BRIAN BERLETIC—The editor of The New Atlas files a haunting message in homage to Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice for the sake of Gaza’s salvation. Moral cowards will attack him as being an extremist or a mental case, but Bushnell was not mental. He simply woke up to the horrors of what his country does and has been doing, and wanted no part of it. Bushnell chose self-immolation to arouse attention and hopefully action against the perverted and hypocritical involvement of America and its equally complicit allies in possibly one of the greatest crimes in history. It took a long time and millions of people to create this evil system; it will take a long time and millions of people to bring it down, notes Berletic. So join those who are working to build a different world. Support the alternative media. Break out of your isolation. Fight today, fight tomorrow, don’t give up.
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EDITOR—Johnson was appointed by the Attorney General to be a “special advocate” in around 2007, Declassified understands. These are specially vetted barristers who act for the purpose of hearing secret evidence in a closed court.
Special advocates “must undergo and obtain Developed Vetting (the highest level of HM Government security clearance) prior to their appointment”, government guidance states. Developed Vetting is required for individuals having “frequent and uncontrolled access to TOP SECRET assets or require any access to TOP SECRET codeword material”.
In 2016, Johnson acted as a special advocate in the case of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan national who accused the UK government and MI6 of participating in kidnapping him and his pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar. The UK government later apologised for its actions that contributed to Belhaj and Bouchar’s rendition, detention and torture.
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JAY JANSON—The State of Israel from its creation has been in bed with a US war-investing business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent, even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible, and afterward blocked a bill to allow 20,000 Jewish children into the U.S. [18] (a war investing business elite that owned the media conglomerates journalists worked for moulding public opinion.)
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It’s a horrific thing, burning alive. I suspect that pretty much everyone who’s ever self-immolated has had serious regrets about it within the first few seconds. There’s simply nothing one can do to prepare oneself for the experience of that kind of pain, or for how long it can take them to lose consciousness after it’s started. At that point the only comfort they could possibly offer themselves is that it can’t go on forever.
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EDITOR—A masterful lesson on how the capitalist/imperialist system really works, which is something the rulers can’t afford to allow because it unmasks their criminality and complete disregard for democracy and all the rest we have been taught to believe in. Fact is, the truth instantly erodes the legitimacy of the international rules-based order, and the credibility of the ruling class in the US, UK, and other members of the US empire, the so-called “collective West”. As Joti Brar notes, we enjoy free speech, “as long as no one is listening…when they begin to lose the quiescence, the passivity of the masses, free speech is over.”
