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“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”

-- Mahatma Gandhi

News and Opinion

True scale of UK role in torture and rendition after 9/11 revealed

British intelligence agencies were involved in the torture and kidnap of terrorism suspects after 9/11, according to two reports by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee. The reports published on Thursday amount to one of the most damning indictments of UK intelligence, revealing links to torture and rendition were much more widespread than previously reported.

While there was no evidence of officers directly carrying out physical mistreatment of detainees, the reports say the overseas agency MI6 and the domestic service MI5 were involved in hundreds of torture cases and scores of rendition cases. The committee says the agencies were aware “at an early point” of the mistreatment of detainees by the US and others. There were two cases in which UK personnel were “party to mistreatment administered by others”. One has been investigated by the Metropolitan police but the other is still to be fully investigated.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary from 2001-06, will face questions over how much he knew and, given that accusations of torture and rendition were widespread at the time in the press, why he did not ask for a briefing. ... One report deals with the mistreatment and rendition of detainees between 2001 and 2010, while the other considers current issues.

The report dealing with the treatment of detainees details a litany of cases of concern, saying: “We have found 13 incidents where UK personnel witnessed at first hand a detainee being mistreated by others, 25 where UK personnel were told by detainees that they had been mistreated by others and 128 incidents recorded where agency officers were told by foreign liaison services about instances of mistreatment. In some cases, these were correctly investigated but this was not consistent.”

It said in 232 cases UK personnel continued to supply questions or intelligence to other services despite knowledge or suspicion of mistreatment, as well as “198 cases where UK personnel received intelligence from liaison services which had been obtained from detainees who knew they had been mistreated – or with no indication as to how the detainee had been treated but where we consider they should have suspected mistreatment”.

White House: US, Ecuador Coordinating About Future Of Assange Asylum

The agenda of the United States government to extradite WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is kind of like Israel’s nuclear arsenal: everyone knows it exists, but government officials refuse to openly confirm it. ... Unlike Israel’s nukes, however, you’ll still see empire loyalists pretending that they don’t believe there’s an agenda to extradite Assange. You’ll often see social media accounts patrolling all posts about Julian Assange any time he’s in the news, stating in remarkably uniform language that Assange is free to leave the embassy whenever he wants because there is no extradition agenda.

It is this false narrative manipulation which makes it essential to document such events as ten Democratic Senators writing a letter to Vice President Mike Pence demanding that he confront Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno about continuing to give political asylum to Assange. ...

Why would US Senators care that Assange is receiving political asylum if his belief that the US government is trying to extradite him was a paranoid fantasy? The only known existing charge that Assange could be arrested for if he leaves the embassy is a bogus bail violation he was charged with a full 12 days after he applied for political asylum; nobody actually believes ensuring that Assange is prosecuted for that nonsensical charge is an urgent matter, let alone one so urgent it necessitates the full attention of ten sitting US Senators and the Vice President of the United States. Continuing to pretend that we don’t all know that the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning is trying to extradite Assange is a farce, and the correct response to anyone denying it is to laugh in their face.

And according to a statement from a White House official, Vice President Pence marched right along to the fascistic drum beat of Democratic Senators Feinstein, Warner, Menendez, Durbin, Blumenthal, Markey, Bennet, Coons, Manchin, and Shaheen. “The vice president raised the issue of Mr. Assange,” the statement reads. “It was a constructive conversation. They agreed to remain in close coordination on potential next steps going forward.”

Why would the government granting political asylum to Assange be “in close coordination” about Assange with a government that isn’t interested in Assange?

The EU just agreed to get a lot tougher on migrants entering Europe

European Union leaders announced a tough new deal Friday to tackle irregular migration, one that will see asylum processing centers established across the bloc.

Under the agreement, EU member states will share refugees arriving in the bloc on a voluntary basis — amid resistance to mandatory quotas from nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland —– and will create “controlled centers” across the EU for “rapid and secure processing” of asylum requests, to distinguish between those in need of international protection, and economic migrants who will be sent back home.

The leaders also agreed to toughen up external border controls, boost efforts to combat people smugglers operating out of Libya and elsewhere, and explore the possibility of “regional disembarkation platforms” to process migrant claims outside the EU, potentially in North Africa.

The toughened stance of the agreement, reflecting rising nationalist sentiment over immigration in many parts of the bloc, has concerned NGO groups who work to help migrants who make the perilous Mediterranean crossing. ...

Doctors Without Borders warned that the deal would lead to more deaths at sea, and people being stranded in brutal Libyan migrant camps.

Trump trashed Nato at G7, calling it ‘as bad as Nafta’, officials confirm

Donald Trump trashed Nato, saying it was “as bad as Nafta”, the North American free trade agreement the US president openly despises, European officials have confirmed. Trump’s inflammatory remarks – made in private at the G7 summit in Quebec earlier this month – were first reported by Axios and confirmed on Thursday by two European officials. They have added to jitters among US allies about what will happen at a Nato summit in Brussels starting on 11 July, followed by Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki five days later.

At the tense G7 meeting in Quebec, Trump berated his six fellow leaders of major industrialised democracies for taking advantage of the US, in trade relations and in defence spending. Of the looming Nato summit, he said: “It will be an interesting summit. Nato is as bad as Nafta. It’s much too costly for the US.” ...

The fractures in the alliance have been widened by a looming trade war between the US and Nato allies in Europe and Canada. Trump has imposed tariffs on their steel and aluminium and they have hit back with tariffs on distinctive US exports from Levi’s to bourbon and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The administration is also threatening sanctions against any European and other foreign firms that do business in Iran.

One of the consistent elements of Trump’s foreign policy is fervent opposition to multilateral organisations, including Nafta, which he has threatened to leave, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he abandoned, and the EU, which he rails against frequently. He has told European leaders privately they would be better off in a bilateral free-trade deal with the US than in the Union.

Canada hits US with retaliatory tariffs: 'We will not back down'

Canada has announced billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs against the US in a tit-for-tat response to the Trump administration’s duties on Canadian steel and aluminum.

Justin Trudeau’s government released the final list of items that will be targeted beginning 1 July. Some items will be subject to taxes of 10 or 25%. “We will not escalate and we will not back down,” the Canadian foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, said. The taxes on items including ketchup, lawn mowers and motorboats amount to $12.6bn. “This is a perfectly reciprocal action,” Freeland said. “It is a dollar for dollar response.”

Many of the US products were chosen for their political rather than economic impact. For example, Canada imports just $3m worth of yoghurt from the US annually and most of it comes from one plant in Wisconsin, the home state of House speaker Paul Ryan. The product will now be hit with a 10% duty. Another product on the list is whiskey, which comes from Tennessee and Kentucky, the latter of which is the home state of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

Freeland also said they are prepared if Donald Trump, the US president, escalates the trade war.

New House Bill Would Empower Donald Trump to Punish U.S. Companies that Boycott Israel

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs unanimously passed a measure on Thursday that would give the Trump administration power to decide how to punish U.S. companies that engage in or promote boycotts of Israel — including through criminal penalties. The committee passed an amendment by voice vote from Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., that largely replaced the text of a bill called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. When the original legislation was first introduced last year, it drew outrage from activists, and the American Civil Liberties Union warned that by threatening to impose steep criminal penalties on boycott activists engaged with international bodies’ boycotts, the bill was unconstitutional.

After the uproar, the initial bill, which was supported by the influential America Israel Public Affairs Committee, lost momentum. But Royce’s effort to move his version out of the Foreign Affairs Committee is part of a push to reinvigorate Capitol Hill’s efforts to use statutory means to clamp down on the growing movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state for human rights violations against the Palestinians.

Pro-Palestinian activists said Royce’s amendment, despite being an apparent attempt to work around civil liberties concerns, could be the most dangerous version of the bill yet, because it delegates the lawmaking power to the Trump administration.

Susan Sarandon & Linda Sarsour Speak Out as 630 Women Arrested Protesting U.S. Immigration Policy

A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S.

A Twitter bot is posting images and information about all 212 prisons and detention centers that hold immigrants across the United States, providing a systematic overview of where people are being detained in the wake of increased scrutiny on the nation’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.

The bot, @Abolish_ICE_Now, has been tweeting since Friday. (As of the time of publishing, it has posted 67 tweets.) Its creator, Everest Pipkin, is a drawing and language artist. Pipkin said in an email to Gizmodo that they were motivated to create the bot as a “civic act” to provide activists with key information about these facilities.

The data for the bot was scraped from an interactive map on immigrant detention statistics published by the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants. Pipkin’s bot combines this information with Census data and demographic and civic information about the detention centers’ locations. The tweets also attach an image of the detention facility pulled from Google Maps, Street View, or Places.

As Mike Pence Visits Guatemala, Jennifer Harbury Discusses the U.S. Role in the Refugee Crisis

Annapolis shooting: at least five dead in attack on newspaper office

Five people were shot dead and others injured on Thursday in what police described as a “targeted attack” on a Maryland newspaper, though they did not give a possible motive. William Krampf, Anne Arundel county’s acting police chief, said during a news conference on Thursday evening that officers were investigating a possible past dispute between the gunman and the newspaper’s staff.

The gunman opened fire with a shotgun in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. Dozens of police officers and federal agents responded within minutes, and a suspected shooter was arrested without a further exchange of gunfire. “He entered the building with a shotgun and he located his victims as he walked through the lower level,” Krampf said. The shooter was described as a white Maryland resident in his late 30s. ... Officials said the suspect was not being cooperative. ...

The shooting prompted new condemnation of Donald Trump’s demonisation of the media. The president has repeatedly called the press “the enemy of the people” and encourages crowds at his rallies to join him in deriding journalists. Returning to the White House later on Thursday after a visit to Wisconsin, Trump smiled and silently walked past reporters who shouted questions to him about the shooting and his past comments on the press.

The shooting today in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland cannot reasonably be separated from the President's mission to villainize the press as "the enemy of the American people."

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) June 28, 2018

President Trump, who repeatedly calls the media "the enemy of the people", is offering his thoughts and prayers to the victims of the shooting at a newspaper office in Annapolis.

— Eylon A. Levy (@EylonALevy) June 28, 2018

I'm reserving judgment on the #capitalgazette shooting until we know more, but like everyone else, my first thought was: this is what Trump has been building up to since the election and there's more where it came from. My thoughts are with every reporter and journalist I know.

— Rasmus Rasmussen (@theprint) June 28, 2018

Milo Yiannopoulos wants “vigilante squads” to start shooting journalists.

Only a few years ago, Yiannopoulos was one of the star pundits on the Trumpian right. He was a prized writer for Breitbart, a touted ally of Steve Bannon and even the possessor of a book deal from Simon and Shuster. The Mercer family, among the biggest donors to the Republican Party, amply subsidized his provocations. But Yiannopoulos’ extremist politics have made him an increasingly toxic figure, especially after an amply documented BuzzFeed expose revealing the depth of his ties to Neo-Nazis. These revelations caused even very hard-right figures like the Mercers and Breitbart to cut their ties to Yiannopoulos.

Now, Observer is reporting that Yiannopoulos’ descent into the political gutter continues apace. Asked by Observer to comment on a story, Yiannopoulos texted, “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” He sent a similar comment to a Daily Beast writer. ...

Amid the current brouhaha over civility, it is important to remember that so noxious a figure as Yiannopoulos was once courted and promoted by a White House aide and major Republican donors.

After Warning Congresswoman 'Be Careful,' Trump Has Yet to Denounce Lynching Threats Made Against Maxine Waters

It has been more than 13 hours since Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) announced that she was forced to cancel speaking events due to "very serious" lynching threats, and President Donald Trump — who just days ago warned Waters to "be careful what you wish for" — has yet to issue so much as a tweet denouncing the threats against the life of a sitting member of Congress.

"As the president has continued to lie and falsely claim that I encouraged people to assault his supporters, while also offering a veiled threat that I should 'be careful', even more individuals are leaving [threatening] messages and sending hostile mail to my office," Waters said in a statement late Thursday, specifically blaming Trump's Twitter attack for setting off the wave of threats. "There was one very serious death threat made against me on Monday from an individual in Texas which is why my planned speaking engagements in Texas and Alabama were canceled this weekend," Waters continued. "This is just one in several very serious threats the United States Capitol Police are investigating in which individuals threatened to shoot, lynch, or cause me serious bodily harm."

Trump's Twitter threat against Waters came after the congresswoman said during a rally in Los Angeles last weekend that Americans should "push back on" White House officials and tell them "they're not welcome" whenever they show their faces in public. Calling Waters "extraordinarily low IQ person" in a tweet on Monday, Trump falsely accused her of calling on Americans to "harm" his supporters.

On Monday, Waters made clear that nothing in her weekend statement should be construed as a call for anything violent. "I believe in peaceful, very peaceful protests," she told reporters on Capitol Hill. "I have not called for the harm of anybody. This President has lied again when he's saying that I've called for harm." At a rally on Wednesday night, Trump continued spreading lies when he claimed Waters "practically was telling people the other day to assault" members of his administration.

"Maxine Waters didn't call for harming Trump administration officials," noted former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse. "She called for protesting loudly against them." After several consecutive days of early morning tweets, as of this writing Trump's feed is conspicuously silent in the wake of Waters' statement on the wave of death threats. Noting that Trump's Twitter attack on Waters "can definitely be construed as a veiled threat against her," The Root's Monique Judge argued that the president's tweet was also "a very loud dog whistle to his base, and intentionally so."

"Don't be fooled; he may look like an idiot with a bad wig, but he is very cunning when it comes to these things. He knows what he is doing. And let's not forget that Sean Hannity blamed Waters for the Capital Gazette shooting only moments after he heard about it. And now she is receiving increased death threats. This is exactly what they wanted."

Red Hen owner resigns from Va. business group

The owner of the Lexington, Va., restaurant that made national headlines last week after asking White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave has resigned from a local business organization.

WSLS-TV in Roanoke reported that Stephanie Wilkinson, who owns the Red Hen restaurant, stepped down from her role on Main Street Lexington, a community business group that seeks to promote Lexington's downtown area.

"Considering the events of the past weekend, Stephanie felt it best that for the continued success of Main Street Lexington, she should step aside," Elizabeth Outland Branner, the organization's president, told WSLS-TV in an email.

Wilkinson and her restaurant have faced criticism in recent days after she asked Sanders and her family to leave her business on Friday.

The Civility Debate Has Reached Peak Stupidity

By all accounts, the most civil action taken in L’affaire Poule Rouge was the way Stephanie Wilkinson handled her refusal to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. She first consulted with her staff, several members of which were gay and were angry at the administration’s policies in that regard, and everyone was outraged by what was going on at the border. Wilkinson then took a vote on whether or not to serve Sanders. When the staff voted not to do so, she politely informed Sanders and her party that they would not be eating at the Red Hen that night. She even comped them the cheese plates they’d already ordered.

She did not use an official government Twitter account to discuss the episode, as Sanders did later. She did not use the power of the Oval Office to try and destroy someone’s business, as the president found time to do later. She asked the staff what they wanted to do. She took a vote. She abided by their wishes. If there’s a more civil way of saying “no” to someone, I don’t know what it would be. ...

You know who would’ve been baffled by this sudden debate over “civility”? Samuel Adams and John Hancock, that’s who. They were a helluva lot less civil to the crew of the Dartmouth than Stephanie Wilkinson was to the Sanders party, and the citizens of Boston did not comp Thomas Hutchinson to a cheese plate when they ran his sorry ass across the pond. And, who knows, maybe if Elliott Abrams had been chased out of a few DC bistros in the 1980s, Archbishop Oscar Romero and four American nuns would still be alive.

This debate is stupid. It’s also dangerously beside the point. SarahHuck is the lying mouthpiece of a lying regime that is one step away from simply hauling people off in trucks. That she was politely told to take her business elsewhere is a small step towards assigning public responsibility to public officials that enable a perilous brand of politics. There are bigger steps to be taken, but everyone in official Washington is too damn timid to do what really needs to be done about this band of pirates.

As Interest in Democratic Socialism Surges, Ocasio-Cortez Explains to Colbert What a 'Moral' Economy Would Look Like

Since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's stunning primary win over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday, interest in democratic socialism—the label Ocasio-Cortez unabashedly uses to describe her platform and political outlook—has surged exponentially, prompting corporate TV networks to feature segments on the term and driving a record-breaking membership boost for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

In an interview on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" Thursday night, Ocasio-Cortez—who is one of DSA's 42,000 members—was given a chance to explain the core principles of democratic socialism to an audience of millions.

"I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live," Ocasio-Cortez told Colbert, who claimed that democratic socialism is "not an easy term for a lot of Americans."

"So what that means is healthcare as a human right," Ocasio-Cortez explained. "It means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade school education if they so choose it. And, you know, I think that no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policies to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States."

The Trump Administration Is Reshaping the Country Under the Guise of National Security. The Energy Sector Is Next.

The Trump administration is unilaterally reshaping the United States under the cover of national security. The White House’s justification for its “zero tolerance” policy of separating families at the border was based on the president’s powers over national security. President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban was justified on grounds of national security, as are his vague “extreme vetting” proposals for visa applicants. Now, his Energy Department is looking to reshape the energy industry and reverse the trend away from coal-fired power plants. Their justification?

National security.

Yet in the case of the energy industry, nobody is buying the rationale, and the radical intervention into energy markets has produced an odd-bedfellows coalition of opposition that includes the oil and gas industry, renewable energy companies, and environmentalists. On the other side, in support of the White House, stands the coal and nuclear industry, headed up by Murray Energy and First Energy, who’ve long lobbied for just such a lifeline. ...

A Department of Energy memo first obtained by Bloomberg details the Trump administration’s plan to subsidize struggling coal and nuclear plants. The justification is that a lack of reliability in the electric grid represents a threat to national security. It’s not clear what action the administration has taken on the draft memo, but if implemented, the measure would allow the Energy Department to activate wartime powers under the Defense Production of Act of 1950, enacted in response to the Korean War.

Speaking at the World Gas Conference this week in Washington, Energy Secretary Rick Perry assured the government and industry representatives present that the U.S. is working to “honor the right of every nation to use every available fuel at its disposal. I wish I can tell you the entire developed world is on board with our vision. They are not.” ... Ahead of the conference, Perry had been coy about how the plan would unfold, likely in an effort to avoid further backlash from the industry with which he hopes to maintain cozy ties. Attending the same event, Patrick Pouyanne, CEO of the French gas giant Total, had harsh words for Perry’s vision. “The U.S. administration tries to promote coal-fired plants, but frankly if you find an investor who wants to invest 25 years in coal-fired plants,” he chided, “I would not buy the shares of that company.” ...

As Perry himself stated last month, “There is no free market for energy,” and the new rule he’s backing would actively intervene against prevailing trends in the energy market, where natural gas has reliably outcompeted coal over the last several years. Perry, though, isn’t wrong: The U.S. subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of about $15 billion per year, according to a recent study from Oil Change International, and it regularly tips the scales in fossil fuel producers’ favor. At most, though, the administration’s proposed bailout could only kick the can of coal’s decline farther down the road.

New Study Warns of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill's Long-Lasting Impact on Ocean's "Building Blocks"

Following President Donald Trump's "reckless" decision last week to repeal an ocean protection policy enacted by his predecessor, a study published Friday in the journal Nature details the long-term impact of BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, outlining how "lingering oil residues have altered the basic building blocks of life in the ocean."

Researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi collected and studied microbial samples from seven of the more than 2,000 historic shipwrecks at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico to analyze how the spill affected the ocean's smallest living creatures, which are foundational to the marine food chain. As the report explains, "shipwrecks serve as artificial reefs and hotspots of biodiversity by providing hard substrate, something rare in deep ocean regions."

While conservationists and scientists have, for the past several years, expressed alarm about the consequences of the spill—which poured 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf and devastated local wildlife—this is the first study of shipwreck-associated microbiomes, and caused the researchers to issue new warnings about the long-term impact.

"At the sites closest to the spill, biodiversity was flattened," Leila Hamdan, a microbial ecologist and the study's lead author, told the Guardian. "There were fewer types of microbes."

"This is a cold, dark environment and anything you put down there will be longer lasting than oil on a beach in Florida. It's premature to imagine that all the effects of the spill are over and remediated," Hamdan warned. "We rely heavily on the ocean and we could be looking at potential effects to the food supply down the road. Deep sea microbes regulate carbon in the atmosphere and recycle nutrients. I'm concerned there will be larger consequences from this sort of event."

Britain's biggest butterfly threatened by rising seas

Britain’s biggest butterfly, the swallowtail, could become extinct within four decades because of rising sea levels, a new charity has warned.

New inland habitat needs to be created for the swallowtail because rising seas are predicted to turn much of its current home, the Norfolk Broads, into saltmarshes later this century.

The British swallowtail caterpillar’s only food plant, milk parsley, cannot survive in saltwater, and so the plant and the butterfly will need to be translocated to the Cambridgeshire fens, according to butterfly experts.

“At least 90% of the current swallowtail breeding sites will become salt marsh with a sea level rise of 50cm,” said Mark Collins, chair of the Swallowtail and Birdwing Butterfly Trust, a new charity working to save the 500 swallowtail and birdwing butterfly species worldwide. “We could be looking at 30 or 40 years and these sites will be gone, given the rate of sea-level rise and also tidal surges and ‘salination events’, where saltwater comes rushing up the Broads’ rivers.” ...

The swallowtail was once found on marshland across southern England but the draining of marshes in Victorian times saw it confined to the Broads, where it has become slightly smaller and is now a unique subspecies, britannicus.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Farewell to Anthony Kennedy, Author of Some of the Most Ludicrous Pronouncements in Supreme Court History

Trump’s “Shithole Countries” Remark Is at the Center of a Lawsuit to Reinstate Protections for Immigrants

Manners or morals? The choice is easy when the stakes are this high

Democratic Elite Scrambles to Respond to Ocasio-Cortez

Soaring Cost of Clues Leaves Thomas Friedman Apparently Unable to Buy One

A Little Night Music

Sly & the Family Stone - Only One Way Out of This Mess

Sly & the Family Stone - Everyday People

Sly & The Family Stone - I Ain't Got Nobody

Sly and the Family Stone - Love City

Sly & Billy Preston - I Remember

Sly & The Family Stone - Just Like A Baby

Sly & The Family Stone – Chicken

Sly & the Family Stone - Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Again

Sly & the Family Stone - Dance to the Music

Sly and The Family Stone - I Want to Take You Higher