Brendan e-mailed to remind me that I have not noted President John F. Kennedy in a few weeks. Thank you for reminding me.
Here is one about then-president Richard Nixon (1968 to 1974 when he resigns in disgrace) asking F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover who assassinated President Kennedy?
Tuesday, June 21, 2022. Joe Biden continues to persecute Julian
Assange, Hillary Clinton continues to be annoying, climate change hits
Iraq hard, and much more.
US President Joe Biden continues to persecute Julian Assange.
In the video above, from Australia's ABC, Julian's brother Gabriel implores Joe to end the persecution.
Though
the prime minister of Australia has stated previously that this
persecution is wrong and needs to end, he shrinks on the world stage
unable to defend one of his country's own citizens now that he's prime
minister. Aden-Jay Wood (GBN) notes:
But the brother of Mr Assange, Gabriel Shipton, believes the case has “gone on too long” and “could be ended so easily.”
He
added in an interview on GB News’ Mark Steyn: “Joe Biden could just
drop these charges, move on, just let it go and Julian could walk free.”
AP notes, "The Australian government has been under mounting pressure to intervene since the British government last week
ordered Assange's extradition to the United States on spying charges.
[. . .] Albanese, who came to power at elections a
month ago, declined to say whether he had spoken to President Joe Biden
about the case."
This persecution of Julian is about silencing the press. Monday April 5, 2010, WIKILEAKS released US military video of a July 12, 2007 assault in Iraq. 12 people were killed in the assault including two Reuters
journalists Namie Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. That is when the
persecution begins. It was an intimidation carried out by multiple
presidents starting with Barack Obama, continuing with Donald Trump and
now the baton for killing the press has been handed off to Joe Biden.
This has had the effect of scaring off many traditional news outlets.
They once partnered with Julian to report and now they act as though
they've never heard of him. Saving their own asses? They may think
that. If they do, they're dead wrong. An attack on Julian is an attack
on all. And if the attack on Julian is not loudly and publicly
rebuked, you can be sure that next up will be THE WASHINGTON POST or THE
MIAMI HERALD or some other institution -- despite the US Constitution
-- the same one that's being ignored in this attack on Julian. Branko Marcetik (JACOBIN) offers this exercise:
In the authoritarian political system that exists in Russia, it can be
very hard to learn the truth about what the government is up to, let
alone force it to change its behavior or obtain any sort of justice for
its crimes. This makes government leaks, the whistleblowers who leak
them, and the journalists and press outlets that publish them, all the
more vital.
It also means all of those entities have a big target on their backs.
So let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say Moscow has engaged in a
years-long attempt to catch and imprison the man responsible for
publishing a series of massive leaks that proved deeply embarrassing to
the Kremlin.
Though he’s not a Russian national, has never lived in the country,
nor was he there when he committed his supposed “crime,” the Russian
government has taken the radical step of trying to have him extradited
to its soil, so it can put him through a trial that’s a foregone
conclusion and imprison him for god knows how long — effectively
asserting the right to prosecute and jail any journalist anywhere in the
world if they happen to publish something that displeases Russia’s
ruling elite.
What was it that displeased them? One was the several tranches of secret documents he released about the variouswars
Moscow has fought in the twenty-first century, revealing war crimes we
never knew about, a civilian death toll higher than we thought, and
various cover-ups and behind-the-scenes subterfuge. Another was the
decades worth of diplomatic cables that gave us unprecedented insight into the workings of Russian and other nations’ foreign policy.
But maybe his greatest crime in the minds of the country’s ruling class was publishing scandalous information
about the corruption and political manipulation of one section of the
political elite, embarrassing revelations almost certainly fed to him by
an adversarial foreign power with its own particular motivations.
The Kremlin has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish these acts of truth-telling, and to deter any future ones. It pressured PayPal to cut off payments to him, gave immunity
to a criminal and sex offender if he helped them catch him, and used
its assets in the hacker world to attack a foreign government’s websites
and create the pretext for its security services to enter the country
he was staying in. It eventually forced him to spend seven years in a
foreign embassy to avoid capture by Russian authorities, leading to the
partial unravelling of his sanity. Once they finally caught him, they
promptly imprisoned him without charge for the next three years, some of it spent in solitary confinement, a vicious form of torture. As a result of Moscow’s actions, when he finally showed up to his extradition trial, he struggled to say his name and age, and the extreme stress ultimately caused him to have a stroke.
All for the crime of exposing war crimes and corruption.
If you haven't caught on yet, the evil Russia above? It's not Russia. That's what the US government is doing to Julian.
Yet, the dogged pursuit of Mr. Assange has been renewed by the Biden
administration. The only guarantee that it has provided is that it will
not hold him in a maximum security prison, which has strict confinement
rules, and that if convicted, he could serve his sentence in his native
Australia if he requested it. Its position runs counter to its stated
aim of bringing the U.S. back to the forefront of world democracies that
promote values enshrined in the West as pivotal, such as freedom of
expression accorded to the press. Subjecting Mr. Assange to trial will
be a blow against media freedom in the U.S. and will also criminalise
investigative journalism, particularly one that is pointed at the inner
workings of the deep state. Mr. Assange’s representatives have filed an
appeal before the British High Court. With the present Labor party-led
Australian government — Mr. Assange remains an Australian citizen — also
expressing its displeasure at the continued pursuit, the onus is on the
British judiciary to do right by him.
Responding to the news that the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has
certified Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States to face
charges under the Espionage Act, Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International
Secretary General said:
“Allowing Julian Assange to be extradited to the US would put him at
great risk and sends a chilling message to journalists the world over.”
“If the extradition proceeds, Amnesty International is extremely
concerned that Assange faces a high risk of prolonged solitary
confinement, which would violate the prohibition on torture or other
ill treatment. Diplomatic assurances provided by the US that Assange
will not be kept in solitary confinement cannot be taken on face value
given previous history.”
“We call on the UK to refrain from extraditing Julian Assange, for the US to drop the charges, and for Assange to be freed.”
Julian Assange is likely to further appeal the extradition on
separate grounds that it violates his right to freedom of expression.
For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact:
+44 20 7413 5566
email: press@amnesty.org
twitter: @amnestypress
The world is watching, Joe Biden, as you terrorize Julian and as you try to burn the US Constitution.
The world is watching.
As
people converse about Joe's advanced age and whether he would be up for
the job of a second term, while Joy Behar hisses and stamps her feet
and calls for the conversation to end because she doesn't like it, a
really important point is being missed.
Joe can't run for office again.
Not unless we're going to have another pandemic.
That's the only reason he won last time.
When
he was forced to be onstage, either his eye exploded, his dentures
slipped loose, he made one stupid remark after another, he got angry and
looked crazy? Are people forgetting the debates?
Are they forgetting that he had to hide in his basement?
Joe
can't run, he can't campaign. He's too old. He's too cranky. And
people don't like him. The polls make that clear right now, yes. But
it's also true that on the campaign trail, people didn't like him He
was constantly getting into fights with potential voters. And he
couldn't draw crowds. People have better things to do then go see
someone in mental decline offer excuses for why the working people of
America are constantly being screwed over.
If
2024 demanded real campaigning, the type we've had for every campaign
except 2020, Joe's not up to it. Before the pandemic hit, it was
obvious he wasn't up for campaigning. Four years older, and he's going
to be this time? All the 'energy shots' in the world won't manage to
keep him up. They will keep him cranky, as they did in 2020. And
someday that will be the big news. Historians will talk about it, how
the campaign insisted upon 'energy shots' to keep Joe awake. It's like
the shots JFK got for 'his back' that the press ignored in real time.
On
elections, maybe it's time the press said enough to Hillary Clinton,
told her to sit that fat ass down and maybe focus on that marriage with
that husband who continues to stray?
Hillary wants you to vote. She wants the transgender community to disappear.
We've wanted Hillary to disappear for years but she's never taken a hint.
She wants to say that elections are important.
The press should hold her feet to the fire.
The
obvious should be pointed out. She wants to whine about CNN or this
person or that person promoting Donald Trump in 2016. We all know she
and her campaign wanted that to happen and they promoted Donald.
Underestimating just how much the American public loathed her, they were
convinced she could win against Donald.
She was wrong.
If
she wants to give advice now about how important elections are, the
press should shoot back that maybe she should have realized that before
she attempted to elevate who she perceived as the worst candidate in the
bunch because she thought it would be an easy win.
Donald
Trump got the nomination. Maybe he would have anyway. But let's not
deny the reality that she and her campaign worked to get him that
nomination.
Instead of begging the country's forgiveness, she wants to pretend like it didn't happen.
And she wants to tell others that they are harming elections.
Neither
the transgender community nor anyone who advocates for their rights is
harming the Democratic Party's chances in the next election. That's
reality.
Hillary Clinton harmed the party's
chances when she and her team came up with the strategy to get the media
to elevate Donald so she could have an easy win.
CNN gushed today over the finds in a newly emerged city. Not to rain on
the parade but the reason we're seeing the ancient city is that the
Tigris River has dried up so much that the city was visible again for
the first time in centuries -- plural. That's not a good thing.
This is also the first year that Iraq's seen Lake Sawa dry up.
These are not good things for the Iraqi people.
And this is only going to get worse in the immediate future.
Another major sandstorm is predicted in the next few days. Iraq's seen
these repeatedly this year. People have to go inside. Some that don't
make it in time end up hospitalized. Iraq's always had sandstorms but
they haven't been as frequent and as massive as the ones this year.
Temperatures are rising and the water is disappearing.
A report
from the European Union Institute of Security Studies projects that the
number of days when temperatures in Baghdad hit 120 degrees will go
from roughly 14 per year to more than 40 over the next two decades.
The
study forecasts that the Iraqi capital, which is already seeing longer
heat waves each summer and higher peak temperatures, will be one of the
places hardest hit by global warming.
Baghdad set a new record high of 125.2 degrees on July 28, 2020. The next day it cooled down to 124.
This morning, Aland Qaradaxi (RUDAW) reports, "The water flowing into the Alwan dam in Khanaqin has decreased sharply
due to the presence of mud and silt, as well as Iran’s building of dams
which has restricted the water flow, leading to only two cubic meters of
water entering the dam daily." RUDAW also notes, "The level of Erbil’s underground water has decreased around 500 meters
over the past two decades, the Kurdistan Region’s ministry of
municipalities and tourism warned on Friday."
There
are all these issues and yet Iraq, eight months after the October 10th
elections, still can't name a prime minister or president.
Maybe it wouldn't matter if they could?
It's not like the previous governments in Iraq have ever done a damn thing.
AFP notes, "A cholera outbreak in Iraq has infected at least 13 people and scores
more suspected cases have been sent for analysis, most from the northern
Kurdistan region, health officials said on Sunday."
TELUGUSTOP.COM reminds, "Cholera is an extremely virulent disease, whose
symptoms in its most severe form include a rapid onset of watery
diarrhoea and dehydration that can lead to death.The disease is acquired
by consuming food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio
cholerae."
Today is June 21st. The first
official day of summer in the US. What happens every summer at this
site? We note the cholera outbreaks in Iraq. Sometimes it's a 'minor'
summer. Sometimes, like 2015, it's major. But why are they happening?
Why are they still happening?
Because one
failed government after another has refused to ensure that the Iraqi
people have potable water. The 13 diagnosed -- and the nearly 4,000 in
the same province who have sought medical care at hospitals already this
month -- have resulted in what? An ambitious project to finally bring
Iraq's infrastructure up to date? No. The same public reminder to boil
water and that you, the individual, not the government, are responsible
for ensuring that your water is safe to drink -- by boiling it first.
It's not like Iraq's not dealing with other health crisis. IRAQI NEWS AGENCY reports 305 new cases of COVID in Iraq.
