking at this and saw the intelligence and said, “Listen, I have a bit of a different assessment.” And she was a USAID official who, when she spotted the 10 children that everyone who was reviewing this footage saw, said, “Listen, I don’t think those children are transients,” meaning they’re merely passing through. “I think they may live in or near this target compound.” And the military disagreed. They continued to classify the children as transients, meaning that they believed they could mitigate the potential for the harm to those kids by carrying out the strike at night, when they wouldn’t be outside playing or wherever it was that they had seen them playing, by a stream near the structure, in the target video, in the pre-surveillance video.
And so, you know, shortly after this airstrike, video surfaced online of family members, whom I met many years later — four years later, I believe — who were picking up the bodies of their loved ones and trying to salvage everyone they could. At least 21 people died from that single family alone in this airstrike, and they were civilians. And when that video surfaced online — ISIS often made propaganda videos — it triggered a credibility assessment, in which the U.S.-led coalition took a look at the evidence, reinterviewed this USAID official to try to determine what went wrong. And what they concluded was that there was — you know, that the process and procedures, you know, they did not find any wrongdoing or disciplinary action. In fact, they said they had even taken more measures than necessary to protect against civilian harm. And there really wasn’t the kind of deep unearthing of what happened here.
When I first got this document about this incident, I showed it to somebody, a source in the military. And, you know, he said, “You know what this is, right? This is confirmation bias.” He explained it this way. He said that military officials, they see something that’s called a target or called a chemical weapons production facility, and as it’s being vetted through these chains, they place very high value on that kind of vetting. And at that point, it’s very hard for them to unsee it as anything else other than that particular target. And so, you know, he said that probably this USAID official, who had not been through so many instances of that kind of military analysis that would lead you to believe that these people were targets or that these children were not transients, or whatever it might be, she had the kind of eyes that were clear and an understanding of ground realities to understand what was happening here.
And so, that issue of confirmation bias came up again and again in the more than 1,300 records that I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act of the military’s own assessments Misidentification, conflating somebody who was a civilian for a combatant was common. And the number one reason why that often happened was that there was confirmation bias at play.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Azmat, I wanted to ask you to put these records and this many deaths in the context of past U.S. wars. It seems to me that the mass killings of civilians have marked all modern U.S. wars. In Vietnam, it was the use of napalm and white phosphorus bombs against what became the civilian — largely civilian population; during the Panama invasion, the first use of what the Pentagon called bunker buster bombs. But it wasn’t until the Gulf War of 1991 that the Pentagon began to trumpet the use of so-called smart, remote precision-guided bombs, that were going to eliminate civilian casualties. And our government seems to increasingly rely on this false claim that better technology can somehow eliminate mistakes and save both U.S. soldiers and civilians. What do you see from these documents once again demonstrates the basic or fundamental fallacy of this approach to war?
AZMAT KHAN: So, it’s true that, you know, a lot of these different innovations in warfare, in weaponry, have been implemented in earlier wars. And at the time, the United States would make grand claims about it. You mentioned the Gulf War. It’s true. During the Gulf War, U.S. officials were very apt to talk about the use of precision-guided weapons, laser-guided weapons, their effectiveness in hamstringing one of the largest militaries in the world with what was categorized at the time as “surprisingly few” civilian casualties.
There’s Congressional Research Service report that came out many years later, or was made public many years later, that said that a lot of those claims being made about the effectiveness of that precision weaponry’s use in the Gulf War were vastly overstated. We’ve seen that again and again. In fact, there are claims about the use of precision-guided weapons that just don’t stack up with the reality of what they can actually offer.
Certainly there are advancements in the ability to follow a moving target, but here’s the thing. You can precisely hit a target exactly the way you want to with many of this new weaponry, but that is meaningless, that precision is meaningless, if you have the wrong target in the first place, if your intelligence is wrong. And so, what I found in many of these documents were overwhelming patterns of failures in intelligence, over and over, whether that was conflating a civilian with a combatant. Probably the biggest was just failing to detect the presence of civilians in the first place before carrying out a strike. There were so many instances in which they had determined or concluded that there were no civilians in that area, or they did not detect the presence of them.
And the military is really only held to a standard of, you know, “With reasonable certainty, we concluded this particular thing,” and their chain of command and their process. So, you know, another major finding in the examination of these documents was that there were no findings — or at least not in the records I have — any findings of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. And that surprises a lot of people, but it probably shouldn’t, when you know what results in findings of wrongdoing or disciplinary action in the kind of apparatus or the way that these investigations or assessments work, which is that it’s based on mainly chain of command, reasonable certainty.
And despite this often being framed — you know, when there’s a major failure that becomes very public, like the Kabul strike or the MSF bombing in Kunduz in — you know, the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders clinic in 2015 in Kunduz, Afghanistan, American officials will come out and say this is an anomaly, this is unique, this is an extremely tragic error. But what I found through the examination of the documents and ground visits to, yes, 60 sites that were deemed credible, meaning they had accepted those — they had accepted that casualties occurred, and more than 40 others that were either deemed noncredible or not yet assessed, so more than a hundred in total — what I often found in examining the records, looking at these strikes on the ground, interviewing people, and really going in-depth, was that there were patterns of failure that they really couldn’t investigate or understand without being on the ground, that they had limited view from where they were looking and the kinds of things that they were using.
And after a while, once you see that over and over and over, you do have to ask whether this is really a system of accountability or whether it is designed to function as a system of impunity, actually to provide, for example, as some sources have told me, to provide legal cover in instances in which there will be allegations against U.S. soldiers, or even to provide the military, as one analyst, Larry Lewis, who has studied a lot of these kinds of documents in the past, put it, to basically provide them expanded authority on the battlefield and use to justify taking greater freedom of action in war.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking of accountability, your reports of the — and these were actually the military’s own investigations. About how many of them did the Pentagon officially acknowledge as civilian casualties? And how many were basically kept in-house, until you were able to uncover these records?
AZMAT KHAN: Oh, OK. So, the number of records that had previously been made public before I obtained them, of the vast trove, they’ve conducted, at least in the air war against Iraq and Syria, I think, around 2,800 assessments that they’ve done, either determining them to be credible or not. Of those 2,800, 340 have been deemed credible. Before I had started requesting them, or, actually, before — just putting aside the number I got, the number that had been made public among those was less than 20. So, less than 20 of these records had ever been made public. I obtained, I think, 216 credible assessments and around 1,100 or so noncredible ones, where they concluded that it was not likely that they had killed or injured civilians.
At WSWS, Joseph Scalice notes:
On Sunday, the New York Times published a major investigative account, the Civilian Casualty Files, accompanied by hundreds of confidential Pentagon documents, revealing that US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have killed thousands of civilians, and the military has systematically covered this up.
The Civilian Casualty Files are evidence of extensive war crimes. They reveal that the US military, under the Obama and Trump administrations, deliberately killed civilians, including children. The Pentagon documents manifest a contempt for human life that is chilling.
The lead author and investigator, Azmat Khan, an assistant professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, spent five years uncovering the story. She filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the reports of the Pentagon’s internal review process. When these requests were denied, she filed lawsuits against the Department of Defense and U.S. Central Command, demanding the release of the documents.
When the US military receives an allegation from an external source that civilians were hit in an airstrike, a formal review process is launched and a final report issued. There were 2,866 reports issued for airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between September 2014 and January 2018. Prior to the Civilian Casualty Files, “little more than a dozen” had been published. The Times was given 1,311 reports, of which hundreds have now been published.
Khan checked the reports against on-the-ground witness testimony, traveling to over 100 sites where civilian casualties had been reported in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to interview survivors. She found that “many allegations of civilian casualties were erroneously dismissed ... [and] even when civilian deaths were acknowledged, they were often significantly undercounted.”
Her investigation found, for example, that more than 120 civilians were killed in a single airstrike in July 2016 in the hamlet of Tokhar in Northern Syria. The US military claimed it was targeting ISIS, but confronted with evidence that the victims were farmers, it admitted to killing 24.
The military report on the slaughter at Tokhar found “no evidence of negligence or wrongdoing” and that “no further action” was necessary. No payment has been made to any of the survivors. This is the pattern with all of the reports, which taken together amount to a massive coverup.
Not a single report contained a finding of wrongdoing or a recommendation for disciplinary action. In many instances, “the unit that executed a strike also ended up investigating it.” A drone footage analyst, who spoke with the Times anonymously, reported that “superior officers would often ‘tell the cameras to look somewhere else’ because ‘they knew if they’d just hit a bad target.’” In many cases, reports indicated that “equipment error” meant that no footage was available at all.
The following sites updated:
