How
do you pick the greatest movies of all time? What are the requirements?
How about a movie that you have watched a hundred times? How about a
movie that stars all of your favorite funny people being as funny as
they have ever been? How about a comedy that is gentle, riotous and
infectious?
I’ve never understood why that wasn’t as important as “Citizen Kane” when making these lists. Well, “Waiting for Guffman”
is my “Citizen Kane.” Has anyone watched “Citizen Kane” more than three
times? Maybe eight people. Does anyone think Orson Welles’ performance
is better than Eugene Levy’s in “Guffman”? If you were feeling down
about the state of the world, what would you watch, “Waiting for
Guffman” or “Citizen Kane”? They need to move “Waiting for Guffman” much
higher on this list! Christopher Guest is a legendary comic force. The
man behind “A Mighty Wind,” “Best in Show” and the star and co-writer of
“This Is Spinal Tap” has brought the world countless comic pleasures,
but “Guffman” is my favorite.
I
love WAITING FOR GUFMAN. Parker Posey is perfection in that film. I
love it when she's talking about the DQ and how sometimes people come
in, maybe just for a cup of ice, you know?
She
is so funny in that film. So Christopher Guest lives in Blaine,
Missouri and they've got a bit centennial coming up so the town hires
him to put on a big celebration. There idea of big and his are two
different things. But he puts together a troupe with Eugene Levy,
Parker Posey, Catharine O'Hara, Fred Willard and Matt Kessler and they
practice to learn it so they can forget it -- though Christopher thinks
they could save time by not learning it since they're just going to
forget it . . .
And you can't forget City Council member Steve (Michael Hitchock) who just loves the play Corky's written and taken the lead in. Michael gushes, "He can act and he can sing and he can dance. There's only one other person in the world who can do all that and that's Barbra Streisand."
Matt
Kessler's character drops out of the troupe so Christopher has to take
over that role. Interestingly, Matt ended up dropping acting after the
movie. Too bad because he was really talented in this.
On movies, VARIETY insists, "As Houston, the British actor Naomi Ackie is far from the singer’s physical double, yet she nails the hard part: channeling her incandescence. "
No, she doesn't channel Whitney's incandescence. Yes, she is British
and, yes, it is another insult to Black actresses that they refused to
cast an American in this role. A long pattern of this happening, in
fact.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022. Hate merchants peddle hate with little
consequences, Iraq's last prime minister was a sadist sicko, Will Lehman
calls out voter suppression, and much more.
We're going to start with this exchange from last week's House Oversight Committee hearing:
US
House Rep David Cicilline: Republicans are happy to discuss our
community when they're attacking our rights, when they're crying on the
House floor because they oppose marriage equality or when they releasing
statements attacking our community in press releases and when they
release new bills targeting our community. But when it comes to
actually discussing the violence against our community and its causes?
Just a quick condemnation of what happened at Club Q and violence
broadly and nothing more. In my view, this is shameful. And so I want
to begin, Ms. Robinson, to thank all of the witnesses for being here
today. Ms. Robinson, as we near the end of this hearing, is there
anything that we've not covered yet relating to anti-LGBTQ+ extremism
and violence that you would like to share for the record?
Kelley
Robinson: We can do something about this. We can assure that social
media companies uphold their community standards. We can pass the
equality act to ensure that LGBTQ+ people actually don't have legalized
discrimination happening to them in more than half of the states. We
can, as a community, step up and say whole heartedly, no matter what our
party affiliation is, repudiate and rebuke these horrendous attacks on
our people. There is work to be done and, especially on this ten year
mark of Sandy Hook, we can do something to end this epidemic of gun
violence. We have to and we must.
US
House Rep David Cicilline: Thank you so much. And Mr. Wolf, thank you
so much for being here and for sharing your story. What message do you
have for politicians who are championing bills to limit the rights of
the LGBTQI+ community?
Brandon
Wolf: Thank you, I'm grateful to be here. And my message is simple:
Words have consequences. Somebody has to pay the price for unmitigated,
unbridled hatred -- the kind of hatred that we've seen on the rise
across this country. We've heard a lot about accountability in this
hearing and I'm glad we're talking about accountability. No one is
asking for anyone but the shooter at Club Q to be on trial in Colorado
Springs. But what we are saying is that people should be accountable
for the things that come out of their mouths. And when you're willing
to traffic in cheap shots and biogtry against a marginalized community
that's already seeing hate against it that's on the rise, already seeing
violence rising across the country, when you're willing to traffic in
those things to score political points, you have to be accountable for
what happens next. You have to hold yourself accountable for the impacts
of your words. Words really do have consequences. Unfortunately,
communities like mine have felt them. We have to do better than we are
today.
Last Wednesday, the
House Oversight and Reform Committee, chaired by US House Rep Carolyn
Maloney, held a hearing entitled "The Rise of Anti-LGBTQI+ Extremism and
Violence in the United States." The hearing was held due to the rise
in violence aimed at the LGBTQ+ community which includes last month's
Club Q shooting. The shooting left five people dead:
Daniel Davis Aston, 28
Kelly Loving, 40
Ashley Paugh, 35
Derrick Rump, 38
Raymond Green Vance, 22
The shooting also left twenty-five people injured.
Hate
merchants continue to attack the LGBTQ+ community and they largely get
away with it. You can -- and a body does -- call for gay people to be
killed -- and get away with it. At least with regards to government
officials. Sometimes, a community comes together to make clear that
this hate speech is neither wanted nor desired. Such as in Fort Worth,
Texas, where Stedfast Baptist Church's hate merchant Jonathan Shelley is
in a tizzy that his church will have to move yet again:
“The
reality is nobody really wants to lease to us, so it makes it very
difficult,” Shelley said. “I am still working a few options, as far as
lease options, or maybe even getting a building.”
In May, Shelley spoke to the Arlington City Council and said that gay people deserved to be killed. He advocated for enforcing an old Texas law outlawing “sodomy” that has since been ruled unconstitutional.
Residents
in Watauga have said they want Stedfast out of their community because
it promotes hate-filled, violent rhetoric that causes them to be
concerned about their safety. Church officials said they have been
harassed by the protesters.
You're calling for
murder. And you're surprised people don't want to lease to you? You're
calling for murder and you're pretending that this is due to your
religious teachings. See "Those fake ass 'religious' litigants (Ava and C.I.)"
for how to many idiots are getting away with too much by citing
''religious freedom" when they're not even practicing the teachings of
Jesus.
Your a hate merchant
spewing hate but don't worry, Jonathan Turley will always protect your
speech. He won't protect the rights of other speech. He won't protect
the speech of drag performers or of libraries but he'll rush to defend
the hate merchants and only the hate merchants.
Protesters
trying to shut down a reading event geared toward neurodiverse children
at a branch of the New York City Public Library were met by a wall of
counterprotesters.
The standoff over the Drag Story Hour event
— a popular national storytelling program where drag performers read
children's books at libraries, schools and bookstores — took place
outside the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library in
Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday. The event was billed as
“storytime with local drag performers adapted to be more accessible to
kids with autism and other disabilities.”
Saturday's
protest was just the latest in a string of standoffs across the country
from a fringe movement targeting drag events over unsubstantiated
allegations of grooming.
The
group demonstrating on Saturday brought handmade signs covering a
spectrum of issues, with messages protesting everything from fascism to
grooming to gender identity.
New
York City Council member Erik Bottcher shared images and videos online
of the protesters, some of whom he tried speaking with before entering
the children’s reading event.
“I
want to show you the face of hate, right here in Chelsea,” Bottcher
said in a video shared on Twitter, before showing the counterprotesters
clad in rainbows.
A
representative for the New York Public Library said the event went on
as planned and added that the library would continue to offer programs
supporting diverse voices.
“This
is particularly important at this moment when we are seeing a rise of
hate and violence targeting LGBTQ+ communities," the representative
said.
A right winger
gets booed at a campus events and Jonathan Turley's sobbing tears and
insisting booing is wrong. (Another example of how stupid he is and how
he shouldn't be commenting on supposed art -- cake baking and computer
templates aren't art.) But a mob goes after a library event and, in
fact, targets a local government official and Jonathan says nothing.
Well, after all, FOX NEWS is now paying him.
Outrageous. Unless you're banking a check from FOX NEWS apparently.
Turning to Iraq . . .
Mustafa
al-Kadhimi was Iraq's most inept prime minister since the US-led
invasion of Iraq. It turns out that he might have also been one of the
most corrupt and sick -- and remember, Iraq has already suffered through
two terms of Nouri al-Maliki being prime minister. So to be more
corrupt and sick than Nouri is really saying something. Remember,
Nouri's actions lead to the rise of ISIS in Iraq. Louisa Loveluck and Mustafa Salim (WASHINGTON POST) report:
A flagship anti-corruption drive under the tenure of U.S.-backed Iraqi
Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi used incommunicado detention, torture
and sexual violence to extract confessions from senior Iraqi officials
and businessmen, according to a nine-month investigation by The
Washington Post.
Kadhimi, who left office in October, came to power in 2020 after mass anti-corruption demonstrations felled his predecessor. His government’s high-profile campaign to tackle graft in one of the world’s most corrupt countries drew widespread international encouragement.
Central
to the effort was a series of highly publicized night raids in late
2020 on the homes of public figures accused of corruption, conducted
under the authority of the Permanent Committee to Investigate Corruption
and Significant Crimes, better known as Committee 29. The architect of
the raids was Lt. Gen. Ahmed Taha Hashim, or Abu Ragheef, who became
known in Iraq as the “night visitor.”
But what happened to the men behind closed doors was far darker: a
return to the ugly old tactics of a security establishment whose abuses
Kadhimi had vowed to address. In more than two dozen interviews —
including five men detained by the committee, nine family members who
had relatives imprisoned, and 11 Iraqi and Western officials who tracked
the committee’s work — a picture emerges of a process marked by abuse
and humiliation, more focused on obtaining signatures for pre-written
confessions than on accountability for corrupt acts.
Those
interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss sensitive matters or, in the case of detainees and their
families, to protect their safety.
“It
was every kind of torture,” one former detainee recalled. “Electricity,
choking me with plastic bags, hanging me from the ceiling by my hands.
They stripped us naked and grabbed at the parts of our body underneath.”
In
at least one case, a former senior official, Qassim Hamoud Mansour,
died in the hospital after being arrested by the committee. Photographs
provided to The Post by his family appear to show that a number of teeth
had been knocked out, and there were signs of blunt trauma on his
forehead.
Right now, my thoughts
go to Robert Pehter, whose been held forever and who looks like he's
been tortured. The Australian government has done nothing to secure his
release.
We'll wind down with this from Will Lehman's campaign:
Dear fellow workers,
Yesterday,
I submitted a formal protest to the UAW Monitor challenging the UAW
election results. Based on extensive evidence of voter suppression by
the UAW bureaucracy, the election cannot be considered a real expression
of the will of the membership, and the results should not be certified.
I
encourage you to read the full text of my challenge to the UAW election
results, which thoroughly documents how the vote was suppressed:
This
election was characterized by a deliberate suppression of the vote of
the rank and file by the entrenched UAW leadership. The union
intentionally failed to provide adequate notice to the rank and file,
who are not accustomed to direct elections and would not ordinarily
expect to receive ballots. This fact is confirmed by the extremely low 9
percent turnout. Hundreds of thousands of members were simply unaware
that an election was taking place and did not vote. In some locals
representing tens of thousands of younger academic workers, turnout was
less than one percent.
The
9 percent turnout in the UAW elections was by far the lowest for any
direct national union elections. By comparison, the first-ever Teamsters
direct election in the 1990s had 28 percent turnout. The first-ever
UMWA direct elections had 47 percent.
The alibi of the UAW apparatus—that workers are “apathetic”—is simply not credible.
Meanwhile,
even as the UAW apparatus was keeping workers in the dark about its
union elections, it went to great lengths to “get out the vote” for the
Democrats in the midterm elections—meaning that the UAW leadership had
the means to inform workers of the union elections, but deliberately did
not.
To
remedy the violation of workers’ democratic right to participate in a
meaningful election, either ballots should be re-issued and a new UAW
election held, or the names of all candidates added to the ballot in the
runoff.
In
either case, this time adequate measures must be taken to prevent the
UAW leadership from suppressing the vote and ensure that the entire
membership is aware of the election and able to vote.
I urge workers in the UAW and my followers to read the full protest and to share it as widely as possible. Contact my campaign and
send us a statement supporting my challenge opposing the UAW
bureaucracy’s attempt to once again trample the rights of the rank and
file.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022. US President Joe Biden continues to
persecute Julian Assange -- even as calls for his release continue and,
in fact, increase, ISIS is not 'back' in Iraq because it never left (and
their acts of terrorism are getting harder and harder to ignore), and
much more.
Press freedom and rights organizations on Thursday
expressed "grave concern" about the Biden administration's "relentless
pursuit" of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian who is
jailed in London while he fights against extradition to the United
States.
"It is more than a year since our coalition sent a joint letter calling for the charges against Assange to be dropped," 21 groups wrote
to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. "Today, we repeat those
concerns, and urge you to heed our request. We believe that the
prosecution of Assange in the U.S. would set a harmful legal precedent
and deliver a damaging blow to press freedom by opening the way for
journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive
classified material from whistleblowers."
For those who've forgotten, Julian's 'crime' was revealing the
realities of Iraq -- Chelsea Manning was a whistle-blower who leaked the
information to Julian. WIKILEAKS then published the Iraq War Logs.
And many outlets used the publication to publish reports of their own.
For example, THE GUARDIAN published many articles based on The Iraq War
Logs. Jonathan Steele, David Leigh and Nick Davies offered, on October 22, 2012:
A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes. Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the
Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident
US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have
leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters
and civilian killings in the Afghan war. The new logs detail how: •
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse,
torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct
appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a
notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after
they tried to surrender. • More than 15,000 civilians died in
previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no
official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081
non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical
evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or
ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric
shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat
The Biden administration
has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and
vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal
assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.
But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States
under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used
before for publishing classified information.
Whether the US justice department continues to
pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group
put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics
before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether
the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to
protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
President Joe Biden is pressing ahead with a controversial criminal
case against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a whistleblower
website. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the
UK’s harsh Belmarsh Prison while appealing extradition to the United
States, where he faces espionage and computer intrusion charges that
could land him in a maximum security prison for 175 years. Meanwhile,
the U.S case against Assange is facing mounting criticism here at home
as a threat to press freedom. In a twist this month that could have
far-reaching implications for the case, two people are asking the
Justice Department to indict them as well. John Young, who runs a
Wikileaks-like website, Cryptome.org, and legendary Pentagon Papers
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are demanding they be indicted for
publishing and/or retaining the same documents for which Julian Assange
is being charged.
In 1971, Dan Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of
U.S. involvement in Vietnam, to several newspapers, including the New
York Times and the Washington Post. The resulting stories sent
shockwaves through the nation, further eroding public support for the
war. President Richard Nixon was furious, and orchestrated a criminal
campaign to destroy Ellsberg and to block further publication of the
papers. Nixon failed in both efforts, and the case against Ellsberg was
thrown out of court.
Today, Dan Ellsberg, sharp and alert at 91, sees stark parallels in
the case against Julian Assange which, he says, invalidate the
government’s case.
“Assange, like me, was illegally surveilled. In his case, even his
lawyers’ and his doctors’ discussions were surveilled,” Ellsberg said
this week on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Discussions were made of
kidnapping and killing him or poisoning, just as a dozen CIA assets were brought up from Miami on May 3rd, 1973, by President Nixon with orders to ‘incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally’.”
John Young’s website, Cryptome.org, actually published the same set
of “Cablegate” documents days earlier than Wikileaks, and the material
is still available on the site. “I’m unclear why, if they’re charging
him, why they’ve never charged someone like us,” Young, who turns 87
next
AMYGOODMAN:
Pressure is growing on President Biden to drop charges against
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s been jailed in Britain since his
arrest in April of 2019. The Biden administration is asking the U.K.
government to extradite him to the U.S., where he faces up to 175 years
in prison on espionage and hacking charges if he’s found guilty at
trial. WikiLeaks says Assange could be extradited within weeks. Assange
was first arrested 12 years ago this month, on December 7th, 2010. After
a period under house arrest, he lived in the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London, where he had political asylum, from 2012 to 2019.
Five major news organizations, including The New York Times,
which once partnered with WikiLeaks, recently called on the Biden
administration to drop charges against Assange, writing, quote, “This
indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine
America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press,” unquote. The letter goes on to say, “Publishing is not a crime.” The letter was signed by The New York Times, The Guardian in Britain, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany and El PaÃs in Spain.
Meanwhile, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg recently
revealed he was in possession of confidential documents containing
evidence of U.S. war crimes leaked by former military analyst Chelsea
Manning and given to him as backup by WikiLeaks. In a recent message to
President Biden and the Justice Department, Ellsberg wrote on Twitter,
quote, “I am as indictable as he is on the exact same charges,” unquote.
The founder of the website Cryptome.org
has also written to the Justice Department asking to be indicted, as
well. Cryptome’s founder, John Young, says he should be added as a
co-defendant in the prosecution of Assange because he published some of
the same leaked government documents at the center of the U.S. case
against Assange. Cryptome is a website that began in 1996 and is seen by
many as a precursor to WikiLeaks. Young also helped Assange start
WikiLeaks in 2006. While Assange faces 175 years in U.S. prison if he’s
extradited and convicted, the U.S. government has never moved to
prosecute Young, who says he published the unredacted State Department
cables two days prior to WikiLeaks. The U.S. government has never even
asked Young to remove the documents.
Well, today, in a Democracy Now! exclusive, we’re joined by
both Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg in Berkeley, California,
and Cryptome’s John Young here in New York.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dan Ellsberg, let’s begin with you. Why don’t you lay out what you’re asking the Justice Department to do?
DANIELELLSBERG:
I’m asking them to look closely at the charges they have brought
against, actually, past whistleblowers, all past, and Chelsea Manning
and Julian Assange, potentially against me and John Young, because, as
lawyers said at the time of my first trial back in 1971 — Melville
Nimmer, the leading scholar of law of information at that point, said
that if the Espionage Act were used against someone who had done what I
had admittedly done — copy and distribute 7,000 pages of top-secret
documents — that law was unconstitutional. And that’s been true ever
since. It’s unconstitutional use against sources, as it has been done
several dozen times, especially in this century under Presidents Obama
and Trump, and now Biden. It’s also unconstitutional use against
journalists. That’s blatantly unconstitutional. They never tried it,
even under President Obama, when President Biden was vice president.
They backed off because of the clear unconstitutionality under the First
Amendment, which says no law should be passed abridging freedom of the
press.
And finally, by raising this constitutional issue, that I focus on in
particular, I’m showing that the law can be used absurdly — at least
absurdly, broadly — against someone like me, who admittedly retained and
failed to deliver — these are the words of 18 USC
793 paragraph e. And I know that so well, as a nonlawyer — I’m a
defendant — because I was the first person charged with that for giving
information to the public. So, I am as guilty, in their eyes, as
Assange. How come they haven’t come after me for this? I did much the
same a year ago and raised this challenge. If the — at last, the media,
who have been derelict in informing themselves on a law which was always
potentially there to indict them, if they do this and really raise the
issue of the necessity to abandon or strongly amend the Espionage Act so
as to exclude journalists and exclude whistleblowers who are trying to
inform the American public, they can — if they want to continue as they
are, they can come after me, which means anyone who retains a copy of The New York Times
which has the word “classified” in it, and who fails to turn over that
copy to authorities authorized to receive it — mail it in to the Justice
Department, I guess — is as guilty as I am under the plain language of
that act.
A British-type Official Secrets Act is barred from America after our
Revolution by the First Amendment of the United States, freedom of the
press. They don’t have that. Since my prosecution, the Justice
Department has been using the Espionage Act, intended obviously for
entirely different reasons — spies who secretly give information to
America’s enemies, especially in wartime — they’ve been using it as if
it were an Official Secrets Act. If they succeed with Julian Assange, in
extraditing him — which Biden could stop tomorrow, and should — if they
succeed in that, prosecute him and convict him, we will not have a
First Amendment. It’s as if we didn’t fight a War of Independence,
actually, with respect to anything they regarded as related to national
defense. Free speech is pretty much out the door.
And I want to raise the issue that the act even promotes the
possibility of prosecuting people like me, who do not even publish — I
was a backup for Julian Assange, didn’t have to publish — but can get
anybody who handles that material, any secretary at the newspaper and
any reader of The New York Times.
AMYGOODMAN:
John Young, Dan Ellsberg is perhaps the most famous whistleblower in
the world in releasing the Pentagon Papers. You are not as well known.
You founded Cryptome.org back in the ’90s. Explain why you are saying, if Julian Assange is guilty, you should be jailed, as well.
JOHNYOUNG:
Well, it’s pretty clear, looking at the indictment of Julian Assange
and the 18 citations that he’s charged, as far as I could tell, all
those apply to me and Cryptome, that we’ve been doing this now since
1996. We publish classified information, secret information from other
countries, within the United States, and so that I’m unclear why, if
they’re charging him, why they’ve never charged someone like us. By the
way, we’re only one of dozens of people who are putting out this kind of
information, from the Federation of American Scientists to the National
Security Archive. This has been going on for quite a long while. So our
sense is that they’re trying to use Assange as an example to frighten
people. That, to me, is selective vindication against him, and he should
not face this alone.
I think all of those of us who are doing similar kind of work to
serve the public rather than the government should do more than just
protest. I think we’ve got to raise more hell and take more legal action
and publish more, and as our obligation as citizens, that I think the
intelligence agencies are completely out of control. The national
security people are completely out of control. They’re actually trying
to use Assange as a threat against everyone else, not only in the U.S.
but around the world. And this, to us, seems to be anti-democratic. And
we’d like to help combat that by sharing the responsibility that Mr.
Ellsberg and Julian Assange is facing. And we hope others will step up,
as well.
By the way, we’re not publishers. We’re private citizens, practicing
architects. And so we are not doing anything more than exerting our
constitutional rights under the First Amendment. So, this accusation
against Assange would be illegal against an American citizen. So we
think it’s selective prosecution, and it should cease.
AMYGOODMAN:
On Monday, you filed this motion against the U.S. government for
violating your constitutional rights to provide unlimited documents to
the public. Now, specifically in the case of Julian Assange, you say you
published at Cryptome.org, two days
before WikiLeaks did, State Department cables. Explain. You’re saying
the same thing that WikiLeaks revealed, and so you are guilty of the
same crime.
JOHNYOUNG:
Yes, except we don’t see it as a crime. It’s just revelation of
privileged information. We don’t see it as criminal; we see it as free
speech. And it’s all a citizen has to work with if they’re not part of
the press, is to speak up and take responsibility for their views. So
that’s why we did it, is that it was available, thought it worthwhile
for the public to know. It’s been there now for 12 years, hundreds of
downloads. No complaint from the U.S. government against us.
THE
NEW YORK TIMES lied, so many lied. And so many whored. Whoring is
part of US House Rep Nancy Pelosi's record -- especially on Iraq. She
refused to impeach Bully Boy Bush.
You
may remember that US House Rep John Conyers wanted to impeach Bully Boy
Bush. Over fifty years in Congress and John felt there was a strong
case for impeachment. Nancy just didn't want to be bothered. In the
lead up to the 2006 mid-terms, she announced impeachment was off the
table. John continued to try to pursue it and she blocked him
repeatedly. Bully Boy Bush is a War Criminal and Nancy Pelosi covered
for him and protected him. That is -- and forever will be -- a part of
her legacy.
There were two battles in/for/on Falluja during the early years of
the Iraq War. Neither were anything to brag about or take pride in.
Boys were not allowed to leave the city and were treated as armed adult
fighters for 'pacification' purposes. War Crimes were carried out. The
US used illegal weapons. Nothing to be proud of.
Yet a US warship is being named after the battles.
The United States Navy has named a next-generation helicopter
assault ship the USS Fallujah, almost two decades after the western
Iraqi city was the scene of bloody battles that killed hundreds of
civilians.
[. . .]
The US-led coalition conducted a devastating bombing campaign before
their second attack, forcing some 300,000 civilians to flee.
Between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians remained trapped in Fallujah
during the assault, living through what the International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC) described at the time as a “catastrophic”
humanitarian situation.
The ICRC announced immediately after the battle that some 800 Iraqi
civilians were killed in the fighting. It later accused the US of using
white phosphorus as a weapon to defeat the militants.
To this day, babies born in Fallujah have suffered disproportionately
high levels of birth defects, including congenital heart disease,
gastroschisis (where the digestive system is found outside the baby's
body), and Spina Bifida.
One of the most documented reasons for the birth defects has been the
lingering impact of uranium in the local environment, a remnant of the
US bombardment.
Fallujah is where, just a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad in
2003, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a crowd of
civilian protesters and killed 17 of them; the U.S. military claimed
that the first shots came from Iraqis, but there is no convincing evidence for that assertion and significant reporting
to the contrary. Fallujah was a stronghold of the ousted dictator
Saddam Hussein and for that reason, its residents fiercely opposed an
unprovoked invasion that was, according to international law, flagrantly
illegal.
Those killings were the prelude to a torrent of violence and
destruction in 2004. The bloodshed that year included the deaths of more
than 1,000 civilians; the point-blank murder of prisoners; and the
torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, just 20 miles away. Fallujah’s
punishment even extended beyond the brutal era of its U.S. occupation;
in years after, there has been a spike in cancers, birth defects, and miscarriages, apparently due to America’s use of munitions with depleted uranium.
Instead of apologizing for what was done, the
U.S. is choosing to celebrate it: The Pentagon announced this week that
a $2.4 billion warship will be named the USS Fallujah. The commandant
of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, made clear that the military has
decided to double down on its fairy tale of Fallujah as an American
triumph. “Under extraordinary odds, the Marines prevailed against a
determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending an urban
area,” he said in a press release about
the naming. “The battle of Fallujah is, and will remain, imprinted in
the minds of all Marines and serves as a reminder to our nation, and its
foes, why our Marines call themselves the world’s finest.”
The announcement noted that more than 100 U.S. and allied soldiers
died in Fallujah but said nothing about the far larger toll of Iraqi
civilians killed, the flattening of swathes of the city through
extensive bombings, the apparent war crimes by U.S. forces, the health
impacts on civilians that continue to this day — and the inconvenient
fact that U.S. forces were unable to keep their hold on Fallujah for
very long. For the Pentagon, it’s as if none of it mattered, or it
didn’t happen.
At least nine police officers have been killed in a bomb and gun attack in northern Iraq.
The attack took place near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, about 290km (180 miles) from the capital Baghdad on Sunday.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility.
IS has already said it was behind the planting of a roadside bomb that killed three Iraqi soldiers near Baghdad on Wednesday.
AFP notes, "Suspected extremists on motorbikes stormed a village north of Baghdad
late Monday and killed eight Iraqi civilians, officials said." ISIS is suspected in that attack.
ISIS
was not vanquished in 2014. It was driven out areas that it was
occupying. Terrrorists really don't occupy. They threaten, they scare,
they carry out violent attacks. But during Nouri al-Maliki's second
term as prime minister, that's how badly he had destroyed Iraq, areas of
it could be held by a terrorist group. Since losing control of those
areas, ISIS has continued to stage attacks.
