Tom Roche

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump's lead over Desantis exploding after the indictment news, Trump en route to NYC for surrender, Asa Hutchinson enters the 2024 GOP primary race, Marianne Williamson has a surge poll despite media blackout, a Pro-Russian blogger is blown up by a bomb in St. Petersburg, Fox News on Trial facing a 1.6 billion payout, Elon Musk strips the New York Times of their Blue Checkmark, Saagar looks into how Douglas Mackey an Anti-Hillary Meme Lord was just convicted by the Biden administration, and Krystal looks into Biden letting 15 million people lose their healthcare.

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To discuss the war on whistleblowers, the U.S. government’s prosecution of Julian Assange and how the case against him poses a threat to journalism everywhere, Rania Khalek spoke to Kevin Gosztola, managing editor of Shadowproof, co-host of the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast and author of the newly published book “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.” 

You can purchase Kevin’s book here: https://www.project-censored.org/shop/p/guilty-of-journalism-the-political-case-against-julian-assange 

Follow Kevin’s work at Shadowproof: https://shadowproof.com/ 

You can listen to every episode of Rania Khalek Dispatches anywhere you get podcasts.

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3za9DRK 

Apple: https://apple.co/3zeYpeW 

Co-hosts Gary Brecher & Mark Ames

Co-hosts Gary Brecher & Mark Ames

When most people in the West think of the war in Ukraine, they think of February 24, 2022 when Russia launched its invasion. But for 8 years prior, there had been a war raging in the eastern part of the country that received little attention because its reality was inconvenient for mainstream Western narratives.

In the Donbas region, an estimated 15,000 people had died following what many there described as a US-backed coup in 2014 that gave rise to an anti-Russia government and helped empower far-right sentiments across Ukraine. 

To discuss the war in the Donbas, Rania Khalek was joined by Fergie Chambers of Berkshire Communists and a journalist who recently published a piece in Globetrotter about his time in the Donbas, titled “A Donbas Diary: Looking Back at Early Stages of Conflict in Ukraine.”

Fergie’s article discussed in this episode: https://www.newsclick.in/donbas-diary-looking-back-early-stages-conflict-ukraine?amp

You can listen to every episode of Rania Khalek Dispatches anywhere you get podcasts.

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3za9DRK 

Apple: https://apple.co/3zeYpeW 

Thieves have made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars in artillery equipment, unspecified “weapons systems,” and specialized ammunition meant for U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq, according to exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept.

The thefts, which occurred on, or in transit to, far-flung U.S. outposts in the region, remain unsolved. They are just the latest evidence of a persistent problem that has allowed enemy forces from ISIS in Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan to arm themselves — and even kill Americans and their foreign partners — at U.S. taxpayer expense.

The previously unreported thefts illuminate America’s shadow wars in the region, where a U.S. contractor was killed and six other Americans were wounded last week in a suicide drone assault on a U.S. base in northeast Syria. The kamikaze airstrike on the outpost known as RLZ was one of roughly 80 attacks on American bases in Iraq and Syria since January 2021 that the U.S. has blamed on Iranian proxy groups. President Joe Biden ordered retaliatory airstrikes in response to the latest attack “in order to protect and defend the safety of our personnel.”

The thefts and losses uncovered by The Intercept are just the latest weapons accountability woes to afflict the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria. A 2020 audit by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that Special Operations Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, the main unit that works with America’s Syrian allies, did not properly account for $715.8 million of equipment purchased for those local surrogates.

Losses of weapons and ammunition are exceptionally significant — and the military has taken pains to prevent them. When the U.S. withdrew forces from an outpost near Kobani, Syria, in 2019, it conducted airstrikes on ammunition that was left behind. The military also destroyed equipment and ammunition during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Nevertheless, groups like Amnesty International and Conflict Armament Research have found, for example, that a substantial portion of the Islamic State group’s arsenal was composed of U.S.-made or U.S.-purchased weapons and ammunition captured, stolen, or otherwise obtained from the Iraqi Army and Syrian fighters.

The criminal investigations files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal evidence of at least four significant thefts and one loss of U.S. equipment — roughly $200,000 worth — in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022, including 40mm high-explosive grenades stolen from U.S. Special Forces.

Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, does not even know the extent of the problem.

“This is shocking and tragic,” said Stephanie Savell, the co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. “These stolen weapons will circulate and intensify political and illicit violence and make it more lethal, as we’ve seen happen in other wars and conflicts.”

Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, does not even know the extent of the problem. The task force has no record of any thefts from U.S. forces, said a spokesperson. “[W]e do not have the requested information,” Capt. Kevin T. Livingston, CJTF-OIR’s director of public affairs told The Intercept when asked if any weapons, ammunition, or equipment were stolen in the last five years.

U.S. troops are ostensibly deployed to Iraq and Syria — alongside Iraqi Security Forces, Kurdish troops, and Syrian surrogates — to defeat ISIS, but they also increasingly fight Iran-backed militia groups in a legally murky sideshow war. Americans operate on bases where anonymity is sometimes the norm and local partners such as the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed Kurdish-led group, are not always trusted. With little outside oversight or unembedded coverage of American operations, information about these conflicts is largely limited to dubious statements by U.S. commanders, military press releases, and officially sanctioned reporting. The criminal investigation files obtained by The Intercept offer a rare, unvarnished glimpse at how the U.S. wars in Iraq and Syria are actually fought.

Sometime in late 2020 or early 2021, according to the files, “multiple specialized field artillery tools and equipment” were stolen from a military vehicle while being transported to Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq. When the truck arrived at the outpost in that country’s Kurdistan region, U.S. personnel found it was missing gear valued at $87,335.35. “All probative leads were exhausted,” according to the investigation file. No suspects were identified.

In February 2021, 400 armor-piercing rounds and 42 40mm “High-Explosive Dual Purpose” grenades, which are “capable of penetrating three inches of steel,” according to the Army, were stolen from a Special Forces ammunition supply at Mission Support Site Green Village in northeast Syria. A criminal investigation found “negligent ammunition handling and accountability practices” allowed “unknown person(s) to … pilfer the ammunition,” which was valued at $3,624.64.

Sometime in July or August 2021, “five weapons systems” valued at a total of $48,115 were stolen while being transported via “ground convoy” from Mission Support Site Conoco — a base not far from Green Village — to RLZ, Syria. The weapons were taken from a shipping container. No witnesses were found nor were any leads developed.

Last January, according to the documents, thieves broke into a shipping container en route to Erbil Air Base in Iraq and stole more than $57,000 worth of unspecified military equipment and personal items. Four months later, approximately 2,100 full metal jacket rounds that can pierce body armor and three boxes of unspecified “repair parts” were loaded onto a Blackhawk helicopter at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq and flown to Erbil Air Base, where they were supposedly provided to personnel from a unit called Task Force Attack. That unit, however, claimed that they never received the ammunition, kicking off the investigation. About a month later, Task Force Attack personnel allegedly located a crate containing 1,680 rounds of the missing ammunition, but the records do not account for the remainder of the bullets and parts.

In all but the last case, Army criminal investigators determined that there was probable cause to charge those responsible with larceny of government property or government weapons — if they could only find the thieves.

The 2020 Pentagon inspector general report that detailed improper accounting for more than $700 million in equipment bought for America’s Syrian partners found that Special Operations forces did not “maintain comprehensive lists of all equipment purchased and received.” Another unit, the 1st Theater Sustainment Command, improperly stored weapons such as machine guns and grenade launchers, according to the audit. Both units “left thousands of … weapons and sensitive equipment items vulnerable to loss or theft.” Because of sloppy record keeping and security measures, 1st TSC could not even “determine whether items were lost or stolen.”

Losses of arms and ammunition have been a persistent problem for the Pentagon. By the mid-2010s, the U.S. had already lost track of hundreds of thousands of guns in Afghanistan and Iraq according to research led by Iain Overton of Action on Armed Violence, a London-based charity.

U.S. troops left behind $7 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan.

Even before the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, the Taliban had captured significant quantities of American weaponry. When U.S. troops withdrew in 2021, they left behind $7 billion worth of military equipment. The results have sometimes been disastrous. From Afghanistan to Iraq, these U.S.-supplied weapons were turned on U.S. allies and likely even on American troops.

“Every single one of these weapons that will be provided to our partner forces will be accounted for and pointed at #ISIS,” CJTF-OIR pledged in a 2017 tweet. But CJTF-OIR does not seem to have any information about the thefts, let alone a certainty that American weapons and ammunition stolen between 2020 to 2022 have not been turned on U.S. forces or their partners.

The U.S. military has a long history of cover-ups regarding weapons losses. A 2021 Associated Press investigation found that “at least 1,900 U.S. military firearms were lost or stolen during the 2010s, with some resurfacing in violent crimes” and that the “U.S. Army has hidden or downplayed the extent to which its firearms disappear, significantly understating losses and thefts … [a] pattern of secrecy and suppression [that] dates back nearly a decade.”

CJTF-OIR’s lack of records and transparency make it impossible to know how often U.S. weapons have been lost or stolen in Syria and Iraq and if those arms have been used against U.S. troops or their allies, but Savell of the Costs of War Project fears history will repeat itself. “More people will be injured and killed as a result,” she said of the thefts documented in the criminal investigation files. “This is yet another reverberating consequence of having U.S. military operations in so many overseas locations.”

The post Thieves Rip Off U.S. Weapons as Shadow War in Syria Escalates appeared first on The Intercept.

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“It’s the biggest lie I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I’ve never come across this amount of misinformation.”

The Middle East, known geographically correct as West Asia, is fogged with years of propaganda and misinformation, lies told to us from within and out. And from just reading western media, the perspective of the region is wholly different than what’s really going on.

But Sharmine Narwani, columnist at The Cradle, is actually there, interviewing people in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and more, discovering the real story of West Asia. And now she’s sharing her findings with Useful Idiots.

She explains the truth about the war in Syria and the propaganda coming out of it, lamenting that “a picture is no longer worth a thousand words.” She shares the unreported stories of the women in Iran and the truth about hijab laws. And she reveals a truth about Israel that isn’t told by the protective US media: “Israel is being hit from all sides. It’s so deeply fractured from within.”

It’s a chance to learn about a culturally-rich region, outside the veil of western propaganda. Watch the full interview with Sharmine Narwani on the US’s “no values” policy on dictators in the region, the truth about the morality police in Iran, and the lie of the US fight against ISIS in Syria.

Plus, watch this week’s Thursday Throwdown about Aaron’s testimony at the United Nations: “Aaron Maté vs British Diplomat at UN.”

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

Watch the full interview here:

Read more

At a United Nations meeting that addressed a Syria cover-up scandal at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Aaron Maté of The Grayzone responds to a challenge from British diplomat Thomas Phipps. Support Pushback: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate

Speaking to the United Nations Security Council, Aaron Maté of The Grayzone calls out the OPCW's ongoing cover-up of its investigation into the alleged April 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria. Aaron also debunks the latest efforts by the OPCW, in a new report put out by the watchdog's Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), to whitewash the scandal. Audio: Aaron Maté's opening remarks to UN Security Council members, March 24 2023. Support Pushback: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate

Grayzone Radio with Max Blumenthal excerpts investigative reports from The Grayzone podcast.

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Simon Evans, Felicity Ward, Samira Ahmed and Alasdair Beckett-King. This week, we’ll be finding out what’s up with Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps, who wins with the Windsor Framework, and who King Charles had round for tea.

Hosted and written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Alice Fraser, Zoë Tomalin, Rhiannon Shaw and Jade Gebbie.

Producer: Georgia Keating Executive Producer: Richard Morris Production Co-ordinator: Becky Carewe-Jeffries Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Production

Will memorializes his beloved cat Marty (RIP Marty), we discuss mammoth burgers, Peter Thiel, cop fent dealers, the GOP primary field and AI rights. But most importantly, the news of the indictment of former President Donald Trump by a Manhattan grand jury broke as we were recording, so get our live initial reactions to that hilarious and unprecedented news in this ep. Get bonus content on Patreon

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Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., is circulating a letter among her House colleagues that calls on the Department of Justice to drop charges against Julian Assange and end its effort to extradite him from his detention in Belmarsh prison in the United Kingdom.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept, is still in the signature-gathering phase and has yet to be sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The Justice Department has charged Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified information. The Obama administration had previously decided not to prosecute Assange, concerned with what was dubbed internally as the “New York Times problem.” The Times had partnered with Assange when it came to publishing classified information and itself routinely publishes classified information. Publishing classified information is a violation of the Espionage Act, though it has never been challenged in the Supreme Court, and constitutional experts broadly consider that element of the law to be unconstitutional.

“The Espionage Act, as it’s written, has always been applicable to such a broad range of discussion of important matters, many of which have been wrongly kept secret for a long time, that it should be regarded as unconstitutional,” explained Daniel Ellsberg, the famed civil liberties advocate who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The Obama administration could not find a way to charge Assange without also implicating standard journalistic practices. The Trump administration, unburdened by such concerns around press freedom, pushed ahead with the indictment and extradition request. The Biden administration, driven by the zealous prosecutor Gordon Kromberg, has aggressively pursued Trump’s prosecution. Assange won a reprieve from extradition in a lower British court but lost at the High Court. He is appealing there as well as to the European Court of Human Rights. Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, who has been campaigning globally for his release, said that Assange’s mental and physical health have deteriorated in the face of the conditions he faces at Belmarsh.

Tlaib, in working to build support, urged her colleagues to put their differences with Assange the individual aside and defend the principle of the free press, enshrined in the Constitution. “I know many of us have very strong feelings about Mr. Assange, but what we think of him and his actions is really besides the point here,” she wrote to her colleagues in early March. “The fact of the matter is that the [way] in which Mr. Assange is being prosecuted under the notoriously undemocratic Espionage Act seriously undermines freedom of the press and the First Amendment.”

“In the future, the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information.”

Tlaib noted that the Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel had put out a joint statement condemning the charges, and alluded to the same problem that gave the Obama administration pause. “The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well,” she wrote. “In the future, the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information. Or, just as dangerous, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.”

So far, the letter has collected signatures from Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush. Rep. Ro Khanna said he had yet to see the letter but added that he has previously said Assange should not be prosecuted because the charges are over-broad and a threat to press freedom. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is not listed as a signee but told a Seattle audience recently she believes the charges should be dropped. A spokesperson for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that she intends to sign before the letter closes.

Chip Gibbons, policy director for Defending Rights & Dissent, said that the relative silence from Congress on the Assange prosecution has undermined U.S. claims to be defending democracy abroad. “In spite of the rhetoric about opposing authoritarianism and defending democracy and press freedom, we really haven’t seen a comparable outcry from Congress — until now,” said Gibbons, whose organization has launched a petition calling on the Justice Department to drop charges. “Rep. Tlaib’s letter isn’t just a breath of fresh air, it’s extremely important for members of Congress to be raising their voices on this, especially those from the same party of the current administration, at this critical juncture in a case that will determine the future of press freedom in the United States.”

A significant number of Democrats continue to hold a hostile view of Assange, accusing him of publishing material that was purloined by Russian agents from the inbox of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. The indictment, however, relates to his publication of government secrets leaked by Chelsea Manning more than a decade ago. “In July 2010, WikiLeaks published approximately 75,000 significant activity reports related to the war in Afghanistan, classified up to the SECRET level, illegally provided to WikiLeaks by Manning,” the indictment reads. “In November 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing redacted versions of U.S. State Department cables, classified up to the SECRET level, illegally provided to WikiLeaks by Manning.”

The U.S. government has made the general claim that Assange’s publication of classified information put sources and allies of the U.S. in harm’s way, though the government has been unable to provide any example of that. Meanwhile, the U.S. government itself has left thousands of Afghan civilians, who collaborated with the U.S., to their fates after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, raising questions about the sincerity of their lamentations over the security of those who work with the U.S.

The word “publish” appears more than two dozen times in the superseding indictment of Assange, in which he is accused of “having unauthorized possession of significant activity reports, classified up to the SECRET level [and] publishing them and causing them to be published on the Internet.”

The full letter is below.

Dear Colleague:

I’d like to invite you to join me in writing the Dept. of Justice to call on them to drop the Trump-era charges against Australian publisher Julian Assange. 

I know many of us have very strong feelings about Mr. Assange, but what we think of him and his actions is really besides the point here. The fact of the matter is that the in which Mr. Assange is being prosecuted under the notoriously undemocratic Espionage Act seriously undermines freedom of the press and the First Amendment. 

Defendants charged under the Espionage Act are effectively incapable of defending themselves and often are not allowed access to all the evidence being brought against them, or even to testify to the motivation behind their actions. The information that Mr. Assange worked with major media outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian to publish primarily came from the documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. These documents exposed a number of extremely serious government abuses including torture, war crimes, and illegal mass surveillance.

Mr. Assange’s prosecution marks the first time in US history that the Espionage Act has been used to indict a publisher of truthful information. The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well. In the future, the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information. Or, just as dangerous, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.

The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel have taken the extraordinary step of publishing a joint statement in opposition to the indictment, warning that it “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.” They are joined in their opposition to Mr. Assange’s prosecution by groups like the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Numerous foreign leaders have also expressed their concern and opposition, including Australian PM Albanese, Mexican President AMLO, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, and parliamentarians from numerous countries including the UK, Germany, Brazil, and Australia.

If you have any questions or would like to sign on to this letter, please contact Rep. Tlaib’s Policy Advisor… Thank you for your partnership in defending the freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Sincerely,

Rashida Tlaib
Member of Congress

 

Dear Attorney General Merrick Garland,

We write you today to call on you to uphold the First Amendment’s protections for the freedom of the press by dropping the criminal charges against Australian publisher Julian Assange and withdrawing the American extradition request currently pending with the British government.

Press freedom, civil liberty, and human rights groups have been emphatic that the charges against Mr. Assange pose a grave and unprecedented threat to everyday, constitutionally protected journalistic activity, and that a conviction would represent a landmark setback for the First Amendment. Major media outlets are in agreement: The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel have taken the extraordinary step of publishing a joint statement in opposition to the indictment, warning that it “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

The ACLU, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights and Dissent, and Human Rights Watch, among others, have written to you three times to express these concerns. In one such letter they wrote:

“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do. Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.”

The prosecution of Julian Assange for carrying out journalistic activities greatly diminishes America’s credibility as a defender of these values, undermining the United States’ moral standing on the world stage, and effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange’s prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalization of reporting on their activities. Leaders of democracies, major international bodies, and parliamentarians around the globe stand opposed to the prosecution of Assange. Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer and the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic have both opposed the extradition. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called on the U.S. government to end its pursuit of Assange. Leaders of nearly every major Latin American nation, including Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Argentinian President Alberto Fernández have called for the charges to be dropped. Parliamentarians from around the world, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, have all called for Assange not to be extradited to the U.S.

This global outcry against the U.S. government’s prosecution of Mr. Assange has highlighted conflicts between America’s stated values of press freedom and its pursuit of Mr. Assange. The Guardian wrote “The US has this week proclaimed itself the beacon of democracy in an increasingly authoritarian world. If Mr. Biden is serious about protecting the ability of the media to hold governments accountable, he should begin by dropping the charges brought against Mr. Assange.” Similarly, the Sydney Morning Herald editorial board stated, “At a time when US President Joe Biden has just held a summit for democracy, it seems contradictory to go to such lengths to win a case that, if it succeeds, will limit freedom of speech.”

As Attorney General, you have rightly championed freedom of the press and the rule of law in the United States and around the world. Just this past October the Justice Department under your leadership made changes to news media policy guidelines that generally prevent federal prosecutors from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information used in news gathering. We are grateful for these pro-press freedom revisions, and feel strongly that dropping the Justice Department’s indictment against Mr. Assange and halting all efforts to extradite him to the U.S. is in line with these new policies.

Julian Assange faces 17 charges under the Espionage Act and one charge for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.  The Espionage Act charges stem from Mr. Assange’s role in publishing information about the U.S. State Department, Guantanamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of this information was published by mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, who often worked with Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks directly in doing so. Based on the legal logic of this indictment, any of those newspapers could be prosecuted for engaging in these reporting activities. In fact, because what Mr. Assange is accused of doing is legally indistinguishable from what papers like the New York Times do, the Obama administration rightfully declined to bring these charges. The Trump Administration, which brought these charges against Assange, was notably less concerned with press freedom.

The prosecution of Mr. Assange marks the first time in U.S. history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act. The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well. In the future the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information. Or, just as dangerous for democracy, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.

Mr. Assange has been detained on remand in London for more than three years, as he awaits the outcome of extradition proceedings against him. In 2021, a U.K. District Judge ruled against extraditing Mr. Assange to the United States on the grounds that doing so would put him at undue risk of suicide. The U.K.’s High Court overturned that decision after accepting U.S. assurances regarding the prospective treatment Mr. Assange would receive in prison. Neither ruling adequately addresses the threat the charges against Mr. Assange pose to press freedom. The U.S. Department of Justice can halt these harmful proceedings at any moment by simply dropping the charges against Mr. Assange.

We appreciate your attention to this urgent issue. Every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home. We urge you to immediately drop these Trump-era charges against Mr. Assange and halt this dangerous prosecution.

Sincerely,
Members of Congress

CC: British Embassy; Australian Embassy

 

The post Congressional Effort to End Assange Prosecution Underway appeared first on The Intercept.

For the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, the New York Times published an article by Max Fisher headlined “20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?”

The article is a fairly cogent summation of the evidence. However, when it was first published, it was undermined by an extremely significant and extremely funny mistake. After inquiries from The Intercept, the paper has changed the original mistake into a fresh, new mistake.

Here’s how the article originally read:

Mr. Hussein had ejected international weapons inspectors, which was seen in Washington as a humiliating policy failure for Mr. Clinton.

When the American leader was weakened by scandal later that year [in 1998], congressional Republicans pounced, passing the Iraq Liberation Act …

One reason this is so funny is because in 1998 the Times accurately reported what happened. The United Nations inspections team, called UNSCOM, was not expelled by Saddam Hussein, but rather was withdrawn by Richard Butler, the head of UNSCOM, after he consulted with the U.S. — about the fact that the U.S. was about to start bombing Iraq, in a campaign called Operation Desert Fox.

Even funnier is that the Times went on to claim erroneously that Iraq had expelled UNSCOM in 1998 at least five times, twice in 1999 and then in 2000, 2002 and 2003. It issued corrections on the three latter articles.

Two decades later, the paper apparently wanted to recapture its youth by being wrong again. The paper has now issued its fourth correction on this subject. Its present-day story currently reads:

Hussein had ejected international weapons inspectors in 1997, which was seen in Washington as a humiliating policy failure for Mr. Clinton.

Then, when Mr. Clinton was weakened by scandal in 1998, congressional Republicans pounced, passing the Iraq Liberation Act …

Wonderfully enough, this is also wrong. Iraq did expel the American members of the U.N. inspections team in 1997. But the rest remained in Iraq until they were withdrawn by the United Nations. All, including the Americans, returned to Iraq eight days later.

You can find this information in a story published when it happened, by a little-known paper called the New York Times.

The corrected text in the 2023 story also leaves out the reason Iraq expelled the (American) inspectors in 1997: Because some of the Americans were conducting espionage against Iraq. Again, you can read about this in the New York Times.

If you just want to chuckle morosely about the inability of America’s most prestigious newspaper to get this story right — even now, after two decades, after the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings in Iraq because of the 2003 invasion — you can stop here. But if you want the details about why this mistake truly matters, please continue reading.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, one of the favorite talking points of its proponents was that Saddam Hussein had expelled the UNSCOM team in 1998. This claim appeared in numerous media outlets, not just the Times.

This little bit of propaganda was popular because of its obvious implication. What possible reason would Iraq have to throw out the U.N. weapons inspectors unless it was hiding something?

Telling the story accurately, however, makes clear why Iraq’s behavior was congruent with having no banned weapons.

The UNSCOM inspections protocol was created by U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, which ended the 1991 Gulf War following Iraq’s retreat from Kuwait. UNSC 687 demanded that Iraq disclose all its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. Harsh sanctions would remain on Iraq until it had verifiably done so. At that point, however, the sanctions would be lifted. Also, Iraq’s disarmament would “represent steps towards the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction.”

But President George H.W. Bush immediately announced that the U.S. would ignore all of this, and maintain the sanctions — whether Iraq was or wasn’t disarmed — until Saddam Hussein was forced from power. (You can read about this in the New York Times.) In fact, the sanctions were seen as a way to make life in Iraq so miserable that Iraqis would be motivated to overthrow Saddam.

This stance was later reiterated by President Bill Clinton, as well as his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. What UNSC 687 said didn’t matter; sanctions would remain until Saddam was gone.

Thus Saddam Hussein’s regime had little incentive to cooperate with UNSCOM to begin with. Nevertheless, UNSCOM did an excellent job. We now know Iraq was largely disarmed by the end of 1991. It concealed extensive documentation and some equipment from its WMD programs until 1995, when it was forced to divulge all of it. But by that point, eight years before the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq was essentially clean.

The Iraqi regime understandably believed sanctions should be lifted. As the CIA’s final report on Iraq’s WMD programs put it, “Iraq considered [turning over its remaining material] to be a measure of goodwill and cooperation with the UN.” Internally, the government required WMD scientists to sign a declaration that they wouldn’t hide anything from the U.N., on pain of execution.

At the time Richard Haass, now the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke on a Washington, D.C., panel about the problem Iraqi disarmament presented. “We have to guard,” Haass said, “against the possibility that one day we may not be able to keep the French and Russians in line, that Saddam does comply with so much of the resolutions that the United States can’t sustain the policy … We are clearly in favor of regime change … [but] there’s no reference anywhere in any UN resolution to regime change.”

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration had grown tired of passively hoping Saddam would be overthrown and turned to more active measures to encourage a coup. This included putting American spies on the UNSCOM team who would purportedly be helping to look for WMD, but were actually there to conduct espionage aimed at Saddam’s removal.

Iraq figured this out fairly quickly. Naturally, Saddam and his regime weren’t enthusiastic about it, given that this would inevitably end in his death. Moreover, they now felt there would never be an end to the sanctions. This led to several famous standoffs between UNSCOM and Iraqi security.

For instance, on December 9, 1998, UNSCOM showed up unannounced at Saddam’s Baath Party headquarters and was denied entry. The CIA WMD report found that Saddam was actually there at the time, and that he “issued orders not to give them access. Saddam did this to prevent the inspectors from knowing his whereabouts, not because he had something to hide.”

The U.S. used this type of noncompliance as justification for the Desert Fox strikes, which took place from December 16 to December 19, 1998. Following this, Iraq refused to allow UNSCOM to return until forced to in the fall of 2002.

Providing an accurate history like this makes clear that the WMD issue was always irrelevant to the U.S. government. When we were helping Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons was an embarrassing PR problem but otherwise of no significance. During the Clinton administration, it became a useful PR pretext to keep the sanctions on Iraq and try to overthrow Saddam. Then by 2003, it became a rationale for war.

That’s why the “Saddam threw out the inspectors” error is so pernicious. It leads to other conclusions in the Times article, such as that Saddam “concealed the paltry state of his weapons programs to appear strong at home and deter the Americans.” The evidence for this is, let’s say, extremely dubious. Saddam’s behavior can’t be called wise or good, but it wasn’t some kind of mysterious bluff. Iraq didn’t have WMD, and it kept saying that, over and over again. But Saddam had higher priorities than cooperating with UNSCOM, such as staying alive for the next 20 minutes.

The Times coverage of Iraq and its purported weapons of mass destruction was so atrocious in the lead-up to war in 2003 that the paper eventually had to issue an extensive mea culpa. So you’d like to believe that it now would concentrate on getting it right, at long last. However, that’s clearly a vain dream. It’s inevitable that for the rest of our lives, the Times will intermittently claim Saddam threw out the inspectors. Our only hope to prevent this would be to get reporters at the Times a subscription to the paper.

The post New York Times Makes Glaring Error About Iraq War — Then Corrects It Incorrectly appeared first on The Intercept.

In a matter of a few days, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed when a panic set in, causing a run on deposits. “The blue chip VCs suggested something, then that leaked to other ones, then other ones — we had all our investors calling us and basically demanding we pull our cash,” one source told Ryan Grim. This week on Deconstructed, Grim is joined by Damon Silvers, who has been involved in trying to prevent financial fraud and crisis for more than 20 years. He was the deputy chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the 2008 bank bailout, and was formerly the policy director of the AFL-CIO.

Grim and Silver discuss what led to a rush of Silicon Valley Bank depositors withdrawing all at once, the subsequent fallout, how the weakening of Dodd–Frank in 2018 paved the way for the current banking crisis, and what reforms are needed to prevent a future and even bigger economic catastrophe.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com

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Krystal and Saagar discuss the Trump Grand Jury disbanding for 1 Month, Republican voters shredding "Weak" Mike Pence, Trump mocks Desantis over Disney battle, a US Wall Street Journal reporter is detained in Kremlin on accusations of "spying", US blocks a Nordstream investigation by the UN, Zelensky invites China's Xi to Ukraine, Tucker Carlson and Ilhan Omar both blast the Tik Tok Ban bill in Congress, Jamie Dimon forced to testify in Epstein case, Credit Suisse caught in another Fraud Scam, Elon admits that he lost 20 Billion on the Twitter deal, Krystal looks into Blackstone stealing homes from Working Class Americans, and Saagar looks into why the Assault Weapons Ban won't work, and we're joined by Michelle Eisen from Starbucks Workers United to react to CEO Howard Schultz's lies during his hearing.

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We’re joined by author and podcaster Patrick Wyman (Tides of History, The Verge) to discuss developments in money, finance and banking during the pre-modern period. As well as, of course, those dastardly Fuggers.

Find Tides of History here: https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/

Find “The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World” here: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/patrick-wyman/the-verge/9781538701171/

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Ron Josol takes the audience on a journey to all the countries he’s performed in. And Crystal Ferrier tells us that she will exact revenge on her children. She has planned it out very carefully!

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government’s attempt to radically overhaul the Israeli legal and judicial system has sparked widespread protests in Israel. Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets under the banner of defending Israeli democracy.

Very early on in the protests, billboard signs began popping up across Israel that said, “The High Court of Justice is our soldiers’ body armor.” The notion persisted as protests spread. And, likely driven by the fear of losing the court’s protections, a wave of reserve soldiers are declaring their refusal to serve, arguably the protests’ most significant element.

The “body armor” sentiment is largely correct. The perceived independence of the Israeli judiciary is a key factor in preventing international accountability for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians — in the occupation and beyond. Most international court systems will only take up foreign cases if it can be shown that a country’s own system was unable to impartially adjudicate allegations of war crimes.

The situation, however, raises a question that few in Israel have dared to ask: Even without Netanyahu’s reforms, has the judiciary done enough to deal with violations of intranational law? Beyond its work upholding civil rights, have the courts’ rulings on international law merely given Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians a patina of legitimacy, as some progressive Israelis and many Palestinians contend?

A former attorney general, Avichai Mendelblit, was quite blunt in explaining why the country needs its courts to be independent: “The moment that the justice system in Israel isn’t perceived as such,” he warned, “Israel will lose international legitimacy for its military operations and will no longer be shielded from accusations of war crimes.”

Mendelblit’s prediction could soon be put to the test, with Palestinian appeals to the International Criminal Court in The Hague already pending. Losing the appearance of independence may expose Israeli soldiers, military commanders, leaders of the security forces, and even Israeli ministers, past and present, to prosecutions in foreign countries.

Such cases could rise to the level of holding Israel accountable for grave crimes such as torture: Last June, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, in collaboration with the International Federation for Human Rights, requested the ICC’s prosecutors to include the crime of torture in their investigation into the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The question of torture in Israel is just one of several potential grounds for international juridical intervention relating to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Israel’s prolonged occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, its sustaining of an apartheid regime, and the war crimes it has been committing in Gaza would also come to the fore.

Israeli courts’ treatment of torture and other crimes offer some answers as to how impartial the judiciary has really been on crimes against Palestinians — and the Israeli claims of democracy on display in the recent protests.

The Case of Torture

Taking a closer look at how the Israeli judiciary has been addressing allegations of torture reveals what is — and what is not — at stake in the recent legislation in Israel.

In 1999, Israel’s High Court of Justice rendered a ruling which was hailed as putting an end to the use of torture in Israel. Yet, according to data collected by Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and other human rights organizations, Israel still regularly subjects Palestinian detainees to interrogation methods that constitute torture and inhumane and degrading treatment, in clear violation of international law.

Complaints submitted by Palestinians who were interrogated by the Shabak, Israel’s general security service, to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel since 2000 show the persistence of methods that were explicitly forbidden by the High Court in 1999.

An analysis we have conducted of more than 1,500 of these complains, which was funded by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council, shows that physical violence — such as beating, violent shaking, and strangling — is still regularly used in interrogations. Other frequently used interrogation techniques include forcing people into painful stress positions, tight handcuffing, severe sleep deprivation, incommunicado detention, use of family members, threats, humiliations, and prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures.

This is not merely a de facto breach of the ruling: As several recent decisions by the justices make clear, the High Court itself is willing to tolerate and even explicitly approve the use of torture in violation of Israel’s obligations under international law — and, some would argue, the court’s own decision.

Israel has further put in place several judicial mechanisms to address complaints of torture in recent decades. Yet these, too, constantly fail to offer legal remedy to torture victims.

More than 1,300 complaints of torture have been submitted on behalf of Palestinians to the Ministry of Justice between 2001 and June 2021. Only three criminal investigations have been launched. None have resulted in an indictment.

Yet as long as Israel can claim it has robust mechanisms for investigating complaints and independent judicial oversight over its security forces, it can fend against calls for international intervention.

War Crimes Launderer

On Monday night, as Netanyahu was deliberating in his chamber whether to stop the new legislation following the protests and a general strike, right-wing demonstrators assembled in Jerusalem for the first rally in favor of the legislation.

Many of the slogans shouted in this rally were not directly supporting the government, but instead targeting Palestinians. Some were explicit — and, unfortunately, too familiar — calls demanding “death to all Arabs.” Several Palestinian passersby (as well as journalists and other Israelis perceived as “leftist”) were attacked by demonstrators.

It is clear that at least as far as the nationalistic right is concerned, enshrining Jewish supremacy is the goal of this constitutional revolution. This is not an unfounded supposition; it is the professed plan of some of the most senior members in the government, including the national security minister and the minister of finance, who recently openly called for the complete erasure of a Palestinian town.

This legislation must not be passed. Resisting it, though, cannot also be about the freedom of Israeli soldiers and security apparatuses to continue operating — and even killing — with impunity.

Whatever the results of the current constitutional upheaval may be, the world must no longer ignore what is now irrefutable: Israel’s judiciary has served as a war crimes launderer.

When calling to “protect democracy,” we must bear in mind that the High Court of Justice has indeed served as the body armor not just for soldiers, but also for Israel’s anti-democratic practices. For years, the court has condoned Israeli human rights abuses, including settlement expansion, extrajudicial killings, and torture of Palestinian detainees.

Whatever the results of the current constitutional upheaval may be, the world must no longer ignore what is now irrefutable: Israel’s judiciary has served as a war crimes launderer. The international community must intervene to hold Israel accountable for its continued violations of Palestinian rights — an accountability Israel evidently fails to uphold itself.

At the same time, those in Israel protesting in the streets should realize that there is no such thing as a democracy for Jews alone. A true democracy will only be achieved when Israel ends its long-lasting occupation, recognizes the national rights of the Palestinians, and offers protections and equality under the law for all its citizens.

The post Protect the Israeli Judiciary — but Don’t Let It Launder War Crimes Against Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. media has recently been filled with retrospectives on the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Most of these outlets eagerly helped the George W. Bush administration sell the war, publishing lavish falsehoods about how Iraq posed a terrible danger to the U.S. (It did not.)

So you might hope that in the past two decades, the same publications have learned the most basic facts about Iraq — and would steer clear of publishing obvious and stupendous errors yet again. You would hope in vain.

One incredible example appeared in a March 13 article in The Atlantic by David Frum, who is best known for serving as a speechwriter for President Bush and coming up with the phrase “axis of evil” in the 2002 State of the Union address. Frum is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, which is probably the most prestigious magazine in America behind the New Yorker. The Atlantic is forthrightly endorsing Frum’s fabrication and will not respond to basic questions about it.

As you may have heard, Bush’s case for war was that Iraq had programs to produce “weapons of mass destruction” — that is, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. In his article, “The Iraq War Reconsidered,” Frum tells us in the first paragraph that Iraq was found to possess “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads.”

This is false. You don’t even need to know the details to understand why.

Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, never said a word about this arsenal of chemical weapons that Frum says were discovered by the U.S. This means there are two possibilities:

1. Iraq did have an arsenal of chemical weapons, thus totally vindicating Bush and Cheney and proving that they were right about the most famous political issue on Earth. However, they never mentioned this because they’re super-modest.
2. Iraq did not have an arsenal of chemical weapons.

If you’d like to understand this subject in detail, you can read this long explanation I wrote a few years ago. But the basic story is this:

Iraq deployed a huge quantity of chemical weapons during its war with Iran in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Iraq turned over almost all its chemical munitions to United Nations inspectors, and they were destroyed.

However, Iraq lost track of some of those weapons. It was not intentionally hiding them before the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003; just the opposite. As we now know from the CIA’s $1 billion investigation of the weapons of mass destruction issue, in December 2002, Saddam Hussein’s regime ordered Iraq’s military to “cooperate completely” with the renewed U.N. inspections. Commanders established committees “to ensure their units retained no evidence of old WMD.”

Nonetheless, while occupying Iraq, the U.S. stumbled upon about 5,000 old shells from the 1980s. According to Charles Duelfer, who headed the CIA inquiry, “Keeping in mind that they used 101,000 munitions in the Iran-Iraq War … it’s not really surprising that they have imperfect accounting. I bet the U.S. couldn’t keep track of many of its weapons produced and used during a war.”

Indeed, this is true: The U.S. military lost $1.2 billion of material during just the first year of the Iraq War. It’s also true about chemical weapons specifically. In 1993, a significant quantity of chemical munitions from World War I were discovered in what’s now one of the toniest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice, grew up just a few blocks from the site. In other words, even the most dangerous weapons can be lost in the most unlikely places. The cleanup was still going on decades later, at a cost of more than $250 million.

In fact, lost chemical weapons from World War I continue to be located across the world. During the same period the U.S. was finding 5,000 Iraqi chemical munitions, about the same number were discovered in Europe, mostly in Belgium and France.

Duelfer, asked for his perspective on The Atlantic’s claim, responded via email: “I disagree with [Frum’s] characterization of residual CW stuff as ‘an arsenal.’ What was found were militarily useless remains left over from production during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam did not know it was around.”

You’d think, well, case closed. All that’s necessary is to notify The Atlantic of its mistake, and they’ll correct it. Obviously they believe in adhering to the most basic standards of honesty.

Nope. In response to questions, Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s senior vice president for communications, emailed, “What is being described in our article matches the definition of ‘arsenal.’ I’m not seeing the point of objection, and certainly not any need for a correction.” (Notably, the current editor of The Atlantic is Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most prominent journalistic supporters of the Iraq War, and last night The Atlantic won a General Excellence award from the American Society of Magazine Editors.)

I sent Bross some obvious follow-up questions. Is The Atlantic saying that Charles Duelfer — again, the head of the Bush administration’s investigation of this — is wrong, and they’re right? Would they publish something saying the U.S. and France both recently possessed an arsenal of chemical weapons? Does The Atlantic think Bush and Cheney just forgot to ever mention this arsenal?

Bross did not write back. I guess that’s for the best because I was planning to move on to ask her about several other astonishing mistakes in Frum’s article.

I’ve followed this issue closely for over 25 years. By the time of the U.S. invasion, I was so sure Iraq had no banned weapons that I bet someone $1,000 about it (quite a lot of money to me).

I was barely a professional writer then. I didn’t even have a blog. So when I saw the media’s blatant, grievous errors in the run-up to war, all I could do was send lots of emails to the fancy publications that were getting it so wrong. They didn’t care, and hundreds of thousands of people died.

They still don’t care. They will continue deceiving their readers about Iraq. There must be something we can do about this, but so far, I haven’t figured out what it is.

The post The Atlantic Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Iraq War With Lavish Falsehoods About Iraq War appeared first on The Intercept.

We’re joined by author and scholar Norman Finkelstein to discuss his new book “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It,” as well as a candid discussion of the political situation in Israel, the modern left, Obama’s legacy, and our old friend Alan Dershowitz.

Find “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It” here: https://itascabooks.com/products/ill-burn-that-bridge-when-i-get-to-it-heretical-thoughts-on-identity-politics-cancel-culture-and-academic-freedom

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In a geopolitical shift, Brazil has come out in favor of accountability for the OPCW's Syria cover-up scandal. At a meeting of UN Security Council members on March 23rd, Brazil criticized the OCW's “poor” handling of the issue and rebuked the UK and other states for blocking the testimony of veteran Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani, the OPCW’s first Director General. In response to remarks from The Grayzone's Aaron Maté, Ambassador João Genésio de Almeida Filho, the Deputy Permanent Representative of Brazil, said: "You are clear, you are logical, and you come here with data." The Ambassador then asked Maté for suggestions on how to address the OPCW's Douma controversy. Support Pushback: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate Links: Video: "Aaron Mate at UN: OPCW cover-up denies justice to Douma victims" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1BCtPgyxY Aaron Mate: "Burying key evidence, new OPCW report covers up Douma’s unsolved deaths" https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/27/burying-key-evidence-new-opcw-report-covers-up-doumas-unsolved-deaths/ Aaron Mate: "In Douma cover-up, OPCW’s new smoking gun backfires" https://thegrayzone.com/2023/02/03/opcw-smoking-gun-backfires/

End of unipolarity w/ Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen

Mickey takes Zebb to a Bass Pro Shop to buy a gun. Everything seems to be going to plan. But then, Mickey is exposed as an informant by a group in Colorado Springs. With Zebb’s help, Mickey creates a bizarre video railing against the group. Zebb begins to question what’s going on with his friend. But is it too late? 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Krystal and Saagar discuss a Trans suspect behind the Christian Mass School Shooting, Netanyahu caves after Israeli protests erupt, Peter Beinart joins the show to discuss Palestinians seeing hypocrisy behind Israeli protests, the top SVB accounts had 13 Billion in cash, Trump trashes SVB Bank bailout, American patriotism plummets, IRS targets Matt Taibbi on the day of his testimony, Elon fully Paywalls New Twitter, Saagar looks into the massive US military shortages after Ukraine Aide, and Krystal looks into Binance crypto being sued.

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Textual is a Python package used to create cross-platform Text User Interfaces (TUI). This may sound like you’ll be creating a user interface with ASCII-art, but that is not the case.

Textual is quite advanced and allows you to add widgets to your terminal applications, including buttons, context switchers, scroll bars, checkboxes, inputs and more.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do is install Textual. If you only want to run Textual applications, then the following pip comand is all you need:

python3 -m pip install textual

However, if you want to write your own Textual applications, you should run this command instead:

python3 -m pip install "textual[dev]"

That funny little [dev] part will install some extra dependencies that make developing Textual applications easier.

Run the Textual Demo

The Textual package comes with a demo. You’ll find the demo is a great way to see what types of things you can do with Textual.

Here’s how you can run the demo:

python3 -m textual

When you run the command above in your terminal, you should see something like the following appears:

You can explore Textual in the demo and see the following features:

• Widgets
• Accelerators (i.e. CTRL+C)
• CSS styling
• and more

Creating Your Own Simple Application

While the demo is a great place to start to get a feel for what you can do with Textual, it’s always better to dive into the docs and start writing some real code.

You will understand how things work much quicker if you write the code yourself and then start changing the code piece by piece. By going through this iterative process, you’ll learn how to build a little at a time and you’ll have a series of small failures and successes, which is a great way to build up your confidence as you learn.

The first step to take when creating a Textual application is to import Textual and subclass the App() class. When you subclass App(), you create a Textual application. The App() class contains all the little bits and bobs you need to create your very own terminal application.

To start off, create a new Python file in your favorite text editor or IDE and name it hello_textual.py.

Next, enter the following code into your new file:

from textual.app import App


class HelloWorld(App):
    ...


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = HelloWorld()
    app.run()

When you go to run your terminal application, you should run it in a terminal. Some IDEs have a terminal built-in, such as VS Code and PyCharm. Textual may or may not look correct in those terminals though.

Whenever possible, it is recommended that you run Textual applications in your external terminal. Your applications will look and behave better there most of the time. On Mac, it is recommended that you use iTerm rather than the built-in terminal as the built-in Terminal application hasn’t been updated in quite some time.

To run your new terminal application, you will need to run the following command:

python3 hello_textual.py

When you run this command, you will see the following:

Oops! That’s kind of like creating a blank black box! That’s probably not what you want after all.

To exit a Textual application, press CTRL+C. When you do, you will exit the application and return to the normal terminal.

That was exciting, but the user interface was very plain. You can fix that up a bit by adding a label in the next section!

Adding a Label

Now that you are back to your original terminal, go back to your Python editor and create a new file. This time you will name it hello_textual2.py.

Enter the following code into your new Python file:

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import Label


class HelloWorld(App):

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield Label("Hello Textual")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = HelloWorld()
    app.run()

Your HelloWorld() class was empty before. Now you added a compose() method. The compose() method is where you normally setup your widgets.

A widget is a user interface element, such as a label, a text box, or a button. In this example, you add a Label() with the text “Hello World” in it.

Try running your new code in your terminal and you should see something like this:

Well, that looks a little better than the original. But it would be nice to have a way to close your application without using CTRL+C.

One common way to close an application is with a Close button. You’ll learn how to add one of those next!

Adding a Close Button

When you create a user interface, you want to communicate with the user about how they can close your application. A terminal application already has a way to close the terminal itself by way of its exit button.

However, you usually want a way to close your Textual application without closing the terminal itself. You have been using CTRL+C for this.

But there’s a better way! You can add a Button widget and connect an event handler to it to close the function.

To get started, open up a new Python file in your Python editor of choice. Name this one hello_textual3.py and then enter the following code:

# hello_textual3.py

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import Button, Label


class HelloWorld(App):

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        self.close_button = Button("Close", id="close")
        yield Label("Hello Textual")
        yield self.close_button

    def on_mount(self) -> None:
        self.screen.styles.background = "darkblue"
        self.close_button.styles.background = "red"

    def on_button_pressed(self, event: Button.Pressed) -> None:
        self.exit(event.button.id)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = HelloWorld()
    app.run()

The first change you’ll encounter is that you are now importing a Button in addition to your Label.

The next change is that you are assigning the Button to self.close_button in your compose() function before yielding the button. By assigning the button to a class variable or attribute, you can more easily access it later to change some features around the widget.

The on_mount() method is called when your application enters application mode. Here you set the background of your app (the screen) to “darkblue” and you set the background color of the close button to “red”.

Lastly, you create an on_button_pressed() method, which is your event handler for catching when a button is pressed. When the close button is pressed, the on_button_pressed()  is called and your application exits. You pass in the button’s id to tell the application which button was used to close it, although you don’t use that information here.

It’s time to try running your code! When you do, you should see the following:

So far so good. Your application is looking great!

Now you’re ready to learn the basics of styling your application with CSS.

Adding Style with CSS

Textual let you apply a style using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) in much the same way that web developers use CSS. You write the CSS file in a separate file that ends with the following extension: .css

By separating out the style from the logic, you can follow the Model-View-Controller design pattern. But even if you don’t follow that pattern, it lets you separate the logic from the design and can make iterating on your design easier.

To get started, you will first update your Python file so that it uses a CSS file. Open up your Python editor and create a new file named hello_textual_css.py, then enter the following code into it:

# hello_textual_css.py

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import Button, Label


class HelloWorld(App):
    CSS_PATH = "hello.css"

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        self.close_button = Button("Close", id="close")
        yield Label("Hello Textual", id="hello")
        yield self.close_button

    def on_mount(self) -> None:
        self.screen.styles.background = "darkblue"
        self.close_button.styles.background = "red"

    def on_button_pressed(self, event: Button.Pressed) -> None:
        self.exit(event.button.id)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = HelloWorld()
    app.run()

The only change here is to add the class attribute, CSS_PATH, right after your HelloWorld() class definition. The CSS_PATH can be a relative or absolute path to your CSS file.

In the example code above, you use a relative path to a file named hello.css which should be saved in the same folder as your Python file.

You can now create hello.css in your Python or text editor. Then enter the following code into it:

Screen {
    layout: grid;
    grid-size: 2;
    grid-gutter: 2;
    padding: 2;
}
#hello {
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    column-span: 2;
    content-align: center bottom;
    text-style: bold;
}

Button {
    width: 100%;
    column-span: 2;
}

The Screen mentioned here maps to the self.screen object in your code. You are telling Textual that you want to use a grid layout where the number two signifies that the grid will be two columns wide and include two rows.

The spacing between rows is controlled by the grid-gutter. Finally, you set padding to add spacing around the content of the widget itself.

The #hello tag matches to the hello id of a widget in your code. In this case, your Label has the id of “hello”. So everything in the curly braces that follows the #hello tag controls the style of your Label. You want the label to span across both columns, and the text-style to be bold. You also set the width and height to 100%.

Finally, you have some styling to add to Button widgets. There’s only one here, but this would apply to all buttons if you had additional ones. You are setting the width of the button to 100% and telling it to span both columns.

Now that the explanation is out of the way, you are ready to try running your code. When you do, you should get something like this:

The button is now nice and large, but you could certainly make the text of the label a bit bigger. You should try and figure out how to do that as a stretch goal!

Wrapping Up

Textual is amazing! The demo has many more examples than what is covered here as does the Textual documentation

Here is what you learned from this article:

• The Textual Demo
• Creating a Label
• Adding a button
• Using a layout
• Styling with CSS

This article barely scratches the surface of all the amazing features that Textual has to offer. Keep an eye on this website though, as there are lots more articles on Textual coming soon!

The post An Intro to Textual – Creating Text User Interfaces with Python appeared first on Mouse Vs Python.

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