(07-04-2025, 09:36 PM)Lauren Johnson Wrote: Wrote:Your Uncle Lemkin's institute has put out a condemnation on the Gaza Genocide:

https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-g...-west-bank

Quote:The Magnitskiy Myth Exploded [URL="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/?fbclid=IwAR1KITnuXtUX03MNIt9zFAOzctzGHfl2KyFofOj6ZcURpqYZU_jxdtlmWDc#tc-comment-title"]

1

[/URL]by Craig Murray

16 Sep, 2019 in Uncategorized by craig

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The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.

The myth is that Magnitskiy was an honest rights campaigner and accountant who discovered corruption by Russian officials and threatened to expose it, and was consequently imprisoned on false charges and then tortured and killed. A campaign over his death was led by his former business partner, hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who wanted massive compensation for Russian assets allegedly swindled from their venture. The campaign led to the passing of the Magnitskiy Act in the United States, providing powers for sanctioning individuals responsible for human rights abuses, and also led to matching sanctions being developed by the EU.

However the European Court of Human Rights has found, in judging a case brought against Russia by the Magnitskiy family, that }]the very essence of this story is untrue. They find that there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed engaged in tax fraud, in conspiracy with Browder, and he was rightfully charged. The ECHR also found there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed a flight risk so he was rightfully detained. And most crucially of all, they find that there was credible evidence of tax fraud by Magnitskiy and action by the authorities "years" before he started to make counter-accusations of corruption against officials investigating his case.

This judgement utterly explodes the accepted narrative, and does it very succinctly:

The applicants argued that Mr Magnitskiy's arrest had not been based on a reasonable suspicion of a
crime and that the authorities had lacked impartiality as they had actually wanted to force him to
retract his allegations of corruption by State officials. The Government argued that there had been
ample evidence of tax evasion and that Mr Magnitskiy had been a flight risk.
The Court reiterated the general principles on arbitrary detention, which could arise if the
authorities had complied with the letter of the law but had acted with bad faith or deception. It
found no such elements in this case: the enquiry into alleged tax evasion which had led to
Mr Magnitskiy's arrest had begun long before he had complained of fraud by officials. The decision
to arrest him had only been made after investigators had learned that he had previously applied for
a UK visa, had booked tickets to Kyiv, and had not been residing at his registered address.
Furthermore, the evidence against him, including witness testimony, had been enough to satisfy an
objective observer that he might have committed the offence in question. The list of reasons given
by the domestic court to justify his subsequent detention had been specific and sufficiently detailed.
The Court thus rejected the applicants' complaint about Mr Magnitskiy's arrest and subsequent
detention as being manifestly ill-founded.

"Manifestly ill founded". The mainstream media ran reams of reporting about the Magnitskiy case at the time of the passing of the Magnitskiy Act. I am offering a bottle of Lagavulin to anybody who can find me an honest and fair MSM report of this judgement reflecting that the whole story was built on lies.

Magnitskiy did not uncover corruption then get arrested on false charges of tax evasion. He was arrested on credible charges of tax evasion, and subsequently started alleging corruption. That does not mean his accusations were unfounded. It does however cast his arrest in a very different light.

Where the Court did find in favour of Magnitskiy's family is that he had been deprived of sufficient medical attention and subject to brutality while in jail. I have no doubt this is true. Conditions in Russian jails are a disgrace, as is the entire Russian criminal justice system. There are few fair trials and conviction rates remain well over 90% the judges assume that if you are being prosecuted, the state wants you locked up, and they comply. This is one of many areas where the Putin era will be seen in retrospect as lacking in meaningful and needed domestic reform. Sadly what happened to Magnitskiy on remand was not special mistreatment. It is what happens in Russian prisons. The Court also found Magnitskiy's subsequent conviction for tax evasion was unsafe, but only on the (excellent) grounds that it was wrong to convict him posthumously.

The first use of the Magnitsky Act was to sanction those subject to Browder's vendetta in his attempts to regain control of vast fortunes in Russian assets. But you may be surprised to hear I do not object to the legislation, which in principle is a good thing although the chances of Western governments bringing sanctions to bear on the worst human rights abusers are of course minimal. Do not expect it to be used against Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or Israel any time soon.

Quote:The World's Most Important Political Prisoner [URL="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-worlds-most-important-political-prisoner/?fbclid=IwAR36i2SGA8n-Ph5SiIu7E5h5HmmSrNVvP1wAIk4guXUqZY1tqdLJ-gUafvE#tc-comment-title"]

[/URL]15 Sep, 2019 in Uncategorized by craig

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We are now just one week away from the end of Julian Assange's uniquely lengthy imprisonment for bail violation. He will receive parole from the rest of that sentence, but will continued to be imprisoned on remand awaiting his hearing on extradition to the USA a process which could last several years.

At that point, all the excuses for Assange's imprisonment which so-called leftists and liberals in the UK have hidden behind will evaporate. There are no charges and no active investigation in Sweden, where the "evidence" disintegrated at the first whiff of critical scrutiny. He is no longer imprisoned for "jumping bail". The sole reason for his incarceration will be the publshing of the Afghan and Iraq war logs leaked by Chelsea Manning, with their evidence of wrongdoing and multiple war crimes.

In imprisoning Assange for bail violation, the UK was in clear defiance of the judgement of the UN Working Group on arbitrary Detention, which stated

Under international law, pre-trial detention must be only imposed in limited instances. Detention during investigations must be even more limited, especially in the absence of any charge. The Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr. Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offense that cannot post facto justify the more than 6 years confinement that he has been subjected to since he sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. Mr. Assange should be able to exercise his right to freedom of movement in an unhindered manner, in accordance with the human rights conventions the UK has ratified,

In repudiating the UNWGAD the UK has undermined an important pillar of international law, and one it had always supported in hundreds of other decisions. The mainstream media has entirely failed to note that the UNWGAD called for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe a source of potentially valuable international pressure on Iran which the UK has made worthless by its own refusal to comply with the UN over the Assange case. Iran simply replies "if you do not respect the UNWGAD then why should we?"

It is in fact a key indication of media/government collusion that the British media, which reports regularly at every pretext on the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case to further its anti-Iranian government agenda, failed to report at all the UNWGAD call for her release because of the desire to deny the UN body credibility in the case of Julian Assange.
In applying for political asylum, Assange was entering a different and higher legal process which is an internationally recognised right. A very high percentage of dissident political prisoners worldwide are imprisoned on ostensibly unrelated criminal charges with which the authorities fit them up. Many a dissident has been given asylum in these circumstances. Assange did not go into hiding his whereabouts were extremely well known. The simple characterisation of this as "absconding" by district judge Vanessa Baraitser is a farce of justice and like the UK's repudiation of the UNWGAD report, is an attitude that authoritarian regimes will be delighted to repeat towards dissidents worldwide

Her decision to commit Assange to continuing jail pending his extradition hearing was excessively cruel given the serious health problems he has encountered in Belmarsh.

It is worth noting that Baraitser's claim that Assange had a "history of absconding in these proceedings" and I have already disposed of "absconding" as wildly inappropriate is inaccurate in that "these proceedings" are entirely new and relate to the US extradition request and nothing but the US extradition request. Assange has been imprisoned throughout the period of "these proceedings" and has certainly not absconded. The government and media have an interest in conflating "these proceedings" with the previous risible allegations from Sweden and the subsequent conviction for bail violation, but we need to untangle this malicious conflation. We have to make plain that Assange is now held for publishing and only for publishing. That a judge should conflate them is disgusting. Vanessa Baraitser is a disgrace.
Assange has been demonised by the media as a dangerous, insanitary and crazed criminal, which could not be further from the truth. It is worth reminding ourselves that Assange has never been convicted of anything but missing police bail.

So now we have a right wing government in the UK with scant concern for democracy, and in particular we have the most far right extremist as Home Secretary of modern times. Assange is now, plainly and without argument, a political prisoner. He is not in jail for bail-jumping. He is not in jail for sexual allegations. He is in jail for publishing official secrets, and for nothing else. The UK now has the world's most famous political prisoner, and there are no rational grounds to deny that fact. Who will take a stand against authoritarianism and for the freedom to publish?

We Fight for the Users

Records Requests

Demand for Information

Our Opposition

Why Bother?

Posted on May 24, 2017

By Nadia Prupis / Common Dreams

Wikipedia Logo


A federal appeals court on Tuesday reversed a previous decision by a lower court that dismissed a challenge to the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance operations, scoring an "important victory for the rule of law."
Tuesday's unanimous decision by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court means a case against the NSA filed by the Wikimedia Foundation can proceed, after the judges ruled that the plaintiffs had provided enough evidence that the NSA was monitoring their communications as part of its Upstream surveillance program.
"This is an important victory for the rule of law. The NSA has secretly spied on Americans' internet communications for years, but now this surveillance will finally face badly needed scrutiny in our public courts. We look forward to arguing this case on the merits," said Patrick Toomey, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing the plaintiffs.
"Our government shouldn't be searching the private communications of innocent people in bulk, examining the contents of Americans' emails and chats day in and day out. This mass surveillance threatens the foundations of a free internet," Toomey said.The three-judge panel found that Wikimedia had standing to argue that the NSA was violating its First and Fourth Amendment rights by spying on its communications.
"Wikimedia has plausibly alleged that its communications travel all of the roads that a communication can take, and that the NSA seizes all of the communications along at least one of those roads," the opinion stated.
The panel's ruling overturns an October 2015 decision by the district court, which said the plaintiffs had not adequately proven that their communications were being monitored.
The other plaintiffs are The Nation magazine, Amnesty International USA, PEN America, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Rutherford Institute, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women, and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). Their cases will not move forward, due to their smaller online presence, the panel ruled.
Still, the decision signaled an important victory in the fight against government spying, attorneys said.
"This kind of indiscriminate surveillance has grave implications for individual rights, including the freedoms of speech and association," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which also represented the plaintiffs. "It's gratifying that the appeals court has rejected the government's effort to shield this surveillance from constitutional review."

Quote:Assange Lawyer to Justice Department: Your Move


Julian Assange said he was willing to come to the United States. It's not that simple.


AJ VICENSFEB. 1, 2017 6:00 AM



Peter Nicholls/Zuma


On January 12, WikiLeaks tweeted that founder Julian Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, would "agree to US extradition" if President Barack Obama granted clemency to convicted Army leaker Chelsea Manning. Five days later, Obama commuted Manning's sentence, and the spotlight turned to Assange. The embattled Australian said that although he'd hoped for a full pardon for Manning, he would stand by his pledge and discuss a return to the United States with the Department of Justice.


But the situation isn't that simple, says Barry Pollack, Assange's Washington, DC-based lawyer. Assange, Pollack says, is stuck in limbo because the Justice Department won't make clear what it's intentions arewhether it will charge him, whether he's already been indicted, or whether there's room to talk about a resolution.


"I have, for quite some period of time, been trying to get the Department of Justice to engage in some sort of a dialogue about what it is they are looking for," Pollack tells Mother Jones. "Where does Julian fit into whatever investigation they're doing? Have they charged him? Will they charge him? Are they seeking to extradite him? And the Department of Justice has just repeatedly refused to engage or provide any information whatsoever."


Assange has been a thorn in the side of the US government for years, but his decision last year to publish tens of thousands of hacked Democratic Party emails and documents, allegedly stolen at the behest of the Russian government and passed to WikiLeaks, further inflamed tensions. On January 6, intelligence officials released an assessment accusing Russian intelligence of directing the hacks in order to hinder Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming president and boost those of Donald Trump.


Assange has denied that the Russian government was his source and said the January 6 report was "embarrassing" to the agencies that gathered the intelligence and a "political attack cannon against Donald Trump." Assange denies that he supports Trump: Last July, he likened the choice between Clinton and Trump to one between "cholera or gonorrhea." But he has drawn praise from Trump and conservatives, with some arguing that Trump should pardon Assange on any potential charges.


So when Assange offered to give himself up to US authorities in exchange for Manning's release and Obama commuted Manning's sentence, eyes turned to Assange to see what he'd do next. Two weeks later, that hasn't become any clearer.


"We look forward to having a conversation with the DOJ about what the correct way forward is," Assange said during a January 19 press conference. "We say, of course, that they should immediately drop their case, or they should unseal their extradition request if they have one, unseal their charges…But what is occurring in the United States is an attempt to prevent us and our lawyers getting our teeth stuck in to this case and getting standing by keeping it secret."


Pollack, who represents Assange in his US legal matters and has nothing to do with WikiLeaks, says there is no basis for anyone to make predictions about how Trump might handle the Assange and WikiLeaks investigation. But he points to Obama's commutation of Manning's sentence and his pardon of General James Cartwright, who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators in 2016 about providing information about the Stuxnet computer virus to reporters, as evidence that the crackdown on whistleblowers might be ebbing.


"My hope," he says, "would have been and is that the commutation of Manning's sentenceand, for that matter, the pardon of Cartwrightsignals that we're moving into a new phase…that maybe there's some thought somewhere in the US government that our war on whistleblowers has gone a little bit too far."


The Justice Department has been investigating potential crimes committed by WikiLeaks and Assange since 2010, after the site that year published a video shot in 2007 from a US military helicopter as it gunned down a dozen people in a Baghdad neighborhood. (A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the department's investigation, and the White House didn't respond to several requests for comment.) A month later, Manning, then an Army information analyst stationed in Baghdad, was detained by the military after being turned in by a former hacker she'd confided in about stealing the material published by WikiLeaks.


In November 2010, the website began publishing information from more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables in conjunction with several major newspapers. In September 2011, the site released the full unredacted batch of State Department cables after the material became available online through other means. Manning was formally charged with crimes related to stealing the documents in February 2012, convicted in July 2013, and sentenced to 35 years in prison in August 2013.


After the commutation was announced, Obama said that justice had been served. "First of all, let's be clear," Obama said at his last press conference as president. "Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence." He noted that Manning's sentence was "very disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received" and that "it made some sense to commute a part of her sentence."


Assange was accused of rape in Sweden in August 2010, a charge he denies. At the time, he implied that the accusations were "dirty tricks" by US intelligence to discredit WikiLeaks. "Reminder: US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks as far back as 2008," Assange tweeted after the accusations became public. Fearing that the Swedish government would send him to the United States, Assange sought asylum in Ecuador. The country granted it in August 2012, citing the possibility that he could be the victim of "cruel and degrading" treatment in the United States.


Assange has been in the Ecuadorian embassy in London ever since, and the British government says it will not allow him to leave the embassy and plans to hand him over to Sweden as part of its obligation to respect a European arrest warrant. The United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called the situation "a state of arbitrary deprivation of liberty" and noted that under current British lawwhich was changed to raise the bar for extraditions after Sweden issued its warrantAssange's extradition to Sweden would not be approved by the British government.


Sweden has said it hasn't received an extradition request from the US government, and it's unclear whether the United States is trying to extradite him. "We don't know," Pollack says. Assuming the United States does want to get its hands on Assange, it's unclear what charges he would face.


Assange asserts that WikiLeaks is merely publishing information it obtains, much as news organizations do every day. But the government might make the case that Assange went beyond merely accepting material from Manning, perhaps alleging some sort of collusion or coercion to steal the material. Pollack says allegations along those lines wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility given the Obama administration's naming of journalists as "unindicted co-conspirators" in cases involving leaks of classified information.


"I think that the problem they have is they really can't distinguish [Assange] from the New York Times or the Washington Post or Mother Jones," Pollack says, and "they may recognize that legally they would have real problem doing so."


It's unclear how far along the government's investigation is. Pollack says he has no idea and noted in an August 2016 letter to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch that the limited information he gets about the investigation comes through filings in other cases. Assange said during the January 19 press conference, based on responses to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the government by other parties, that the FBI investigation alone has produced at least 45,135 pages of documents. Hacked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, published by WikiLeaks in 2012, suggested the US government had a sealed indictment in early 2011, but in 2013, unnamed officials told the Washington Post that there was no sealed indictment.


"It really is unique in my experience," says Pollack, who has worked in federal criminal defense for 25 years. "I've never had a matter where the Department of Justice would not discuss my client's situation with me, much less one where simultaneously they're providing the public with at least some information."


But Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer in Washington, says it doesn't seem unusual to him.


"In a situation where there is a sealed indictment, the DOJ is not obligated to reveal details of pending charges to the subject or his lawyer until the subject is actually arrested," Moss says. "To hold otherwise would nullify the purpose of the seal."


Both Pollack and Assange seem to want the case to move forward. Pollack says the Justice Department could resolve the situation by declaring that there's no indictment or by telling him what exactly investigators are seeking from Assange.


"Maybe it's that they're perfectly happy to leave him in limbo in the embassy," Pollack says. "But that, to me, is not justice…What they should do is they should engage and say either we're not pursuing him or we are. And if they're not, great. And if they are, let's discuss what that means."

Quote: A powerful Republican lawmaker abruptly stopped a hearing Monday on Capitol Hill to serve a subpoena demanding the FBI's full investigative file on the Hillary Clinton email probe to a top official, telling the man "you are hereby served." The dramatic moment came as House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, expressed frustration that the FBI would not guarantee to provide the committee with the full, unedited, unredacted investigative summaries of the federal inquiry into Clinton's homebrewed server and the Democratic presidential nominee's potential mishandling of classified information.

"That's the way a banana republic acts, not the way the United States of America acts," Chaffetz told FBI acting legislative affairs chief Jason Herring. "I don't expect to have to issue a subpoena to see unclassified information." The FBI could fight the subpoena, though analysts say a resolution could come quickly. "There are judges sitting in an emergent capacity for applications like this," Judge Andrew Napolitano said on "Fox & Friends" on Tuesday. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's resolved by the end of this week."

Chaffetz and other Republicans on the panel say the FBI has withheld summaries of interviews with witnesses and unnecessarily blacked out material from documents sent last month. "We decide what's relevant -- not the Department of Justice, not the FBI," Chaffetz said. "We are entitled to the full file." Democrats on the panel dismissed Chaffetz's theatrics at the emergency hearing and insisted the sole purpose of the hearing was to undermine Clinton's presidential bid. "As far as I can tell, the only emergency' is that the election is less than two months away," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said.

Witnesses at the hearing on several occasions said they could not answer the questions from lawmakers in an open forum and the committee later voted to hold the remainder of the hearing in closed session. FBI Director James Comey last week defended the decision to forgo criminal charges against Clinton after a lengthy probe into whether then-Secretary of State Clinton mishandled classified information that flowed through the private email system located in her New York home. Comey told bureau employees in an internal memo that it wasn't a close call.

Republicans have assailed Comey's ruling and demanded that the Justice Department open a new investigation into whether Clinton lied during testimony last year before the House panel investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi. The FBI provided portions of the Clinton probe file to Congress last month and warned lawmakers that the documents "contain classified and other sensitive material" and are not to be made public. But Republicans have said the documents "did not constitute a complete investigative file," as many of the records had been substantially blacked out or were missing altogether.

"So here's what we have heard from people who have seen this stuff: that the FBI is attempting to create a false impression of what they want us to think they found by selectively releasing all information," Napolitano said on "Fox & Friends." "If all of it had been released, people could form their own opinions about the wisdom and lawfulness of the FBI's decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Quote: The parents of two Americans killed in the 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court Monday against Hillary Clinton. In the suit, Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, the parents of Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods, claim that Clinton's use of a private e-mail server contributed to the attacks. They also accuse her of defaming them in public statements. Smith was an information management officer and Woods was a security officer, both stationed in Benghazi.


"The Benghazi attack was directly and proximately caused, at a minimum by defendant Clinton's 'extreme carelessness' in handling confidential and classified information," such as the location of State Department employees in Libya, the lawsuit said. While no such connection has ever been established, their lawsuit called it "highly probable" that Clinton sent and received information about the activities of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Such information, the lawsuit claimed, "easily found its way to foreign powers" and was then obtained by Islamic terrorists.


James Comey, in announcing the findings of the FBI's investigation of her private e-mail server last month, said it was "possible that hostile actors gained access" to it. But he said the FBI did not find direct evidence that it was successfully hacked. The two parents also said when Secretary Clinton met with them after their children were killed, she said that a controversial YouTube video was the motivation for the attacks. But they said that in later interviews she denied making such a statement and implied that the recollection of the parents was incorrect.


In a speech to the Republican convention in Cleveland, Smith said, "I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son."


The parents were represented by Washington, D.C., lawyer Larry Klayman, a frequent critic of the Clintons. In response to the suit, Nick Merrill, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said "While no one can imagine the pain of the families of the brave Americans we lost at Benghazi, there have been nine different investigations into this attack and none found any evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing on the part of Hillary Clinton." And one campaign official noted that Klayman is the founder or "Freedom Watch," a conservative group that "has been unsuccessfully attacking the Clintons for decades."