[Peace-discuss] Notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

News is coming fast
Need time to digest it all
Constipation hurts

Here are some topics to consider discussing on News from Neptune and/or 
AWARE on the Air. If I had to give the notes a theme name, I'd call them 
the "exploitation edition".



Syria/War: More OPCW leaks further confirm the alleged Syrian chemical 
attack was a staged chemical weapons incident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o6RA6C2WDM -- Aaron Maté interviews former 
Newsweek journalist Tareq Haddad who quit his job over Newsweek's refusal 
to cover the OPCW’s [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] 
unfolding Syria scandal.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/19/newsweek-reporter-quits-after-editors-block-coverage-of-opcw-syria-scandal/ 
--
> According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW
> officials raised alarm about the suppression of critical findings that
> undermine the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical
> weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad’s editors at
> Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. “If I don’t find
> another position in journalism because of this, I’m perfectly happy to
> accept that consequence,” Haddad says. “It’s not desirable. But there is
> no way I could have continued in that job knowing that I couldn’t report
> something like this.”

https://tareqhaddad.com/2019/12/14/lies-newsweek-and-control-of-the-media-narrative-first-hand-account/ 
-- Haddad's own account of what happened and why he left Newsweek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWJbdIqwJBU -- Jimmy Dore interviews Max 
Blumenthal on many topics including the corporate/neocon support for 
smearing anyone who pointed out the Venezuelan coup (including The Grayzone 
Project crew's Anya Parampil & Max Blumenthal), and the additional OPCW 
leaks which confirm that the Syrian chemical attack was a manufactured 
pretext to ostensibly justify the US/UK/French coordinated attack.

Here's a transcript of the Syria portion of the interview starting around 
41m08s into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWJbdIqwJBU

Background: Higgins is a founder of Bellingcat, a website known for 
spreading neocon-supporting lies in the Skripal and Douma investigations 
among others. Relating to the US' Venezuela coup attempts, Blumenthal was 
arrested and had his home raided on the basis of the allegation from a 
58-year-old immigrant woman who supports the Venezuelan coup. As of 
mid-December 2019, police recently dropped Blumenthal's false charges.

[On screen: Jimmy Dore shows 
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1191679166111977479 a tweet from 
Eliot Higgins which Dore is about to read.]

> Jimmy Dore: [...] by this guy, Eliot Higgins, who, by the way, got his
> expertise by, I'm not kidding, he got his expertise in weapons, because
> he considers himself a weapons expert, by playing videogames. Not
> kidding. Not kidding. That's in the New York Times. So this guy says
> "Documenting Max Blumenthal's Arrest for Assaulting a 58-Year-Old
> Immigrant Woman from Venezuela".
> 
> Max Blumenthal: Yeah, this sort of 'open source journalism' that Eliot
> Higgins admires where they basically put a bunch of phony arrest
> warrants and court documents in this by someone who is just constantly
> smearing me. And Eliot Higgins knew exactly what he was doing which is
> to put it out there and then say 'Let's all remember he's innocent
> before being proven guilty'. Why would you put all this out there? It's
> obvious that you want me to be locked away because you don't like my
> journalism and I have done significant damage to your narrative. And
> that's just what it is, it's a narrative that he's putting forward. He
> uses open source journalism to create a plausible narrative without
> going to the ground, there's no field journalism there, that supports
> western foreign policy. So he was the guy that, apparently, when the US
> put pressure on the OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical
> Weapons] to declare that a chemical attack had, in fact, occurred in the
> suburb of Douma which was used to trigger a US military assault on
> Syria, he was the guy along with Bellingcat, that the OPCW went to to
> doctor their report which has now been completely discredited.
> 
> Jimmy Dore: What do you mean they went to him to doctor it?
> 
> Max Blumenthal: It looks to be the case, this is what Ted Postol, an
> actual rocket scientist I think told Aaron Maté, this is what we're
> learning, and Higgins hasn't denied it, which is that Bellingcat had
> substantial input into the phony OPCW report. And when I say it was
> doctored, look at Jonathan Steele, one of the journalists who got to
> meet with the OPCW whistleblower, that whistleblower told Steele that
> three US officials approached the OPCW and demanded that they produce a
> report stating that a chemical attack had occurred even though they had
> no scientific evidence or any evidence that one [such attack] had
> [occurred]. And so in comes Bellingcat, apparently, and the report still
> wasn't really a very strong report, but then when it dropped Bellingcat
> touted that it shows 'oh, that there are organophosphorate on the
> scene'.
> 
> Jimmy Dore: [shaking his head 'no'] Didn't show that. Didn't show that.
> That was false, in fact there were people who contradicted that: they
> suppressed their findings and didn't include it in the report.
> 
> Max Blumenthal: Yeah, so the point is, this guy is, it appears that he
> and Bellingcat have been involved in lying the public into a military
> assault. So when I called him out for this disgusting Twitter post he
> came back at me and said 'Max, got any war crimes to deny?'. I don't
> know what war crimes I'm denying. But the response to him is that it
> appears you were involved in what could have been a war crime.
> 
> Jimmy Dore: Yeah.
> 
> Max Blumenthal: What the US did to Syria was a war crime.
> 
> Jimmy Dore: Right.
> 
> Max Blumenthal: And he [Eliot Higgins] is supplying the background noise
> for that with Bellingcat. They [Higgins & Bellingcat] have a lot of
> questions to answer about their involvement in this doctored report.
> 
> Jimmy Dore: I have a feeling they're never gonna answer any of those
> questions, Max. And everybody knows who Bellingcat is now. All they have
> to do is go to YouTube; that video [of Jimmy Dore on Eliot Higgins with
> Dore's live audience] has gotten tens of thousands of views, if not a
> hundred. And so anybody can just refer -- just go to his [Higgins']
> Twitter feed and I post that video all the time so people who follow him
> know who he is. And he's not foolin' anybody.
> 
> Max Blumenthal: Consider the dissonance between the conversation we're
> having now and the conversation people are witnessing here about
> Bellingcat and their record and what's sold to the rest of the public.
> Bellingcat just won an international Emmy for this bunk documentary
> about how great they are and what a genius Higgins is. And they're being
> celebrated in the New York Times, and in fact, one of the New York Times
> new Directors of Investigation came out of Bellingcat. So the New York
> Times is actually hiring people from this organization which is
> intimately linked to the national security state. So it's like they're
> all part of the same apparatus. If you're not turning to alternative
> media on this you're going to be left completely in the dark about why
> we are going to war or sanctioning this or that country.
> 
> Jimmy Dore: So the budget director, David Stockman, for Ronald Reagan
> [...] was recently on Fox Business with Maria Buttafuoco [Maria
> Bartiromo] and they were pushing the Syria lie and he [Stockman] said of
> course he [Assad] didn't gas his own people! Like everybody says so!
> Well he [Stockman] says you've gotta quit listening to the mainstream
> media! Get outside the mainstream -- this is a guy from the Reagan
> administration telling Fox News that they've gotta get out of the
> mainstream news if they wanna get the truth about Syria. So I think
> people know [not to trust the mainstream media]. I don't think anybody
> believes the mainstream media anymore on Syria, do you?
> 
> Max Blumenthal: I actually went through Douma where the attack occurred.
> I wasn't able to go to the location because the Syrian military controls
> access. But I went through Douma, I saw it. And I went with someone who
> was from Douma who actually had to leave because the so-called Moderate
> Rebels took over his neighborhood and set up a recruiting center for the
> Saudi-funded militia known as the Army of Islam. And he told me that
> everybody in Syria, this wasn't affiliated with someone from the Syrian
> government, [...] he told me that everybody was watching that day that
> the chemical attack was said to have occurred. And the rebels in the
> area are said to have been completely defeated. The Syrian military had
> no reason to drop a chemical weapon, they'd already won! And then the
> last-ditch attempt by the rebels to stir up a US military event --
> intervention -- took place where they basically staged this incident.
> And nobody in Syria believed there was a chemical attack. [...] They
> were watching live on TV, there was a livestream setup in the area on
> all the state TV channels so it wasn't like they were trying to hide
> anything either. And when I went to Syria, I just got mercilessly
> attacked by this same echo chamber because, obviously, they don't want
> me to show what's going on in and around Damascus.




Labor/Exploitation: Child labor in the Congolese cobalt mines gets a court 
hearing as Congolese families sue tech giants over their dead, maimed, and 
exploited children who have suffered mining cobalt for the tech giants. 
Cobalt is used in batteries which are found in every tracker/cell phone, 
laptop, and car; cobalt is thus one of many materials needed for our 
so-called "green future" in which we shift to powering more of our gadgets 
with batteries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7lQQiKzKMs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJyELDmmFvA -- RT's reports (RT is one of 
the few places to get coverage that doesn't shy away from criticizing the 
tech industry on this issue; plenty of other corporate-framed discussion 
sites like Slashdot and Hacker News permit neoliberal commentary which 
discourage questioning modern-day tech practices and discourage keeping 
older computers for longer).

jbn: Free software has a part to play in this as well -- free software is 
published software which we're free to run, inspect, share, and modify 
including commercially. Free software gives us a practical reason to care 
about how our computers work, even if we're non-technical computer users 
who can't directly use the technical information ourselves. Computers that 
operate fully using free software are computers that we can keep in service 
longer. The computers we use were very likely produced with exploitative 
practices, but we can make processes that use the advanced capabilities of 
today's computers by not relying on others getting newer computers every 
other year (which is exactly what tracker/cell phone manufacturers urge us 
all to do about once every other year). Current practices fuel the 
exploitation which Alphabet (Google), Apple, and other tech giants are 
rightly accused of.






Democrats/Russiagate: What if the impeachment process doesn't go well for 
the Democrats? "Plan B" is to bring back the Mueller report!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmXrYjFll7o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24z4bxIgP4k --

RT: It's difficult to understand the purpose of last night's impeachment 
vote: why should the upper house of the US Congress pass judgment on Donald 
Trump when Democrats already have a 'plan B'? The House Judiciary Committee 
said it will continue to investigate Donald Trump regardless of the 
outcome. But what else is left to investigate? Well, the House Judiciary 
Committee is saying that they will resurrect the dead, i.e., the Mueller 
Report. This will give them a chance to get back to their roots and bring 
up that old Russian collusion agenda and they can get the impeachment 
hearings going all over again:

 From US House Judiciary Committee legal brief:
> The public version of the Mueller Report contains numerous redactions...
> These rule 6(E) redactions withhold information about President Trump's
> knowledge of his campaign's contacts with Russian officials and
> WikiLeaks and therefore bear on whether the President committed
> impeachable offenses...
RT's reports indicating that Rep. Nancy Pelosi seems unwilling to introduce 
the articles of impeachment to the Senate and even she realizes that the 
Democrats are giving voters no reason to go vote Democrat (or vote at all); 
after all, impeachment does not give voters Medicare for All, a living 
wage, potable water pipes, a national jobs program, cleaner air, free 
education, nor does it end wars or bring back the soldiers, contractors, 
and their weapons.




Voting: Exclusive RT interview with Greg Palast: Expect red state voter 
purge in 2020 --Greg Palast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGSUTcZ5oX8 -- RT's interview with Greg Palast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmWgZUsMbWU -- Jimmy Dore's coverage of the 
same issue and Bernie Sanders' response which motivates nobody to vote for 
his candidacy.





FBI: FBI found to be lying to FISA court. Jimmy Dore offers multiple 
examinations of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZLx1ofEAz4 -- Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC 
defends FBI lying to FISA court.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VurVs8yg8lQ -- MSNBC claiming it's telling 
their viewers the facts, which would be a new thing for that network to the 
extent their claim is true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FOzRVoPE94 -- MSNBC defends lying and 
discredited Steele dossier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb0gyt9Vriw -- James Comey downplays how 
his FBI lied to get FISA warrants, lies about how hard FISA warrants are to 
get (they're incredibly easy to get -- In 2013 we saw reports much like 
what Mother Jones published including "FISA Court Has Rejected .03 Percent 
Of All Government Surveillance Requests" from 
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request/ 
which is coming from Mother Jones, a source that has been incredibly 
sympathetic to neocon coverage)

In 
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request/ 
David Corn wrote in 2013:
> After last week’s revelations extensive National Security Agency
> surveillance of phone and internet communications, President Barack
> Obama made it a point to assure Americans that, not to worry, there is
> plenty of oversight of his administration’s snooping programs. “We’ve
> got congressional oversight and judicial oversight,” he said Friday,
> referring in part to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC),
> which was created in 1979 to oversee Department of Justice requests for
> surveillance warrants against foreign agents suspected of espionage or
> terrorism in the United States. But the FISC has declined just 11 of the
> more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33
> years, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. That’s a rate of .03
> percent, which raises questions about just how much judicial oversight
> is actually being provided.

Similar stories throughout the years:
2015: 
https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-spy-court-didnt-reject-a-single-secret-government-demand-for-data/

2017: 
https://dailycaller.com/2017/03/06/fisa-surveillance-requests-are-almost-never-rejected/

2017: 
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/last-6-years-record-fisa-court-denied-0-9400-electronic-surveillance 
which includes:
> In the last six years on record (2010-2015), the Foreign Intelligence
> Surveillance Court did not deny a single application out of the 9,400
> the government submitted seeking authority “to conduct electronic
> surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes” under the terms of the
> Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to reports filed by the
> U.S. Justice Department.
> 
> The last time the court denied an electronic surveillance application
> under FISA was 2009. That year, the court denied one application
> outright and denied another in part.

This CNSNews.com story also includes a chart showing year by year the 
number of applications, how many were approved, approved-but-modified, 
withdrawn, denied-in-part, and denied.

2019: 
https://www.thetcanada.com/2019/12/18/fisa-court-fbi-secretive-surveillance-court-rebukes-fbi/ 
which includes:
> [...] open criticism of a federal agency is uncommon for the secretive
> FISA court, some observers were skeptical that procedural tweaks would
> generate sincere reform, given that FBI agents are already required to
> swear under threat of perjury that every application is truthful and
> accurate.
> 
> The court itself, meanwhile, seldom turns down an FBI request, with a
> minuscule 0.03 percent rejection rate over its 30-plus years in
> operation. There is little reason to expect that to change after January
> 10.




Assange: Medical experts are "not allowed in" to Julian Assange hearing

RT remains one of the few places one can get coverage of how Assange is 
doing, coverage of the pro-press freedom/pro-release Assange protests 
outside Belmarsh prison (where is Assange is unjustifiably being held well 
beyond any requirement by legal judgment), and coverage at each Assange 
court hearing. This is another mark of shame for other allegedly 
progressive news outlets including Democracy Now which (according to their 
own website: 
https://www.democracynow.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=assange) 
apparently doesn't conduct interviews with Assange's father John Shipton 
(https://www.democracynow.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=Shipton returns 
no hits as of 2019-12-19) and other attendees of Assange-related events. 
Occasionally DN guests speak on Assange's behalf but that's not the same as 
what RUPTLY does: RT visits the site of the event, points a camera at the 
people there, lets them speak, and then runs the recorded footage. This is 
famously how RUPTLY (RT's comment-free dead-roll camera outlet) got the 
only footage we have of Assange being forced out of the Ecuadorian embassy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMZU2DnPD4Q -- RT interview with 
interviewees who wanted to bring medical testimony to court, and summarize 
findings by Nils Melzer, the UN rapporteur on torture who visited Assange 
in May 2019, who says that Assange's condition is consistent with someone 
suffering from torture.

https://on.rt.com/9z0f -- Nils Melzer is quoted:
> Given the strongly perceptible public and official prejudice held
> against Mr. Assange in the United States, there are serious reasons to
> doubt that he would receive a fair trial before an impartial judicial
> body as required under human rights law.
> 
> I underscore my most serious concern that, if Mr. Assange were to be
> extradited or otherwise surrendered to the United States... he would be
> exposed to a real risk of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading
> treatment or punishment.
> 
> [Assange shows] all symptoms typical for prolonged and sustained
> exposure to severe psychological stress, anxiety and related mental and
> emotional suffering in an environment highly conducive to major
> depressive and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD).”
https://cdnv.rt.com/files/2019.06/5cfcb89ddda4c876728b463d.mp4 -- 
Christopher Hedges interview with Nils Melzer from July 7, 2019
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/461420-julian-assange-prison-torture/ 
-- transcript of above interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYk-_E_BUcQ -- recent RT interview with 
Nils Melzer



Healthcare: US healthcare delivery is coming to UK. John Pilger's latest 
documentary, "The Dirty War on the NHS", covers what that means and how 
this has been in the works for years. Perhaps the American people can help 
warn the UK away from this shift before they lose what the UK public sees 
as a widely-valued institution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlJGL8Z52YE -- John Pilger's latest 
documentary "The Dirty War on the NHS"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHZcXrc9_wk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkH-JPlTgMQ -- John Pilger interviewed by 
Afshin Rattansi on RT's "Going Underground" about "The Dirty War on the NHS"

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHDkALRz5Rk -- DW's documentary on 
"How poor people survive in the USA". The last segment of this is not as 
good as the previous segments, but this does help show what's in store for 
the UK's poor when the NHS becomes nothing but a brand wherein healthcare 
is decided upon by HMOs.

-J