JUSTICE: “Our Invisible Revolution” / Chris Hedges

Posted on 10.28.2013 by AlwaysQuestionAuthority

“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”

Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

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INJUSTICE: “‘Chelsea E. Manning’ and the Gangster State” / Chris Hedges

Posted on 08.22.2013 by AlwaysQuestionAuthority

FORT MEADE, Md.—The swift and brutal verdict read out by Army Col. Judge Denise Lind in sentencing Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison means we have become a nation run by gangsters. It signals the inversion of our moral and legal order, the death of an independent media, and the open and flagrant misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes. The passivity of most of the nation’s citizens—the most spied upon, monitored and controlled population in human history—to the judicial lynching of Manning means they will be next. There are no institutional mechanisms left to halt the shredding of our most fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus and due process, or to prevent pre-emptive war, the assassination of U.S. citizens by the government and the complete obliteration of privacy.

Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. It marks the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile. It marks the day when the country dropped all pretense of democracy, obliterated checks and balances under the separation of powers and rejected the rule of law. It marks the removal of the mask of democracy, already a fiction, and its replacement with the ugly, naked visage of corporate totalitarianism. State power is to be, from now on, unchecked, unfettered and unregulated. And those who do not accept unlimited state power, always the road to tyranny, will be ruthlessly persecuted. On Wednesday we became vassals. As I watched the burly guards hustle Manning out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing, as I listened to half a dozen of his supporters shout to him, “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!” I realized that our nation has become a vast penal colony.

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INJUSTICE: “Extradition Hypocrisy on the Part of the U.S.: Whistleblowers Yes, Terrorists No” / Liberation

Posted on 07.14.2013 by AlwaysQuestionAuthority

Whistleblower Edward Snowden

Terrorist Luis Posada Carriles

Edward Snowden, who recently disclosed the massive nature of NSA spying on not only Americans but on every single person in the world who uses electronic communications of any kind, is currently a fugitive from “justice” in the United States. Although [Edward Snowden] is currently in a Russian airport, he has been offered political asylum by Venezuela, as well as by Nicaragua and Bolivia.

Although Snowden isn’t yet in Venezuela, the U.S. government has already requested his extradition from that country. The irony of this request abounds. For eight years now, since June 15, 2005, the U.S. has refused to extradite a notorious terrorist to Venezuela. Luis Posada Carriles is wanted in Venezuela on 73 counts of murder for masterminding the 1976 midair bombing of a Cubana airliner (the flight originated in Venezuela, and the bombing was planned there, which is why that country is involved). Posada was also responsible for a string of Cuban hotel bombings in 1997 which killed Italian tourist Fabio di Celmo, and was jailed for four years in Panama (2000-2004) for an attempt to bomb an auditorium in which Fidel Castro was speaking to university students. This is the man the U.S. Government continues to allow to walk the streets of Miami a free man, while they ask for the extradition of a man whose crime was to expose their own illegal actions.

Read more . . .

Extradition hypocrisy on the part of the U.S.: (pslweb.org)
Refusal to extradite terrorist to Venezuela exposes Washington’s hypocrisy (workers.org)
INJUSTICE: “U.S. Shelters Bolivia Ex-President From Genocide Charges As Evo Morales Offers Snowden Asylum” (alwaysquestionauthority.com)

INJUSTICE: “U.S. Shelters Bolivia Ex-President From Genocide Charges As Evo Morales Offers Snowden Asylum”

Posted on 07.14.2013 by AlwaysQuestionAuthority

[…]

Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, president of Bolivia from 2002 to 2003, was a free-market reformer and U.S. ally. He fled his country after protests to his plans to route natural gas through neighboring Chile toppled his government in 2003 — an episode known in Bolivia as the “Gas War.” He now faces charges of genocide in Bolivia for allegedly ordering the military to fire on protesters in 2003, killing more than 60 people, as well as a civil lawsuit in the U.S. brought by relatives of those who died. Sánchez de Lozada, now living in the U.S., is being sheltered from extradition back to Bolivia.

The Sánchez de Lozada issue hung heavy over U.S-Bolivian relations. And that was before Edward Snowden.

[…]

In 2007, prosecutors in Bolivia filed charges of genocide against Sánchez de Lozada. The Bolivian penal code includes massacres as part of the legal definition of “genocide.”

In 2011, the Bolivian courts convicted five military officers and two former cabinet members and imposed sentences ranging from three to 15 years. In its 2013 “World Report,” Human Rights Watch called the convictions the “only notable advance” in Bolivia’s efforts to punish human rights violations under previous governments.

[…]

The Obama administration refused to extradite Sánchez de Lozada last year. The Bolivian government has filed a second request for extradition, according to La Razón newspaper.

Beth Stephens, the attorney representing the victims’ families [said,] . . . “What they really want is for them to face is criminal prosecution in Bolivia,” Stephens said. “The United States shouldn’t be a safe haven for those who order violent attacks against unarmed civilians.”

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Extradition hypocrisy on the part of the U.S.: (pslweb.org)

JUSTICE: “Statement by Julian Assange after One Year in Ecuadorian Embassy”

Posted on 06.24.2013 by AlwaysQuestionAuthority

It has now been a year since I entered this embassy and sought refuge from persecution.

As a result of that decision, I have been able to work in relative safety from a US espionage investigation.

But today, Edward Snowden’s ordeal is just beginning.

Two dangerous runaway processes have taken root in the last decade, with fatal consequences for democracy.

Government secrecy has been expanding on a terrific scale.

Simultaneously, human privacy has been secretly eradicated.

A few weeks ago, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on an ongoing program – involving the Obama administration, the intelligence community and the internet services giants – to spy on everyone in the world.

As if by clockwork, he has been charged with espionage by the Obama administration.

The US government is spying on each and every one of us, but it is Edward Snowden who is charged with espionage for tipping us off.

It is getting to the point where the mark of international distinction and service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Prize, but an espionage indictment from the US Department of Justice.

Edward Snowden is the eighth leaker to be charged with espionage under this president.