➜⇢ ➽ ➤ Heaven Protect Us From Men Who Live the Illusion of Danger: Pete Buttigieg and the US Military “America deserves a Commander-in-Chief who knows what that sacrifice means and who will honor the sacred promise we make to our veterans.” #CIAPete has been trending on social media this past month as stories and commentaries have emerged telling and re-telling Pete Buttigieg’s role as a naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan, his duties in his assignment in Kabul as a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, and his relationship to CIA colleagues. This would be all rather amusing and just another dust speck of non-sense in the vast universe of inanity that is the US presidential race, if it were not for Buttigieg’s own use of his time in uniform and in Afghanistan as a cudgel to silence others from both an informed and moral perspective on issues of foreign policy and war. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/26/heaven-protect-us-from-men-who-live-the-illusion-of-danger-pete-buttigieg-and-the-us-military/

➜⇢ ➽ ➤ ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Should Journalists Be Punished For Exposing War Crimes? Should journalists and publishers be punished for exposing US war crimes?, asks Caity Johnstone. A British judge this week has started the process of answering a very important question. It’s a question that many of us knew was the heart of this debate back in 2010, ten years ago, when this all started. It’s a question that they have been obfuscating, bloviating, huffily denying, smearing, gaslighting, and distracting from–basically doing anything they can to hide it from view.

It’s a question that they don’t want the public to know that we are answering. A question that goes to the heart of democracy, and to the heart of the role of the fourth estate, journalism. And that question is this:

Should journalists and publishers be punished for exposing US war crimes?

And, ancillary to that question: should we allow them to be punished by the very people who committed those war crimes? https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/25/assange-extradition-should-journalists-be-punished-for-exposing-war-crimes/

➜⇢ ➽ ➤ RAY McGOVERN: Queen’s Counsel Charges vs Assange ‘Significantly Overwrought’

CIA and Pentagon are saying, in effect, “Trust Us.” What could possibly go wrong? — aside from a publisher of accurate information spending the rest of his life in prison .

We are about to see how malleable the British Court system is to diktat from Washington. Will the British embrace the flimsiest of circumstantial “evidence” from U.S. security services that have axes to grind?

Will British officials turn their back on 800 years of progress on the human rights wrested from King John at Runnymede? Are there today no “English Nobles” to thwart the obscene “legal” proceedings aimed at extraditing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a U.S. prison for publishing the truth about U.S. and UK war crimes? https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/25/ray-mcgovern-queens-counsel-charges-vs-assange-significantly-overwrought/

➜⇢ ➽ ➤ Pete Buttigieg Brings 9-Year-Old Boy on Stage to Announce He’s Gay https://pjmedia.com/election/pete-buttigieg-brings-9-year-old-boy-on-stage-to-announce-hes-gay/?fbclid=IwAR266zTghopyDP6VxpcSUYmZdXNLnOMlfbiVVsdkp_kLj37OHc_fIGazgoc

➜⇢ ➽ ➤ Intelligence Sources: All Candidates Are Russian Agents But Pete Buttigieg Following shocking reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post that Moscow is simultaneously working to both re-elect Donald Trump and ensure the nomination of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary race, NNC has obtained further information confirming that nearly all candidates currently running for president are in fact covert agents of the Russian government.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the lone candidate not literally conducting espionage on behalf of the Russian government is Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“Intelligence has revealed that Mr. Buttigieg is at this time the only candidate who we can count on not to place our nation’s interests square in the hands of Vladimir Putin,” an anonymous source in the Central Intelligence Agency told NNC on Saturday. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/02/23/intelligence-sources-all-candidates-are-russian-agents-but-pete-buttigieg/

➜⇢ ➽ ➤ #MeToo Founder Tarana Burke: Harvey Weinsteins of the World Can’t Exist Without “Systems of Power” Disgraced former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was convicted of first-degree commission of a criminal sexual act and third-degree rape, but acquitted of two more serious charges. “If we turn a blind eye to the systems that they operate in, then we’ll just have another Harvey Weinstein. … That’s why we have to upend the systems,” says Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement. We also speak with award-winning actress Rosanna Arquette, who was one of the first women to share details of Weinstein’s sexual misconduct. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/25/tarana_burke_me_too_systemic_issues

➜⇢ ➽ ➤ Nine Years After Bahrain’s Uprising, Its Human Rights Crisis Has Only Worsened

Despite well documented abuses in the kingdom, the spigot of aid and arms from the U.S. and U.K. remains open. It’s been nine years since Bahrain’s February 2011 uprising. Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in cities and towns across the country to protest the ruling Al Khalifa family’s tight grip on power, discrimination against the country’s majority Shia population, and arrests of political critics.

The 2011 uprising itself came 10 years after the 2001 referendum in which citizens voted overwhelmingly for the National Action Charter. The charter promised key democratic reforms, including a popularly elected national assembly.

Despite the “honeymoon” after the National Action Charter’s adoption, Bahrain gradually reverted to its repressive past, and by 2010 authorities were detaining prominent opposition activists and closing opposition organizations, and reports of torture of detainees surfaced frequently.

A similar pattern played out following the last uprising. https://fpif.org/nine-years-after-bahrains-uprising-its-human-rights-crisis-has-only-worsened/

➜⇢ ➽ ➤ Making America Unsafe Again

Whether it’s Russian hackers, deadly viruses, or unscrupulous investors, the Trump administration has made it much easier for some foreign agents to destabilize the United States. Donald Trump is all about boundaries. At a personal level, he doesn’t like touching strangers for fear of infection. Politically, he makes no long-lasting close alliances. And geopolitically, he obsesses over strong borders: big walls, more stringent immigration requirements, tariffs on foreign imports.

But Trump is nothing if not a walking contradiction. For a guy who shies away from shaking hands with strangers, he has no problem putting his hands all over women who recoil from his touch. And for someone who talks so much about keeping America safe, he has undermined many of the traditional mechanisms that have protected the country from foreign interference.

So, for instance, while the president diverts money from the Pentagon to block people coming from the south to do jobs Americans don’t want to do, he is simultaneously ignoring the Russian trolls and hackers who have targeted the U.S. electoral system. Meanwhile, Trump gutted the government infrastructure for dealing with pandemics, leaving the United States especially vulnerable during the current coronavirus outbreak. https://fpif.org/make-america-unsafe-again/