Highlighting a story tonight that's important and that I had never heard about before tonight. John Russell (LGBTQ NATION) reports:
Sometime in the late 1950s, Australia became home to the world’s only
gay prison. The story of the prison and what went on there remained
buried for decades until out journalist Patrick Abboud heard about it from a colleague in late 2017, just after Australia voted to legalize same-sex marriage.
Abboud’s three-year investigation of the story resulted in one of the most fascinating and disturbing podcasts of 2022.
The Greatest Menace: Inside the Gay Prison Experiment was released earlier this year and is streaming for free on Audible.com.
The series explores how and why the prison was established, the
far-reaching effects it had on Australia’s LGBTQ+ community, and the
mystery surrounding what officials discovered via their “experiments”
there.
Abboud says that the prison in Cooma, New South Wales, was
operational by 1958 and may have housed gay prisoners as late as the
1980s. Through his reporting, he came to believe that the prison was
intentionally established to research the causes and treatments of
homosexuality and to eradicate it. He describes how New South Wales
police purposefully entrapped gay men, arresting and charging them with
“indecent assault” even for consensual encounters. Along the way, he
spoke to historians, former vice squad cops, and men they entrapped and
arrested.
“Discovering what some of those men went through in the process of being trapped and charged, it’s horrifying. It really is,” Abboud told News.au.com earlier this year. “Their lives were destroyed, and they’re still reeling from it.”
What prisoners experienced in the Cooma facility was chilling.
But at the heart of The Greatest Menace remains a mystery.
“They established a prison specifically to incarcerate gay men,
specifically to incarcerate homosexuals and they had an intention behind
that,” Abboud said. “We uncovered the intention. And then what came of
that intention? And that’s the part that really niggles at me the whole
time. Where’s the report? Where’s the findings of what happened? My
instinct is that they didn’t want it to be widely known.”
“Whatever they did, either they didn’t discover what they wanted to,
and they wanted to bury it because it didn’t turn out how they wanted
to, or there’s something kind of explosive that they didn’t want to get
out,” he continued.
What is known, and is revealed through Abboud’s interviews and
recreations of actual court transcripts, is the history of persecution
that gay men faced. Abboud told News.au.com in February, “When you
unpack and sort of understand the time, and what was going on, it’s
really sad.”
I'm listening to it on AUDIBLE right now.
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Tuesday, December 20, 2022. US President Joe Biden continues to
persecute Julian Assange -- even as calls for his release continue and,
in fact, increase, ISIS is not 'back' in Iraq because it never left (and
their acts of terrorism are getting harder and harder to ignore), and
much more.
Starting with Julian Assange.
Press freedom and rights organizations on Thursday
expressed "grave concern" about the Biden administration's "relentless
pursuit" of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian who is
jailed in London while he fights against extradition to the United
States.
"It is more than a year since our coalition sent a joint letter calling for the charges against Assange to be dropped," 21 groups wrote
to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. "Today, we repeat those
concerns, and urge you to heed our request. We believe that the
prosecution of Assange in the U.S. would set a harmful legal precedent
and deliver a damaging blow to press freedom by opening the way for
journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive
classified material from whistleblowers."
For those who've forgotten, Julian's 'crime' was revealing the
realities of Iraq -- Chelsea Manning was a whistle-blower who leaked the
information to Julian. WIKILEAKS then published the Iraq War Logs.
And many outlets used the publication to publish reports of their own.
For example, THE GUARDIAN published many articles based on The Iraq War
Logs. Jonathan Steele, David Leigh and Nick Davies offered, on October 22, 2012:
A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the
Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident
US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have
leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters
and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
•
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse,
torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct
appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a
notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after
they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in
previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no
official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081
non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical
evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or
ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric
shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat
The Biden administration
has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and
vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal
assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.
But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States
under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used
before for publishing classified information.
Whether the US justice department continues to
pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group
put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics
before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether
the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to
protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
President Joe Biden is pressing ahead with a controversial criminal
case against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a whistleblower
website. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the
UK’s harsh Belmarsh Prison while appealing extradition to the United
States, where he faces espionage and computer intrusion charges that
could land him in a maximum security prison for 175 years. Meanwhile,
the U.S case against Assange is facing mounting criticism here at home
as a threat to press freedom. In a twist this month that could have
far-reaching implications for the case, two people are asking the
Justice Department to indict them as well. John Young, who runs a
Wikileaks-like website, Cryptome.org, and legendary Pentagon Papers
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are demanding they be indicted for
publishing and/or retaining the same documents for which Julian Assange
is being charged.
In 1971, Dan Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of
U.S. involvement in Vietnam, to several newspapers, including the New
York Times and the Washington Post. The resulting stories sent
shockwaves through the nation, further eroding public support for the
war. President Richard Nixon was furious, and orchestrated a criminal
campaign to destroy Ellsberg and to block further publication of the
papers. Nixon failed in both efforts, and the case against Ellsberg was
thrown out of court.
Today, Dan Ellsberg, sharp and alert at 91, sees stark parallels in
the case against Julian Assange which, he says, invalidate the
government’s case.
“Assange, like me, was illegally surveilled. In his case, even his
lawyers’ and his doctors’ discussions were surveilled,” Ellsberg said
this week on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Discussions were made of
kidnapping and killing him or poisoning, just as a dozen CIA assets were brought up from Miami on May 3rd, 1973, by President Nixon with orders to ‘incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally’.”
John Young’s website, Cryptome.org, actually published the same set
of “Cablegate” documents days earlier than Wikileaks, and the material
is still available on the site. “I’m unclear why, if they’re charging
him, why they’ve never charged someone like us,” Young, who turns 87
next
AMY GOODMAN:
Pressure is growing on President Biden to drop charges against
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s been jailed in Britain since his
arrest in April of 2019. The Biden administration is asking the U.K.
government to extradite him to the U.S., where he faces up to 175 years
in prison on espionage and hacking charges if he’s found guilty at
trial. WikiLeaks says Assange could be extradited within weeks. Assange
was first arrested 12 years ago this month, on December 7th, 2010. After
a period under house arrest, he lived in the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London, where he had political asylum, from 2012 to 2019.
Five major news organizations, including The New York Times,
which once partnered with WikiLeaks, recently called on the Biden
administration to drop charges against Assange, writing, quote, “This
indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine
America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press,” unquote. The letter goes on to say, “Publishing is not a crime.” The letter was signed by The New York Times, The Guardian in Britain, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany and El PaÃs in Spain.
Meanwhile, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg recently
revealed he was in possession of confidential documents containing
evidence of U.S. war crimes leaked by former military analyst Chelsea
Manning and given to him as backup by WikiLeaks. In a recent message to
President Biden and the Justice Department, Ellsberg wrote on Twitter,
quote, “I am as indictable as he is on the exact same charges,” unquote.
The founder of the website Cryptome.org
has also written to the Justice Department asking to be indicted, as
well. Cryptome’s founder, John Young, says he should be added as a
co-defendant in the prosecution of Assange because he published some of
the same leaked government documents at the center of the U.S. case
against Assange. Cryptome is a website that began in 1996 and is seen by
many as a precursor to WikiLeaks. Young also helped Assange start
WikiLeaks in 2006. While Assange faces 175 years in U.S. prison if he’s
extradited and convicted, the U.S. government has never moved to
prosecute Young, who says he published the unredacted State Department
cables two days prior to WikiLeaks. The U.S. government has never even
asked Young to remove the documents.
Well, today, in a Democracy Now! exclusive, we’re joined by
both Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg in Berkeley, California,
and Cryptome’s John Young here in New York.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dan Ellsberg, let’s begin with you. Why don’t you lay out what you’re asking the Justice Department to do?
DANIEL ELLSBERG:
I’m asking them to look closely at the charges they have brought
against, actually, past whistleblowers, all past, and Chelsea Manning
and Julian Assange, potentially against me and John Young, because, as
lawyers said at the time of my first trial back in 1971 — Melville
Nimmer, the leading scholar of law of information at that point, said
that if the Espionage Act were used against someone who had done what I
had admittedly done — copy and distribute 7,000 pages of top-secret
documents — that law was unconstitutional. And that’s been true ever
since. It’s unconstitutional use against sources, as it has been done
several dozen times, especially in this century under Presidents Obama
and Trump, and now Biden. It’s also unconstitutional use against
journalists. That’s blatantly unconstitutional. They never tried it,
even under President Obama, when President Biden was vice president.
They backed off because of the clear unconstitutionality under the First
Amendment, which says no law should be passed abridging freedom of the
press.
And finally, by raising this constitutional issue, that I focus on in
particular, I’m showing that the law can be used absurdly — at least
absurdly, broadly — against someone like me, who admittedly retained and
failed to deliver — these are the words of 18 USC
793 paragraph e. And I know that so well, as a nonlawyer — I’m a
defendant — because I was the first person charged with that for giving
information to the public. So, I am as guilty, in their eyes, as
Assange. How come they haven’t come after me for this? I did much the
same a year ago and raised this challenge. If the — at last, the media,
who have been derelict in informing themselves on a law which was always
potentially there to indict them, if they do this and really raise the
issue of the necessity to abandon or strongly amend the Espionage Act so
as to exclude journalists and exclude whistleblowers who are trying to
inform the American public, they can — if they want to continue as they
are, they can come after me, which means anyone who retains a copy of The New York Times
which has the word “classified” in it, and who fails to turn over that
copy to authorities authorized to receive it — mail it in to the Justice
Department, I guess — is as guilty as I am under the plain language of
that act.
A British-type Official Secrets Act is barred from America after our
Revolution by the First Amendment of the United States, freedom of the
press. They don’t have that. Since my prosecution, the Justice
Department has been using the Espionage Act, intended obviously for
entirely different reasons — spies who secretly give information to
America’s enemies, especially in wartime — they’ve been using it as if
it were an Official Secrets Act. If they succeed with Julian Assange, in
extraditing him — which Biden could stop tomorrow, and should — if they
succeed in that, prosecute him and convict him, we will not have a
First Amendment. It’s as if we didn’t fight a War of Independence,
actually, with respect to anything they regarded as related to national
defense. Free speech is pretty much out the door.
And I want to raise the issue that the act even promotes the
possibility of prosecuting people like me, who do not even publish — I
was a backup for Julian Assange, didn’t have to publish — but can get
anybody who handles that material, any secretary at the newspaper and
any reader of The New York Times.
AMY GOODMAN:
John Young, Dan Ellsberg is perhaps the most famous whistleblower in
the world in releasing the Pentagon Papers. You are not as well known.
You founded Cryptome.org back in the ’90s. Explain why you are saying, if Julian Assange is guilty, you should be jailed, as well.
JOHN YOUNG:
Well, it’s pretty clear, looking at the indictment of Julian Assange
and the 18 citations that he’s charged, as far as I could tell, all
those apply to me and Cryptome, that we’ve been doing this now since
1996. We publish classified information, secret information from other
countries, within the United States, and so that I’m unclear why, if
they’re charging him, why they’ve never charged someone like us. By the
way, we’re only one of dozens of people who are putting out this kind of
information, from the Federation of American Scientists to the National
Security Archive. This has been going on for quite a long while. So our
sense is that they’re trying to use Assange as an example to frighten
people. That, to me, is selective vindication against him, and he should
not face this alone.
I think all of those of us who are doing similar kind of work to
serve the public rather than the government should do more than just
protest. I think we’ve got to raise more hell and take more legal action
and publish more, and as our obligation as citizens, that I think the
intelligence agencies are completely out of control. The national
security people are completely out of control. They’re actually trying
to use Assange as a threat against everyone else, not only in the U.S.
but around the world. And this, to us, seems to be anti-democratic. And
we’d like to help combat that by sharing the responsibility that Mr.
Ellsberg and Julian Assange is facing. And we hope others will step up,
as well.
By the way, we’re not publishers. We’re private citizens, practicing
architects. And so we are not doing anything more than exerting our
constitutional rights under the First Amendment. So, this accusation
against Assange would be illegal against an American citizen. So we
think it’s selective prosecution, and it should cease.
AMY GOODMAN:
On Monday, you filed this motion against the U.S. government for
violating your constitutional rights to provide unlimited documents to
the public. Now, specifically in the case of Julian Assange, you say you
published at Cryptome.org, two days
before WikiLeaks did, State Department cables. Explain. You’re saying
the same thing that WikiLeaks revealed, and so you are guilty of the
same crime.
JOHN YOUNG:
Yes, except we don’t see it as a crime. It’s just revelation of
privileged information. We don’t see it as criminal; we see it as free
speech. And it’s all a citizen has to work with if they’re not part of
the press, is to speak up and take responsibility for their views. So
that’s why we did it, is that it was available, thought it worthwhile
for the public to know. It’s been there now for 12 years, hundreds of
downloads. No complaint from the U.S. government against us.
THE
NEW YORK TIMES lied, so many lied. And so many whored. Whoring is
part of US House Rep Nancy Pelosi's record -- especially on Iraq. She
refused to impeach Bully Boy Bush.
You
may remember that US House Rep John Conyers wanted to impeach Bully Boy
Bush. Over fifty years in Congress and John felt there was a strong
case for impeachment. Nancy just didn't want to be bothered. In the
lead up to the 2006 mid-terms, she announced impeachment was off the
table. John continued to try to pursue it and she blocked him
repeatedly. Bully Boy Bush is a War Criminal and Nancy Pelosi covered
for him and protected him. That is -- and forever will be -- a part of
her legacy.
There were two battles in/for/on Falluja during the early years of
the Iraq War. Neither were anything to brag about or take pride in.
Boys were not allowed to leave the city and were treated as armed adult
fighters for 'pacification' purposes. War Crimes were carried out. The
US used illegal weapons. Nothing to be proud of.
Yet a US warship is being named after the battles.
The United States Navy has named a next-generation helicopter
assault ship the USS Fallujah, almost two decades after the western
Iraqi city was the scene of bloody battles that killed hundreds of
civilians.
[. . .]
The US-led coalition conducted a devastating bombing campaign before
their second attack, forcing some 300,000 civilians to flee.
Between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians remained trapped in Fallujah
during the assault, living through what the International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC) described at the time as a “catastrophic”
humanitarian situation.
The ICRC announced immediately after the battle that some 800 Iraqi
civilians were killed in the fighting. It later accused the US of using
white phosphorus as a weapon to defeat the militants.
To this day, babies born in Fallujah have suffered disproportionately
high levels of birth defects, including congenital heart disease,
gastroschisis (where the digestive system is found outside the baby's
body), and Spina Bifida.
One of the most documented reasons for the birth defects has been the
lingering impact of uranium in the local environment, a remnant of the
US bombardment.
,
Fallujah is where, just a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad in
2003, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a crowd of
civilian protesters and killed 17 of them; the U.S. military claimed
that the first shots came from Iraqis, but there is no convincing evidence for that assertion and significant reporting
to the contrary. Fallujah was a stronghold of the ousted dictator
Saddam Hussein and for that reason, its residents fiercely opposed an
unprovoked invasion that was, according to international law, flagrantly
illegal.
Those killings were the prelude to a torrent of violence and
destruction in 2004. The bloodshed that year included the deaths of more
than 1,000 civilians; the point-blank murder of prisoners; and the
torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, just 20 miles away. Fallujah’s
punishment even extended beyond the brutal era of its U.S. occupation;
in years after, there has been a spike in cancers, birth defects, and miscarriages, apparently due to America’s use of munitions with depleted uranium.
Instead of apologizing for what was done, the
U.S. is choosing to celebrate it: The Pentagon announced this week that
a $2.4 billion warship will be named the USS Fallujah. The commandant
of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, made clear that the military has
decided to double down on its fairy tale of Fallujah as an American
triumph. “Under extraordinary odds, the Marines prevailed against a
determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending an urban
area,” he said in a press release about
the naming. “The battle of Fallujah is, and will remain, imprinted in
the minds of all Marines and serves as a reminder to our nation, and its
foes, why our Marines call themselves the world’s finest.”
The announcement noted that more than 100 U.S. and allied soldiers
died in Fallujah but said nothing about the far larger toll of Iraqi
civilians killed, the flattening of swathes of the city through
extensive bombings, the apparent war crimes by U.S. forces, the health
impacts on civilians that continue to this day — and the inconvenient
fact that U.S. forces were unable to keep their hold on Fallujah for
very long. For the Pentagon, it’s as if none of it mattered, or it
didn’t happen.
At least nine police officers have been killed in a bomb and gun attack in northern Iraq.
The attack took place near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, about 290km (180 miles) from the capital Baghdad on Sunday.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility.
IS has already said it was behind the planting of a roadside bomb that killed three Iraqi soldiers near Baghdad on Wednesday.
AFP notes, "Suspected extremists on motorbikes stormed a village north of Baghdad
late Monday and killed eight Iraqi civilians, officials said." ISIS is suspected in that attack.
ISIS
was not vanquished in 2014. It was driven out areas that it was
occupying. Terrrorists really don't occupy. They threaten, they scare,
they carry out violent attacks. But during Nouri al-Maliki's second
term as prime minister, that's how badly he had destroyed Iraq, areas of
it could be held by a terrorist group. Since losing control of those
areas, ISIS has continued to stage attacks.
New content at THIRD:
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