It's almost Christmas!!! I hope everyone who is celebrating has a merry Christmas and I hope it is a day of peace.
I also hope 2022 is a better year for every one of us.
In the meantime, we still have to get through 2021.
We needed more truth this year and I was reminded of that yesterday when I read C.I.'s snapshot and saw this:
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.
Exactly. If JACOBIN and IN THESE TIMES want credit for covering Black issues, then they need to cover them. I don't mean months ago coverage that they keep on their front page to look 'woke.' I mean that they need to do the actual work.
They are not fooling anyone and virtue signaling is not coverage.
That's a truth we all need to grasp if we want 2022 to be a better year.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
This Christmas may well be the last that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will spend outside US custody. On December 10, the British High Court ruled in favor of extraditing Assange to the United States, where he will be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. It is clear to me that the charges against Assange are both baseless and dangerous, in unequal measure — baseless in Assange’s personal case, and dangerous to all. In seeking to prosecute Assange, the US government is purporting to extend its sovereignty to the global stage and hold foreign publishers accountable to US secrecy laws. By doing so, the US government will be establishing a precedent for prosecuting all news organization everywhere — all journalists in every country — who rely on classified documents to report on, for example, US war crimes, or the US drone program, or any other governmental or military or intelligence activity that the State Department, or the CIA, or the NSA, would rather keep locked away in the classified dark, far from public view, and even from Congressional oversight.
I agree with my friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the US government’s indictment of Assange amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this criminalization is a cruel and unsual paradox: namely, the fact that many of the activities that the US government would rather hush up are perpetrated in foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the US court system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department’s response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York Times reporters for violating Iran’s secrecy laws? How will the United Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition of Guardian reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K would ever comply with those demands — of course they wouldn’t — but that they would lack any principled basis for their refusals.
The U.S. attempts to distinguish Assange’s conduct from that of more mainstream journalism by characterizing it as a “conspiracy.” But what does that even mean in this context? Does it mean encouraging someone to uncover information (which is something done every day by the editors who work for Wikileaks’ old partners, The New York Times and The Guardian)? Or does it mean giving someone the tools and techniques to uncover that information (which, depending on the tools and techniques involved, can also be construed as a typical part of an editor’s job)? The truth is that all national security investigative journalism can be branded a conspiracy: the whole point of the enterprise is for journalists to persuade sources to violate the law in the public interest. And insisting that Assange is somehow “not a journalist” does nothing to take the teeth out of this precedent when the activities for which he’s been charged are indistinguishable from the activities that our most decorated investigative journalists routinely engage in.
This kind of sincere, credulous, smug, and gloating inquiry is just the most recent, just-in-time-for-Christmas, example of in-the-flesh-and-in-the-word bad faith, presented by media professionals who are never in worse faith than when they report on — or pass judgment on — other media.
On December 22, Doctors for Assange released an open letter, published below, to Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, imploring him to seek the WikiLeaks founder’s urgent release on medical grounds. The letter makes that request based on Joyce’s recent statements suggesting that the US extradition request against Assange should now be dropped.
That hundreds of doctors have again written, warning of Assange’s dire medical situation, underscores the grave dangers he faces as he spends yet another year behind bars with extradition hanging over his head and the prospect of being incarcerated for life on trumped-up US espionage charges.
US authorities accuse Assange, 50, of 18 counts relating to WikiLeaks' release of vast troves of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables, which they said had put lives in danger.
On December 10 the WikiLeaks founder moved a step closer to facing criminal charges in the United States after Washington won an appeal over his extradition in London's High Court.
The court said it was satisfied with a package of assurances given by the US about the conditions of Assange's detention, including a pledge not to hold him in a so-called "ADX" maximum security prison in Colorado and that he could be transferred to Australia to serve his sentence if convicted.
The Supreme Court is the United Kingdom's final court of appeal.
