BRITISH DEVIOUSNESS

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Baraitser’s frightening ruling supported virtually every US prosecutorial argument that was made during the extradition trial, no matter how absurd and Orwellian. This includes quoting from a long-discredited CNN report alleging without evidence that Assange made the embassy a “command post” for election interference, saying the right to free speech does not give anyone “unfettered discretion” to disclose any document they wish, dismissing arguments from the defense that UK law prohibits extradition for political offenses, parroting the false claim that Assange’s attempt to help protect his source Chelsea Manning while she was exfiltrating documents she already had access to was not normal journalistic behavior, saying US intelligence might have had legitimate reasons to spy on Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, and claiming Assange’s rights would be protected by the US legal system if he were extradited.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Western propaganda hasn’t gotten less advanced since the Iraq invasion, it has gotten more advanced. The Russiagate psyop and the smear campaigns against Assange and Corbyn make this abundantly clear. The idea that the lies and propaganda which led to the Iraq invasion were a one-off fluke is itself the product of propaganda. You need to be more critical of western narratives than with Iraq, not less.

DAN GLAZEBROOK—Firstly, the UK is an imperial entity. The relinquishing of formal political rule over most of its colonies between the 1940s and 1970s (with the crucial exception of a string of strategically-positioned island territories such as Diego Garcia, the Caymans, the Falklands, the Virgin islands and around a dozen others) has not changed this simple reality. The basic contours of the world economy created by colonialism – a system of wealth transference from Asia, Africa and Latin America to North America and Western Europe – remain intact, and have indeed been strengthened and perfected in the era of neo-colonialism, to the extent that net resource transfers from the global South to the North today amount to roughly $3trillion per year – triple the value of goods and services flowing the other way, and twenty-four times the total value of North-South foreign aid. Much of this uncompensated wealth transfer is via ‘capital flight’, often illicit, and mostly facilitated through the network of tax havens located in Britain’s remaining island colonies.

VANESSA BEELEY—The BBC has recently produced a 15-part radio documentary ‘probe’ into the Le Mesurier fraud allegation and the White Helmets. The “Mayday” series, produced by Chloe Hadjimatheou, turned out to be nothing more than an attempt to smear and discredit researchers, academics, scientists and journalists whose work has exposed the White Helmets to be an armed-group-auxiliary, an extension of power for the UK/US-led regime-change coalition, whose failed agenda is the removal of the Syrian government and President Bashar Assad.

KIT KLARENBERG—The linkage between JAI and the Helmets gains an acutely sinister dimension given the former’s primary base of operations was the city of Douma, the site of a highly controversial alleged chemical weapons attack 7th April 2018. The Helmets were central to Western news reporting in the initial hours and days following the contested strike, its operatives claiming two Syrian Air Force helicopters dropped barrel bombs containing the nerve agent sarin on the city. Images they provided of cylinders embedded in buildings circulated widely on social networks and media platforms the world over, along with footage of local residents being hosed down in hospitals, children foaming at the mouth, and piles of dead bodies in a housing complex.

Paris, London and Washington claimed to possess secret proof Assad’s forces had attacked the city with chemical weapons, and in response launched a series of military strikes against multiple government sites in Syria 14th April 2018. In March 2019, the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued a final report on the incident, which concluded there were “reasonable grounds” to believe a chemical weapons attack had occurred in Douma, and “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

However, a number of the organization’s previously suppressed files are now in the public domain — they make clear the report’s findings were directly contrary to the overwhelming majority of evidence collected by investigators who actually visited Douma, which pointed strongly to a staged ‘false flag’ incident.