It is all a part of the same phenomenon. Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right wing parties and fuelled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.

It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in western philosophy.

This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy. Therefore this philosophy does not really have its equivalent of Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, whose careful exposition of societal analysis and ideals, based on a comprehensive understanding of previous philosophical discourse, is being superceded.

If there is a current equivalent we may look at Bernard Henri Levy, whose rejection of collectivism and support of individual rights moved ever rightwards into support of raw capitalism, invasions of Muslim countries and now outspoken support for the genocide in Gaza. If you want to find an embodiment of the shift in western philosophy, it might be him. But few any longer pay attention to academic intellectuals sitting in their studies. The now threadbare mantle of “public intellectual” in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.

Part of this is institutional. In my youth, Bernard Russell or AJP Taylor were quite likely to turn up giving serious talks on the BBC, and John Pilger was the most celebrated documentary maker in British media. But now left wing voices are effectively banned from mainstream media, whilst now left wing academics ware most unlikely to progress in academia. Academia is itself now entirely run on a corporate model in the UK as throughout all the West.

A young Noam Chomsky would almost certainly be told by the University authorities to stick to linguistics and leave aside the philosophy and politics, or not get tenure. Chomsky was already a renowned linguist in 1967, when he published his breakthrough essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Essentially a call for academics to support the protest movement, a young professor who published it today would almost certainly get suspended if not sacked and even, in today’s climate, quite possibly arrested.

The deportations of students from the USA who have broken no law but protested against genocide; the fines there on universities for allowing free speech; the deportations of EU citizens from Germany for speaking out on Palestine; the police raid on the Quaker meeting house in London and the widespread “terrorism” charges against peaceful journalists – these are just examples of a wave of repression sweeping the major western states.

They are all linked. It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930’s.

The great irony of course is that it is the western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the western destabilisation of Syria that led to the massive wave of immigration to Europe that caused the rise of the far right. Over 1.5 million Syrian “refugees” were granted asylum in the EU, because they claimed to be on the anti-Assad side, which the west was supporting. AfD is very much a result of Merkel’s decision to accept 600,000 Syrian refugees in Germany.

Fascinatingly, now their side has “won” and a western backed government been installed in Damascus, less than 1% of these refugees have returned to Syria. Despite the official anti-immigrant narratives of almost all western governments, there seems to be no attempt to suggest that they might return. Indeed, those western politicians most keen on deporting immigrants are the least likely to suggest that the reliably zionist Anti-Assad Syrians should leave, even though those same politicians portray Syria under al Jolani as a liberal paradise and rush to give it money.

The neo-con immigration narrative in Europe is peculiarly complex and flexible. Effectively immigrants viewed as on the West’s sides side in its wars (Sunni Syrians, Ukrainians) have an open door.

Mass immigration to Europe is therefore a direct result of imperialist foreign policy, and that plays out in complex ways, with the West’s victims arriving against official disapproval and the West’s clients arriving with official approval.

Equally, the economic dislocation and large rise in inflation which also has strengthened the populist right, is itself exaggerated by western foreign policy. The proxy war in Ukraine is largely responsible for the step change in Europe’s energy prices, with the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline
a key factor in the major struggles of German manufacturing industry.

Incredibly, for a year the entire western media and political class tried to enforce the lie that Russia destroyed its own pipeline – just as they claimed Hamas blew up the first of the dozens of hospitals and health centres destroyed by Israel.

We come back to Gaza, as all serious discussion must at present. I cannot come to terms with the fact that the takeover of the political Establishment by zionist interests – itself a consequence in the massive growth of the comparative wealth of the ultra-rich – is making it possible for the most brutal genocide possible to happen before the eyes of the world, with active support for the western establishment.

It is not that the people do not want to stop it. It is that there is no mechanism connecting the popular will to the instruments of government. The major parties all support Israel’s genocide in almost all the western “democracies”.

It has become impossible to deny the intention of Genocide now. Israel has stepped up its killing of children to dozens every day, is openly executing medics and destroying all healthcare facilities, is bombing desalination plants and is blockading all food.

The zionist narrative on social media has shifted from denial of genocide to justification of genocide.

I simply cannot understand the mainstream tolerance of this Holocaust. I am living in an age where the power structures and social narratives I do not recognise as part of a societal organisation to which I can consent to belong. It is the British Labour Party which is actively supporting genocide whilst targeting the most vulnerable at home for cuts in income. It is the EU which is doing everything possible to promote World War 3 and transforming into a militarily aggressive organisation of Nazi leanings.

The UK, US and other first world nations are radically cutting overseas aid to provide money for imperialist military aggression. The broadly social democratic consensus of the western world in my youth involved much dull compromise: but it was infinitely better and more hopeful than this Hell we are creating.

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Two key points the discussion has mostly missed:

1) It has been a bipartisan Justice Department policy for years to attempt to establish that the First Amendment does not apply to non-US citizens

2) Why has the Trump administration chosen Mahmoud Khalil out of thousands of potential victims; about as problematic a test case as can be imagined?

First Amendment Protection

The outrageous arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration Control Enforcement is a new front in the widespread attack on free speech on Palestine in the USA. Indeed free speech on Palestine is under severe attack throughout almost the entire western world.

There is no shortage of excellent commentary and analysis on the Khalil case and its multiple ramifications. The characterisation of criticism of Israel as anti-semitism, the fake narrative of a threat to Jewish students, the denial of the right to protest, the attack on academic freedom, these are all aspects of the case which shed a horrifying light on the devastating effect on civil liberties of explicit Zionist control of the political system.

The same can be said of the arbitrary detention, the lack of access to lawyers and the characterisation of dissent as “terrorism”.

But it has not been much discussed that the central legal issue in the case – whether non-US citizens have First Amendment rights or whether free speech only applies to US citizens – is not an innovation by the Trump administration.

That non-US citizens are not protected by the First Amendment was the key issue pursued by Biden’s Justice Department in the extradition hearings of Julian Assange.

Indeed it was the insistence of English Court of Appeal judge Dame Victoria Sharp that the US must confirm that Assange did have First Amendment protection, that led directly to the Biden administration dropping the case and agreeing a plea deal, rather than give the assurance which Sharp requested.

Key paragraphs of the relevant judgment are here

…

…

The British judges took the view that not to apply the First Amendment to non-citizens would breach the principle of non-discrimination (as guaranteed in the European Convention of Human Rights), and I am sure they were right.

This is a very worrying doctrine which the US Executive is attempting to enforce. But Trump did not initiate it – Biden tried it too, on Assange.

Why Mahmoud Khalil?

Thousands of foreign students in the USA have spoken out and demonstrated against the genocide in Gaza. I am sure that amongst them there will be one or two individuals who can plausibly be depicted as jihadist, who may indeed have actual anti-semitic tendencies and who are only in the US on a student visa.

So why pick on Mahmoud Khalil, who is none of these things?

He has a pregnant American wife and is in possession of a Green Card residency. Those factors may conceivably play into the First Amendment argument in his favour, if judges are looking to fudge the issue.

In addition to which, while he undoubtedly was in the leadership group of protestors at Columbia University, he appears to have played a responsible role in liaising with authorities. The cherry on the cake is that he is a former British Government employee, having worked in the British Embassy in Lebanon, on Syrian affairs.

This is where the story starts to become very murky. I was told by Resistance-linked contacts in Lebanon that not only was Khalil not viewed as pro-Resistance to Israel while there, he was believed to be involved in UK government attempts to undermine the Assad regime by promotion of jihadist groups.

Free Palestine TV, which is Lebanon-based, has the same information.

It is important to understand how deeply the UK has been involved in anti-Syrian activity in Lebanon. Training and equipping of al-Nusra/ISIS/HTS units was carried out by British special forces based at Rayak airbase in the Bekaa Valley, who were certainly still there in January after HTS conquered Damascus.

Contrary to some reports, Mahmoud Khalil would not have worked for MI6 in the Embassy. MI6 stations do not employ foreign nationals. He would have worked for the Political and Information Sections, under diplomats who cooperated closely with MI6 or in some instances were active “undeclared” members of MI6.

Middle East Eye describes Khalil’s role in the Embassy as a “programme manager” running Chevening scholarships. I know this programme extremely well. While I have no reason to doubt Khalil did this, it would amount to no more than 10% of anybody’s time and would not require the UK security clearance which the article states that Khalil received.

The simple truth is that anybody working in good faith in the British Embassy in Lebanon can be no friend of the resistance to Israel. Everything the British Embassy do in Lebanon is intrinsically linked to the overriding goal of promoting the interests of Israel, particularly through weakening Hezbollah, and this is especially true when it comes to programmes into Syria running out of Beirut.

So how did Khalil move from British government operative to Palestinian student activist?

And then, why on earth did the Trump regime pick him for its first high-profile deportation?

I can see three plausible explanations for Khalil’s behaviour:

1) He was never pro-British but was infiltrating the Embassy for the Palestinians

2) He was never pro-Palestinian but was infiltrating the protest movement for the British government

3) He was not very political but was moved recently to activism by the genocide in Gaza

Of these, option 3) seems to me the most plausible, though all are certainly possible.

It would be a delicious irony if the Trump regime had arrested a British agent by accident, but this seems to me unlikely. I do not think MI6 would run a Palestinian agent in the USA without informing the CIA – although they may have done if there were a specific concern that the CIA would leak the identity.

If Khalil were a British agent he could have been arrested for protection if there were concerns he had been “made”, or he could have been arrested because the Americans found out and were furious at not being informed. But I do not think these are the likely scenarios.

It seems to me much more probable that a once-complacent Khalil changed his mind and became more – righteously – radical due to the genocide in Gaza.

In which case the motive for choosing him as the target for arrest is very plain. Both the US and UK will be worried about revelations Khalil might make about support to jihadists in Syria from his time working on this in Lebanon. Whisking him into incommunicado detention, whilst maximum pressure is applied to persuade him to keep silent, is then an obvious move.

It is important for freedom of speech and for the rights in general of immigrants in the USA that Mr Khalil is free. It is obviously profoundly important for him and his family. I do not want anything I have written to detract from that.

But the puzzle of why such an extremely complicated target for the test case was chosen, when there exist far lower-hanging fruit, is one that needs to be considered. I hope I have offered some possible lines of thought you find useful.

We were searching for a site in the northern Bekaa valley recently bombed by Israel. Hadi knew near which village it was located but, as we drove between large expanses of fertile, well-cultivated fields, it was plain his information was vague.

We pulled up at a garage to ask the way. Lebanon has not gone the way of Western economies in making consumers perform the very service for which they are paying, and in Lebanese service stations they still have attendants. A scruffily dressed old man sat on the front step of a dilapidated and very basic kiosk constructed of concrete blocks. He came over to the driver’s window.

First Hadi ordered fuel, and the old man filled the car, washed the windscreen and took payment. His hair was white and his beard short, but not from the obsessively neat trimming that is universal in Beirut. When he returned with change, Hadi asked him if he knew where to find the bomb site.

The old man replied with questions. I did not understand the Arabic, but from the body language there was a marked shift in the interaction between the two, from the man serving Hadi to the man interrogating Hadi. He lost his shuffle, notably straightened his back and stood taller.

They were talking through the driver’s window, and with a very definite movement the man moved forward and rested his forearm on the sill, intruding his head into the vehicle assertively. He looked at me with searching eyes, and looked at Niels sitting in the back seat with his camera equipment. His questioning of Hadi became terse.

I looked into his eyes. He had the distinct, piercing gaze that I used to note in the special forces officers I occasionally came across in my Foreign Office career. He then walked away from the car, took out his phone and made a call.

After a while he handed the phone to Hadi, who looked both serious and worried. Hadi listened, handed the phone back to the attendant, said goodbye and thank you, and reversed out of the garage. Hadi told us we were not permitted to go to the bomb site.

We had just encountered Hezbollah. The important thing to understand in this encounter is that it is not that the man was an undercover Hezbollah operative posing as a garage attendant. He was a garage attendant who was a Hezbollah operative.

Hezbollah is not an organisation comparable to the IRA, in which a relatively small number of members operated within the context of a community in which they enjoyed very large sympathy. Hezbollah operates in a community in which almost everybody is an activist and pretty well every adult is prepared to pick up a gun or an RPG and knows how to use it.

This is a key to understanding how Hezbollah became the only military force that has ever been able to defeat the IDF in pitched ground warfare. In this respect, Hezbollah’s crucial advantage compared to Hamas is that it has had practical access to weapons deliveries to build its arsenal, whereas Hamas has been greatly constricted by Israel’s control of goods entering Gaza.

Ending the weapons supply to Hezbollah has been a key US/Israeli strategic objective this last year, and they have in large part achieved it. I shall return to that.

On a personal level, this encounter with the garage attendant was fairly typical of my interactions with Hezbollah in my four months in Lebanon. They had detained me in a rather frightening manner on first encounter, and in general treated me with a suspicion which is understandable given my British diplomatic background.

I saw literally thousands of buildings in Lebanon that Israel had destroyed. The most haunting part of the entire experience was the frequent event of finding the clothing and toys of small children among the rubble: I still have bad dreams about it.

However this was the second of the two occasions when we were able to identify that Israel had struck an actual Hezbollah military installation, rather than a civilian building. Both times Hezbollah prevented me from going to see. In terms of maintaining the security of the military site, this strikes me as shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Having been denied access to that particular bomb site, we drove on into the village and met with some locals Hadi knew. In this small village there had been over 70 Israeli bombings, 8 of them since the ceasefire.

They took me to one large house which had been completely destroyed, a pile of rubble spread over a large area. Twelve members of the same family had been killed in this house, seven of them children. The head of the family had left in late afternoon to go to the butcher’s to buy dinner, when his home and family was destroyed behind him.

The explosion was so enormous that the body of one of the children was found in the neighbouring orchard of olive trees, clean across the road, about seventy yards away. Many of the olive trees had been shredded and debris from the house was strewn across the field and beyond.

The next house was not greatly damaged, but there a father and his two daughters were killed by the shock wave as they sat on their terrace drinking coffee.

There are so many important points to make about Hezbollah, but let me start with these three.

The first is that support for Hezbollah among their own Shia communities in Lebanon is extremely strong. They are far more than a military organisation. They are Lebanon’s largest legitimate political party.

At the 2022 election Hezbollah received 19.9% of the vote, and their close ally the Amal Movement received another 10.5%. The party with the second highest vote behind Hezbollah, the neo-fascist Lebanese Forces, received 11.6% of the vote.

[The Lebanese Forces political party should not be confused with the Lebanese Armed Forces, with which it has no connection. The Lebanese Armed Forces remain under effective US control and fired not a shot against the Israeli invasion and occupation. But like so much in Lebanon, the situation should not be simplified and the majority of the rank and file of the LAF are Shia Muslims sympathetic to Hezbollah, and a large majority of the rank and file of any denomination would be happy to fight the Israelis were they ever allowed to do so.]

Under Lebanon’s extraordinary constitution, Lebanese Forces with 11.6% received 19 seats in parliament while Hezbollah with 19.9% received 15 seats. Of which again more later.

But when it comes to political legitimacy, it is worth noting that the combined Hezbollah/Amal vote percentage is equal to the Labour Party percentage at the last General Election in the UK. There is no argument that Hezbollah are not a legitimate democratic political force.

The second point is that it is absolutely wrong to see Lebanon in purely sectarian terms. Hezbollah has supporters and allies across all religions in Lebanon and, in a country where politics is officially and constitutionally organised on religious lines (a “confessional” constitution), there are minor parties of all religions aligned with Hezbollah, of which several had ministers until appointment of the new Cabinet last month (of which again, more later).

Perhaps a quarter of those at the funeral for Nasrallah were not Shia Muslims.

The third point is that Hezbollah is much more than a political party with a military wing. In a country in which central government has all but collapsed (Lebanon has no income tax), Hezbollah provides hospitals, schools, banking, pensions and welfare benefits.

When Niels and I witnessed refugee returns to evacuated areas following the “ceasefire”, a very substantial percentage of the population were waving Hezbollah flags or Lebanese flags, with some waving both. Hezbollah is an integral part of Lebanese society, entirely born within the country out of the resistance to Israel’s 1982 occupation, and is in no sense alien or anti-Lebanese.

The elephant in the room is that in the UK and other Western states, this highly complex social and political movement is designated as a terrorist organisation in its entirety. Ironically, the justification for this given in Westminster in 2019 was that Hezbollah was destabilising the Middle East and prolonging the conflict in Syria – where the very Western powers that proscribed Hezbollah have just assisted another proscribed terrorist group into power.

The truth is that terrorist proscription by the NATO powers of organisations in the Middle East is simply a tool for taking whatever decisions are expedient at that moment to promote the interests of apartheid Israel. The “terrorist acts” of Hezbollah that led to proscription of the entire organisation in 2019 consisted of fighting ISIS, Al Qaeda and Al Nusra in Syria.

We all suffer from the temptation of assuming that others share our prejudices. I assume that like me, many in the West find it difficult to empathise with Hezbollah because of its Islamic philosophy and – I know this is petty – appearance.

Hassan Nasrallah was the most important and steadfast leader of resistance to the mass murderous Zionist project of the last forty years. He was also, by all accounts, a hugely charismatic figure to Arabic speakers. But his very appearance made it easy for him to be represented to Western audiences as an alienating, even evil, character, due to the state-promoted Islamophobia in the Western world which has been universally projected in the media this last quarter century.

But here honesty is required. I myself do not like to see political leaders with a religious function and am simply against theocratic rule. I am entirely in favour of freedom of religion, but utterly opposed to religion ruling any state.

There is an element of smoke and mirrors here. In the glorious mosaic of Lebanon, Hezbollah exist jumbled with those of other sects and religions, and in practice rub along very well.

Nasrallah spoke like all committed Islamists of his desire to seeing a united Muslim rule over Muslim lands, with the state under firmly religious leadership and Sharia law. But in practice Hezbollah are highly tolerant.

In those large areas of Lebanon where they both have physical military control and dominate the elected local authority, Hezbollah do not ban the sale of alcohol by the Christian minority or enforce hair covering, even on Muslims.

This is an area where my prejudices were disabused. I did not expect to find this.

All this caused me some difficulty in Lebanon. I was frequently asked whether I supported Hezbollah. As I was spending much of my time in those areas attacked by Israel – which largely are the Hezbollah areas – in general the question came from Hezbollah supporters.

I would always reply that I supported absolutely the right of occupied people to conduct armed resistance, and the duty to do everything possible to prevent genocide. Both are established principles of international law. But I did not support Hezbollah per se, and would not vote for it were I Lebanese, because it is an openly Islamist organisation and I am opposed to theocratic rule and religious legal codes.

Being in Lebanon did however allow me to overcome some of the gulf of my cultural understanding. The practice of calling those killed by Israel “martyrs” and frequently referring to them as such in conversation, is alien to a Western ear where the word has largely outdated religious connotations.

When you live amongst a community where everybody has friends or relatives who have been killed in the decades-long aggression of Israel, the revering of the fallen as martyrs, and their omnipresence in everyday thought, starts to make much more sense.

Similarly to Western eyes the widespread display of large images of the “martyrs” is peculiar. These are along every roadside and atop every ruin. There are always posters at the site where the person was killed, and frequently dozens of other posters of that individual at sites of importance to them.

I overcame my incomprehension of this practice by thinking of it in reference to my own culture, that these were posters of people put up to mark where they fought and died to defend their wee bit hill and glen. In those terms it made sense to me.

I am extremely conscious that religious faith has played a very positive role in both Palestine and South Lebanon in enabling people to endure the unendurable and to maintain Resistance against impossible odds. But it is not possible to ignore the fact that there remain substantial differences between my world view and an Islamist world view.

This has been brought into urgent focus by the attitude of many Sunni Muslims to the overthrow of Assad in Syria. In my world view, this has been a disaster for the Palestinians. It has seriously and perhaps permanently damaged the flow of arms and other resources to Hezbollah, the Palestinians’ most important ally. And it has enabled the Greater Israel project to expand substantially into Syria.

Try now to imagine that you are a Sunni Muslim scholar who believes that only by becoming Sunni Muslim can people obey God. You believe that the benefit to mankind of bringing Sunni Muslim rule to most of Syria outweighs the loss of part of Syria to Israel. You believe that Palestinian martyrs killed by Israel are going immediately to Heaven anyway, so in spiritual terms there is no real loss to the “martyrs”.

That really is the position of many of the leaders of the Saudi- and Gulf-sponsored Muslim religious community. Just like there are a great many shades of Christian, there are a great many shades of Islam and there are many Muslims, including Sunni Muslims, who would not share that viewpoint. But to a religious Islamist it makes perfect sense.

I cannot find it again because it was deep in replies on a thread, but I had a very interesting exchange with a Muslim intellectual on Twitter on precisely this topic. He accused me of “orientalism” for denigrating an Eastern spiritual viewpoint in favour of a Western secularist narrative, in seeing the installation of HTS as a reverse for Palestine. He pointed out that Hamas, a fellow Sunni Islamist movement, had welcomed the triumph of HTS.

The exchange was welcome for its honesty and intellectual acuity. I said I did not believe Edward Said would have welcomed the accompanying expansion of Israel into Syria or cutting off of supplies to Hezbollah. He called in a nephew of Said to bolster his view that my viewpoint is orientalist.

I have thought about this deeply; I do not think my viewpoint can fairly be described as orientalist. The truth is that all mainstream Western thought would have entirely concurred with the view that the expansion of rule by a particular religious sect was more important than associated temporal reverses that did not affect the faith of the people: but Western thought was exactly that 500 years ago.

I do not see my view as orientalist. I see it as anti-medievalist.

The fall of the Assad regime was deeply desired by western neoliberals and Zionists in order to replace it with a western democratic model, and they are desperately pretending that is what they have got in al-Jolani. As atrocities against Shia, Alaouites and Christians in Syria mount, the one thing that cannot be disputed is that al-Jolani is steadfastly Zionist, as he allows Israel daily to occupy more of Syria and destroy more of its infrastructure, without a single shot fired in response.

There is no doubt that the position of the Resistance to an expansionist apartheid Israeli colonial project has worsened considerably since my arrival in Lebanon in October. While Israel could not progress a ground offensive, the almost total absence of any air defences for Lebanon meant it could murder and destroy with impunity from the air.

Israel embarked on a campaign of devastation of purely civilian areas by aerial bombardment. Of that I am an eye witness. I can say from personal inspection that the claims that the tens of thousands of homes destroyed had any military use are a massive lie.

With no defence against a relentless bombing campaign, and with most of their leadership eliminated, Hezbollah were obliged to accede to a suicidally unbalanced “ceasefire agreement”. It is plain on the actual face of the agreement that only one side will cease fire.

All Lebanese groups are to cease fire without qualification whereas Israel is only to cease “offensive” operations. Israel of course claims all its attacks as defensive. This is absolute nonsense, but despite over 500 violations of the ceasefire agreement, killing hundreds of people, Israel has not been held accountable because Hezbollah acceded to a ceasefire guaranteed by a “Mechanism” which is chaired by a United States General.

I think my discussion on this point with the UN Spokesman in Lebanon was extremely important, especially where he explicitly states that the Ceasefire Agreement was drafted by the USA. This link takes you to the key point in the interview.

The members of the “Mechanism” overseeing the ceasefire are the United States, France, Israel (sic), and the Lebanese government of General Aoun, a total US puppet.

Furthermore while the Ceasefire Agreement provides for a zone south of the Litani river from which Hezbollah must remove its weapons, it also calls for Hezbollah disarmament throughout the whole of Lebanon, which the Israelis and Americans have used to justify numerous continuing Israeli strikes in the Bekaa Valley, the Syrian border and even Beirut.

Hezbollah are not a formal party to the Agreement but it was sanctioned by them before signature. Personally I find it difficult to imagine that Nasrallah would ever have accepted such a position.

At the same time, Hezbollah’s domestic political position has been also greatly weakened. They were obliged to accept effectively the US imposition of General Aoun as President, which they had been resisting for over two years. They also then found themselves accepting his nomination of the openly anti-Hezbollah Nawaf Salam as Prime Minister.

I referred earlier to Lebanon’s “confessional” constitutional arrangements, and said I would give more detail. The President must be a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite.

But it does not stop there. The governing agreement specifies the division of ministerial positions too. Not only between Sunni, Shia and Christian, but to include several other groupings, of which the best known is Druze and there are others, particularly various specific sects of Christianity.

Hezbollah has operated through the Amal movement in providing the Shiite ministers, but it is a key fact that it has always had important allies among Christian anti-Israeli occupation factions who have filled important ministerial posts.

The loss of Hezbollah power within Lebanon is to be found within the detail of all these ministries. In claiming to appoint a “technocratic”, apolitical administration, Aoun and Salam have in fact excluded most of Hezbollah’s support.

It is in practice almost impossible to find a Shiite in Lebanon who is not pro-Hezbollah, but Aoun and Salam have certainly done their best. More pertinently, they have almost totally excluded Hezbollah and anti-Zionist sympathisers from the ministerial representation of Sunni and the assorted minority and smaller Christian groups, while simultaneously boosting the de facto influence of the fascist Lebanese Forces sympathisers.

Hezbollah has not been this politically weak in the Lebanese institutions for 20 years, which is why the show of mass popular support at Nasrallah’s funeral was so important to them. However, given Lebanon’s electoral system with its deliberate Christian bias, piling up popular support is of little use to Hezbollah electorally. There are Christian MPs in parliament elected with under 500 votes, while Hezbollah could put on another 100,000 votes without significantly increasing their representation.

Crucially the “Ministerial statement” of the aims of the new government excluded resistance to Israel as an objective – a key change – and specified the state’s monopoly on carrying arms, a reference to the full disarmament of Hezbollah.

Finally, of course, Hezbollah’s archenemies, HTS, are now in power in Damascus. Hezbollah fought off repeated Al Qaeda/Al Nusra/ISIS attempts to invade Lebanon and also intervened against these forces within Syria. Al-Jolani coming to power represents a major disruption to Hezbollah’s supply lines from Iran.

The US and Israel are attempting to turn up this pressure by frequent aerial attacks on border crossings from Syria and on Hezbollah individuals within Lebanon. Recently they took the additional measure of banning pilgrimage flights to and from Iran, which greatly angered the Shia community and was aimed at cutting off a route for physical supplies of cash.

What is uncertain is what secret accommodations General Aoun may have reached with Hezbollah, over whether their physical disarmament throughout Lebanon under SCR 1701 and the Ceasefire Agreement is a genuine process or a show. Politically, Aoun and Salam have strongly planted their banner for real disarmament of Hezbollah.

What appears beyond dispute is that the Israelis receive a continued flow of intelligence from Lebanese sources on Hezbollah personnel movements and sites, and the US-sanctioned intense Israeli bombing campaign shows no sign of abating.

We can add to this sad fact that Israel was able to use the Ceasefire Agreement to occupy parts of Southern Lebanon which Hezbollah had successfully defended during the war, and that Israel has destroyed by demolition thousands of homes and other civilian buildings under cover of the ceasefire to add to those destroyed during the war.

Indeed Israel demolishes more buildings in Southern Lebanon every day still, and has now destroyed over 90,000 buildings in Lebanon in total. As I predicted, Israel is building 5 permanent military outposts in Southern Lebanon and has made plain it has no intention of leaving.

The US puppet government in Beirut, like the US puppet government in Damascus, plainly has no intention of any realistic action against de facto Israeli annexation of its land. While Hezbollah has signalled a reversion to past tactics of guerilla warfare, I have serious doubts about both its current capacity, both political and military.

Of the enduring heroism of the people of South Lebanon I have no doubt, and I also have no doubt that as Israel is maintaining an illegal occupation, their legal right of armed resistance in unimpeachable.

It is however foolish not to acknowledge that with Israel expanding into Lebanon and Syria, with US puppet regimes in Syria and Damascus, with genocide about to restart in Gaza and spreading into the West Bank, and with an apparently crazed level of open Zionist support from Trump that is in fact only more honest than the pro-Genocide positions of the large majority of Western governments, the current position looks bleak indeed.

The only grounds for hope is that I cannot imagine that the people of the region are going to tolerate Israeli collaborationist regimes in Damascus, Beirut and Ramallah much longer. Indeed with slight variations you might say the same of the entire Arab world.

I hope you will forgive this being a very personal post as I try to make sense of my experiences and assimilate much new knowledge into my view of the world.

I went to Lebanon knowing literally nobody in the country, and with an introduction to just one person who helped us through immigration, but whose assistance thereafter did not work out. I did so accompanied by Niels as cinematographer, despite my never really having worked in video before, and my not being very accomplished at it. On top of which we had no financial resources except for our crowdfunding, which was not going well.

I now realise just how deeply ignorant I was about Lebanon before arriving.

The truth is, I wanted to go to Gaza but could find no way to get in. I had then had applied to Israel for the required permission from COGAT to enter the West Bank, but had been refused. So Lebanon was the one place under Israeli aggression where I could actually hope to get in to document and report on Israeli atrocities.

This venture was also born out of a rather desperate feeling that I must try to do something. I had been involved in the genesis of the ICJ case and in international campaigning for Palestine, but felt so helpless watching murdered children in Gaza every day on social media, that I felt compelled to do more.

With war against the Israeli invaders raging in Lebanon, I admit I also had a compulsion to share at least some of the danger of those putting their lives at stake. In truth, I felt something of a fraud to be writing about it from home if I was not prepared to experience it.

Well, at times Lebanon really was dangerous for us, but I am extremely proud of what Niels and I achieved. The six mini-documentaries reached millions of people and I think genuinely informed the Western public. I think the interview with the UN was extremely revealing and important and wish I had been able to get a rather wider audience for it. On top of which we produced numerous shorter video pieces, written articles and interviews with alternative media outlets across the globe, as well as doing a lot of Arab mainstream media.

In the end we had to leave because it proved simply not possible to meet the substantial costs of the venture by individual subscriptions and donations, and I ran out of money. It was a bold experiment in being able to do the kind of real, on-the-ground journalism that legacy media has abandoned, but to continue would require more fundraising ability or organisational ability than I possess.

There is no doubt that we suffered – and still suffer – massive social media suppression, and this limitation of reach is what crippled fundraising efforts. Essentially we were asking the same people for donations again and again, which is both impractical and, I admit, I found personally difficult and undignified.

So I shall continue reporting from my base in Scotland, travelling the world as occasion demands. My knowledge has been hugely expanded by my time in Beirut. I will now largely revert to written rather than video format. The struggle for justice goes on, and my commitment to it remains.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Israel isn't eradicating 'the terrorists'. It's turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability

[First published by Middle East Eye]

If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.

The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.

It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.

2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.

Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.

He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.

By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.

It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.

Held in torture camp

The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.

After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.

According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.

The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.

Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.

Psychotic logic

According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.

By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.

In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.

An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.

A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.

The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.

Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.

This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.

Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.

'Consciousness warfare'

Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.

That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.

Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.

Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.

They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.

The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.

But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.

The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.

And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.

And that is exactly what they did.

Red herrings

Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.

Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.

Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.

These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.

Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.

The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.

Mass graves

Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.

These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.

Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.

Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.

Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.

For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.

Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: "The health sector is being systematically dismantled." The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. "At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients."

In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.

They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.

Trajectory to genocide

The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.

Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.

He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”

The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.

But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.

The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.

Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.

Mad Max vision

Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.

Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new defence minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.

It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.

Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.

Where does this lead?

Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.

Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.

It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”

The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.

This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.

Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.

Cover story

The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.

They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.

Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.

So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.

They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.

This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.

No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.

The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.

Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.

Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.

Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.

The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.

Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, and fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafés.

What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches. Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.

But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.

Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.

Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.

That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.

The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.

In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.

In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.

In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long-cherished and hard-won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicitly to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.

The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and the tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.

In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.

The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.

That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.

The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even the almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious Zionists.

So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.

I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.

Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025

So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.

The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.

I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.

Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.

I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.

Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria, which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.

Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netanyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.

Biden wanted Genocide.

The myth of Western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of Western support for the “two-state solution”. There never was a viable two-state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.

The “two-state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two-state solution” has to be finally killed off.

Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)

Within 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.

While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoner as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.

Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.

Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.

Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.

Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of their populations or an apartheid state. He may see such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.

It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.

It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.

The other point on which Israel relies is the support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.

This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.

To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.

That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.

At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.

The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.

Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.

———————–

To be blunt, our two months in Lebanon before Christmas made a slight financial loss. I was delighted with the output of four mini-documentaries and numerous short video reports and articles, some of which individually had millions of viewers. But to date the model of reader-sponsored real overseas journalism is not proven nor stable.

If you have not yet contributed financially, I should be grateful if you could do so. If you have contributed, perhaps you could help further by encouraging others to do so. I would as always stress I do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them the slightest financial hardship.

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

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On 4 October I spoke to a meeting of the United European Left group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Arriving a bit early, I sat through a presentation by a Moldovan judge, Victoria Sanduta, who was formerly the President of the Association of Judges in Moldova.

She had recently been dismissed, along with other judges, after investigation by a committee set up by the President to vet judges. She said the “vetting” was openly political, and the purpose was to remove any judges who were not “Western-oriented” and who might query the process in a forthcoming EU referendum and Presidential election.

You might think that this was an operation to clear out legacy judges hanging on since the days of the Iron Curtain. It was not; Victoria Sanduta is quite young. There had been no criticism of her judicial decisions. Her fault was that she was suspected of not supporting the President and lacking “Western orientation”.

Both the EU referendum and Presidential election were remarkably close. The EU referendum was “won” by the pro-EU side with 50.34% of the vote. The Presidential election was “won” by pro-EU President Sandu with 55.35% of the vote.

In both elections, the pro-Western side lost substantially on the votes of those living in Moldova, but won with the addition of hundreds of thousands of votes from the diaspora overseas.

There were 235 overseas voting stations in countries outside of Moldova, the large majority within the EU. There were however only two voting stations in Russia – the country where the majority of the Moldovan diaspora live, over half a million of them. Those voting stations (both in Moscow) were provided with only 5,000 ballot papers each. The official justification for this is that that’s the number of Moldovans living in Moscow itself, the majority being in the south of Russia.

As a result, approximately half a million Moldovans living in Russia were disenfranchised, while hundreds of thousands living in the EU voted.

In total 328,855 Moldovans living outside Moldova voted. Only 9,998 of those were in Russia, where most of the diaspora live.

Almost 300,000 of the permitted diaspora votes were for joining the EU – won with a majority of 10,555 – and for President Sandu – majority 179,309. If votes from the diaspora in Russia had been permitted on an equal footing with votes from the diaspora in the West, the EU would certainly have lost and Sandu would very probably have lost.

It was therefore very useful that Sandu sacked any judge who might entertain a challenge to the outcome.

This naturally recurred to me when I saw that pro-Western judges had disqualified the frontrunner in the neighbouring Romanian general election on the grounds of not being a Russophobe and being popular, which is an offence.

Călin Georgescu is not a supporter of the war in Ukraine. His socially conservative views are popular in Romania but are not EU-friendly. However he is absolutely not the far-right nutter he has been portrayed as across the Western media.

In fact Georgescu is a highly regarded developmental economist and a former United Nations Special Rapporteur. His expertise is in sustainable development, and he is one of those who wishes nations to move away from use of the US dollar as the primary medium of trade.

Georgescu has some views with which I agree and some with which I do not, but that is not the point. He won the first round of the Romanian Presidential Elections with a clear lead, and the decision of the judges of the Constitutional Court to disqualify him is clearly wrong and disproportionate.

The main offence he is accused of is sending lines to take to supporters and asking them to post these on social media. But almost every election candidate in the world nowadays does exactly this. It is further claimed that some of his supporters were paid by Russia, and the Constitutional Court was given evidence which originated from “Western security services” of Russian online campaigning for him.

Note the accusation here is not vote-rigging or electoral fraud. The accusation is of people saying things online to try to persuade voters to vote.

Which is what an election is.

It is the same as the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was so hysterically hyped by the Guardian and their deranged Russophobe Carole Cadwalladr (friend of Christopher Steele, author of the famous fabricated Trump “pee dossier”). There was a scandal, which was that Facebook was selling clients’ personal data to enable better targeting of political adverts.

But Cambridge Analytica was never Russian-funded, and the notion that some Facebook posts, among the massive sea of advertising and campaigning of every kind, had swung the Brexit vote is nonsense clung to by losers who cannot get over being defeated.

Targeted advertising, and the sale of your online data, is a horrible, everyday feature of modern life. All political parties and all causes use it nowadays.

I have no doubt Russia does interfere to try to influence elections overseas. So does every major country. I did it myself for the UK – unsuccessfully in Poland when Kwaśniewski was elected and successfully in Ghana when Kufuor was elected. The EU and Western powers fund NGOs and fund journalists all over the world to sway opinion, openly, and covertly Western security services fund “agents of influence”. Let me say it again. I have done it personally.

However it becomes somehow uniquely wrong when Russia does it.

That is not even to mention the absolutely massive role of the Israeli lobby in buying political influence all over the world. That is a far greater threat to democracy than Russia ever is.

I don’t know how Romania’s judges were curated to get the right result, as they were in Moldova, or how they were forced or bribed to change their original decision not to annul the election, just four days later.

I do know that regime change propaganda is in full swing in Georgia, where again the “wrong” party, insufficiently hostile to Russia, had the temerity to win the election. The French President of Georgia is hanging on. Not even large sums of CIA money nor funds channelled through CIA NGOs, nor beautifully printed English language placards, have been able to get enough people out on the streets to make the “colour revolution” demonstrations look convincing.

Georgian opposition supporters rally to protest results of the parliamentary elections that showed a win for the ruling Georgian Dream party, outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi on October 28, 2024. (Photo by Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE / AFP)

Meanwhile back in France, Macron refuses to accept he lost the election and insists on appointing a series of right-wing ministers that cannot possibly get support in the National Assembly.

The pretence of Western Democracy is falling apart, just as the pretence of international law is falling apart, abandoned by the Zionist-bought politicians in their desire to further the genocide and annexation of Gaza.

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In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on

Bad advice.

The latest judgment by the High Court in the Assange case achieved completely the objectives of the UK and US states. Above all, Julian remains in the hell which is Belmarsh maximum security prison. He is now safely there alone and incommunicado, from the authorities’ point of view, for at least several more months.

Importantly, the United States has managed to keep him detained without securing his actual appearance in Washington. It is crucial to grasp that the CIA, who are very much controlling the process, do not actually want him to appear there until after their attempt to secure the re-election of Genocide Joe. No matter what your opinion of Donald Trump, there is no doubt the CIA conspired against him during his entire Presidency, beginning with the fake Russiagate scandal and ending with their cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story. They do not want Trump back.

Biden is politically in deep trouble. Biden’s lifelong political support for Israel has been unwavering to the point of fanaticism. In the process he has collected millions of dollars from the Zionist lobby. That always seemed a source of political strength in the United States, not of weakness.

The current genocide in Gaza has changed all those calculations. The sheer evil and viciousness of the Israeli state, the open and undisguised enthusiasm for racist massacre, has achieved the seemingly impossible task of turning much American public opinion against Israel.

That is particularly true among key elements of the Democratic base. Young people and ethnic minorities have been shocked that the party they have supported is backing and supplying genocide. The mainstream media have lost control of the narrative, when the truth is so widely available on mobile phones, to the point that the MSM have actually been forced to change course and occasionally tell truths about Israel. That also was unthinkable a few months ago.

Precisely the same groups who are outraged by Biden’s support for genocide are going to be alienated by the attack on a journalist and publisher for revealing true facts about war crimes. Assange is not currently a major public issue in the United States, because he is not currently in the United States. Were he to arrive there in chains, the media coverage would be massive and the issue unavoidable in the presidential election campaign.

The extradition proceeding has therefore had to be managed in such a way as to keep Assange locked in a living hell the whole time, without actually achieving the extradition until after the presidential election in November. As the years of hearings have rolled by this has become increasingly difficult for the British state to finesse on behalf of their American masters.

In this respect, and only in this respect, Dame Victoria Sharp and Lord Justice Johnson have done brilliantly in their judgment.

Senior British judges do not have to be told what to do. They are closely integrated into a small political establishment that is socially interlinked, defined by membership of institutions, and highly subject to groupthink.

Dame Victoria Sharp’s brother Richard arranged an £800,000 personal loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and subsequently became chairman of the BBC despite a complete lack of relevant experience. Lord Justice Johnson as a lawyer represented the intelligence services and the Ministry of Defence.

They did not have to be told what to do in this case explicitly, although it was very plain that they entered the two-day hearing process knowing nothing except a briefing they had been given that the crux of the case was the revelation of names of US informants in the Wikileaks material.

The potential danger of an appeal, the granting of which would achieve the United States’ objective of putting the actual extradition back beyond the election date, was that it would allow the airing in public of a great catalogue of war crimes and other illegal activity which had been exposed by Wikileaks.

Sharp and Johnson have obviated this danger by adjourning the decision with the possibility of granting an appeal, but only on extremely limited grounds. Those grounds would explicitly gag the defence from ever mentioning again in court inconvenient facts, such as United States war crimes including murder, torture and extraordinary rendition, as well as the plans by the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange.

All of those things are precluded by this judgment from ever being raised again in the extradition hearings. The politically damaging aspect of the case in terms of the Manning revelations and CIA behaviour has been cauterised in the UK.

There has been some confusion because the judgment stated that three grounds of possible appeal were open. But in fact this was really only two. The judgment states that freedom of expression under article 10 of the European Convention is adequately covered by the First Amendment protections of the US Constitution. Therefore this point can only be argued by the defence against extradition if the First Amendment will not be applied in the case.

The second ground of appeal which they stated may be allowed was discrimination by nationality, in that the prosecution has stated that as a foreign citizen who committed the alleged acts whilst outside of the United States, Julian may not have the protection of the First Amendment or indeed of any of the rights enshrined in the US Constitution.

So the first two grounds are in fact identical. Sharp and Johnson ruled that both would fall if an assurance were received from the government of the United States that Julian would not be denied a First Amendment defence on grounds of nationality.

The other ground on which an appeal may be allowed to go forward is the lack of an assurance from the United States that, following additional charges, Julian may not become subject to the death penalty.

I shall go on to analyse what happens now and the chances of success on any of these allowed appeal points, but I wish first to revisit the points which have not been allowed and which are now barred from ever being raised in these proceedings again.

The most spectacular argument in the judgment, and one which I trust will become notorious in British legal history, refers to the application to bring in new evidence regarding the US authorities’ illegal spying on Julian and plotting to kidnap or assassinate him.

There are any number of things in this case over five years which are so perverse that they have to be witnessed to be believed, but none has risen to this height and it would be a struggle for anybody to come up with anything in British legal history more brazen than this.

Judge Johnson and Judge Sharp accept that there is evidence to the required standard that the US authorities did plot to kidnap and consider assassinating Julian Assange, but they reason at para. 210 that, as extradition is now going to be granted, there is no longer any need for the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange: and therefore the argument falls.

It does not seem to occur to them that a willingness to consider extrajudicial violent action against Julian Assange amounts to a degree of persecution which obviously reflects on his chances of a fair trial and treatment in the United States. It is simply astonishing, but the evidence of the US plot to destroy Julian Assange, including evidence from the ongoing criminal investigation in Spain into the private security company involved, will never again be allowed to be mentioned in Julian’s case against extradition.

Similarly, we are at the end of the line for arguing that the treaty under which Julian is being extradited forbids extradition for political offences. The judgment confirms boldly that treaty obligations entered into by the United Kingdom are not binding in domestic law and confer no individual rights.

Of over 150 extradition treaties entered into by the United Kingdom, all but two ban extradition for political offences. The judgment is absolutely clear that those clauses are redundant in every single one of those treaties.

Every dictatorship on Earth can now come after political dissidents in the UK and they will not have the protection of those clauses against political extradition in the treaties. That is absolutely plain on the face of this ruling.

The judgment also specifically rejects the idea that the UK court has to consider rights under the European Convention of Human Rights in considering an extradition application. They state that in the United States—as in other Category 2 countries in terms of the Extradition Act 2003—those rights can be presumed to be protected at trial by the legislation of the country seeking extradition.

That argument abdicating responsibility for application of the ECHR is one that is not likely to be accepted if this case ever gets to Strasbourg (but see below on the possibility of that happening).

By refusing to hear the freedom of expression argument, the court is ruling out listening to the war crimes exposed by the material published and hearing that the publication of state level crime is protected speech. That entire argument is now blocked off in future hearings and there will be no more mention of US war crimes.

The judges accept—hook, line and sinker—the tendentious argument that Julian is not being charged with the publication of all of the material but only with those documents within the material which reveal the name of US informants and sources. As I reported at the time, this was plainly the one “fact” with which the judges had been briefed before the hearing.

That it is a legitimate exercise to remove entirely from consideration the context of the totality of what was revealed in terms of state crimes, and to cherry pick a tiny portion of the release, is by no means clear; but their approach is in any event fatally flawed by a complete non sequitur:

At para. 45 they argue that none of the material revealing criminal behaviour by the United States is being charged, only material which reveals names. Their argument depends upon an assumption that the material revealing names of informants or sources does not also reveal any criminal behaviour by the United States. That assumption is completely and demonstrably false.

Let us now turn to the grounds on which a right to appeal is provisionally allowed, but may be cancelled in the event of sufficient diplomatic assurances being received from the United States.

To start with the death penalty, which has understandably drawn the most headlines: it astonishes me, as this argument has been in play now for several months, that the United States has not provided the simple assurance against imposition of the death penalty which is absolutely bog standard in many extradition proceedings.

There is no controversy about it, and it is really quick and easy to do. It is a template: you just fill in the details and whiz off the diplomatic note. It takes 5 minutes.

I do not believe the Biden administration is failing to provide the assurance against the death penalty because they wish to execute Julian Assange. They do not need to execute him. They can entomb him in a tiny concrete cell, living a totally solitary existence in a living hell. Arguably, he is of more value alive that way as a terrible warning to other journalists, rather than an executed martyr.

I view the failure so far to produce a guarantee against the death penalty as the clearest evidence that the Biden administration is trying simply to kick this back past the election. By not providing the assurance, already they have achieved a delay of another few weeks which they have been given to provide the assurance, and then further time until the hearing on 20 May to discuss whether assurances produced have been adequate. Not giving the death penalty assurance is simply a stalling tactic, and I am sure they will go right up to the deadline given by the court and then provide it.

The second assurance requested by the court is actually much more interesting. They have requested an assurance that Julian Assange will be able to plead a First Amendment defence on freedom of expression and will not be prevented from doing so on the grounds of his Australian nationality.

The problem which the United States faces is that it is the federal judge who will decide whether or not Julian is entitled to plead that his freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. Neither the Department of Justice nor the State Department can bind the judge by an assurance.

The problem was flagged up by the US prosecutor in this case who stated that it is open to the prosecution to argue that a foreign national, operating abroad as Julian did, does not have First Amendment rights. It is extremely important to understand why this was said.

The prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are deemed not to have any constitutional rights, despite being under the power of the US authorities, because they were non-US citizens acting abroad.

A key US Supreme Court judgment in the case of USAID versus Open Society stated unequivocally that non-US citizens acting abroad do not have First Amendment protection. At first sight that decision appears to have little relevance. It concerns foreign charities in receipt of US aid funds which, as a condition of aid, they must oppose sex work. They attempted to claim this was in breach of First Amendment rights but the Supreme Court ruled that, as foreigners acting abroad, they did not have any such rights.

While that may appear of limited relevance, referring to NGOs not individuals, there is a paragraph in the Open Society judgment which states as a rationale that were First Amendment rights to be granted to those NGOs they would also have to be granted to foreigners with whom the US military and intelligence services were in contact – i.e. the Guantanamo problem.

This paragraph of the Supreme Court ruling appears inescapable in the Assange case:

Julian was a foreign national operating abroad when the Wikileaks material was published. So I do not see how the United States can simply give an assurance on this point, and indeed it seems to me very likely that Julian would indeed be denied First Amendment rights at trial in the United States.

The sensible solution would of course be that as a non-US citizen publishing material outside the United States, Julian should not be subject to US jurisdiction at all. But that will not be adopted.

So I anticipate the United States will produce an assurance which tries to fudge this. They will probably give an assurance that the prosecutor will not attempt to argue that Julian has no First Amendment rights. But that cannot prevent the judge from ruling that he does not, especially as there is a Supreme Court judgement to rely on.

In May when we come to the hearing on the permitted points of appeal, it is vital to understand that there will be two parts to the argument. The first part will be to consider whether the assurances received by diplomatic note from the United States are sufficient for the grounds of appeal to fall completely.

However if it is decided that the assurances from the United States are insufficient, that does not automatically mean that the appeal succeeds. It just means that the appeal is heard. The court will then decide whether the death penalty or nationality discrimination points are strong enough to stop the extradition.

The absence of the death penalty assurance should end the extradition process. But the hearing would see the prosecution argue that it is not necessary, as there are no capital charges currently and none are likely to be added. The judges could go with this, given the undisguised bias towards the United States throughout.

The state will again kick in with its iron resolve to crush Julian. I don’t think that the United States will be able, for the reasons I have given, to provide assurances on the nationality and First Amendment rights, but I think the court will nonetheless order extradition.

The United States will argue that it is a free country with a fair trial system and independent judges and that Julian will be allowed to make the argument in court that he should have First Amendment rights. The UK court should accept that the US judge will come to a fair decision which protects all human rights considerations. They will say that it is perfectly reasonable and normal for states to treat citizens and foreign nationals abroad in different ways in different contexts, including consular protection.

A justice system which is capable of ruling that a person should be handed over to his attempted kidnapper, because then the kidnapper does not have to kidnap him, and ruling that the clauses of the very treaty under which somebody is being extradited do not apply, is capable of accepting that the ability to argue in court for a First Amendment defence is sufficient, even if that defence is likely to be denied.

There is, however, plenty of meat in those questions that would allow another adjourned hearing, another long delay for a judgment and plenty of leeway to get past the November election for Genocide Joe.

The British establishment continues to move inexorably towards ordering Julian’s extradition at the time of its choosing. Once extradition is ordered, Julian in theory has an opportunity to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

The European Court of Human Rights can delay the extradition until it hears the case by a section 39 order. But there are two flaws: firstly the extradition may be carried out immediately upon the court judgement before a section 39 order can be obtained, which would take at least 48 hours. Secondly the Rwanda Safety Act has provision, though specifically in the Rwanda context, for the government to ignore section 39 orders from the ECHR.

It cannot be ruled out that the British government would simply extradite Julian even in the face of an ECHR hearing. That would be popular with the Conservative base and, given Starmer’s extremely extensive and dubious role in the Assange saga while Director of Public Prosecutions, I certainly do not put it past him either. It is worth noting that there have been several occasions in recent years when the Home Office has deported people despite British court orders putting a stay on the deportation. There has never been any consequence other than a verbal rap on the knuckles for the Secretary of State from the court.

So the struggle goes on. It is a fight for freedom of speech, it is a fight for freedom of the press, and above all it is a fight for the right of you and me to know the crimes that our governments commit, in our name and with our money.

I am ever more struck by the fact that in fighting for Julian I am fighting exactly the same power structures and adversaries who are behind the genocide in Gaza.

I need to close with an appeal. Please do not stop reading. You will recall that I recently addressed the UN Human Rights Committee on Julian’s case and in doing so had the opportunity to state a few hard truths about the war crimes of the United States.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/video.mp4

My opportunity to do so was organised by the Swiss NGO Justice For All International, who submitted a shadow report (open link and click on red icon) by their lawyers to the UN 7 year Periodic Review of the UK’s human rights record. Justice For All also carried out a great deal of lobbying activity in connection with this to get me onto that stage and into meetings with key officials.

I had agreed a fee to pay Justice For All for this legal and lobbying activity, in the expectation that it would be met from the substantial funds held by the bodies comprising the US/European institutions of Julian Assange campaign.

Unfortunately the Assange campaign has refused to meet the bill and I have been left holding it.

I have been told that I failed to follow correct procedures to apply for the spending. I am frankly in shock and a form of grief, because I thought we were friends working for a common cause, in my own case for free. I am reminded of the brilliant perception of Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement and becomes a business”.

I am left with this bill I cannot pay for the work at the UN. Justice For All could not have been nicer about the situation, but if you could contribute to this Justice For All crowdfunder, I should be very grateful.

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I spent the last week at the UN, trying to ram home some truths about the Assange case as input to the UN’s Periodic Review (every 7 years) of the UK’s human rights record, in terms of its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

I had a very short opportunity to address the UN Committee on Human Rights, which is a body of elected experts. In such a short time frame you have to go with just a couple of points. I am open to criticism of my selection, but I maintain that this was much plainer speaking than is generally heard. The reasons for this are interesting.

There are fora like this where registered NGOs can make their point. Human rights is quite an industry in Geneva, where literally hundreds of NGO reps live and roam the UN buildings. The favoured NGOs are those with ECOSOC registration status. The delegates of UNESCO status NGOs have blue passes and extremely free access throughout, at any time.

But UNESCO status is granted by a committee of member states – and is difficult to get. It is therefore unsurprising that a high proportion of NGOs are not real NGOs at all. They are astroturf; fake NGOs paid to whitewash the record of their governments. I did not understand this at first until I attended (as a dry run for the UK) the meetings of the Human Rights Committee for the Egyptian periodic review. Several Egyptian NGOs, one after the other, told us what a great respect for human rights the Egyptian dictatorship has. (It has, incidentally, just sentenced another group of opposition figures to death, after murdering Egypt’s only ever freely elected President.)

Even well-known western NGOs tend to pull their punches at the UN because, bluntly, almost all of them receive large amounts of funding from Western governments. While theoretically this is funding to attack the human rights record of the western governments’ designated enemies, it is a concomitant that the NGOs are reluctant seriously to bite the hand that feeds them.

Consider these facts: firstly, no important whistleblower has ever subsequently found employment with an established NGO. A great many have tried.

Secondly, had I not been there, nobody would have mentioned Julian Assange in the periodic review of the UK’s human rights record.

Money talks in the UN itself too. The US and Western powers contribute a very high proportion of the UN budget. There is a reason why I attended a commemoration ceremony in Geneva for UN staff killed in Gaza, where none of the senior UN staff dared to mention who killed them.

Also of course the NATO powers and allies are disproportionately represented in key staff positions.

The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, an Austrian, has been disgustingly pusillanimous on Gaza and has done nothing on Assange. I spoke with a member of his staff who regurgitated to me a number of detailed US prosecution talking points on Assange which are simply factually incorrect. They have been thoroughly briefed.

Staff are visibly afraid to take on the UK/US interest. I met a number of UN staff who were happy to chat away until I brought up Assange; then they quite literally physically recoiled, in some cases took an actual step back, and always discovered they had pressing business elsewhere.

After the Human Rights Committee meeting with NGOs, the committee then met with the UK government representatives to discuss their concerns. One member of the committee, Rodrigo Carasco of Costa Rica, decided he would raise the case of Julian Assange, based on the briefing which we had supplied. A full elected member of the committee, Carasco is also the former Costa Rican Ambassador to the United Nations.

Carasco was put on the speakers’ list and he informed the committee what he was going to raise. Come the meeting with the UK delegation, Amb. Carasco was astonished when the Chair simply skipped over him in the speaking list and did not call him. He caught the Chair’s eye several times as the meeting progressed but still was not called, then it wound up and the Chair went to the UK delegation to respond to the bland and generic points which had been raised.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IMG_0804.mp4

In this short video, when it first cuts away from the Chair you can see the white-haired Amb Carasco rising from his seat to remonstrate with her. She then disappears off the next shot while they had a pretty pointed exchange. I am sorry it is off camera; you will have to take my word for it.

My conclusion from this is that the UK and US are currently very sensitive to international criticism over Assange, and that rather than be discouraged we need to keep pushing. As both the US and UK are becoming international pariah states over Gaza, we need to remind the world of their long established crimes.

Given the large population in the UK of Pakistani origin, the lack of serious media coverage of the overthrow and incarceration of Imran Khan, and the mass imprisonment of his supporters, is truly extraordinary.

Imran Khan was last week sentenced to three years in prison – and a five year ban from politics – for alleged embezzlement of official gifts. This follows his removal as Prime Minister in a CIA engineered coup, and a vicious campaign of violence and imprisonment against Khan and his supporters.

It is currently illegal in Pakistan to publish or broadcast about Khan or the thousands of new political prisoners incarcerated in appalling conditions. There have been no protests from the UK or US governments.

Imran Khan is almost certainly the least corrupt senior politician in Pakistan’s history – I admit that is not a high bar. Pakistan’s politics are, to an extent not sufficiently understood in the west, literally feudal. Two dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, have alternated in power, in a sometimes deadly rivalry, punctuated by periods of more open military rule.

There is no genuine ideological or policy gap between the Sharifs and Bhuttos, though the latter have more intellectual pretension. It is purely about control of state resource. The arbiter of power has in reality been the military, not the electorate. They have now put the Sharifs back in power.

Imran Khan’s incredible breakthrough in the 2018 National Assembly elections shattered normal political life in Pakistan. Winning a plurality of the popular vote and the most seats, Khan’s PTI party had risen from under 1% of the vote in 2002 to 32% in 2018.

The dates are important. It was not Khan’s cricketing heroics which made him politically popular. In 2002, when his cricket genius was much fresher in the mind than it is now, he was viewed as a joke candidate.

In fact it was Khan’s outspoken opposition to the United States using Pakistan as a base, and particularly his demand to stop the hundreds of dreadful US drone strikes within Pakistan, that caused the surge in his support.

The Pakistani military went along with him. The reason is not hard to find. Given the level of hatred the USA had engendered through its drone killings, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hideous torture excesses of the “War on terror”, it was temporarily not in the interests of the Pakistan military to foreground their deep relationship with the CIA and US military.

The Pakistan security service, ISI, had betrayed Osama Bin Laden to the USA, which hardly improved the popularity of the military and security services. Imran Khan was seen by them as a useful safety valve. It was believed he could channel the insurgent anti-Americanism and Islamic enthusiasm which was sweeping Pakistan, into a government acceptable to the West.

In power, Imran proved much more radical than the CIA, the British Tories and the Pakistani military had hoped. The belief that he was only a playboy dilettante at heart was soon shattered. A stream of Imran’s decisions upset the USA and threatened the income streams of the corrupt senior military.

Khan did not only talk about stopping the US drone programme, he actually stopped it.

Khan refused offers of large amounts of money, also linked in to US support for an IMF loan, for Pakistan to send ground forces to support the Saudi air campaign against Yemen. I was told this by one of Imran’s ministers when I visited in 2019, on condition of a confidentiality which need no longer apply.

Khan openly criticised military corruption and, in the action most guaranteed to precipitate a CIA coup, he supported the developing country movement to move trading away from the petrodollar. He accordingly sought to switch Pakistan’s oil suppliers from the Gulf states to Russia.

The Guardian, the chief neo-con mouthpiece in the UK, two days ago published an article about Khan so tendentious it took my breath away. How about this for a bit of dishonest reporting:

in November a gunman opened fire on his convoy at a rally, injuring his leg in what aides say was an assassination attempt.

“Aides say”: what is this implying?

Khan had himself shot in the legs as some kind of stunt? It was all a joke? He wasn’t actually shot but fell over and grazed a knee? It is truly disgraceful journalism.

It is hard to know whether the article’s astonishing assertion that Khan’s tenure as Prime Minister led to an increase in corruption in Pakistan, is a deliberate lie or extraordinary ignorance.

I am not sure whether Ms Graham-Harrison has ever been to Pakistan. I suspect the closest she has been to Pakistan is meeting Jemima Goldsmith at a party.

“Playboy”, “dilettante”, “misogynist”, the Guardian hit piece is relentless. It is an encapsulation of the “liberal” arguments for military intervention in Muslim states, for overthrowing Islamic governments and conquering Islamic countries, in order to install Western norms, in particular the tenets of Western feminism.

I think we have seen how that playbook has ended in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, amongst others. The use of the word “claim” to engender distrust of Khan in the Guardian article is studied. He “claimed” that his years living in the UK had inspired him to wish to create a welfare state in Pakistan.

Why is that a dubious comment from a man who spent the majority of his personal fortune on setting up and running a free cancer hospital in Pakistan?

Khan’s efforts to remove or sideline the most corrupt Generals, and those most openly in the pay of the CIA, are described by the Guardian as “he tried to take control of senior military appointments and began railing against the armed forces’ influence in politics.” How entirely unreasonable of him!

Literally thousands of members of Khan’s political party are currently in jail for the crime of having joined a new political party. The condemnation by the Western establishment has been non-existent.

It is difficult to think of a country, besides Pakistan, where thousands of largely middle class people could suddenly become political prisoners, while drawing almost no condemnation. It is of course because the UK supports the coup against Khan.

But I feel confident it also reflects in part the racism and contempt shown by the British political class towards the Pakistani immigrant community, which contrasts starkly with British ministerial enthusiasm for Modi’s India.

We should not forget New Labour have also never been a friend to democracy in Pakistan, and the Blair government was extremely comfortable with Pakistan’s last open military dictatorship under General Musharraf.

On my last visit to Pakistan I went to Karachi, Abbottabad and the Afghan border. I hope to return in the spring, should the new government let me in.

May I make the plea that all of this activity (and my coming Assange tour in the US next month) is funded entirely by your subscriptions and donations. Please do consider helping if you can, as the finances of the blog are very tight at the moment, as the cost of living crisis bites people. All the contributions, even the smallest, add up to a major cumulative difference to keep us going.
 
 
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This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

All of the worst atrocities in human history have been perpetrated by people convinced they were in the right. People act according to the mores of their era and group. There is nothing more dangerous that the inability to see that it is reasonable for others to have a different view or interest.

The Guardian has been publishing calls for NATO to declare war on Russia. Twitter is awash with fanatic “liberals” arguing there can be no negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, and the war must only end with Ukraine recovering all territory including Crimea.

The most crazed sometimes go further and suggest the war may only end with regime change in Russia.

It does not require any special degree of intelligence to see the dangers of insisting on the unconditional surrender, and the personal incarceration or death, of those with their finger on the big red button, in a war against a nuclear power.

The 20th century saw two terrible “world wars”. The first was the result of Imperial rivalries and dynastic power, and it is difficult to discern any morality in it at all (though the propaganda fabrications about Germans bayonetting Belgian babies are a template that has been, with slight variations, repeated by western media in every war right up until today).

The Second World War, however, was as close to a justified war as can ever be found. Fascism and Nazism were truly evil doctrines, while the Western forces that opposed them were on the brink of a golden but short-lived era of social democracy and meaningful working class empowerment.

The problem is that this has become the template for thinking about war in the West – that we are always the “goodies” and the opponents are truly evil, and that total war must be fought leading to unconditional surrender, with even the most horrendous atrocities (Dresden, Hiroshima) justified within the overarching moral imperative.

We have seen straightforward imperial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, each of which the media has tried to manipulate to fit that thought pattern. It also drives the continual propaganda that the war in Ukraine comes from an invasion by an evil Russian regime and was “illegal and unprovoked”.

Now as you know, I hold that Russian incursion or invasion was illegal, both in 2014 and 2022. But unprovoked it most certainly was not.

It is interesting to return to the World War II precedent here, because it has never been understood to detract from acceptance of the evil of Nazism, to attempt to understand how it happened.

Every schoolchild of my age was taught the “Causes of World War II”, and the first cause was always the extremely punitive Treaty of Versailles.

The insistence on unconditional surrender in World War I, the entirely unfounded claim the whole conflict of World War I was Germany’s fault, the annexations, cruel financial reparations and blow to national pride of military suppression, were all universally acknowledged by historians as mistakes that were of great help to Hitler.

Interestingly, today’s history school curricula in the UK spend much more time on World War II than we used to, and are much less nuanced. The causes of the war feature much less if at all, and heroic Britnat tales of a brave struggling people (which are not of course untrue) feature much more.

With Ukraine, we are not allowed to acknowledge any of the factors that provoked Russia. Not NATO expansion and forward positioning of missiles, not glorification of Nazism, not suppression of Russian language and political parties, not shelling of Russian civilian areas.

In fact it is apparently traitorous to mention any of these things: a crime against the overarching goal of total victory.

This establishment and media narrative is countered on social media by others who take an opposite and equally uncompromising view. They believe Russia must fight to a total victory in Ukraine, depose Zelensky, and humiliate and weaken NATO, thus dealing a blow to US Imperialism.

While a much smaller group, the pro-Russian extremists can be every bit as bloodthirsty as the NATO hawks.

The problem is that all these people on both sides, fuelled by the righteousness of their own belief, are blind to the immense human suffering of the war. They don’t seem to care that many times the amount of suffering so far would be required in order for either side to achieve total victory.

Whereas in the real world both sides are bogged down in a barely moving battle of attrition. The idea of “total victory” is impractical nonsense.

As for those actually making the decisions, for Western politicians a continuing war is a win-win. It drains Russia, their designated enemy. More importantly, it provides the massive opportunities for concentrated political power and super-profits from the public purse that only war can bring.

So far the UK has provided £4.1 billion of weaponry to Ukraine, without a mainstream political dissenting voice. If total victory is the aim, that is just an appetiser.

Yet we have the pretend opposition Labour Party stating that £1.2 billion a year cannot possibly be found to lift the two-child benefit cap and relieve child poverty.

That is one reason wars are so good for the wealthy who control us. Weapons expenditure is beyond control or criticism. To date £5 billion has been spent on the Ajax light armoured vehicle project without a single vehicle ready to enter service having been produced.

There is no telling how much Trident is eventually going to cost, though at least 125 billion. The war in Ukraine provides yet more evidence that our nuclear deterrent does not actually deter anything.

Though I suppose the Ukraine war does radically improve the chances that at least we might get our money’s worth from Trident by blowing the whole world to pieces.

I can see no logical refutation to my constantly repeated argument that the war in Ukraine has shown that Russia cannot speedily defeat a much smaller, weaker and extremely corrupt neighbouring state, so the incredibly high expenditure on “defence” by NATO is not really needed.

The idea that Russia, which is taking a long while to defeat Ukraine, could be a serious threat to the entire NATO alliance is plainly utter nonsense.

But Russia can of course eventually defeat it’s much weaker and smaller neighbour. Ultimately Ukraine cannot win this war, and somehow the West has to come to terms with that. Ukraine is quite simply going to run out of people able and willing to fight.

Ukraine’s use of US cluster weapons was perhaps the first major dent in the blue and yellow public opinion so carefully manufactured in the West. As the horrible war continues on with no real Ukrainian victories to cheer, the “who started it” question will fade in the public mind.

I still think it was unwise of Putin to start this war, as well as illegal. If his goals are limited, then this is a good time to move to cash in his gains.

You may be surprised to know that I have a certain degree of admiration for Bismarck. Apart from a genuine claim to have invented the foundations of a welfare state, Bismarck’s use of war was brilliant.

Bismarck stuck to defined and limited objectives, and did not allow spectacular military success to lead him to expand those objectives.

The purpose of his two wars against Austria and France was to unify Germany, and he succeeded in very quick wars, immediately ended. Humiliating or punishing France or Austria played no significant part in his thinking. Bismarck had limited goals, achieved them and stopped the fighting immediately.

This horrible war will end with Russia retaining Crimea. There is no point in arguing about it. Whether the Donbass remains theoretically part of Ukraine remains to be seen, but de facto Russian autonomy there will be established. I suspect that more important to Putin than the Donbass would be territory further south which secures the approaches to Crimea.

There has to be a territorial settlement. That is what diplomacy is for. The total war options are in themselves terrible and bring massive nuclear risk.

The idea of either side fighting through to total victory is, quite simply, madness. Sanity must be imposed on those who seek to profit from continuing war, or seek to engulf the world in the flames of ideology and righteousness.

Ask this one question of those who insist on total victory for one side or the other. “How many dead people is that worth?”. Insist on an actual number. For total victory either way, anything less than 1 million is utterly unrealistic. It could be much, much worse. Do you really want that?

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Intellectual curiosity can takes us in unexpected directions. This particular journey started with my learning that the word “Cajun” is a contraction of “Canadian”.

Nine years after Culloden, 300 British troops under Lt Col John Winslow entered the town of Grand Pre in Acadia, Nova Scotia. They constructed a palisade fort which enclosed both the church and cemetery. They then summoned all males aged ten and over to the church to hear a proclamation. Disarmed and surrounded, the Acadians were all registered, then told they were to be deported immediately.

Here is that register. Remember many of these were children as young as ten years old. About a quarter did not survive the brutal deportation.

[788 names listed]

In the next year 40% of the 15,000 population of Acadia were forcefully deported, deliberately dispersed to British colonies around the globe, in such dreadful conditions that over 1,200 died on the journeys. Males over ten, and females and small children, were bundled into separated random groups and those groups sent off to different destinations.

In Grand Pre itself, the British troops burnt down the church and destroyed the homes, and then smashed the system of dykes and sluices that the Acadians had built for their highly productive agricultural system.

Almost all of the remaining Acadians were dispersed over the next few years. Traveling through the wilds, some who left “voluntarily” eventually found their way to Louisiana. Hence “Cajun”. In 1758 it was made illegal in Nova Scotia for Catholics to own land. In 1759 a further Act was passed:

“An Act for the Quieting of Possessions to the Protestant Grantees of the Lands, formerly occupied by the French Inhabitants, and for preventing vexatious Actions relating to the same.” The legislation prohibited “any troublesome or vexatious Suits of Law” by Acadians trying to recover their lands and made it illegal for any courts in the province to hear cases brought “for the Recovery of any Lands” by “the former French Inhabitants.”

The preamble to Act recounted the “Manifest Treasons and Rebellions” of the Acadians against a British crown to which they had never in truth had the slightest duty of allegiance.

The Acadians had arrived in modern Nova Scotia from 1608. There were three unusual things about them.

i) From the start they had been focused on land reclamation in the coastal marshlands, rather than moving inland cutting down forests for agricultural land as was the prevalent pattern across North America. Historians have calculated they reclaimed in total 5,261 hectares of land. Their achievements in land reclamation were quite startling, especially as in the Grand Pre marsh they were dealing with tidal flows in the Bay of Fundy of over 15 metres, said to be the world’s highest.

Acadian reclaimed marshland at the town of Saint Pre

Modern scholarship has emphasised that their land reclamation skills were brought with then from the Western French seaboard, and then developed in a local vernacular. The unique feature of Acadian land reclamation, as opposed to French or Dutch, is that it was a communal effort and not dependent on central finance and hierarchical organisation. That is because of their second special feature:

ii) The Acadians arrived as individuals or families with no hierarchy. They acknowledged no nobility and crucially they did not acknowledge any Crown. Occasionally they were obliged temporarily to pay lip service to the French or British crown when military forces passed through, but until their deportation they were never successfully subjected to any central authority.

iii) They enjoyed consistently friendly relationships with the local Mik’maq nation and intermarried without apparent prejudice on either side, developing a large Creole component. Historians have generally explained this as due to Acadian agriculture being on reclaimed land and thus not competing for resources. However that ignores the fact the salt marshes they were reclaiming were themselves a very valuable source of food for the Mik’maq – birds and eggs, fish shellfish and crustaceans, samphire etc.

I rather tend to the view that it was the lack of hierarchy and crown allegiance that also led to good relationships with the native people. The Acadians made no claim to conquer the land, impose a new king or create a state. They were just settling non-aggressive farming communities.

Historians are at pains to counter the idyllic portrait of the Acadians. We are told they were very poor, lived in squalid conditions, tended to inbreed, left no cultural legacy and were often led by their Catholic priests. There is validity in all those points, but in the historical context such criticisms cannot help but come over badly. The imperfections of a society do not justify genocide.

In reading about the Acadians, I was struck by this passage:

“When the first New England colonists came to Nova Scotia five years after the Acadians were expelled, they encountered a landscape littered with bleached bones of livestock and burned ruins of houses.”

Anyone who has hill walked in the Highlands of Scotland knows just how frequently you come across the low walls of the base of old homes, often grouped together in small settlements, and sometimes in desolate moor many miles from the nearest habitation or cultivated land. These of course date from the Highland Clearances, some contemporary with the genocide of the Acadians.

One obvious fact had leapt out at me since childhood. The depopulation of the Highlands was a political choice, and the vast managed hunting estates were perfectly capable of supporting large populations through livestock and arable in the past. The notion they can only sustain grouse and small numbers of deer is evidently nonsense.

I am currently researching a biography of the Jacobite General George Murray, and was looking at a journey he took from Blair Atholl to Braemar. There is absolutely no public road there any more – not within twenty miles of most of his route – and the places he stayed including manses seem to be wiped from the map. There was a population – indeed he later raised troops there.

Go to google maps, trace a straight line Blair Atholl to Braemar (yes, obviously you can get there the long way round) and see what you can find today in the middle. But this is not wilderness, it is completely habitable and was populated.

I could recount a thousand or more atrocities across the history of the British Empire as bad as the Acadian genocide. Many are completely forgotten, like the massacre of the Murree tribe in Balochistan under a flag of truce, or the Sierra Leone Hut Tax war. Some are startlingly recent, like the Chagos Islands. But I recount the Acadian story because of its resonance to the Scottish Highlands, with that justification of treason and rebellion, and because of the furious denial in recent days after Scottish colonisation was asserted in the House of Commons.

The tone of much of that reaction is essentially that white people were not the victims of Empire. Well, I give you the Acadians. It is also worth pointing out the very basic fact that there was never the kind of expulsion and depopulation anywhere in England that occurred in both Scotland and Ireland. What happened to the Gael was much worse than effects of agricultural enclosure.

It is Armistice Day today and Remembrance Sunday shortly. What was in my childhood an occasion for reflection, grief and thanksgiving for peace has been turned into an orgy of militarism.

We are supposed to think of those who “gloriously” gave their lives for Britain, perhaps while shooting up Afghan civilians in a village or destroying the infrastructure of Iraq. Have a look through that list of names from the town of Grand Pre, and wonder which ones were ten year old boys separated from their mothers. Ponder which died on their hideous deportation journeys. The victims of Empire deserve remembrance too.

Please read this story, and note your reaction. Then read Expulsion of the Acadians - Wikipedia; Does knowing more context affect your judgment of these events?

I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adulthood at the end of the one, forty year long, period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.

In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector, significant public housing.

We thought it would last forever.

In 1973 I joined the Liberal Party. Much of the 1974 Liberal Party manifesto I could still believe in now. The above things like public ownership of utilities and major industries and free education were not in the manifesto, because they did not have to be – they already existed and were the basic structure. The manifesto added things like a basic guaranteed income for everybody in society, compulsory worker shareholdings in those industries not nationalised, workers’ councils, and a rent freeze in both public and private sectors.

I am not claiming it as a great socialist document – there were signs of right-wing thought creeping in, like a shift to indirect taxation. But the truth is that the Liberal Party manifesto of 1974 was at least as left as Corbyn’s manifesto. Some of its ideas were far ahead of their time – like the idea that continuous economic growth and increasing consumption are not sustainable or desirable.

Believing in essentially the same things now, I find myself on the far left – without ever having moved!

Here are a couple of extracts from the 1974 Liberal manifesto which may surprise you. This kind of language you will not hear from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – indeed it would probably get you thrown out:

That Liberal Party is of course gone, along with the radical, anti-war, anti-unionist traditions of British liberalism. They were diluted by the merger with the SDP and finally killed off by Nick Clegg and the “Orange Bookers” who turned the hybrid party fully neoliberal, a doctrine with almost no resemblance to the liberalism it claims to reassert.

Those hardy souls who follow and support this blog are witnessing the last knockings of the legacy of political thought that was bestowed by John Stuart Mill, William Hazlitt, John Ruskin, John A Hobson, Charles Kingsley, Bertrand Russell, William Beveridge and many others, seasoned by Piotr Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I don’t imagine any further generation attempting to be active in politics will develop their worldview with those thinkers as their primary motivators.

But the point of this self-absorbed drivel is that I am not a Marxist and do not come from an organised labour or socialist background or mindset.

The key thought towards which I am plodding through this morass of explanation is this: I grew up in the one era when capitalism was sufficiently moderated by palliative measures that it seemed a reasonable way to conduct society. That ended around 1980 when the doctrine of neoliberalism took hold of the Western world. In the UK, that doctrine now firmly controls the Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour and SNP parties and is promoted relentlessly by both state and corporate media.

The result of this neoliberal domination has been a massive and accelerating expansion in the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society, to the extent that ordinary, once middle-class people struggle to pay the bills required simply to live. The situation has become unsustainable.

In short, it turns out Marx was right. The crisis of capitalism is now upon us. Neoliberalism (another word for designing state systems deliberately to lead to incredible concentrations of wealth amid general poverty) is coming to the end of its course. There are no palliative measures that will make the situation bearable. A radical change in the ownership of assets is the only thing that will address the situation – starting with public ownership of all energy companies, from hydrocarbon extractors like Shell and BP, through gas, electricity and fuel generators and manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them. I suggest we do neither.

That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start. I frequently pass the Grangemouth refinery and am amazed that all that land, massive equipment, all those chemicals and processes, go primarily to the benefit of Britain’s richest man, Jim Ratcliffe, who is considering buying Manchester United as his latest toy, while his workers protest at another real-terms pay cut.

This obscenity cannot continue forever.

Wars are not incidental to neoliberalism. They are an essential part of the programme, because untrammelled consumerism requires massive acquisition of natural resources. Constant war has the helpful side-benefit for the global elite of enormous profit to the military industrial complex. The cost in human misery and death is kept at a discreet distance from the Western world save for refugee flows, which meet with a response increasingly founded in the denial of humanity.

The promotion of continual war has led to the acceleration of crisis. Much of the current cost of living explosion can be directly attributed to the provoked, prolonged and pointless war in Ukraine, while neoliberal doctrine forbids control of the horrendous associated profiteering of the energy companies.

There is going to be public anger, come spring, of a strength and reach not seen in my lifetime. The ultra wealthy and their political servants know this, and therefore strong action is being taken to forestall public protest. The new Policing Act is only one of a raft of measures being brought in to clamp down on avenues for free expression of public discontent. Demonstrations can simply be banned if they are “noisy” or an “inconvenience”. The 2 million person march against the Iraq War in London, for example, could have been banned on both grounds.

I met and talked last weekend at the Beautiful Days festival with the admirable Steve Bray; we don’t agree on everything but his public concern is genuine. He is getting used to being removed by police from Parliament Square after being specifically targeted in legislation. I reminded him – and I remind you – that the Blair government had also banned protest near the Westminster parliament, and the Scottish parliament has recently taken powers to do the same. Intolerance of dissent is a feature of modern neoliberalism, as people in Canada and New Zealand are also witnessing – or as Julian Assange might tell you.

But in addition to legislative and state attack on protest, the neoliberal state is also ramping up its more subtle elements of control. The security services are continually being expanded. The media is not only increasingly concentrated, it is increasingly under direct security service influence – the Integrity Initiative, the Paul Mason revelations, and the barely disguised spookery of Luke Harding and Mark Urban all being small elements of a massive web designed to control the popular imagination.

The splitting of the political left by identity politics has been the go-to weapon of the state for several decades now. The replacement of horizontal class solidarity by vertical gender solidarity being the most obvious tool, epitomised by the notion that it was better to elect the multi millionaire, corrupt, neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton than the class politics espousing Bernie Sanders, simply because the warmonger was a woman.

A specific use of this tool has been the weaponisation of fake sexual allegations against any individual likely to be a threat to the state. You see this in the cases of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan, Scott Ritter and Alex Salmond (they tried it on me when I left the FCO but had to drop it because they could not find – despite massive efforts – any woman who knew me who would say anything bad about me).

Those in power know that the portion of the left who identify as feminist, which is almost all of us, are highly susceptible to support alleged victims due to the extreme difficulties of real victims in obtaining justice. This makes sexual allegations, no matter how fake, very effective in removing the support base of anti-establishment figures.

The propaganda narrative against Assange, Salmond, Ritter and Sheridan depends on the idea that at the very moment that each of these men reached the peak of a lifetime’s endeavour and posed the maximum threat to the state, they lost focus, lost their marbles and acted very wrongly towards women, despite no previous history of such behaviour.

It astonishes me that anybody does not see through it.

Rather quaintly, they use different methods on women. Brigadier Janis Karpinski was the chosen patsy to take the blame for the USA’s Abu Ghraib atrocities (entirely unfairly – she had no role or authority in the CIA controlled portion of the jail where the atrocities took place). Dismissed from her post, she was prepared to testify to a memo personally signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorising torture.

How did the US security services fit up a woman, not a man, who threatened the powers that be? Shoplifting. The day after her enforced resignation, Karpinski was “caught shoplifting”. Because of course, when at the eye of an international storm and under CIA surveillance, you immediately go out and steal some clothes.

The cynical weaponisation of the trans debate has taken the art of using identity politics to split the left to a whole new level, and in particular to alienate the younger generation from traditional left feminists. It has also been used successfully – and remarkably – to neuter the most potent current threat to the UK state, by driving both the non neoliberals and the more ardent Independence supporters out of the SNP.

Similar to the use of gender politics to undermine class solidarity is the weaponisation of accusations of anti-semitism. Just as accusations of misogyny, however false, succeed in alienating left unity, so do allegations of racism.

Here it is not so much that accusations were believed – the conflation of criticism of the crimes of Israel with criticism of Jews per se being all too obvious – as that the attack was so blistering, with the full weight of the establishment political and media class behind it, that people cowered rather than face up to it. The worst example of cowering being Jeremy Corbyn.

One lesson from both the “leaked report” and the Forde report is that Corbyn and his office believed that if they threw enough sacrifices to the wolves, betraying decent people like Tony Greenstein (son of a Rabbi), Mark Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone, then the wolves would be appeased.

Israel is the last large scale project of colonisation by physical occupation of a conquered land by European people. Ukraine and Israel are the two current neo-liberal violence projects, which it is not permitted to criticise. The banning of any nuance of opinion on Ukraine should frighten everybody who is thinking rationally. If you are thinking rationally, try this small antidote to the unremitting propaganda:

The Ukraine war is unusual in the attempt to enforce wartime levels of unanimity of narrative on the population, in western countries which are not only not combatants in the war, but not even formally allied to Ukraine. The United States was a party to the Vietnam War, but it was still possible for Americans to criticise that war without having all media access banned. Today you cannot criticise Ukraine in the state or corporate media at all, and your social media access is likely to be severely restricted unless you follow the official propaganda narrative.

This is the Establishment’s strongest method of control – the labeling of opposing opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, even when there is no genuine evidential base that makes the official “facts” unassailable, as with Douma or the Skripals. To ask questions is stigmatised as traitorous and entirely illegitimate, while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.

Yet, despite this interwoven system of dampening all dissent from the neoliberal agenda, the Establishment remains terrified of the public reaction to the crisis that is about to hit. The controlled opposition is therefore used to attack actual opposition. Keir Starmer’s banning of Labour MPs from union picket lines is a clear example of this.

We are seeing for the first time in many years an assertion of the rights of organised labour in the face of the massive attack on workers’ real incomes. This is the first time many adults under thirty will ever have encountered the notion that ordinary people are able to defend themselves against exploitation – that is one reason the impressive Mick Lynch has been such a revelation, and is viewed by the “elite” as such a threat.

The Starmer line is that strikes inconvenience the public, which you will recall is the government excuse for banning protest also. Well, of course they do. So does the spiral of real terms wage cuts. The fractured workers of the gig economy are now showing interest in unionising and organising; this is too little and too late to avert the crisis that is about to hit us, but a useful indication of the will to resist.

Popular resistance terrifies the elite and thus must be demonised. The political class is to be protected from insult or contradiction. You may recall in February it was headline news that Keir Starmer was “mobbed” in Whitehall as he walked down the street, by protestors shouting at him over lockdown and over his role in the non-prosecution of Jimmy Savile (and, less reported, in the extradition of Julian Assange).

In fact, nothing happened. Aerial photographs showed that the protestors numbered about a dozen, that they were heavily outnumbered by Starmer’s handlers and the police. The only, mild, violence was initiated by the police. There was no threat to Starmer other than the threat of being verbally opposed by members of the public on subjects he did not wish to be discussed.

This protection of highly paid politicians from the public, this claim that it is extremely bad behaviour for ordinary people to confront elite politicians with an opposing view, is an extraordinary assertion that the people must not challenge their betters.

We are going to see a great deal more of this in the coming crisis. There is currently the most extraordinary manifestation of it in Scotland where the Chief Constable has announced an investigation into people daring to protest against the Tory leadership hustings in Perth.

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To sum up.

The 2008 banking bailout gave hundreds of billions of dollars straight to the ultra-wealthy, to be paid for by ordinary people through over a decade of austerity cuts to social services, real terms cuts in pay, and increased taxation. In the current crisis the plan is to advance money in some form to ordinary people, for them to pay off by a further decade of the same.

In neither instance was taking money from those with billions in personal wealth even considered.

The neoliberal phase of super-capitalism has run its course. The gap between the wealthy and ordinary people has become so extreme that, even in the West, ordinary people no longer can afford to live decently. Consumerism has desperately depleted natural resources and accelerated climate change. The policy of perpetual war has finally undermined the world economy to a fatal degree.

The situation is not sustainable, but the global elite have no intention to give up sufficient of their massive wealth to make any difference. They seek to control society through the propaganda model and through increasing state repression of dissent, allied to an assault on “incorrect” thought by censorship of the internet and by populist demonisation. “Left” causes such as identity politics and protection from offence have been weaponised to support this suppression.

There is no democratic outlet for popular anger. The “opposition” parties which people can vote for are all under firm neoliberal, warmonger control. Democracy has ceased to present any effective choice that offers any hope of real change. The revival of interest in organised labour and the willingness of young people to engage in direct action in the field of climate change offer some avenues for activism, but it is too little, too late.

Yet this will not hold. Discontent is now so strong, and public anger becoming so widespread, that change is coming. With no available democratic mechanism for change and a firm clampdown on the development of coherent radical programmes and on radical organisation, that change will initially manifest in chaos.

The Establishment response? They clutch at their pearls, twitch at their curtains and condemn the uncouth masses.

In my second week in Saughton jail, a prisoner pushed open the door of my cell and entered during the half hour period when we were unlocked to shower and use the hall telephone in the morning. I very much disliked the intrusion, and there was something in the attitude of the man which annoyed me – wheedling would perhaps be the best description. He asked if I had a bible I could lend him. Anxious to get him out of my cell, I replied no, I did not. He shuffled off.

I immediately started to feel pangs of guilt. I did in fact have a bible, which the chaplain had given me. It was, I worried, a very bad thing to deny religious solace to a man in prison, and I really had no right to act the way I did, based on an irrational distrust. I went off to take a shower, and on the way back to my cell was again accosted by the man.

“If you don’t have a Bible,” he said, “Do you have any other book with thin pages?”

He wanted the paper either to smoke drugs, or more likely to make tabs from a boiled up solution of a drug.

You cannot separate the catastrophic failure of the Scottish penal system – Scotland has the highest jail population per capita in all of Western Europe – from the catastrophic failure of drugs policy in Scotland. 90% of the scores of prisoners I met and spoke with had serious addiction problems. Every one of those was a repeat offender, back in jail, frequently for the sixth, seventh or eighth time. How addiction had led them to jail varied. They stole, often burgled, to feed their addiction. They dealt drugs in order to pay for their own use. They had been involved in violence – frequently domestic – while under the influence.

I had arrived in Saughton jail on Sunday 1 August. After being “seen off” by a crowd of about 80 supporters outside St Leonards police station, I had handed myself in there at 11am, as ordered by the court. The police were expecting me, and had conducted me to a holding area, where my possessions were searched and I was respectfully patted down. The police were very polite. I had been expecting to spend the night in a cell at St Leonards and to be taken to jail in a prison van on the Monday morning. This is what both my lawyers and a number of policemen had explained would happen.

In fact I was only half an hour in St Leonards before being put in a police car and taken to Saughton. This was pretty well unique – the police do not conduct people to prison in Scotland. At no stage was I manacled or handled and the police officers were very friendly. Reception at Saughton prison – where prisoners are not usually admitted on a Sunday – were also very polite, even courteous. None of this is what happens to an ordinary prisoner, and gives the lie to the Scottish government’s claim that I was treated as one.

I was not fingerprinted either in the police station or the jail, on the grounds I was a civil prisoner with no criminal conviction. At reception my overcoat and my electric toothbrush were taken from me, but my other clothing, notebook and book were left with me.

I was then taken to a side office to see a nurse. She asked me to list my medical conditions, which I did, including pulmonary hypertension, anti-phospholipid syndrome, Barrett’s oesophagus, atrial fibrillation, hiatus hernia, dysarthria and a few more. As she typed them in to her computer, options appeared on a dropdown menu for her to select the right one. It was plain to me she had no knowledge of several of these conditions, and certainly no idea how to spell them

The nurse cut me off very bluntly when I politely asked her a question about the management of my heart and blood conditions while in prison, saying someone would be round to see me in the morning. She then took away from me all the prescription medications I had brought with me, saying new ones would be issued by the prison medical services. She also took my pulse oximeter, saying the prison would not permit it, as it had batteries. I said it had been given to me by my consultant cardiologist, but she insisted it was against prison regulations.

This was the most disconcerting encounter so far. I was then walked by three prison officers along an extraordinarily long corridor – hundreds of yards long – with the odd side turning, which we we ignored. At the end of the corridor we reached Glenesk Block. The journey to my cell involved unlocking eight different doors and gates, including my cell door, every one of which was locked behind me. There was no doubt that this was very high security detention.

Once I reached floor 3 of Glenesk block, which houses the admissions wing, we acquired two further guards from the landing, so five people saw me into my cell. This was twelve feet by eight feet. May I suggest that you measure that out in your room? That was to be my world for the next four months. In fact I was to spend 95% of the next four months confined in that space.

The door was hard against one wall, leaving space within the 12 ft by 8 ft cell for a 4 ft by 4 ft toilet in one corner next the door. This was fully walled in, to the ceiling, and closed properly with an internal door. This little room contained a toilet and sink. The toilet had no seat. This was not an accident – I was not permitted a toilet seat, even if I provided it myself. It was a normal UK style toilet, designed to be used with a seat, with the two holes for the seat fixing, and a narrow porcelain rim.

The toilet was filthy. Below the waterline it was stained deep black with odd lumps and ridges. Above the waterline it was streaked and spotted with excrement, as was the rim. The toilet floor was in a disgusting state. The cell itself was dirty with, everywhere a wall or bolted down furniture met the floor, a ridge built up of hardened black dirt.

A female guard looked around the cell, then came back to give me rubber gloves, a surface cleaner spray and some cloths. So I spent my first few hours in my cell on my knees, scrubbing away furiously with these inadequate materials.

The female guard had advised me that even after cleaning the cell I should always keep shoes on, because of the mice. I heard them most nights in my cell, but never saw one. The prisoners universally claim them to be rats, but not having seen one I cannot say.

A guard later explained to me that prisoners are responsible for cleaning their own cells, but as nobody generally stayed in a new admissions cell for more than two or three nights, nobody bothered. Cells for new arrivals will be cleaned out by a prisoner work detail, but as I had arrived on a Sunday, that had not happened.

So about 3pm I was locked in the cell. At 5.20pm the door opened for two seconds to check I was still there, but that was it for the day. There I was confused, disoriented and struggling to take in that all this was really happening. I should describe the rest of the cell.

A narrow bed ran down one wall. I came to realise that prison in Scotland still includes an element of corporal punishment, in that the prisoner is very deliberately made physically uncomfortable. Not having a toilet seat is part of this, and so is the bed. It consists of an iron frame bolted to the floor and holding up a flat steel plate, completely unsprung. On this unyielding steel surface there is a mattress consisting simply of two inches of low grade foam – think cheap bath sponge – encased in a shiny red plastic cover, slashed or burnt through in several places and with the colour worn off down the centre.

The mattress was stamped with the date 2013 and had lost its structural resistance, to the extent that if I pinched it between my finger and thumb, I could compress it down to a millimetre. On the steel plate, this mattress had almost no effect and I woke up after a sleepless first night with acute pain throughout my muscles and difficulty walking. To repeat, this is deliberate corporal punishment – a massively superior mattress could be provided for about £30 more per prisoner, while in no way being luxurious. The beds and mattresses can only be designed to inflict both pain and, perhaps more important, humiliation. It is plainly quite deliberate policy.

It is emblematic of the extraordinary lack of intellectual consistency in the Scottish prisons system that cells are equipped with these Victorian punishment beds but also with TV sets showing 23 channels including two Sky subscription channels (of which I shall write more in another instalment). The bed is fixed along one long wall, while a twelve inch plywood shelf runs the length of the other and can serve as a desk. At one end, up against the wall of the toilet, this desk meets a built-in plywood shelving unit fixed into the floor, on top of which are sat the television and kettle next to two power points. At the other end of the desk, a further set of shelves are attached to the wall above. There is a plastic stackable chair of the cheapest kind – the sort you see stacked outside poundshops as garden furniture.

On the outside wall there is a small double glazed window with heavy, square iron bars two inches thick running both horizontally and vertically, like a noughts and crosses grid. The window does not open, but had metal ventilation strips down each side, which were stuck firmly closed with black grime. At the other end of the cell, next to the toilet, the heavy steel door is hinged so as to have a distinct gap all round between the door and the steel frame, like a toilet cubicle door.

Above the desk shelf is fixed a noticeboard, which is the only place prisoners are allowed to put up posters or photos. However as prisoners are not permitted drawing pins, staples, sellotape or blu tak, this was not possible. I asked advice from the guards who suggested I try toothpaste. I did – it didn’t work.

There is a single neon light tube.

The admissions unit has single-occupancy cells, of which there are very few in the rest of the jail. All the prison’s cells were designed for single occupancy, but massive overcrowding means that they are mostly in practice identical to this description, but with a bunk bed rather than a single bed.

The prison is divided into a number of blocks. Glenesk block had three floors, each containing 44 of these cells. Each floor is entered by a central staircase and has a centrally located desk where the guards are stationed. Either side of the desk are two heavy metal grills stretching right across the floor and dividing it into two wings. Within the central area is the kitchen where meals are collected (though not prepared), then eaten back locked in the cell.

The corridor between the cells either side of each wing is about 30 feet wide. It contains a pool table and fixed chairs and tables, and is conceived as a recreational area. There are two telephones at the end of each wing from which prisoners may call (at 10p a minute) numbers from a list they have pre-registered for approval.

The various cell blocks are located off that central spine corridor whose length astonished me at first admission. I did not realise then that this is a discreet building in itself rather than a corridor inside a building – it is like a long concrete overground tunnel.

I should describe my typical day the first ten weeks. At 7.30am the cell door springs open without warning as guards do a head count. The door is immediately locked again. At 8am cereals, milk and morning rolls are handed in, and the door is immediately locked again. At 10am I was released into the corridor for 30 minutes to shower and use the telephone. The showers are in an open room but with individual cubicles, contrary to prison movie cliche. At 10.30am I was locked in again.

At 11am I was released for one hour and escorted under supervision to plod around an enclosed, tarmac exercise yard about 40 paces by 20 paces. This yard is filthy and contains prison bins. One wing of Glenesk block forms one side, and the central spine corridor forms another; the wall of a branch corridor leading to another cell block forms a third and a fence dividing off that block a fourth. The walls are about 10 feet high and the fence about 16 feet high.

In the non-admissions, larger area of Glenesk block the cells had windows with opening narrow side panels. It is the culture of the prison that rather than keep rubbish in their cells and empty it out at shower time, the prisoners throw all rubbish out of their cell windows into the exercise yard. This includes food waste and plates, newspapers, used tissues and worse. At meal times, sundry items (bread, margarine etc) are available on a table outside the kitchen and some prisoners scoop up quantities simply to throw them out of the window into the yard.

I believe the origin of this is that this enclosed yard is used by protected prisoners, many of whom are sexual offenders. Glenesk house has a protected prisoner area on its second floor. “Mainstream” prisoners from Glenesk exercise on the astroturf five-a-side football pitch the other side of the spine corridor. (For four months that pitch was the view from my window and I never saw a game of football played. After three months the goals were removed.) New admissions exercise in the protected yard because they have not been sorted yet – that sorting is the purpose of the new admissions wing. New prisoners therefore have to plough through the filth prepared for protected prisoners.

At times large parts of this already small exercise yard were ankle deep in dross – it was cleaned out intermittently, probably on average every three weeks. Only on a couple of occasions was it so bad I decided against exercise. After exercise getting the sludge off my shoes as we went straight back to my cell was a concern. I now understood how the cell had got so dirty.

After exercise, at noon I collected my lunch and was locked back in the cell. Apart from 2 minutes to collect my tea, I would be locked in from noon until 10am the following morning, for 22 hours solid, every single day. In total I was locked in for 22 and a half hours a day for the first ten weeks. After that I was locked in my cell for 23 hours and 15 minutes a day due to a covid outbreak.

At 5pm the door would open for a final headcount, and then we would be on lockdown for the night, though in truth we had been locked down all day. Lockdown here meant the guards were going home.

Now I want you again to just mark out twelve feet by eight feet on your floor and put yourself inside it. Then imagine being confined inside that space a minimum of 22 and a half hours a day. For four months. These conditions were not peculiar to me – it is how all prisoners were living and are still living today. The library, gym and all educational activities had been closed “because of covid”. The resulting conditions are inhumane – few people would keep a dog like that.

It is also worth noting that Covid is an excuse. In September 2017 an official inspection report already noted that significant numbers of prisoners in Saughton were confined to cells for 22 hours a day. The root problem is massive overcrowding, and I shall write further on the causes of that in a future instalment.

The long concrete and steel corridors of the prison echo horribly, and after lockdown for the first time I felt rather scared. All round me prisoners were shouting out at the top of their voices. That first evening two were yelling death threats at another prisoner, with extreme expressions of hate and retribution. Inter-prisoner communication is by yelling out the window. This went on all night into the early hours of the morning. Prisoners were banging continually on the steel doors, sometimes for hours, calling out for guards who were not there. Somebody was crying out as though being attacked and in pain. There were sounds of plywood splintering as people smashed up their rooms.

It was unnerving because it seemed to me I was living amongst severely violent and out of control berserkers.

Part of the explanation of this is that for most prisoners the new admissions wing on first night is where they go through withdrawal symptoms. Many prisoners come in still drugged up. They are going through their private hell and desperate to get medication. I can understand (though not condone) why the prison medical staff are so remarkably bad and unhelpful. Their job and circumstances are very difficult.

On that first evening I was concerned that I did not have my daily medicines, and by the next morning my heart was getting distinctly out of synch. I was therefore relieved to receive the promised medical visit.

My cell door was opened and a nurse, flanked by two guards, addressed me from outside my cell. She asked if I had any addictions. I replied in the negative. I asked when I might receive my medicines. She said it was in process. I asked if I might get my pulse oximeter. She said the prison did not allow devices with batteries. I asked if my bed could somehow be propped or sloped because of my hiatus hernia (leading to gastric reflux) and Barrett’s oesophagus. She said she didn’t think that the prison could do that. I asked about management of my blood condition (APS), saying I was supposed to exercise regularly and not sit for long periods. She replied by asking if I would like to see the psychiatric team. I replied no. She left.

I was taken out to exercise alone, with four guards watching me. I felt like Rudolf Hess. In the lunch queue I met my first prisoners, who were respectful and polite. The day passed much as the first, and I still did not get my medicines on the Monday. They arrived on the Tuesday morning, as did the prison governor.

I was told the governor had come to see me, and I met him in the (closed) Glenesk library. David Abernethy is a taciturn man who looks like a rugby prop and has a reputation among prisoners as a disciplinarian, compared to other prison regimes in Scotland. He was accompanied by John Morrison, Glenesk block manager, a friendly Ulsterman, who did most of the talking.

I was an anomaly in that Saughton did not normally hold civil prisoners. The Governor told me he believed I was their first civil prisoner in four years, and before that in ten. Civil prisoners should be held separately from criminal prisoners, but Saughton had no provision for that. The available alternatives were these: I could move into general prisoner population, which would probably involve sharing a cell; I could join the protected prisoners; or I could stay where I was on admissions.

On the grounds that nothing too terrible had happened to me yet, I decided to stay where I was and serve my sentence on admissions.

They wished to make plain to me that it was their job to hold me and it was not for them to make any comment on the circumstances that brought me to jail. I told them I held no grudge against them and had no reason to complain of any of the prison officers who had (truthfully) so far all been very polite and friendly to me. I asked whether I could have books I was using for research brought to me from my library at home; I understood this was not normally allowed. I was also likely to receive many books sent by well-wishers. The governor said he would consider this. They also instructed, at my request, extra pillows to be brought to prop up the head of my bed due to my hiatus hernia.

That afternoon a guard came along (I am not going to give the names except for senior management, as the guards might not wish it) with the pillows, and said he had been instructed I was a VIP prisoner and should be looked after. I replied I was not a VIP, but was a civil prisoner, and therefore had different rights to other prisoners.

He said that the landing guards suggested that I should take my exercise and shower/phone time at the same time as other mainstream new admission prisoners (sexual offender and otherwise protected new admission prisoners had separate times). I had so far been kept entirely apart, but perhaps I would prefer to meet people? I said I would prefer that.

So the next day I took my exercise in that filthy yard in the company of four other prisoners, all new arrivals the night before. I thus observed for the first time something which astonished me. Once in the yard, the new prisoners (who on this occasion arrived individually, not all part of the same case), immediately started to call out to the windows of Glenesk block, shouting out for friends.

“Hey, Jimmy! Jimmy! It’s me Joe! I am back. Is Paul still in? What’s that? Gone tae Dumfries? Donnie’s come in? That’s brilliant.”

The realisation dropped, to be reinforced every day, that Saughton jail is a community, a community where the large majority of the prisoners all know each other. That does not mean they all like each other – there are rival gangs, and enmities. But prison is a routine event in not just their lives, but the lives of their wider communities. Those communities are the areas of deprivation of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a city of astonishing social inequality. It contains many of the areas in the bottom 10% of multiple social deprivation in Scotland (dark red on the map below). These are often a very short walk from areas of great affluence in the top 10% (dark blue on the map). Of course, few people make that walk. But I recommend a spell in Saughton jail to any other middle class person who, like myself, was foolish enough to believe that Scotland is a socially progressive country.

The vast majority of prisoners I met came from the red areas on these maps. The same places came up again and again – including Granton, Pllton, Oxgangs, Muirhouse, Lochend, and from West Lothian, Livingston and Craigshill. Saughton jail is simply where Edinburgh locks away 900 of its poorest people, who were born into extreme poverty and often born into addiction. Many had parents and grandparents also in Saughton jail.

A large number of prisoners have known institutionalisation throughout their lives; council care and foster homes leading to young offenders’ institutions and then prison. A surprising number have very poor reading and writing skills. The overcrowding of our prisons is a symptom not just of failed justice and penal policy, but of fundamentally flawed economic, social and educational systems.

Of which I shall also write more later. Here, on this first day with a group in the exercise yard, I was mystified as the prisoners started going up to the ground floor windows and the guards started shouting “keep away from the windows! Stand back from the windows” in a very agitated fashion, but to no effect. Eventually they removed one man and sent him back to his cell, though he seemed no more guilty than the others.

By the next week I had learnt what was happening. At exercise the new admissions prisoners get drugs passed to them through the window by their friends who have been in the prison longer and had time to get their supply established. These drugs are passed as paper tabs, as pills or in vape tubes. There appears no practical difficulty at all in prisoners getting supplied with plentiful drugs in Saughton. Every single day I was to witness new admissions prisoners getting their drugs at the window from friends, and every single day I witnessed this curious charade of guards shouting and pretending to try and stop them.

My first few days in Saughton had introduced me to an unknown, and sometimes frightening, world, of which I shall be telling you more.

In Thursday’s separate hearing on allowing Assange out of the armoured box to sit with his legal team, I witnessed directly that Baraitser’s ruling against Assange was brought by her into court BEFORE she heard defence counsel put the arguments, and delivered by her entirely unchanged.

I might start by explaining to you my position in the public gallery vis a vis the judge. All week I deliberately sat in the front, right hand seat. The gallery looks out through an armoured glass window at a height of about seven feet above the courtroom. It runs down one side of the court, and the extreme right hand end of the public gallery is above the judge’s bench, which sits below perpendicular to it. Remarkably therefore from the right hand seats of the public gallery you have an uninterrupted view of the top of the whole of the judge’s bench, and can see all the judge’s papers and computer screen.

Mark Summers QC outlined that in the case of Belousov vs Russia the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg ruled against the state of Russia because Belousov had been tried in a glass cage practically identical in construction and in position in court to that in which Assange now was. It hindered his participation in the trial and his free access to counsel, and deprived him of human dignity as a defendant.

Summers continued that it was normal practice for certain categories of unconvicted prisoners to be released from the dock to sit with their lawyers. The court had psychiatric reports on Assange’s extreme clinical depression, and in fact the UK Department of Justice’s best practice guide for courts stated that vulnerable people should be released to sit alongside their lawyers. Special treatment was not being requested for Assange – he was asking to be treated as any other vulnerable person.

The defence was impeded by their inability to communicate confidentially with their client during proceedings. In the next stage of trial, where witnesses were being examined, timely communication was essential. Furthermore they could only talk with him through the slit in the glass within the hearing of the private company security officers who were guarding him (it was clarified they were Serco, not Group 4 as Baraitser had said the previous day), and in the presence of microphones.

Baraitser became ill-tempered at this point and spoke with a real edge to her voice. “Who are those people behind you in the back row?” she asked Summers sarcastically – a question to which she very well knew the answer. Summers replied that they were part of the defence legal team. Baraitser said that Assange could contact them if he had a point to pass on. Summers replied that there was an aisle and a low wall between the glass box and their position, and all Assange could see over the wall was the top of the back of their heads. Baraitser said she had seen Assange call out. Summers said yelling across the courtroom was neither confidential nor satisfactory.

I have now been advised it is definitely an offence to publish the picture of Julian in his glass box, even though I didn’t take it and it is absolutely all over the internet. Also worth noting that I am back home in my own country, Scotland, where my blog is based, and neither is within the jurisdiction of the English court. But I am anxious not to give them any excuse to ban me from the court hearing, so I have removed it but you can see it here.

This is the photo taken illegally (not by me) of Assange in the court. If you look carefully, you can see there is a passageway and a low wooden wall between him and the back row of lawyers. You can see one of the two Serco prison officers guarding him inside the box.

Baraitser said Assange could pass notes, and she had witnessed notes being passed by him. Summers replied that the court officers had now banned the passing of notes. Baraitser said they could take this up with Serco, it was a matter for the prison authorities.

Summers asserted that, contrary to Baraitser’s statement the previous day, she did indeed have jurisdiction on the matter of releasing Assange from the dock. Baraitser intervened to say that she now accepted that. Summers then said that he had produced a number of authorities to show that Baraitser had also been wrong to say that to be in custody could only mean to be in the dock. You could be in custody anywhere within the precincts of the court, or indeed outside. Baraitser became very annoyed by this and stated she had only said that delivery to the custody of the court must equal delivery to the dock.

To which Summers replied memorably, now very cross “Well, that’s wrong too, and has been wrong these last eight years.”

Drawing argument to a close, Baraitser gave her judgement on this issue. Now the interesting thing is this, and I am a direct eyewitness. She read out her judgement, which was several pages long and handwritten. She had brought it with her into court in a bundle, and she made no amendments to it. She had written out her judgement before she heard Mark Summers speak at all.

Her key points were that Assange was able to communicate to his lawyers by shouting out from the box. She had seen him pass notes. She was willing to adjourn the court at any time for Assange to go down with his lawyers for discussions in the cells, and if that extended the length of the hearing from three to six weeks, it could take as long as required.

Baraitser stated that none of the psychiatric reports she had before her stated that it was necessary for Assange to leave the armoured dock. As none of the psychiarists had been asked that question – and very probably none knew anything about courtroom layout – that is scarcely surprising

I have been wondering why it is so essential to the British government to keep Assange in that box, unable to hear proceedings or instruct his lawyers in reaction to evidence, even when counsel for the US Government stated they had no objection to Assange sitting in the well of the court.

The answer lies in the psychiatric assessment of Assange given to the court by the extremely distinguished Professor Michael Kopelman (who is familiar to everyone who has read Murder in Samarkand):

“Mr Assange shows virtually all the risk factors which researchers from Oxford
have described in prisoners who either suicide or make lethal attempts. … I
am as confident as a psychiatrist can ever be that, if extradition to the United
States were to become imminent, Mr Assange would find a way of suiciding.”

The fact that Kopelman does not, as Baraitser said, specifically state that the armoured glass box is bad for Assange reflects nothing other than the fact he was not asked that question. Any human being with the slightest decency would be able to draw the inference. Baraitser’s narrow point that no psychiatrist had specifically stated he should be released from the armoured box is breathtakingly callous, dishonest and inhumane. Almost certainly no psychiatrist had conceived she would determine on enforcing such torture.

So why is Baraitser doing it?

I believe that the Hannibal Lecter style confinement of Assange, this intellectual computer geek, which has no rational basis at all, is a deliberate attempt to drive Julian to suicide. The maximum security anti-terrorist court is physically within the fortress compound that houses the maximum security prison. He is brought handcuffed and under heavy escort to and from his solitary cell to the armoured dock via an underground tunnel. In these circumstances, what possible need is there for him to be strip and cavity searched continually? Why is he not permitted to have his court papers? Most telling for me was the fact he is not permitted to shake hands or touch his lawyers through the slit in the armoured box.

They are relentlessly enforcing the systematic denial of any basic human comfort, like the touch of a friend’s fingertips or the blocking of the relief that he might get just from being alongside somebody friendly. They are ensuring the continuation of the extreme psychological effects from isolation of a year of virtual solitary confinement. A tiny bit of human comfort could do an enormous amount of good to his mental health and resilience. They are determined to stop this at all costs. They are attempting to make him kill himself – or create in him the condition where his throttling death might be explained away as suicide.

This is also the only explanation that I can think of for why they are risking the creation of such obvious mistrial conditions. Dead people cannot appeal.

I would remind you that Julian is a remand prisoner who has served his unprecedentedly long sentence for bail-jumping. His status is supposedly at present that of an innocent man facing charges. Those charges are for nothing except for publishing Chelsea Manning’s revelations of war crimes.

That Baraitser is acting under instructions seems to me certain. She has been desperate throughout the trial to seize any chance to deny any responsibility for what is happening to Julian. She has stated that she has no jurisdiction over his treatment in prison, and even when both defence and prosecution combined to state it was normal practice for magistrates to pass directions or requests to the prison service, she refused to accept it was so.

Baraitser is plainly attempting psychologically to distance herself from any agency in what is being done. To this end she has made a stream of denials of jurisdiction or ability to influence events. She has said that she has no jurisdiction to interfere with the strip searching, handcuffing and removal of Assange’s papers or with his being kept in solitary. She has said she has no jurisdiction to request that his defence lawyers have more access to their client in jail to prepare his defence. She has said she has no jurisdiction over his position in the courtroom. Se has suggested at various times it is up to Serco to decide if he may pass notes to his lawyers and up to Group4 to decide if he can be released from the armoured dock. The moments when she looks most content listening to the evidence, are those when prosecution counsel James Lewis argues that she has no decision to make but to sign the extradition because it is in good form and that Article 4 of the Treaty has no legal standing.

A member of the Assange family remarked to me at the end of week one that she seems very lazy, and thus delighted to accept any arguments that reduce the amount she needs to do. I think it is different to that. I think there is a corner of the mind of this daughter of dissidents from apartheid that rejects her own role in the torture of Assange, and is continually urging “I had no choice, I had no agency”. Those who succumb to do evil must find what internal comfort they may.

With grateful thanks to those who donated or subscribed to make this reporting possible. I wish to stress again that I absolutely do not want anybody to give anything if it causes them the slightest possibility of financial strain.

This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.

Please try this experiment for me.
Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”.

Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”.

Firstly, congratulations on your acting skills; you take direction very well. Secondly, is it not fascinating how precisely the same words can convey the opposite meaning dependent on modulation of stress, pitch, and volume?

Yesterday the prosecution continued its argument that the provision in the 2007 UK/US Extradition Treaty that bars extradition for political offences is a dead letter, and that Julian Assange’s objectives are not political in any event. James Lewis QC for the prosecution spoke for about an hour, and Edward Fitzgerald QC replied for the defence for about the same time. During Lewis’s presentation, he was interrupted by Judge Baraitser precisely once. During Fitzgerald’s reply, Baraitser interjected seventeen times.

In the transcript, those interruptions will not look unreasonable:
“Could you clarify that for me Mr Fitzgerald…”
“So how do you cope with Mr Lewis’s point that…”
“But surely that’s a circular argument…”
“But it’s not incorporated, is it?…”

All these and the other dozen interruptions were designed to appear to show the judge attempting to clarify the defence’s argument in a spirit of intellectual testing. But if you heard the tone of Baraitser’s voice, saw her body language and facial expressions, it was anything but.

The false picture a transcript might give is exacerbated by the courtly Fitzgerald’s continually replying to each obvious harassment with “Thank you Madam, that is very helpful”, which again if you were there, plainly meant the opposite. But what a transcript will helpfully nevertheless show was the bully pulpit of Baraitser’s tactic in interrupting Fitzgerald again and again and again, belittling his points and very deliberately indeed preventing him from getting into the flow of his argument. The contrast in every way with her treatment of Lewis could not be more pronounced.

So now to report the legal arguments themselves.

James Lewis for the prosecution, continuing his arguments from the day before, said that Parliament had not included a bar on extradition for political offences in the 2003 Act. It could therefore not be reintroduced into law by a treaty. “To introduce a Political Offences bar by the back door would be to subvert the intention of Parliament.”

Lewis also argued that these were not political offences. The definition of a political offence was in the UK limited to behaviour intended “to overturn or change a government or induce it to change its policy.” Furthermore the aim must be to change government or policy in the short term, not the indeterminate future.

Lewis stated that further the term “political offence” could only be applied to offences committed within the territory where it was attempted to make the change. So to be classified as political offences, Assange would have had to commit them within the territory of the USA, but he did not.

If Baraitser did decide the bar on political offences applied, the court would have to determine the meaning of “political offence” in the UK/US Extradition Treaty and construe the meaning of paragraphs 4.1 and 4.2 of the Treaty. To construe the terms of an international treaty was beyond the powers of the court.

Lewis perorated that the conduct of Julian Assange cannot possibly be classified as a political offence. “It is impossible to place Julian Assange in the position of a political refugee”. The activity in which Wikileaks was engaged was not in its proper meaning political opposition to the US Administration or an attempt to overthrow that administration. Therefore the offence was not political.

For the defence Edward Fitzgerald replied that the 2003 Extradition Act was an enabling act under which treaties could operate. Parliament had been concerned to remove any threat of abuse of the political offence bar to cover terrorist acts of violence against innocent civilians. But there remained a clear protection, accepted worldwide, for peaceful political dissent. This was reflected in the Extradition Treaty on the basis of which the court was acting.

Baraitser interrupted that the UK/US Extradition Treaty was not incorporated into English Law.

Fitzgerald replied that the entire extradition request is on the basis of the treaty. It is an abuse of process for the authorities to rely on the treaty for the application but then to claim that its provisions do not apply.

“On the face of it, it is a very bizarre argument that a treaty which gives rise to the extradition, on which the extradition is founded, can be disregarded in its provisions. It is on the face of it absurd.” Edward Fitzgerald QC for the Defence

Fitzgerald added that English Courts construe treaties all the time. He gave examples.

Fitzgerald went on that the defence did not accept that treason, espionage and sedition were not regarded as political offences in England. But even if one did accept Lewis’s too narrow definition of political offence, Assange’s behaviour still met the test. What on earth could be the motive of publishing evidence of government war crimes and corruption, other than to change the policy of the government? Indeed, the evidence would prove that Wikileaks had effectively changed the policy of the US government, particularly on Iraq.

Baraitser interjected that to expose government wrongdoing was not the same thing as to try to change government policy. Fitzgerald asked her, finally in some exasperation after umpteen interruptions, what other point could there be in exposing government wrongdoing other than to induce a change in government policy?

That concluded opening arguments for the prosecution and defence.

MY PERSONAL COMMENTARY

Let me put this as neutrally as possible. If you could fairly state that Lewis’s argument was much more logical, rational and intuitive than Fitzgerald’s, you could understand why Lewis did not need an interruption while Fitzgerald had to be continually interrupted for “clarification”. But in fact it was Lewis who was making out the case that the provisions of the very treaty under which the extradition is being made, do not in fact apply, a logical step which I suggest the man on the Clapham omnibus might reason to need rather more testing than Fitzgerald’s assertion to the contrary. Baraitser’s comparative harassment of Fitzgerald when he had the prosecution on the ropes was straight out of the Stalin show trial playbook.

The defence did not mention it, and I do not know if it features in their written arguments, but I thought Lewis’s point that these could not be political offences, because Julian Assange was not in the USA when he committed them, was breathtakingly dishonest. The USA claims universal jurisdiction. Assange is being charged with crimes of publishing committed while he was outside the USA. The USA claims the right to charge anyone of any nationality, anywhere in the world, who harms US interests. They also in addition here claim that as the materials could be seen on the internet in the USA, there was an offence in the USA. At the same time to claim this could not be a political offence as the crime was committed outside the USA is, as Edward Fitzgerald might say, on the face of it absurd. Which curiously Baraitser did not pick up on.

Lewis’s argument that the Treaty does not have any standing in English law is not something he just made up. Nigel Farage did not materialise from nowhere. There is in truth a long tradition in English law that even a treaty signed and ratified with some bloody Johnny Foreigner country, can in no way bind an English court. Lewis could and did spout reams and reams of judgements from old beetroot faced judges holding forth to say exactly that in the House of Lords, before going off to shoot grouse and spank the footman’s son. Lewis was especially fond of the Tin Council case.

There is of course a contrary and more enlightened tradition, and a number of judgements that say the exact opposite, mostly more recent. This is why there was so much repetitive argument as each side piled up more and more volumes of “authorities” on their side of the case.

The difficulty for Lewis – and for Baraitser – is that this case is not analogous to me buying a Mars bar and then going to court because an International Treaty on Mars Bars says mine is too small.

Rather the 2003 Extradition Act is an Enabling Act on which extradition treaties then depend. You can’t thus extradite under the 2003 Act without the Treaty. So the Extradition Treaty of 2007 in a very real sense becomes an executive instrument legally required to authorise the extradition. For the executing authorities to breach the terms of the necessary executive instrument under which they are acting, simply has to be an abuse of process. So the Extradition Treaty owing to its type and its necessity for legal action, is in fact incorporated in English Law by the Extradition Act of 2003 on which it depends.

The Extradition Treaty is a necessary precondition of the extradition, whereas a Mars Bar Treaty is not a necessary precondition to buying the Mars Bar.

That is as plain as I can put it. I do hope that is comprehensible.

It is of course difficult for Lewis that on the same day the Court of Appeal was ruling against the construction of the Heathrow Third Runway, partly because of its incompatibility with the Paris Agreement of 2016, despite the latter not being fully incorporated into English law by the Climate Change Act of 2008.

VITAL PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

It is intensely embarrassing for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) when an English court repudiates the application of a treaty the UK has ratified with one or more foreign states. For that reason, in the modern world, very serious procedures and precautions have been put into place to make certain that this cannot happen. Therefore the prosecution’s argument that all the provisions of the UK/US Extradition Treaty of 2007 are not able to be implemented under the Extradition Act of 2003, ought to be impossible.

I need to explain I have myself negotiated and overseen the entry into force of treaties within the FCO. The last one in which I personally tied the ribbon and applied the sealing wax (literally) was the Anglo-Belgian Continental Shelf Treaty of 1991, but I was involved in negotiating others and the system I am going to describe was still in place when I left the FCO as an Ambassador in 2005, and I believe is unchanged today (and remember the Extradition Act was 2003 and the US/UK Extradition Treaty ratified 2007, so my knowledge is not outdated). Departmental nomenclatures change from time to time and so does structural organisation. But the offices and functions I will describe remain, even if names may be different.

All international treaties have a two stage process. First they are signed to show the government agrees to the treaty. Then, after a delay, they are ratified. This second stage takes place when the government has enabled the legislation and other required agency to implement the treaty. This is the answer to Lewis’s observation about the roles of the executive and legislature. The ratification stage only takes place after any required legislative action. That is the whole point.

This is how it happens in the FCO. Officials negotiate the extradition treaty. It is signed for the UK. The signed treaty then gets returned to FCO Legal Advisers, Nationality and Treaty Department, Consular Department, North American Department and others and is sent on to Treasury/Cabinet Office Solicitors and to Home Office, Parliament and to any other Government Department whose area is impacted by the individual treaty.

The Treaty is extensively vetted to check that it can be fully implemented in all the jurisdictions of the UK. If it cannot, then amendments to the law have to be made so that it can. These amendments can be made by Act of Parliament or more generally by secondary legislation using powers conferred on the Secretary of State by an act. If there is already an Act of Parliament under which the Treaty can be implemented, then no enabling legislation needs to be passed. International Agreements are not all individually incorporated into English or Scottish laws by specific new legislation.

This is a very careful step by step process, carried out by lawyers and officials in the FCO, Treasury, Cabinet Office, Home Office, Parliament and elsewhere. Each will in parallel look at every clause of the Treaty and check that it can be applied. All changes needed to give effect to the treaty then have to be made – amending legislation, and necessary administrative steps. Only when all hurdles have been cleared, including legislation, and Parliamentary officials, Treasury, Cabinet Office, Home Office and FCO all certify that the Treaty is capable of having effect in the UK, will the FCO Legal Advisers give the go ahead for the Treaty to be ratified. You absolutely cannot ratify the treaty before FCO Legal Advisers have given this clearance.

This is a serious process. That is why the US/UK Extradition Treaty was signed in 2003 and ratified in 2007. That is not an abnormal delay.

So I know for certain that ALL the relevant British Government legal departments MUST have agreed that Article 4.1 of the UK/US Extradition Treaty was capable of being given effect under the 2003 Extradition Act. That certification has to have happened or the Treaty could never have been ratified.

It follows of necessity that the UK Government, in seeking to argue now that Article 4.1 is incompatible with the 2003 Act, is knowingly lying. There could not be a more gross abuse of process.

I have been keen for the hearing on this particular point to conclude so that I could give you the benefit of my experience. I shall rest there for now, but later today hope to post further on yesterday’s row in court over releasing Julian from the anti-terrorist armoured dock.

With grateful thanks to those who donated or subscribed to make this reporting possible. I wish to stress again that I absolutely do not want anybody to give anything if it causes them the slightest possibility of financial strain.

This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.

In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do is give you my personal assurance that what I recount actually is what happened.

As usual, I shall deal with procedural matters and Julian’s treatment first, before getting in to a clear account of the legal arguments made.

Vanessa Baraitser is under a clear instruction to mimic concern by asking, near the end of every session just before we break anyway, if Julian is feeling well and whether he would like a break. She then routinely ignores his response. Yesterday he replied at some length he could not hear properly in his glass box and could not communicate with his lawyers (at some point yesterday they had started preventing him passing notes to his counsel, which I learn was the background to the aggressive prevention of his shaking Garzon’s hand goodbye).

Baraitser insisted he might only be heard through his counsel, which given he was prevented from instructing them was a bit rich. This being pointed out, we had a ten minute adjournment while Julian and his counsel were allowed to talk down in the cells – presumably where they could be more conveniently bugged yet again.

On return, Edward Fitzgerald made a formal application for Julian to be allowed to sit beside his lawyers in the court. Julian was “a gentle, intellectual man” and not a terrorist. Baraitser replied that releasing Assange from the dock into the body of the court would mean he was released from custody. To achieve that would require an application for bail.

Again, the prosecution counsel James Lewis intervened on the side of the defence to try to make Julian’s treatment less extreme. He was not, he suggested diffidently, quite sure that it was correct that it required bail for Julian to be in the body of the court, or that being in the body of the court accompanied by security officers meant that a prisoner was no longer in custody. Prisoners, even the most dangerous of terrorists, gave evidence from the witness box in the body of the court nest to the lawyers and magistrate. In the High Court prisoners frequently sat with their lawyers in extradition hearings, in extreme cases of violent criminals handcuffed to a security officer.

Baraitser replied that Assange might pose a danger to the public. It was a question of health and safety. How did Fitzgerald and Lewis think that she had the ability to carry out the necessary risk assessment? It would have to be up to Group 4 to decide if this was possible.

Yes, she really did say that. Group 4 would have to decide.

Baraitser started to throw out jargon like a Dalek when it spins out of control. “Risk assessment” and “health and safety” featured a lot. She started to resemble something worse than a Dalek, a particularly stupid local government officer of a very low grade. “No jurisdiction” – “Up to Group 4”. Recovering slightly, she stated firmly that delivery to custody can only mean delivery to the dock of the court, nowhere else in the room. If the defence wanted him in the courtroom where he could hear proceedings better, they could only apply for bail and his release from custody in general. She then peered at both barristers in the hope this would have sat them down, but both were still on their feet.

In his diffident manner (which I confess is growing on me) Lewis said “the prosecution is neutral on this request, of course but, err, I really don’t think that’s right”. He looked at her like a kindly uncle whose favourite niece has just started drinking tequila from the bottle at a family party.

Baraitser concluded the matter by stating that the Defence should submit written arguments by 10am tomorrow on this point, and she would then hold a separate hearing into the question of Julian’s position in the court.

The day had begun with a very angry Magistrate Baraitser addressing the public gallery. Yesterday, she said, a photo had been taken inside the courtroom. It was a criminal offence to take or attempt to take photographs inside the courtroom. Vanessa Baraitser looked at this point very keen to lock someone up. She also seemed in her anger to be making the unfounded assumption that whoever took the photo from the public gallery on Tuesday was still there on Wednesday; I suspect not. Being angry at the public at random must be very stressful for her. I suspect she shouts a lot on trains.

Ms Baraitser is not fond of photography – she appears to be the only public figure in Western Europe with no photo on the internet. Indeed the average proprietor of a rural car wash has left more evidence of their existence and life history on the internet than Vanessa Baraitser. Which is no crime on her part, but I suspect the expunging is not achieved without considerable effort. Somebody suggested to me she might be a hologram, but I think not. Holograms have more empathy.

I was amused by the criminal offence of attempting to take photos in the courtroom. How incompetent would you need to be to attempt to take a photo and fail to do so? And if no photo was taken, how do they prove you were attempting to take one, as opposed to texting your mum? I suppose “attempting to take a photo” is a crime that could catch somebody arriving with a large SLR, tripod and several mounted lighting boxes, but none of those appeared to have made it into the public gallery.

Baraitser did not state whether it was a criminal offence to publish a photograph taken in a courtroom (or indeed to attempt to publish a photograph taken in a courtroom). I suspect it is. Anyway Le Grand Soir has published a translation of my report yesterday, and there you can see a photo of Julian in his bulletproof glass anti-terrorist cage. Not, I hasten to add, taken by me.

We now come to the consideration of yesterday’s legal arguments on the extradition request itself. Fortunately, these are basically fairly simple to summarise, because although we had five hours of legal disquisition, it largely consisted of both sides competing in citing scores of “authorities”, e.g. dead judges, to endorse their point of view, and thus repeating the same points continually with little value from exegesis of the innumerable quotes.

As prefigured yesterday by magistrate Baraitser, the prosecution is arguing that Article 4.1 of the UK/US extradition treaty has no force in law.

The UK and US Governments say that the court enforces domestic law, not international law, and therefore the treaty has no standing. This argument has been made to the court in written form to which I do not have access. But from discussion in court it was plain that the prosecution argue that the Extradition Act of 2003, under which the court is operating, makes no exception for political offences. All previous Extradition Acts had excluded extradition for political offences, so it must be the intention of the sovereign parliament that political offenders can now be extradited.

Opening his argument, Edward Fitzgerald QC argued that the Extradition Act of 2003 alone is not enough to make an actual extradition. The extradition requires two things in place; the general Extradition Act and the Extradition Treaty with the country or countries concerned. “No Treaty, No Extradition” was an unbreakable rule. The Treaty was the very basis of the request. So to say that the extradition was not governed by the terms of the very treaty under which it was made, was to create a legal absurdity and thus an abuse of process. He cited examples of judgements made by the House of Lords and Privy Council where treaty rights were deemed enforceable despite the lack of incorporation into domestic legislation, particularly in order to stop people being extradited to potential execution from British colonies.

Fitzgerald pointed out that while the Extradition Act of 2003 did not contain a bar on extraditions for political offences, it did not state there could not be such a bar in extradition treaties. And the extradition treaty of 2007 was ratified after the 2003 extradition act.

At this stage Baraitser interrupted that it was plain the intention of parliament was that there could be extradition for political offences. Otherwise they would not have removed the bar in previous legislation. Fitzgerald declined to agree, saying the Act did not say extradition for political offences could not be banned by the treaty enabling extradition.

Fitzgerald then continued to say that international jurisprudence had accepted for a century or more that you did not extradite political offenders. No political extradition was in the European Convention on Extradition, the Model United Nations Extradition Treaty and the Interpol Convention on Extradition. It was in every single one of the United States’ extradition treaties with other countries, and had been for over a century, at the insistence of the United States. For both the UK and US Governments to say it did not apply was astonishing and would set a terrible precedent that would endanger dissidents and potential political prisoners from China, Russia and regimes all over the world who had escaped to third countries.

Fitzgerald stated that all major authorities agreed there were two types of political offence. The pure political offence and the relative political offence. A “pure” political offence was defined as treason, espionage or sedition. A “relative” political offence was an act which was normally criminal, like assault or vandalism, conducted with a political motive. Every one of the charges against Assange was a “pure” political offence. All but one were espionage charges, and the computer misuse charge had been compared by the prosecution to breach of the official secrets act to meet the dual criminality test. The overriding accusation that Assange was seeking to harm the political and military interests of the United States was in the very definition of a political offence in all the authorities.

In reply Lewis stated that a treaty could not be binding in English law unless specifically incorporated in English law by Parliament. This was a necessary democratic defence. Treaties were made by the executive which could not make law. This went to the sovereignty of Parliament. Lewis quoted many judgements stating that international treaties signed and ratified by the UK could not be enforced in British courts. “It may come as a surprise to other countries that their treaties with the British government can have no legal force” he joked.

Lewis said there was no abuse of process here and thus no rights were invoked under the European Convention. It was just the normal operation of the law that the treaty provision on no extradition for political offences had no legal standing.

Lewis said that the US government disputes that Assange’s offences are political. In the UK/Australia/US there was a different definition of political offence to the rest of the world. We viewed the “pure” political offences of treason, espionage and sedition as not political offences. Only “relative” political offences – ordinary crimes committed with a political motive – were viewed as political offences in our tradition. In this tradition, the definition of “political” was also limited to supporting a contending political party in a state. Lewis will continue with this argument tomorrow.

That concludes my account of proceedings. I have some important commentary to make on this and will try to do another posting later today. Now rushing to court.

With grateful thanks to those who donated or subscribed to make this reporting possible.

This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.

This afternoon Julian’s Spanish lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, left court to return to Madrid. On the way out he naturally stopped to shake hands with his client, proffering his fingers through the narrow slit in the bulletproof glass cage. Assange half stood to take his lawyer’s hand. The two security guards in the cage with Assange immediately sprang up, putting hands on Julian and forcing him to sit down, preventing the handshake.

That was not by any means the worst thing today, but it is a striking image of the senseless brute force continually used against a man accused of publishing documents. That a man cannot even shake his lawyer’s hand goodbye is against the entire spirit in which the members of the legal system like to pretend the law is practised. I offer that startling moment as encapsulating yesterday’s events in court.

Day 2 proceedings had started with a statement from Edward Fitzgerald, Assange’s QC, that shook us rudely into life. He stated that yesterday, on the first day of trial, Julian had twice been stripped naked and searched, eleven times been handcuffed, and five times been locked up in different holding cells. On top of this, all of his court documents had been taken from him by the prison authorities, including privileged communications between his lawyers and himself, and he had been left with no ability to prepare to participate in today’s proceedings.

Magistrate Baraitser looked at Fitzgerald and stated, in a voice laced with disdain, that he had raised such matters before and she had always replied that she had no jurisdiction over the prison estate. He should take it up with the prison authorities. Fitzgerald remained on his feet, which drew a very definite scowl from Baraitser, and replied that of course they would do that again, but this repeated behaviour by the prison authorities threatened the ability of the defence to prepare. He added that regardless of jurisdiction, in his experience it was common practice for magistrates and judges to pass on comments and requests to the prison service where the conduct of the trial was affected, and that jails normally listened to magistrates sympathetically.

Baraitser flat-out denied any knowledge of such a practice, and stated that Fitzgerald should present her with written arguments setting out the case law on jurisdiction over prison conditions. This was too much even for prosecution counsel James Lewis, who stood up to say the prosecution would also want Assange to have a fair hearing, and that he could confirm that what the defence were suggesting was normal practice. Even then, Baraitser still refused to intervene with the prison. She stated that if the prison conditions were so bad as to reach the very high bar of making a fair hearing impossible, the defence should bring a motion to dismiss the charges on those grounds. Otherwise they should drop it.

Both prosecution and defence seemed surprised by Baraitser’s claim that she had not heard of what they both referred to as common practice. Lewis may have been genuinely concerned at the shocking description of Assange’s prison treatment yesterday; or he may have just had warning klaxons going off in his head screaming “mistrial”. But the net result is Baraitser will attempt to do nothing to prevent Julian’s physical and mental abuse in jail nor to try to give him the ability to participate in his defence. The only realistic explanation that occurs to me is that Baraitser has been warned off, because this continual mistreatment and confiscation of documents is on senior government authority.

A last small incident for me to recount: having queued again from the early hours, I was at the final queue before the entrance to the public gallery, when the name was called out of Kristin Hrnafsson, editor of Wikileaks, with whom I was talking at the time. Kristin identified himself, and was told by the court official he was barred from the public gallery.

Now I was with Kristin throughout the entire proceedings the previous day, and he had done absolutely nothing amiss – he is rather a quiet gentleman. When he was called for, it was by name and by job description – they were specifically banning the editor of Wikileaks from the trial. Kristin asked why and was told it was a decision of the Court.

At this stage John Shipton, Julian’s father, announced that in this case the family members would all leave too, and they did so, walking out of the building. They and others then started tweeting the news of the family walkout. This appeared to cause some consternation among court officials, and fifteen minutes later Kristin was re-admitted. We still have no idea what lay behind this. Later in the day journalists were being briefed by officials it was simply over queue-jumping, but that seems improbable as he was removed by staff who called him by name and title, rather than had spotted him as a queue-jumper.

None of the above goes to the official matter of the case. All of the above tells you more about the draconian nature of the political show-trial which is taking place than does the charade being enacted in the body of the court. There were moments today when I got drawn in to the court process and achieved the suspension of disbelief you might do in theatre, and began thinking “Wow, this case is going well for Assange”. Then an event such as those recounted above kicks in, a coldness grips your heart, and you recall there is no jury here to be convinced. I simply do not believe that anything said or proved in the courtroom can have an impact on the final verdict of this court.

So to the actual proceedings in the case.

For the defence, Mark Summers QC stated that the USA charges were entirely dependent on three factual accusations of Assange behviour:

1) Assange helped Manning to decode a hash key to access classified material.
Summers stated this was a provably false allegation from the evidence of the Manning court-martial.

2) Assange solicited the material from Manning
Summers stated this was provably wrong from information available to the public

3) Assange knowingly put lives at risk
Summers stated this was provably wrong both from publicly available information and from specific involvement of the US government.

In summary, Summers stated the US government knew that the allegations being made were false as to fact, and they were demonstrably made in bad faith. This was therefore an abuse of process which should lead to dismissal of the extradition request. He described the above three counts as “rubbish, rubbish and rubbish”.

Summers then walked through the facts of the case. He said the charges from the USA divide the materials leaked by Manning to Wikileaks into three categories:

a) Diplomatic Cables
b) Guantanamo detainee assessment briefs
c) Iraq War rules of engagement
d) Afghan and Iraqi war logs

Summers then methodically went through a), b), c) and d) relating each in turn to alleged behaviours 1), 2) and 3), making twelve counts of explanation and exposition in all. This comprehensive account took some four hours and I shall not attempt to capture it here. I will rather give highlights, but will relate occasionally to the alleged behaviour number and/or the alleged materials letter. I hope you follow that – it took me some time to do so!

On 1) Summers at great length demonstrated conclusively that Manning had access to each material a) b) c) d) provided to Wikileaks without needing any code from Assange, and had that access before ever contacting Assange. Nor had Manning needed a code to conceal her identity as the prosecution alleged – the database for intelligence analysts Manning could access – as could thousands of others – did not require a username or password to access it from a work military computer. Summers quoted testimony of several officers from Manning’s court-martial to confirm this. Nor would breaking the systems admin code on the system give Manning access to any additional classified databases. Summers quoted evidence from the Manning court-martial, where this had been accepted, that the reason Manning wanted to get in to systems admin was to allow soldiers to put their video-games and movies on their government laptops, which in fact happened frequently.

Magistrate Baraitser twice made major interruptions. She observed that if Chelsea Manning did not know she could not be traced as the user who downloaded the databases, she might have sought Assange’s assistance to crack a code to conceal her identity from ignorance she did not need to do that, and to assist would still be an offence by Assange.

Summers pointed out that Manning knew that she did not need a username and password, because she actually accessed all the materials without one. Baraitser replied that this did not constitute proof she knew she could not be traced. Summers said in logic it made no sense to argue that she was seeking a code to conceal her user ID and password, where there was no user ID and password. Baraitser replied again he could not prove that. At this point Summers became somewhat testy and short with Baraitser, and took her through the court martial evidence again. Of which more…

Baraitser also made the point that even if Assange were helping Manning to crack an admin code, even if it did not enable Manning to access any more databases, that still was unauthorised use and would constitute the crime of aiding and abetting computer misuse, even if for an innocent purpose.

After a brief break, Baraitser came back with a real zinger. She told Summers that he had presented the findings of the US court martial of Chelsea Manning as fact. But she did not agree that her court had to treat evidence at a US court martial, even agreed or uncontested evidence or prosecution evidence, as fact. Summers replied that agreed evidence or prosecution evidence at the US court martial clearly was agreed by the US government as fact, and what was at issue at the moment was whether the US government was charging contrary to the facts it knew. Baraitser said she would return to her point once witnesses were heard.

Baraitser was no making no attempt to conceal a hostility to the defence argument, and seemed irritated they had the temerity to make it. This burst out when discussing c), the Iraq war rules of engagement. Summers argued that these had not been solicited from Manning, but had rather been provided by Manning in an accompanying file along with the Collateral Murder video that showed the murder of Reuters journalists and children. Manning’s purpose, as she stated at her court martial, was to show that the Collateral Murder actions breached the rules of engagement, even though the Department of Defense claimed otherwise. Summers stated that by not including this context, the US extradition request was deliberately misleading as it did not even mention the Collateral Murder video at all.

At this point Baraitser could not conceal her contempt. Try to imagine Lady Bracknell saying “A Handbag” or “the Brighton line”, or if your education didn’t run that way try to imagine Pritti Patel spotting a disabled immigrant. This is a literal quote:

“Are you suggesting, Mr Summers, that the authorities, the Government, should have to provide context for its charges?”

An unfazed Summers replied in the affirmative and then went on to show where the Supreme Court had said so in other extradition cases. Baraitser was showing utter confusion that anybody could claim a significant distinction between the Government and God.

The bulk of Summers’ argument went to refuting behaviour 3), putting lives at risk. This was only claimed in relation to materials a) and d). Summers described at great length the efforts of Wikileaks with media partners over more than a year to set up a massive redaction campaign on the cables. He explained that the unredacted cables only became available after Luke Harding and David Leigh of the Guardian published the password to the cache as the heading to Chapter XI of their book Wikileaks, published in February 2011.

Nobody had put 2 and 2 together on this password until the German publication Die Freitag had done so and announced it had the unredacted cables in August 2011. Summers then gave the most powerful arguments of the day.

The US government had been actively participating in the redaction exercise on the cables. They therefore knew the allegations of reckless publication to be untrue.

Once Die Freitag announced they had the unredacted materials, Julian Assange and Sara Harrison instantly telephoned the White House, State Department and US Embassy to warn them named sources may be put at risk. Summers read from the transcripts of telephone conversations as Assange and Harrison attempted to convince US officials of the urgency of enabling source protection procedures – and expressed their bafflement as officials stonewalled them. This evidence utterly undermined the US government’s case and proved bad faith in omitting extremely relevant fact. It was a very striking moment.

With relation to the same behaviour 3) on materials d), Summers showed that the Manning court martial had accepted these materials contained no endangered source names, but showed that Wikileaks had activated a redaction exercise anyway as a “belt and braces” approach.

There was much more from the defence. For the prosecution, James Lewis indicated he would reply in depth later in proceedings, but wished to state that the prosecution does not accept the court martial evidence as fact, and particularly does not accept any of the “self-serving” testimony of Chelsea Manning, whom he portrayed as a convicted criminal falsely claiming noble motives. The prosecution generally rejected any notion that this court should consider the truth or otherwise of any of the facts; those could only be decided at trial in the USA.

Then, to wrap up proceedings, Baraitser dropped a massive bombshell. She stated that although Article 4.1 of the US/UK Extradition Treaty forbade political extraditions, this was only in the Treaty. That exemption does not appear in the UK Extradition Act. On the face of it therefore political extradition is not illegal in the UK, as the Treaty has no legal force on the Court. She invited the defence to address this argument in the morning.

It is now 06.35am and I am late to start queuing…

With grateful thanks to those who donated or subscribed to make this reporting possible.

This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.

Woolwich Crown Court is designed to impose the power of the state. Normal courts in this country are public buildings, deliberately placed by our ancestors right in the centre of towns, almost always just up a few steps from a main street. The major purpose of their positioning and of their architecture was to facilitate public access in the belief that it is vital that justice can be seen by the public.

Woolwich Crown Court, which hosts Belmarsh Magistrates Court, is built on totally the opposite principle. It is designed with no other purpose than to exclude the public. Attached to a prison on a windswept marsh far from any normal social centre, an island accessible only through navigating a maze of dual carriageways, the entire location and architecture of the building is predicated on preventing public access. It is surrounded by a continuation of the same extremely heavy duty steel paling barrier that surrounds the prison. It is the most extraordinary thing, a courthouse which is a part of the prison system itself, a place where you are already considered guilty and in jail on arrival. Woolwich Crown Court is nothing but the physical negation of the presumption of innocence, the very incarnation of injustice in unyielding steel, concrete and armoured glass. It has precisely the same relationship to the administration of justice as Guantanamo Bay or the Lubyanka. It is in truth just the sentencing wing of Belmarsh prison.

When enquiring about facilities for the public to attend the hearing, an Assange activist was told by a member of court staff that we should realise that Woolwich is a “counter-terrorism court”. That is true de facto, but in truth a “counter-terrorism court” is an institution unknown to the UK constitution. Indeed, if a single day at Woolwich Crown Court does not convince you the existence of liberal democracy is now a lie, then your mind must be very closed indeed.

Extradition hearings are not held at Belmarsh Magistrates Court inside Woolwich Crown Court. They are always held at Westminster Magistrates Court as the application is deemed to be delivered to the government at Westminster. Now get your head around this. This hearing is at Westminster Magistrates Court. It is being held by the Westminster magistrates and Westminster court staff, but located at Belmarsh Magistrates Court inside Woolwich Crown Court. All of which weird convolution is precisely so they can use the “counter-terrorist court” to limit public access and to impose the fear of the power of the state.

One consequence is that, in the courtroom itself, Julian Assange is confined at the back of the court behind a bulletproof glass screen. He made the point several times during proceedings that this makes it very difficult for him to see and hear the proceedings. The magistrate, Vanessa Baraitser, chose to interpret this with studied dishonesty as a problem caused by the very faint noise of demonstrators outside, as opposed to a problem caused by Assange being locked away from the court in a massive bulletproof glass box.

Now there is no reason at all for Assange to be in that box, designed to restrain extremely physically violent terrorists. He could sit, as a defendant at a hearing normally would, in the body of the court with his lawyers. But the cowardly and vicious Baraitser has refused repeated and persistent requests from the defence for Assange to be allowed to sit with his lawyers. Baraitser of course is but a puppet, being supervised by Chief Magistrate Lady Arbuthnot, a woman so enmeshed in the defence and security service establishment I can conceive of no way in which her involvement in this case could be more corrupt.

It does not matter to Baraitser or Arbuthnot if there is any genuine need for Assange to be incarcerated in a bulletproof box, or whether it stops him from following proceedings in court. Baraitser’s intention is to humiliate Assange, and to instill in the rest of us horror at the vast crushing power of the state. The inexorable strength of the sentencing wing of the nightmarish Belmarsh Prison must be maintained. If you are here, you are guilty.

It’s the Lubyanka. You may only be a remand prisoner. This may only be a hearing not a trial. You may have no history of violence and not be accused of any violence. You may have three of the country’s most eminent psychiatrists submitting reports of your history of severe clinical depression and warning of suicide. But I, Vanessa Baraitser, am still going to lock you up in a box designed for the most violent of terrorists. To show what we can do to dissidents. And if you can’t then follow court proceedings, all the better.

You will perhaps better accept what I say about the Court when I tell you that, for a hearing being followed all round the world, they have brought it to a courtroom which had a total number of sixteen seats available to members of the public. 16. To make sure I got one of those 16 and could be your man in the gallery, I was outside that great locked iron fence queuing in the cold, wet and wind from 6am. At 8am the gate was unlocked, and I was able to walk inside the fence to another queue before the doors of the courtroom, where despite the fact notices clearly state the court opens to the public at 8am, I had to queue outside the building again for another hour and forty minutes. Then I was processed through armoured airlock doors, through airport type security, and had to queue behind two further locked doors, before finally getting to my seat just as the court started at 10am. By which stage the intention was we should have been thoroughly cowed and intimidated, not to mention drenched and potentially hypothermic.

There was a separate media entrance and a media room with live transmission from the courtroom, and there were so many scores of media I thought I could relax and not worry as the basic facts would be widely reported. In fact, I could not have been more wrong. I followed the arguments very clearly every minute of the day, and not a single one of the most important facts and arguments today has been reported anywhere in the mainstream media. That is a bold claim, but I fear it is perfectly true. So I have much work to do to let the world know what actually happened. The mere act of being an honest witness is suddenly extremely important, when the entire media has abandoned that role.

James Lewis QC made the opening statement for the prosecution. It consisted of two parts, both equally extraordinary. The first and longest part was truly remarkable for containing no legal argument, and for being addressed not to the magistrate but to the media. It is not just that it was obvious that is where his remarks were aimed, he actually stated on two occasions during his opening statement that he was addressing the media, once repeating a sentence and saying specifically that he was repeating it again because it was important that the media got it.

I am frankly astonished that Baraitser allowed this. It is completely out of order for a counsel to address remarks not to the court but to the media, and there simply could not be any clearer evidence that this is a political show trial and that Baraitser is complicit in that. I have not the slightest doubt that the defence would have been pulled up extremely quickly had they started addressing remarks to the media. Baraitser makes zero pretence of being anything other than in thrall to the Crown, and by extension to the US Government.

The points which Lewis wished the media to know were these: it is not true that mainstream outlets like the Guardian and New York Times are also threatened by the charges against Assange, because Assange was not charged with publishing the cables but only with publishing the names of informants, and with cultivating Manning and assisting him to attempt computer hacking. Only Assange had done these things, not mainstream outlets.

Lewis then proceeded to read out a series of articles from the mainstream media attacking Assange, as evidence that the media and Assange were not in the same boat. The entire opening hour consisted of the prosecution addressing the media, attempting to drive a clear wedge between the media and Wikileaks and thus aimed at reducing media support for Assange. It was a political address, not remotely a legal submission. At the same time, the prosecution had prepared reams of copies of this section of Lewis’ address, which were handed out to the media and given them electronically so they could cut and paste.

Following an adjournment, magistrate Baraitser questioned the prosecution on the veracity of some of these claims. In particular, the claim that newspapers were not in the same position because Assange was charged not with publication, but with “aiding and abetting” Chelsea Manning in getting the material, did not seem consistent with Lewis’ reading of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, which said that merely obtaining and publishing any government secret was an offence. Surely, Baraitser suggested, that meant that newspapers just publishing the Manning leaks would be guilty of an offence?

This appeared to catch Lewis entirely off guard. The last thing he had expected was any perspicacity from Baraitser, whose job was just to do what he said. Lewis hummed and hawed, put his glasses on and off several times, adjusted his microphone repeatedly and picked up a succession of pieces of paper from his brief, each of which appeared to surprise him by its contents, as he waved them haplessly in the air and said he really should have cited the Shayler case but couldn’t find it. It was liking watching Columbo with none of the charm and without the killer question at the end of the process.

Suddenly Lewis appeared to come to a decision. Yes, he said much more firmly. The 1989 Official Secrets Act had been introduced by the Thatcher Government after the Ponting Case, specifically to remove the public interest defence and to make unauthorised possession of an official secret a crime of strict liability – meaning no matter how you got it, publishing and even possessing made you guilty. Therefore, under the principle of dual criminality, Assange was liable for extradition whether or not he had aided and abetted Manning. Lewis then went on to add that any journalist and any publication that printed the official secret would therefore also be committing an offence, no matter how they had obtained it, and no matter if it did or did not name informants.

Lewis had thus just flat out contradicted his entire opening statement to the media stating that they need not worry as the Assange charges could never be applied to them. And he did so straight after the adjournment, immediately after his team had handed out copies of the argument he had now just completely contradicted. I cannot think it has often happened in court that a senior lawyer has proven himself so absolutely and so immediately to be an unmitigated and ill-motivated liar. This was undoubtedly the most breathtaking moment in today’s court hearing.

Yet remarkably I cannot find any mention anywhere in the mainstream media that this happened at all. What I can find, everywhere, is the mainstream media reporting, via cut and paste, Lewis’s first part of his statement on why the prosecution of Assange is not a threat to press freedom; but nobody seems to have reported that he totally abandoned his own argument five minutes later. Were the journalists too stupid to understand the exchanges?

The explanation is very simple. The clarification coming from a question Baraitser asked Lewis, there is no printed or electronic record of Lewis’ reply. His original statement was provided in cut and paste format to the media. His contradiction of it would require a journalist to listen to what was said in court, understand it and write it down. There is no significant percentage of mainstream media journalists who command that elementary ability nowadays. “Journalism” consists of cut and paste of approved sources only. Lewis could have stabbed Assange to death in the courtroom, and it would not be reported unless contained in a government press release.

I was left uncertain of Baraitser’s purpose in this. Plainly she discomfited Lewis very badly on this point, and appeared rather to enjoy doing so. On the other hand the point she made is not necessarily helpful to the defence. What she was saying was essentially that Julian could be extradited under dual criminality, from the UK point of view, just for publishing, whether or not he conspired with Chelsea Manning, and that all the journalists who published could be charged too. But surely this is a point so extreme that it would be bound to be invalid under the Human Rights Act? Was she pushing Lewis to articulate a position so extreme as to be untenable – giving him enough rope to hang himself – or was she slavering at the prospect of not just extraditing Assange, but of mass prosecutions of journalists?

The reaction of one group was very interesting. The four US government lawyers seated immediately behind Lewis had the grace to look very uncomfortable indeed as Lewis baldly declared that any journalist and any newspaper or broadcast media publishing or even possessing any government secret was committing a serious offence. Their entire strategy had been to pretend not to be saying that.

Lewis then moved on to conclude the prosecution’s arguments. The court had no decision to make, he stated. Assange must be extradited. The offence met the test of dual criminality as it was an offence both in the USA and UK. UK extradition law specifically barred the court from testing whether there was any evidence to back up the charges. If there had been, as the defence argued, abuse of process, the court must still extradite and then the court must pursue the abuse of process as a separate matter against the abusers. (This is a particularly specious argument as it is not possible for the court to take action against the US government due to sovereign immunity, as Lewis well knows). Finally, Lewis stated that the Human Rights Act and freedom of speech were completely irrelevant in extradition proceedings.

Edward Fitzgerald then arose to make the opening statement for the defence. He started by stating that the motive for the prosecution was entirely political, and that political offences were specifically excluded under article 4.1 of the UK/US extradition treaty. He pointed out that at the time of the Chelsea Manning Trial and again in 2013 the Obama administration had taken specific decisions not to prosecute Assange for the Manning leaks. This had been reversed by the Trump administration for reasons that were entirely political.

On abuse of process, Fitzgerald referred to evidence presented to the Spanish criminal courts that the CIA had commissioned a Spanish security company to spy on Julian Assange in the Embassy, and that this spying specifically included surveillance of Assange’s privileged meetings with his lawyers to discuss extradition. For the state trying to extradite to spy on the defendant’s client-lawyer consultations is in itself grounds to dismiss the case. (This point is undoubtedly true. Any decent judge would throw the case out summarily for the outrageous spying on the defence lawyers).

Fitzgerald went on to say the defence would produce evidence the CIA not only spied on Assange and his lawyers, but actively considered kidnapping or poisoning him, and that this showed there was no commitment to proper rule of law in this case.

Fitzgerald said that the prosecution’s framing of the case contained deliberate misrepresentation of the facts that also amounted to abuse of process. It was not true that there was any evidence of harm to informants, and the US government had confirmed this in other fora, eg in Chelsea Manning’s trial. There had been no conspiracy to hack computers, and Chelsea Manning had been acquitted on that charge at court martial. Lastly it was untrue that Wikileaks had initiated publication of unredacted names of informants, as other media organisations had been responsible for this first.

Again, so far as I can see, while the US allegation of harm to informants is widely reported, the defence’s total refutation on the facts and claim that the fabrication of facts amounts to abuse of process is not much reported at all. Fitzgerald finally referred to US prison conditions, the impossibility of a fair trial in the US, and the fact the Trump Administration has stated foreign nationals will not receive First Amendment protections, as reasons that extradition must be barred. You can read the whole defence statement, but in my view the strongest passage was on why this is a political prosecution, and thus precluded from extradition.

For the purposes of section 81(a), I next have to deal with the question of how
this politically motivated prosecution satisfies the test of being directed against
Julian Assange because of his political opinions. The essence of his political
opinions which have provoked this prosecution are summarised in the reports
of Professor Feldstein [tab 18], Professor Rogers [tab 40], Professor Noam
Chomsky [tab 39] and Professor Kopelman:-
i. He is a leading proponent of an open society and of freedom of expression.
ii. He is anti-war and anti-imperialism.
iii. He is a world-renowned champion of political transparency and of the
public’s right to access information on issues of importance – issues such
as political corruption, war crimes, torture and the mistreatment of
Guantanamo detainees.
5.4.Those beliefs and those actions inevitably bring him into conflict with powerful
states including the current US administration, for political reasons. Which
explains why he has been denounced as a terrorist and why President Trump
has in the past called for the death penalty.
5.5.But I should add his revelations are far from confined to the wrongdoings of
the US. He has exposed surveillance by Russia; and published exposes of Mr
Assad in Syria; and it is said that WikiLeaks revelations about corruption in
Tunisia and torture in Egypt were the catalyst for the Arab Spring itself.
5.6.The US say he is no journalist. But you will see a full record of his work in
Bundle M. He has been a member of the Australian journalists union since
2009, he is a member of the NUJ and the European Federation of Journalists.
He has won numerous media awards including being honoured with the
highest award for Australian journalists. His work has been recognised by the
Economist, Amnesty International and the Council of Europe. He is the winner
of the Martha Gelhorn prize and has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize, including both last year and this year. You can see from the
materials that he has written books, articles and documentaries. He has had
articles published in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post
and the New Statesman, just to name a few. Some of the very publications for
which his extradition is being sought have been refereed to and relied upon in
Courts throughout the world, including the UK Supreme Court and the
European Court of Human Rights. In short, he has championed the cause of
transparency and freedom of information throughout the world.
5.7.Professor Noam Chomsky puts it like this: – ‘in courageously upholding
political beliefs that most of profess to share he has performed an
enormous service to all those in the world who treasure the values of
freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know
what their elected representatives are doing’ [see tab 39, paragraph 14].
So Julian Assange’s positive impact on the world is undeniable. The hostility
it has provoked from the Trump administration is equally undeniable.
The legal test for ‘political opinions’
5.8.I am sure you are aware of the legal authorities on this issue: namely whether
a request is made because of the defendant’s political opinions. A broad
approach has to be adopted when applying the test. In support of this we rely
on the case of Re Asliturk [2002] EWHC 2326 (abuse authorities, tab 11, at
paras 25 – 26) which clearly establishes that such a wide approach should be
adopted to the concept of political opinions. And that will clearly cover Julian
Assange’s ideological positions. Moreover, we also rely on cases such as
Emilia Gomez v SSHD [2000] INLR 549 at tab 43 of the political offence
authorities bundle. These show that the concept of “political opinions” extends
to the political opinions imputed to the individual citizen by the state which
prosecutes him. For that reason the characterisation of Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency” by Mr Pompeo makes
clear that he has been targeted for his imputed political opinions. All the
experts whose reports you have show that Julian Assange has been targeted
because of the political position imputed to him by the Trump administration –
as an enemy of America who must be brought down.

Tomorrow the defence continue. I am genuinely uncertain what will happen as I feel at the moment far too exhausted to be there at 6am to queue to get in. But I hope somehow I will contrive another report tomorrow evening.

With grateful thanks to those who donated or subscribed to make this reporting possible.

This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.

While it is true that rogue states – most notably the USA – have always posed a threat to the rule of international law, I see no serious room to dispute that the development of the corpus of international law, and of the institutions to implement it, was one of the great achievements of the twentieth century, and did a huge amount to reduce global conflict.

The International Court of Justice, the Law of the Sea Tribunal, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organisation, these are just some of the institutions which have played an extremely positive role, helping resolve hundreds of disputes during their existence and, still more importantly, helping establish rules that prevented thousands more disputes from arising. Regional Organisations, dozens of them including the EU, the African Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, have also flourished.

The judgement of the ICJ in the 160 cases it has heard has almost always been respected by the parties to the case. That has applied even when the dispute is radical, inflammatory and had already led to fighting and deaths, such as the settlement of the Nigeria/Cameroon border. The ICJ has been a massive success story.

The foundation of the International Criminal Court in 2002 was the high water mark in establishing the rule of law as the guiding principle of international affairs. As with all the major worldwide institutions of international law, the UK had played a leading role in the establishment of the ICC. I was in the FCO at the time, and I remember the quiet confidence that eventually the USA would join up, just as they had with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea after decades of havering. In fact, the ICC has been a major disappointment, of which more later. I refer to 2002 as the high water mark for the rule of international law, because subsequently the tide has turned decisively against it.

When Blair and Bush invaded Iraq, not only without the sanction of the UN Security Council but in the certain knowledge the Security Council was against it, and in Blair’s case against the unanimous opinion of the FCO’s entire cadre of Legal Advisers who stated that the war was illegal, they not only precipitated a crisis that has resulted in millions of deaths, they dealt a killing blow to the entire fabric of international law.

The results are now becoming every day more visible. We have just survived for now, thanks to Iran’s remarkable sense and restraint, a dangerous crisis in the Middle East following the illegal assassination of General Soleimani, who was travelling on a diplomatic mission at the time. The use on a massive scale of execution by drone – including execution of UK and US nationals – by the British and American governments, often without the permission of the government in whose territory the execution takes place, is an appalling breach of international law for which there appears to be no effective remedy.

The FCO Legal Advisers refused to advise that the killing of Soleimani was legal in international law. However the UK government no longer cares if something is legal in international law or not. The government line was originally that there was an “arguable case” that the assassination was legal, then after objections from legal advisers the line changed to “it is not for the UK to determine whether the drone strike is legal”.

The United Kingdom used to be a pillar, arguably the most important pillar, of international law. Thanks to a series of neo-con politicians, including Blair, Straw, Cameron, May and Johnson, the UK scarcely makes a pretence any more abut giving a fig about international law. It simply ignores the instruction of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice to decolonise the Chagos Islands. It refuses to implement the binding international arbitration on debt owed to Iran. It mocks the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. It refuses to allow the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women into asylum detention centres. I could go on. A direct consequence of this is sharply diminished UK influence in the world, and in particular for the first time in 71 years it does not have a seat on the International Court of Justice. As the UK has effectively spurned the authority of the ICJ, this is scarcely surprising.

It was the UK’s reputation as an upholder of international law that moderated outrage at the UN at the UK’s anachronistic permanent membership of the UN Security Council. That international respect no longer exists, and the British Government are deluded if they think that the UK’s privileged UN status will last forever, especially as it can no longer be represented as a proxy for EU foreign policy.

The UN itself is of course suffering a sustained threat to its authority. It is simply ignored on the dreadful Saudi led disaster in Yemen. By refusing the Iranian foreign minister a visa to attend a Security Council meeting on Soleimani, the USA struck at the very purpose of the UN. If the institution is to be held the hostage of its geographical host, what is its purpose? Ultimately, to regain relevance the UN would have both democratically to reform and to relocate, perhaps to South Africa. I do not see that happening in the near future.

As for the International Criminal Court, that has been a severe disappointment which in many ways symbolises the collapse of international law. Its failure to prosecute Bush and Blair for the war on Iraq set its direction from the beginning. Waging aggressive war is in itself a war crime and was indelibly established as such by the Nuremburg Tribunal. That it was not specifically mentioned in the Rome Statute was a flimsy pretext from judges not willing to take on power. The same judges have bottled out of investigation of US crimes in Afghanistan and appear to be in the same process over war crimes in Gaza, where astonishingly there has been no backing from states for the ICC against Netanyahu’s threat to institute sanctions against ICC staff if investigations continue. I used to defend the ICC robustly over accusations that it was simply a tool of neo-con policy. I now find it very hard to do so.

The UK is not the only country ignoring international law. Spain’s repudiation of the European Court of Justice decision that Junqueras must be released to take his seat in the European Parliament is a huge blow to the prestige and authority of that organisation. Spain’s vicious persecution of Catalonia is itself the most comprehensive challenge that “western values” have faced for decades in the European heartland, by a large measure worse than anything which Orban has done. Spain completely ignores its Council of Europe obligations.

The structure of international law is looking very shoogly indeed. It does matter, a very great deal. The world is becoming a significantly more dangerous place as a result.