AMERICAN PARTY DUOPOLY

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—This is Defense Department stenography. The US military is an invading force in both Syria and Iraq; it is impossible for its actions in either of those countries to be defensive. It is always necessarily the aggressor. It’s the people trying to eject them who are acting defensively. The deaths of US troops and contractors in those countries can only be blamed on the powerful people who sent them there.

ERIC ZUESSE—And then there’s Julian Assange, who has never been convicted of anything but is being drugged and held in a British maximum-security prison as the latest stage in his decade-long imprisonment-without-conviction for anything. A British judge dropped all charges against him and was keeping him in prison pending a decision by Joe Biden (via Merrick Garland) on whether or not to re-assert Donald Trump’s re-assertion of Barack Obama’s assertion that Assange had stolen (though he never stole) and made public U.S. Government secrets and should be extradited to the U.S. for what everyone expects to be a kangaroo court trial that would end in his execution for having done what Daniel Ellsberg had done in the Pentagon Papers case about the Vietnam War. The international hero, Assange, is to be ‘tried’ in a U.S. court. On February 12th, the New York Times bannered, “Biden Justice Dept. Asks British Court to Approve Extradition of Julian Assange”. Biden continues Trump’s continuation of Obama’s attempt to murder Julian Assange.

PHILIP GIRALDI—he new White House Team has been in place for more than a month and it is perhaps time to consider where it is going with America’s fractured foreign policy. To be sure, when a new administration brings in a bunch of “old hands” who made their bones by attacking Syria and Libya while also assassinating American citizens by drone one might hope that those mistakes might have served as valuable “lessons learned.” Or maybe not, since no one in the Democratic Party ever mentions the Libya fiasco and President Joe Biden has already made it clear that Syria will continue to be targeted with sanctions as well as with American soldiers based on its soil. And no one will be leaving Afghanistan any time soon. The Biden team will only let up when Afghanistan is “secure” and there is regime change in Damascus.

JEREMY KUZMAROV—Even a broken clock is right twice a day. And even a liar like Donald Trump can sometimes tell the truth. During the 2020 election campaign, Trump accused Biden of corruption with regard to secret deals involving the Ukraine and China, in which the Vice President venally leveraged the power of his office and title to enrich himself and his son in clear violation of the law.

In that charge, Trump was absolutely right. But he did not know the half of it. Joe Biden’s history of deceit and corruption did not begin with the 2020 election campaign, nor is it limited to his dealings with the Ukraine and China, although they are a good place to start unraveling the myth of Joe Biden as secular saint, whose incorruptible honesty and nobility of character have been so vigorously propagated by corporate media and internalized even by large segments of the left. For example, let us look at “Ukrainegate” and Joe Biden’s part in it.

GLENN GREENWALD—In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld warned that Congress is rapidly approaching this constitutional boundary if it has not already transgressed it. “Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats,” the duo wrote, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.” Added: Deleted: That article compiled just a small sample of case law making clear that efforts to coerce private actors to censor speech implicate core First Amendment free speech guarantees.