-
ICMag with help from Landrace Warden and The Vault is running a NEW contest in November! You can check it here. Prizes are seeds & forum premium access. Come join in!
Julian Assange Loses Appeal: British High Court Accepts U.S. Request for Trial
- Thread starter Tudo
- Start date
pjlive
Active member
I'm sorry to hear. I'm starting to slip here and there myself these days. Security patches, codecs, web stream capabilities, browser functionalities, workarounds for live streaming media copyrights and on and on and on are changing at the speed of light. It's real hard to keep up. Best to you, man.You mean he wont hang himself off camera?
You damn right PJI ran Ubuntu from 2006 until 2017. The only reason I am not there,
I can't code anymore, even with notes as I don't know what my notes mean anymore. For 11 yrs it was bliss
Switcher56
Comfortably numb!
It is what it is when you get old
yup. whoever called it "the Golden Years" was full of shit...It is what it is when you get old
Switcher56
Comfortably numb!
The have depends for that
Three Berries
Active member
Hard to figure out what's going on with Assange. The US want's to silence him and punish those who release sensitive info in the future, or so is the story. I'm of the opinion that the Brits are behind the a lot of the FISA spying controversy and do NOT want Assange sent to US as this will be exposed in US courts.
This is from supposedly an Assange family insider but take it for what it's worth.
*****************************
....the CIAs main objective: dismantling your access to information by criminalizing the publication of all sensitive documents, and gaining legal precedent and allowance to plot to kill & extract any citizen anywhere on Earth.
-
They absolutely must not gain this power. If they do, the future of humanity becomes incredibly bleak.
I cannot stress enough, how important the Assange case is to you, to your rights, that it transcends both party lines, and international boundaries. It is a pressing, urgent issue for humanity as a collective.
Through the Assange case the CIA is seeking to fundamentally dismantle your access to information and free speech.
If you want to get involved, come and join the official campaign fighting the CIA's murderous plot. Get alerts on the case, stay active, stay involved, and add your voice to the growing chorus speaking out against injustice.
Kindly share this so that others see it, so that they understand, and so humanity acts.
https://dontextraditeassange.com/
https://t.me/TheOfficialE/1374
This is from supposedly an Assange family insider but take it for what it's worth.
*****************************
....the CIAs main objective: dismantling your access to information by criminalizing the publication of all sensitive documents, and gaining legal precedent and allowance to plot to kill & extract any citizen anywhere on Earth.
-
They absolutely must not gain this power. If they do, the future of humanity becomes incredibly bleak.
I cannot stress enough, how important the Assange case is to you, to your rights, that it transcends both party lines, and international boundaries. It is a pressing, urgent issue for humanity as a collective.
Through the Assange case the CIA is seeking to fundamentally dismantle your access to information and free speech.
If you want to get involved, come and join the official campaign fighting the CIA's murderous plot. Get alerts on the case, stay active, stay involved, and add your voice to the growing chorus speaking out against injustice.
Kindly share this so that others see it, so that they understand, and so humanity acts.
https://dontextraditeassange.com/
https://t.me/TheOfficialE/1374
Three Berries
Active member
https://t.me/TheOfficialE/645
Julian Assange exposed the Afghan money laundering operation more than a decade ago, and is currently incarcerated without actual crime, in Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he remains indefinitely as the US endlessly appeals an extradition case they lost in January.
-
The US Gov's pursuit there puts your rights and freedoms in massive and very real danger.
They are after a specific legal precedent, the right to extract and imprison anyone on earth who would attempt to expose their crimes.
This is what is at stake here.
A real and present danger they would rather you not see coming.
If they succeed, it is likely the flow of actual information and truth will come to a grinding and absolute halt.
Because, to put it plainly, to expose them would be an act of terrorism. Even writing this statement, alerting you, would objectively be criminal.
This is where our eyes should turn. To the reality they are trying so desperately to silence.
What they fear here, is public attention on this case and the realities around it. The severe illegality of it. The fact they spied on Julian's lawyers, the fact they tried to steal his children's diapers; the fact they plotted to kill him in numerous ways; the fact the FBI hired a serial pedophile to craft their superceding indictment. The list goes on, of toxic things they engaged in here in their endless pursuit of shutting down Truth itself.
We need to be the tip of the spear here, my friends, and make sure the world is acutely aware of those things.
Julian Assange exposed the Afghan money laundering operation more than a decade ago, and is currently incarcerated without actual crime, in Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he remains indefinitely as the US endlessly appeals an extradition case they lost in January.
-
The US Gov's pursuit there puts your rights and freedoms in massive and very real danger.
They are after a specific legal precedent, the right to extract and imprison anyone on earth who would attempt to expose their crimes.
This is what is at stake here.
A real and present danger they would rather you not see coming.
If they succeed, it is likely the flow of actual information and truth will come to a grinding and absolute halt.
Because, to put it plainly, to expose them would be an act of terrorism. Even writing this statement, alerting you, would objectively be criminal.
This is where our eyes should turn. To the reality they are trying so desperately to silence.
What they fear here, is public attention on this case and the realities around it. The severe illegality of it. The fact they spied on Julian's lawyers, the fact they tried to steal his children's diapers; the fact they plotted to kill him in numerous ways; the fact the FBI hired a serial pedophile to craft their superceding indictment. The list goes on, of toxic things they engaged in here in their endless pursuit of shutting down Truth itself.
We need to be the tip of the spear here, my friends, and make sure the world is acutely aware of those things.
Julian Assange will make his final appeal this week to the British courts to avoid extradition
LONDON — If Julian Assange is denied permission to appeal his extradition to the United States before a panel of two judges at the High Court in London this week, he will have no recourse left within the British legal system. His lawyers can ask the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is far from certain that the British court will agree. It may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/02/no_author/julian-assanges-final-appeal/
Julian Assange’s Day in Court
Julian Assange’s lawyers — in a final bid on Tuesday to stop his extradition — fought valiantly to poke holes in the case of the prosecution to obtain an appeal.
chrishedges.substack.com
Julian Assange’s Grand Inquisitor
The prosecution lawyers in the High Court seeking to ensure Julian’s extradition to the U.S. rely almost exclusively on the judicial opinions of Gordon Kromberg, a highly controversial U.S. attorney.
chrishedges.substack.com
he's going to have to face the music, one way or another. he's lucky he stole shit from US intelligernce rather than someone much more intolerant of such behavior...like Russia maybe? he would have died years ago if that were the case. myself, i think he has more than paid his pound of flesh. but you don't poke the bear unless he's in a cage. the US has already said he could serve his sentence, if any, in Australia. lots of times, prisoners going home to jail from a foreign country end up hearing a judge say "sentenced to time served. go, and sin no more..."
The Heroic Julian Assange
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
February 26, 2024
Julian Assange may soon be extradited to the United States, where he will face prosecution that could end in his imprisonment for life. He is in fact a hero, who should be honored rather than punished. American foreign policy is based on the pursuit of global hegemony and to achieve this goal, our “leaders” engage in torture and murder. Assange brought these crimes to public attention through his publication of the “WikiLeaks” documents he got from Bradley Manning. Because of this, the American government, now headed by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, wants to destroy him. In what follows, I’ll explain the facts of the case and why they are important and detail the persecution of Assange.
Chris Hedges outlines what is at stake:
“The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.
Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.
Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.
Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized.” See here.
It’s important that we understand in detail what was in the WikiLeaks documents. In an article published in March, 2020, the 10th anniversary of their publication, Arjun Walla gives us some of the highlights:
“Last month marked the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks’ publication of the Collateral Murder video. The video shows how two Apache helicopters murdered 11 Iraqi people including two Reuters journalists. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. This is one of the publications Julian Assange is being indicted for espionage. He faces 175 years in a US jail if extradited from the UK. WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. They analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material and spoke to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.
WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work
After the video was released, one of the soldiers involved in the incident, Ethan McCord, said the following:
“If you feel threatened in any way, you’re able to engage that person. Many soldiers felt threatened just by the fact that you were looking at them, so they fired their weapons on anybody that was looking at them because they (I) felt threatened. We were told if we were to fire on anybody, and if it were to be investigated, that ‘officers will take care of you.’ ”
“We were told by our battalion commander to kill every m***** f****** on the street. Many soldiers would not do that, we decided we were going to shoot into the rooftops of buildings because, if you didn’t fire, the NCOs in your platoon would make your life hell.”
“This happens on a daily basis, destroying vans full of children, the destruction of the Iraqi people happens on a daily basis.” See here.
The WikiLeaks documents also showed how the US military and the CIA manipulate the banking and financial system. Arjun Walia is again on top of this:
“I recently came across an article published on MintPress News. It was written by Whitney Webb, who is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
In her article, she references a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” that was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks. The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”
The rest of her article is posted below:
The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”
WikiLeaks’ recent tweets on the subject drew attention to a single section of the 248-page-long document, titled “Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare.” This section in particular notes that the U.S. government applies “unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors,” and specifically names the World Bank, IMF and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as “U.S. diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” such goals.
The manual also touts the “state manipulation of tax and interest rates” along with other “legal and bureaucratic measures” to “open, modify or close financial flows” and further states that the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – which oversees U.S. sanctions on other nations, like Venezuela — “has a long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”
This section of the manual goes on to note that these financial weapons can be used by the U.S. military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels” and that such unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”
The role of these “independent” international financial institutions as extensions of U.S. imperial power is elaborated elsewhere in the manual and several of these institutions are described in detail in an appendix to the manual titled “The Financial Instrument of National Power.” Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of U.S. National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”
Furthermore, the manual states that the U.S. military “understand that properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW,” meaning that these weapons are a regular feature of unconventional warfare campaigns waged by the United States.” See here.
I mentioned that the US seeks global hegemony, and its closest ally in this futile and deadly quest is Britain. The WikiLeaks document showed how close their on-going collaboration really is, as Mark Curtis reveals:
“Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.
The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”
A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.
It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.
Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government “would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and UK.” The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.
The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.
However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.
Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.
A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”
A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.
Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.” See here.
The CIA was so angered by Wikileaks that its director, Mike Pompeo, plotted to kill him. Philip Giraldi gives us the inside story:
“In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.
At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.
CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him.” See here.
Fortunately, the plot failed. But now it looks like Assange will be shipped to the US, where this ill man, who suffered a stroke in a British jail, faces a dire fate. Let’s do everything we can to prevent this and to honor this true American hero.
www.lewrockwell.com
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
February 26, 2024
Julian Assange may soon be extradited to the United States, where he will face prosecution that could end in his imprisonment for life. He is in fact a hero, who should be honored rather than punished. American foreign policy is based on the pursuit of global hegemony and to achieve this goal, our “leaders” engage in torture and murder. Assange brought these crimes to public attention through his publication of the “WikiLeaks” documents he got from Bradley Manning. Because of this, the American government, now headed by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, wants to destroy him. In what follows, I’ll explain the facts of the case and why they are important and detail the persecution of Assange.
Chris Hedges outlines what is at stake:
“The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.
Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.
Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.
Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized.” See here.
It’s important that we understand in detail what was in the WikiLeaks documents. In an article published in March, 2020, the 10th anniversary of their publication, Arjun Walla gives us some of the highlights:
“Last month marked the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks’ publication of the Collateral Murder video. The video shows how two Apache helicopters murdered 11 Iraqi people including two Reuters journalists. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. This is one of the publications Julian Assange is being indicted for espionage. He faces 175 years in a US jail if extradited from the UK. WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. They analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material and spoke to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.
WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work
After the video was released, one of the soldiers involved in the incident, Ethan McCord, said the following:
“If you feel threatened in any way, you’re able to engage that person. Many soldiers felt threatened just by the fact that you were looking at them, so they fired their weapons on anybody that was looking at them because they (I) felt threatened. We were told if we were to fire on anybody, and if it were to be investigated, that ‘officers will take care of you.’ ”
“We were told by our battalion commander to kill every m***** f****** on the street. Many soldiers would not do that, we decided we were going to shoot into the rooftops of buildings because, if you didn’t fire, the NCOs in your platoon would make your life hell.”
“This happens on a daily basis, destroying vans full of children, the destruction of the Iraqi people happens on a daily basis.” See here.
The WikiLeaks documents also showed how the US military and the CIA manipulate the banking and financial system. Arjun Walia is again on top of this:
“I recently came across an article published on MintPress News. It was written by Whitney Webb, who is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
In her article, she references a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” that was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks. The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”
The rest of her article is posted below:
The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”
WikiLeaks’ recent tweets on the subject drew attention to a single section of the 248-page-long document, titled “Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare.” This section in particular notes that the U.S. government applies “unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors,” and specifically names the World Bank, IMF and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as “U.S. diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” such goals.
The manual also touts the “state manipulation of tax and interest rates” along with other “legal and bureaucratic measures” to “open, modify or close financial flows” and further states that the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – which oversees U.S. sanctions on other nations, like Venezuela — “has a long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”
This section of the manual goes on to note that these financial weapons can be used by the U.S. military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels” and that such unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”
The role of these “independent” international financial institutions as extensions of U.S. imperial power is elaborated elsewhere in the manual and several of these institutions are described in detail in an appendix to the manual titled “The Financial Instrument of National Power.” Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of U.S. National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”
Furthermore, the manual states that the U.S. military “understand
I mentioned that the US seeks global hegemony, and its closest ally in this futile and deadly quest is Britain. The WikiLeaks document showed how close their on-going collaboration really is, as Mark Curtis reveals:
“Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.
The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”
A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.
It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.
Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government “would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and UK.” The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.
The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.
However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.
Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.
A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”
A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.
Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.” See here.
The CIA was so angered by Wikileaks that its director, Mike Pompeo, plotted to kill him. Philip Giraldi gives us the inside story:
“In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.
CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him.” See here.
Fortunately, the plot failed. But now it looks like Assange will be shipped to the US, where this ill man, who suffered a stroke in a British jail, faces a dire fate. Let’s do everything we can to prevent this and to honor this true American hero.
The Heroic Julian Assange - LewRockwell
Julian Assange may soon be extradited to the United States, where he will face prosecution that could end in his imprisonment for life. He is in fact a hero, who should be honored rather than punished. American foreign policy is based on the pursuit of global hegemony and to achieve this goal...
www.lewrockwell.com
Assange Final Appeal Day 2 – Your Man in the Public Gallery
I approached Day 2 with trepidation. It was not so much being accustomed to having hopes dashed, as having lived so long without hope that it was hard to
znetwork.org
This article goes into a level of detail that I have not seen elsewhere.
Last edited:
does Great Britain have a death penalty? most countries without it refuse to extradite criminals (regardless of their crimes) to countries where death is a possibility. easier to keep them in YOUR jail than withstand the firestorm of criticism at home if they were to be executed somewhere else...
