Cancillería del Ecuador / Flickr
It’s shaping up to be quite a month, possibly a turning point in world history. One the one hand we’ve got U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, opining on CIA cutout Alexey Navalny‘s death in prison: “The fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built.”
And on the other hand we’ve seen evidence that the CIA planned to assassinate Julian Assange and we know the U.S. wants to extradite him for “espionage” aka journalism sharing inconvenient truths about the inner workings of empire. In other words, fear of one man underscoring the weakness and rot at the heart of the U.S. imperial system.
Today it appears that journalists at the Assange extradition hearing in the UK are being deliberately handicapped in their efforts to cover the proceedings. The palpable fear that we, the public, might have access to this information underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system Blinken feeds off of, don’t you think?
Some are blaming problematic tech in the very fancy courtroom with poor acoustics and no audio feed to the overflow rooms.
Speaking of very fancy tech that is problematic right now, how about those Houthis shooting down their second $30,000,000 MQ-9 Predator drone? Using technology that costs a few thousand dollars. U.S. military-industrial complex response: ka-ching!
Besides which the Houthis have sunk a British ship carrying fertilizer, and hit two more U.S. ships.
https://twitter.com/SprinterMedia1/status/1759889244313591868/photo/1
Did the Western powers not believe Ansar Allah leaders when they warned that they’ll go on denying access to the Red Sea as long as the genocide in Gaza the West is supporting continues?
Meanwhile in the last couple of weeks we saw CIA whistleblower Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years for leaking “Vault 7” documents to wikileaks exposing illegal and immoral actions of that federal agency. Here’s whistleblower John Kiriakou on the case:
Prosecutors had literally no evidence that Schulte had taken the data from the CIA and transferred it to Wikileaks. But they contended that he was a computer genius who was so brilliant that he was able to cover his tracks. That was enough for the jury..
The CIA leadership apparently thought the leak was so damaging that then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo ordered the Agency to come up with a plan to kidnap or to kill Julian Assange in London. One former Trump Administration national security official said that Pompeo and other senior CIA leaders, “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7. They were seeing blood.”
You remember John Kiriakou right? From his Covert Action Magazine bio:
Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing.
At this point we’re all sorely in need of more good news as we await news on Assange that is likely to be very, very bad. Maybe historian Ilan Pappe’s article belongs here: “It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end.”
This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end – such projects usually collapse violently and thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project, and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel.
