CRAIG MURRAY—Baraitser was not 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.
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CRAIG MURRAY—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 center, 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.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—Okay, I’ve said this before. I know Tucker has a sinophobic wacko streak, supports Trump rather squarely (which can be useful when it comes to reaching his ear in moments of real potential war crisis) and he still confuses, unforgivably for a man of his acumen, corporatist warmongering CIA-loving centrist liberals (mostly Democrats) with “the left”, which, if nothing else, besides being a glaring error and an insult to the real left, does a disservice to the cause of serious social change. (It may be the reason most establishmentarians insist on such misleading usage). And of course, Tucker is perched on that cesspool of journalistic cesspools, Fox News, one of the jewels in the Murdoch disinformation machine.
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TED RALL—At the official, ridiculously understated-from-reality inflation rate, $15 in 2012 will be equivalent to $17 in 2021. If the inflation rate were still calculated the same way as a few decades ago, the minimum wage would be at least $25 in order to be worth the same as it was in 1970. If it were up to me, I’d start the discussion at $50. Looking at it from a historical vantage point, Bernie’s proposal is too little, too late for workers. It isn’t radical and it won’t tank the economy—New York and San Francisco are proof of that.
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JEREMY KUZMAROV—Very clearly what we are seeing is a process of scapegoating in which failing corporatist candidates seek to blame Russia for their defeat and the intelligence establishment uses Russia to try and smear candidates who are not to their liking. This strategy represents a sad caricature of the McCarthy period, which is viewed by historians as the worst period of repression in American history.
