#Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions

[caymannewsservice]

Failure to prosecute officials in clinic raid to be reviewed

(CNS): Director of Public Prosecutions Simon Davis has indicated he will review the decision not to prosecute any of the government officials involved in the unlawful raid of the Doctors Express medical facility in 2019. Lawyers representing the clinic filed for a judicial review relating to that decision and the failure of the authorities to hold any of those involved to account following the…

[jobskenyaplace]

ODPP INVITATION TO VARIOUS ODPP TENDER JANUARY 2024  

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS TENDER JANUARY 2024   INVITATION TO TENDER The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) invites sealed tenders from eligible tenderers for the following tenders: – S/ No. Tender No. Tender Description Tender Group Closing 1. ODPP/OT/007/2023-2024. Provision for Maintenance of Photocopiers & Printers for the Office of the Director of…

[infiniteglitterfall]

I guess this might be why the UK seemed to go so antisemitic so quickly

I'm researching the 1947 pogroms in the UK. (Actually, I'm researching all the pogroms and massacres of Jews in the past 200 years. Which today led me to discover that there were pogroms in the UK in 1947.)

From an article on "The Postwar Revival of British Fascism," all emphasis mine:

Given the rising antisemitism and widespread ignorance about Zionism [in the UK in 1947], fascists were easily able to conflate Zionist paramilitary attacks with Judaism in their speeches, meaning British Jews came to be seen as complicit in violence in Palestine.

Bertrand Duke Pile, a key member of Hamm’s League, informed a cheering crowd that “the Jews have no right to Palestine and the Jews have no right to the power which they hold in this country of ours.” Denouncing Zionism as a way to introduce a wider domestic antisemitic stance was common to many speakers at fascist events and rallies. Fascists hid their ideology and ideological antisemitism behind the rhetorical facade of preaching against paramilitary violence in Palestine.

One of the league’s speakers called for retribution against “the Jews” for the death of British soldiers in Palestine. This was, he told his audience, hardly an antisemitic expression. “Is it antisemitism to denounce the murderers of your own flesh and blood in Palestine?” he asked his audience. Many audience members, fascist or not, may well have felt the speaker had a point. ...[The photo of two British sergeants hanged by the Irgun in retaliation for the Brits hanging three of their members] promptly made numerous appearances at fascist meetings, often attached to the speaker’s platform. In at least one meeting, several British soldiers on leave from serving in Palestine attended Hamm’s speech, giving further legitimacy to his remarks. And with soldiers and policemen in Palestine showing increasing signs of overt antisemitism as a result of their experiences, the director of public prosecutions warned that the fascists might receive a steady stream of new recruits.

MI5, the U.K. domestic security service, noted with some alarm that “as a general rule, the crowd is now sympathetic and even spontaneously enthusiastic.” Opposition, it was noted in the same Home Office Bulletin of 1947, “is only met when there is an organized group of Jews or Communists in the audience.”

The major opposition came from the 43 Group, formed by the British-Jewish ex-paratrooper Gerry Flamberg and his friends in September 1946 to fight the fascists using the only language they felt fascists understood — violence. The group disrupted fascist meetings for two purposes: to get them shut down by the police for disorder, and to discourage attendance in the future by doling out beatings with fists and blunt instruments. By the summer of 1947, the group had around 500 active members who took part in such activities. Among these was a young hairdresser by the name of Vidal Sassoon, who would often turn up armed with his hairdressing scissors.

The 43 Group had considerable success with these actions, but public anger was spreading faster than they could counter the hate that accompanied it. The deaths of Martin and Paice had touched a nerve with the populace. On Aug. 1, 1947, the beginning of the bank holiday weekend and two days after the deaths of the sergeants, anti-Jewish rioting began in Liverpool. The violence lasted for five days. Across the country, the scene was repeated: London, Manchester, Hull, Brighton and Glasgow all saw widespread violence. Isolated instances were also recorded in Plymouth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Newcastle and Davenport. Elsewhere, antisemitic graffiti and threatening phone calls to Jewish places of worship stood in for physical violence. Jewish-owned shops had their windows smashed, Jewish homes were targeted, an attempt was made to burn down Liverpool Crown Street Synagogue while a wooden synagogue in Glasgow was set alight. In a handful of cases, individuals were personally intimidated or assaulted. A Jewish man was threatened with a pistol in Northampton and an empty mine was placed in a Jewish-owned tailor shop in Davenport.

And an important addendum:

I've read a whole bunch of articles about the pogroms in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Eccles, Glasgow, etc.

Not one of them has mentioned that the Irgun, though clearly a terrorist group, was formed in response to 18 years of openly antisemitic terrorism, including multiple incredibly violent massacres. Or that it consistently acted in response to the murders of Jewish civilians, not on the offensive. Or that at this point, militant Arab Nationalist groups with volunteers and arms from the Arab League countries had been attacking Jewish and mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhoods for months.

I just think the "Jewish militants had been attacking the British occupiers" angle is incredibly Anglocentric.

Yeah, they were attacking the British occupiers. But also, that's barely the tip of the iceberg.

Everyone involved hated the Brits at this point. If only al-Husseini and his ilk had hated the Brits more than they hated the Jews, Britain could at least have united them by giving them a common enemy.

[luminalunii97]

saying F U to the regime again and again: a quick update on women vs IR regime

Famous Iranian actresses have been appearing in public without a mandatory hijab. This has been happening since the beginning of the protests. Last month, Kiumars Pourahmad, a well known Iranian screenwriter and director, committed suicide. He had a history of criticizing the regime's political decisions. At his funeral, some of the famous actresses attended without mandatory hijab.

You can see Fateme Motamedarya, Katayoun Riyahi, and Golab Adineh in these pictures from the funeral. Ms. Riyahi was one of the first celebrities who took her hijab off at the start of the Jina (Mahsa) Amini protest and for that she's been the target of IRGC harassment and has been to court.

Last week, in the ceremony of screening of the final episode of Lion's Skin (a persian crime show), actress Pantea Bahram participated without hijab. The manager of Tehran’s Lotus Cinema, where the ceremony was held, was fired for letting her attend without hijab.

Other than prosecution, the regime has blocked these celebrities' bank accounts. Basij and IRGC members have also attacked and harassed these women online and in real life.

Students on university campuses take off their hijabs. There's an installed version of morality police in universities that monitor students' styles. Female students must wear "appropriate" hijab and male students must wear "manly" clothes (one of my guy friends once was asked to go back home and change his shoes because they were red casual loafers. Apparently that's gay!). When you enroll in Iranian universities, the first thing you do is to go to the security office and sign an agreement that says you promise to follow the Islamic dress code. There are posters all over the campus that says things like "hijab is security" "respect the islamic hijab" and "not wearing appropriate hijab (tight short clothes, too much hair, makeup, etc) would result in legal action". So not wearing hijab on campus, where a lot of security cameras are installed and it's easy to identify you, is a big deal.

The regime's response to students taking off their hijabs is sending threatening messages to students' phones and increasing the security people. At the entrance of Universities, these security forces check people's clothes and if it's not proper they won't let you in. Some of the students wear the hijab at the entrance and take it off after they're in. They have warned our professors to not let non hijabi students sit in classes too.

One of my favorite trends in Iran now is when guys wear our hijab. These pictures are from universities. Guys wearing hijab make the security mad. This is a great act of solidarity with women against the obligatory hijab.

Some men have been doing either this or wearing shorts in public. The former is to ridicule the obligatory dress code and the latter is because wearing shorts in public is forbidden for guys too.

And women not wearing hijab in general. Though hijab is not our only issue, we want a whole new political system, one that is not theocratic or terroristic, hijab is something the regime won't back down from because it's one of their strongest oppressing tools. If they let us win the fight against obligatory hijab, I quote from a regime head, "people keep demanding more changes"!

So to put people against people to enforce the hijab law again, the regime has closed down many businesses (hotels, cafes, malls, bookstores, etc) for welcoming non hijabi female costumers. They have also warned taxi and bus drivers to not let non hijabi women in their vehicles.

Although not everyone is disobeying the hijab law (some believe in hijab, some don't want to pay the price), the number of women who take the risk and don't wear hijab in Tehran and many other cities is high enough that you feel encouraged to keep doing it.

[aressida]

"The British government is cracking down on people who share social media posts about the U.K. riots.

The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, warned against "publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So, if you retweet that, then you’re republishing that and then potentially you're committing that offense."

He added further, "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material, and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth."

"So it's very, very serious. People might think they're not doing anything harmful. They are. And the consequences will be visited upon them," Parkinson said."

TG -> https://t.me/AussieCossack/20884

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan, Yuval Abraham, and Meron Rapoport at The Guardian:

When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.” Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”. The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so. Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents. Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened. Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs.

A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila. Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet. The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it. Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure.

A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.” Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

[...] That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”. One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.” [...] Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction.

The Guardian's report on how Israel led a 9-year intimidation war campaign against the ICC is a must-read.

[mariacallous]

The Women’s Network of Croatia and other women’s associations held press conferences in 15 cities on Friday ahead of the National Day of Combating Violence Against Women to draw attention to what they described as the lenient treatment of rape and femicide offenders.

They demanded a transparent trial and appropriate punishment for the killer of 21-year-old Mihaela Berak, who was shot dead in the city of Osijek in eastern Croatia a year ago.

The trial of police officer Marko Smazil, in whose apartment Berak was killed, is being held behind closed doors.

Maja Celing Celic of the Adele association, an NGO dealing with women’s rights, told a press conference in Osijek that the trial is closed to the public due to the alleged intimate relationship between the victim and the killer.

But Celing Celic said that jealousy and feelings of revenge should not be used as excuses in the trial. “None of this can be a mitigating circumstance for the murder,” she said.

Friday’s multi-city campaign action was held under the slogan “Stop protecting rapists and abusers”.

Campaigners also called for a just conclusion to the trial of a gynaecologist from the Osijek Clinical Hospital Centre, identified by the court under the initials Z.T., who was convicted under a first-instance verdict of raping a patient, but continued to work in the hospital for months after that.

The defendant is appealing against the conviction and claiming innocence.

Sanja Kastratovic of Adele told the press conference that the Osijek Clinical Hospital Centre’s management did not initiate any procedure to distance the accused from women, while the Croatian Medical Chamber suspended the disciplinary proceedings against him.

The gynaecologist was arrested again on Monday after another patient reported him for allegedly committing lewd acts.

“The system started functioning only after the media got involved,” said Kastratovic.

Adele called for the resignation of the director of the Osijek Clinical Hospital Centre and the minister of health.

Kastratovic also cited a verdict at the Municipal Court in Osijek, where three men, one of whom is a policeman, were sentenced to two years in prison for the rape of a girl with mental disabilities.

The court took into account as mitigating circumstances the fact that they were participants in the 1990s ‘Homeland War’ and were decorated for their service.

“The mitigating circumstances cast a shadow over Croatia, on the Croatian police and on Croatian veterans, because they are being used to create a class of people who are allowed to commit rape and serve [only] two years in prison,” Kastratovic told BIRN.

Adele is also demanding changes to the Law on Healthcare that would oblige the directors of healthcare institutions to temporarily suspend a person who is being prosecuted for sexual crimes.

On Sunday, the National Day of Combating Violence Against Women, a Women’s Long March will be held in Osijek – a protest calling for the protection of women from violence and the defence of their rights.

[petewentzisblack1312]

news from st lucia: the director of public prosecutions wants to arrest some operation restore confidence implicated police officers (ie police officers who are accused of extrajudicial deaths). this is amidst a backdrop of an increase in crime following the pandemic leading to the government to give more power and fewer restrictions to the police, which is actually exactly what operation restore confidence was/is (increase in crime following the global recession leading to ORC as an initiative that unleashed the police and lead to the aforementioned extrajudicial murder). the dpp has also requested the formation of an independent unit to investigate police involved murders, and that has been approved, but has not happened yet.

[simply-ivanka]

Biden Still Hasn’t Learned

The administration launches one last frenzy of spending and regulating.

How much damage can a president do in two months? America may be about to find out as the man considered mentally unfit to be prosecuted or run for re-election embarks on a mad dash to advance a failed agenda.

Fatima Hussein, Matthew Daly and Collin Binkley reported on Friday for the Associated Press:

Biden administration officials are working against the clock doling out billions in grants and taking other steps to try to preserve at least some of the outgoing president’s legacy before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

But voters just said that they don’t want this legacy preserved, especially when it comes to the Biden spending and regulating that did so much to fuel inflation. The AP notes:

Biden administration officials hope that projects funded under the $1 trillion infrastructure law and $375 billion climate law will endure beyond Biden’s term and are working to ensure that money from the landmark measures continues to flow…

The Energy Department, meanwhile, announced a $544 million loan to a Michigan company to expand manufacturing of high-quality silicon carbide wafers for electric vehicles. The loan is one of 28 deals totaling $37 billion granted under a clean-energy loan program that was revived and expanded under Biden.

“There is a new urgency to get it all done. We’re seeing explosions of money going out the door,” said Melinda Pierce, legislative director of the Sierra Club. Biden and his allies ”really want to finish the job they started.”

Has the White House already forgotten that Michigan voters—many of them dissatisfied with the administration’s mania for electric vehicles—voted just two weeks ago against climate-related explosions of taxpayer funds? Now Team Biden has a “new urgency” to do what voters don’t want. Apparently there’s also a new urgency to try to do what the people’s representatives in Congress don’t want and have refused to do. The AP reporters note:

The Education Department has been hurrying to finalize a new federal rule that would cancel student loans for people who face financial hardship. The proposal — one of Biden’s only student loan plans that hasn’t been halted by federal courts — is in a public comment period scheduled to end Dec. 2.

After that, the department would have a narrow window to finalize the rule and begin carrying it out, a process that usually takes months. Like Biden’s other efforts, it would almost certainly face a legal challenge.

Of course it would, because he’s trying once again to make significant changes to this program without a vote in Congress.

Besides the spending surge, the other great inflation fuel of the Biden era has been his regulatory surge. Federal red tape contributes to inflation by making it more difficult and more costly to produce goods, thus making goods more rare and more expensive. Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes today on the latest productivity-killing emissions from federal agencies, as measured in pages of federal rules and proposed rules:

The 2024 Federal Register topped 90,000 pages and is now the second-longest ever, dating back to 1936, with more than a month still to go.

The last month of this year is shaping up to be one big crude gesture directed at consumers. Mr. Young writes that the 2024 Federal Register is on pace for 102,426 pages, which seems to put Mr. Biden in the running to be the all-time champion of such noxious federal paperwork emissions. Mr. Young adds:

The all-time record adjusted page count (subtracting skips, jumps, and blank pages) is 96,994, set in 2016.

Some said that President Barack Obama’s regulatory pace could never be equalled. But look at Mr. Biden go!

Wouldn’t it be nice if the people who are still running our government at least pretended to be listening to voters?

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 23 April 1979, Aotearoa/New Zealand born teacher and socialist Clement Blair Peach was hit by police on an anti-Nazi demonstration in Southall, Middlesex, possibly with an illegal weapon, and later died. Peach had joined thousands of people in an area with a large south Asian and Sikh population to protest against a meeting of the far-right National Front in the town hall. After he was hit he was taken into a nearby house which an ambulance was called. He was then taken to Ealing Hospital with an extradural haematoma, and died shortly after midnight. A subsequent police investigation found that one of six members of the notoriously violent Special Patrol Group was responsible. The officers' lockers were searched, and illegal weapons discovered like a lead cosh. The officers also quickly cleaned their uniforms and changed their appearances after the attack, and several of them lied to investigators. As a result of the deception, the guilty party could not be identified. The investigator did recommend that three officers who had conspired and lied should be charged with obstruction and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, but the director of public prosecutions appointed by the Labour government declined to prosecute them. Officials refused to hold the inquest into Peach's death in front of a jury, and despite multiple witnesses testifying to the police attack, the inquest returned a verdict of "death by misadventure". The coroner disregarded witness testimony which he deemed to be from people who were socialist, or who were Sikh, and according to him "did not have experience of the English system" to be reliable. Since at least the 1930s, police in the UK routinely have helped neo-Nazis organise meetings and demonstrations, attacking and arresting anti-fascists who protest against them. More: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9539/Blair-Peach-murdered https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=613495540823665&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[darkmaga-returns]

President-elect Donald Trump’s likely CIA director Kash Patel has called for the urgent declassification of the Jeffrey Epstein client list and Sean “Diddy” Combs list of co-conspirators as a means of restoring trust in government.

Trump insiders including Elon Musk believe the President-elect is likely to reward long-term loyalist and New York-born attorney Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel with the role of CIA director. A former Republican House staffer, Patel served in various high-ranking staff roles in the defense and intelligence communities during Trump’s first term.

Patel has also been a vocal advocate for the political prisoners who were prosecuted over the January 6 riots.

During an interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Patel said that Trump should create a ‘declassification office’ in order to increase transparency in government and restore public trust.

In response to that proposal, social media personality ALX wrote on X that Patel ‘should be the next CIA Director under Donald Trump.’

‘Good idea,’ Musk replied to the tweet, which included a clip of Patel’s interview.

The opinion of the Tesla, X and SpaceX boss holds a lot of weight with Trump.

DailyMail report: Musk has been with the president-elect ever since Election Day on November 5. Since then the two have been seen dining, golfing and walking around Mar-a-Lago together.

And female NASCAR icon Danica Patrick is backing Patel’s bid to take helm at the CIA, writing on X: ‘Let’s go Kash!’ 

She also said if he does lead the U.S.’s top intelligence agency, she’d love to see Patel declassify the ‘UFO files… while you’re at it.’ 

Earlier this summer, Musk joked online about creating a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that would focus on slashing the D.C. bureaucracy and regulations Republicans feel hold certain industries back. 

Musk first endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt against him at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally in July.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

But it’s also the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in microcosm. Compare Khan’s description of the role played by NGOs and sympathetic media with how Matti Friedman, a former Associated Press reporter who wrote about the media’s problems covering Israel after the 2014 Gaza war, describes the effects of this same alliance on coverage: “these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.”

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these NGOs are extremely powerful, because their perceived authority magnifies their voices above those who may know much more about the issues but who don’t have the megaphone or the credibility lent to the European-funded activist groups masquerading as “humanitarians.” Throughout the current war, polls of American public opinion have never demonstrated that the progressive pro-Hamas rump on college campuses or among city protest groups should be catered to. In Israel vs Hamas, Americans don’t hesitate to side with Israel. Even the “ceasefire at any cost” crowd is smaller than it looks and sounds. A Marist poll last week put their share of the public at 25 percent. Yet they have nudged President Biden’s policies in their direction.

How? The protests on college campuses showed not just the organizing power of the left but the role of the media in amplifying their grievances and whitewashing their violence and lawbreaking. And it works in the other direction too: In many cases the media plays a key role in feeding the wildfire of misinformation that fuels the protests before turning around and reporting on them.

UN groups have been uncritically parroting the obviously inaccurate Hamas-produced death tolls. So have the media. In explaining why the Washington Post trusts Hamas propaganda enough to report it as fact, the paper quoted Omar Shakir in Hamas’s defense. Shakir is the Israel/Palestine director of Human Rights Watch and someone who was expelled from Israel over his support for BDS-affiliated groups that seek Israel’s destruction. In other words, if you switched the staffing of the Hamas Health Ministry and Human Rights Watch, the output of both organizations would likely be unchanged.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 01, 2024

This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term. Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again. 

Cortellessa writes that Trump intends to establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.” 

He plans to use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. He is willing to permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. He will shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). He would like to bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ending the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. In a second Trump presidency, the U.S. might not come to the aid of a European or Asian ally that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. Trump would, Cortelessa wrote, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

To that list, former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer added on social media that if Trump wins, “he could replace [Supreme Court justices Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.” 

“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.�� 

Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions. The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy. 

Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency. 

The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.

Buckley soon began to publish his own magazine, the National Review, in which he promised to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story,” but it was a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by lawyer Lewis M. Powell Jr. for a friend who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that insisted the media had a liberal bias that must be balanced with a business perspective. 

Warning that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell worried not about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system.” They were, he wrote, a small minority. What he worried about were those coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” 

Businessmen must “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” he wrote, launching a unified effort to defend American enterprise. Among the many plans Powell suggested for defending corporate America was keeping the media “under constant surveillance” to complain about “criticism of the enterprise system” and demand equal time. 

President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and when Nixon was forced to resign for his participation in the scheme to cover up the attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election, he claimed he had to leave not because he had committed a crime, but because the “liberal” media had made it impossible for him to do his job. Six years later, Ronald Reagan, who was an early supporter of Buckley’s National Review, claimed the “liberal media” was biased against him when reporters accurately called out his exaggerations and misinformation during his 1980 campaign. 

In 1987, Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the Fairness Doctrine that required media with a public license to present information honestly and fairly. Within a year, talk radio had gone national, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh electrifying listeners with his attacks on “liberals” and his warning that they were forcing “socialism” on the United States. 

By 1996, when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel (FNC), followers had come to believe that the news that came from a mainstream reporter was likely left-wing propaganda. FNC promised to restore fairness and balance to American political news. At the same time, the complaints of increasingly radicalized Republicans about the “liberal media” pushed mainstream media to wander from fact-based reality to give more and more time to the right-wing narrative. By 2018, “bothsidesing” had entered our vocabulary to mean “the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument when the credibility of that side may be unmerited.”

In 2023, FNC had to pay almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and it has since tried to retreat from the more egregious parts of its false narrative. 

News broke yesterday that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had threatened to sue FNC for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” Today, FNC quietly took down from its streaming service its six-part “mock trial” of Hunter Biden, as well as a video promoting the series. 

Also today, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial for election fraud, found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors. Merchan also fined Trump $1,000 per offense, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. This afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts. 

For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court. We know who he is, and today, Trump himself validated the truth of what observers who deal in facts have been saying about what a second Trump term would mean for the United States.

Reacting to the Time magazine piece, James Singer, the spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, released a statement saying: “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today—because of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power…. Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to democracy.” 

Tomorrow, May 1, is “Law Day,” established in 1958 by Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as a national recognition of the importance of the rule of law. In proclaiming the holiday today, Biden said: “America can and should be a Nation that defends democracy, protects our rights and freedoms, and pioneers a future of possibilities for all Americans. History and common sense show us that this can only come to pass in a democracy, and we must be its keepers.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[aressida]

“We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales cautions that sharing riot-related content online might be considered a criminal offense.

[beardedmrbean]

Aug. 7 (UPI) -- British authorities were gearing up for a wave of riots across England with reports of at least 30 planned for Wednesday night amid fears the offices of law firms that represent immigrants and asylum seekers could be potential targets.

A "standing army" of 6,000 police was mobilized after far-right groups circulated a list of 39 immigration lawyers, charities and groups that provide services to migrants and refugees on social media and 500 prison spaces had been freed up as public prosecutors threatened swingeing justice for those participating in or organizing violent disorder.

"All of us are concerned that a list is being circulated online," Communities Minister Jim McMahon told BBC Radio.

"We at this point don't know if those will transpire to be protests in the way that we've seen in other places. Or whether it's a list that's intended just to cause alarm and distress, or even to provoke.

"But to be clear we are absolutely prepared in terms of our policing response, our prosecutor response and also our court response," said McMahon.

The country's top prosecutor said at least one rioter had been charged with terror offenses and warned his office would consider the same where organized groups were planning "really serious disruption to advance an ideology."

Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson said his officials would deploy every legal means available to put people behind the disorder behind bars and that anti-terrorism laws were being used in one ongoing prosecution.

Police also said they were confident they would be able to maintain control.

The Law Society said it had "serious concerns for the safety and wellbeing" of its members with at least one immigration advice center boarding up its windows and doors in anticipation of trouble.

"A direct assault on our legal profession is a direct assault on our democratic values and we are supporting our members who are being targeted," the society's president, Nick Emmerson, said in a post on X.

He added that he had written to Prime Minister Keir Starmer asking that the threats against the profession be treated with the "utmost seriousness."

The non-profit advocacy group Hope Not Hate warned the list was an aspirational "hit list" that called for action, "up to and including terrorism" against the targets named at 8 p.m. local time, circulated by an anonymous individual who it said was also involved in instigating anti-Muslim violence in Southport and Liverpool over the past week.

"This actor, who has also called for the assassinations of public figures, must be brought to justice and face the full force of the law," HNH said in a news release.

The group said the purpose of the list was to spread fear and uncertainty as it was impossible to predict whether and where attacks might materialize and therefore "any and all services should be on high alert."

HNH said it was also monitoring a number of other far-right demonstrations planned for the days ahead which it said were emerging "more organically" and so may attract larger numbers of protesters.

The developments came after a night of relative calm with police in Liverpool and Durham tamping down tensions with the use of dispersal orders that give them powers to order people to leave the area.

The coroner was due to open inquests Wednesday morning in the Liverpool suburb of Sefton into the killings of Bebe King, 6, Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, in nearby Southport on July 29.

The last of the eight other children and two adults injured in the stabbing spree at a dance studio -- triggering a week of unrest across England and Wales -- were discharged from hospital.

Axel Muganwa Rudakubana,17, of Banks in Lancashire, was charged July 31 with three counts of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder and possession of a bladed weapon.

On Wednesday, the first rioters were also sent to prison with a judge at Liverpool Crown Court sentencing one man to three years for taking part in violent disorder in Southport last week when a mob hijacked a vigil for the slain girls, injuring dozens of police and attacking police vehicles and a mosque.

The man received a concurrent two-month sentence for assaulting a police officer.

Another man was sentenced to 28 months in prison for violent disorder and torching a police vehicle in Liverpool plus two months for perpetrating "malicious communication."

A third man was sent to prison for 18 months plus two months for a "racially aggravated element" of the offense.

The first significant prison sentences follow the jailing of an 18-year-old man sent to prison Tuesday for two months after pleading guilty to criminal damage charges following a riot near Manchester on Sunday.

About 100 among the more than 400 people arrested across the country since rioting erupted a day after the July 29 killings in Southport pleaded not guilty to various charges but, unusually, were refused bail pending trial.

Juveniles, however, continue to be bailed in line with standard policy.

[mariacallous]

In less than a day, prosecutors, police and the government in Serbia reacted to an AI deepfake video of Prime Minister Milos Vucevic allegedly posted on Facebook.

The rapid reaction contrasted with other cases of deepfake content posted in Telegram groups or broadcast on national TV stations about Serbian citizens and opposition politicians.

The Special Prosecution Office for High Tech Crime told the police to collect all “necessary notifications” on the matter, said a prosecutor’s statement on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the government said a Facebook account named Corvus01 had posted the AI-generated video statement in which the PM talked about “non-existent government projects”.

“A criminal complaint has been filed against an NN [anonymous] person and work is being done to establish the identity of the person,” the statement said, adding that police had asked Meta company to send them all data on the account and to remove the fake video.

As the video is not publicly available, it was probably removed after the government’s request.

However, BIRN’s Digital Rights Violations Annual Report 2022-2023 noted numerous other cases of AI-generated videos of politicians being published without sanctions.

In August 2023, Zeljko Mitrovic, owner of pro-government TV Pink, published AI-manipulated footage of Marinika Tepic, vice-president of the opposition Freedom and Justice Party, misrepresenting her remarks.

The same month, Mitrovic did the same with Dragan Djilas, president of the Freedom and Justice Party, airing the video on TV Pink as “satire”. Mitrovic posted the deepfake on X and later showed it on TV Pink without the audience being properly informed that it was fabricated.

Mila Tomanovic, a lawyer handling the Djilas case, told BIRN that Djilas sought a temporary measure that would prohibit the broadcast and re-recording of the video but the Higher Court in Belgrade in November 2023 rejected the call. The Court of Appeal then cancelled the decision of the Higher Court, which is currently considering the temporary measure again.

Tomanovic said Mitrovic defended the edited video as artistic expression. “However, the spread of violence, lies, fraud, deception, misuse of other people’s data, provision of false data and fabrication and presenting a person in a false light cannot possibly be art, or of importance to a democratic society,” Tomanovic said.

Other cases in which Serbian institutions didn’t respond concerned tens of thousands of Telegram users in Serbia who were sharing images of women “undressed” by artificial intelligence, as BIRN reported this week.

Ana Toskic Cvetinovic, executive director at Partners for Democratic Change, an NGO from Serbia and a privacy protection expert, told BIRN that the prosecution in the case of the PM likely reacted to a criminal complaint of the unauthorised publication and display of other people’s files, portraits and video.

“In our country, there is no specifically regulated or sanctioned use of artificial intelligence for the generation of audio and video content, so the use of deepfake can be brought under existing criminal offences, such as unauthorised publication,” she said.

She added that what was specific in the latest case was “the speed of reaction of the prosecution, which is mostly absent in other cases”.

“The prosecution and the police generally state that these crimes are difficult to prove, including collecting evidence from companies that manage social networks,” Toskic Cvetinovic noted.

Nina Nicovic, a lawyer, told BIRN that a direct parallel cannot be drawn between the fake recording of PM Vucevic and the deepfake material circulating on social networks and Telegram groups about “ordinary citizens”.

“If something related to the non-existent projects of the government of any country is really published on a video, then every country … has the right to react urgently because it can lead to consequences for the country,” said Nicovic.

However, she added that her impression is that institutions in Serbia only react fast to rights violations in the digital sphere when politicians are involved.

“If they can react so quickly to everything related to the government and politicians, in certain situations such as the Telegram groups they should have reacted just as urgently,” Nicovic said.

She said one big obstacle is that the courts, prosecutor’s offices and the police do not have enough IT experts to help solve these cases.

thinking about @roycohn's post about AI deepfakes and Ted Cruz...