David Dobrodt

Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, has written an open letter to President Trump asking him to grant a pardon to Julian Assange.

His letter reads:

“Mr. President, Today, I respectfully request that you pardon Mr. Julian Assange. Mr. Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his liberty for the past ten years. This is a high price to pay for the courage to publish true information about government misconduct throughout the world. I visited Mr. Assange in Belmarsh High Security Prison in London, with two independent medical doctors, and I can attest to the fact that his health has seriously deteriorated, to the point where his life is now in danger. Critically, Mr. Assange suffers from a documented respiratory condition which renders him extremely vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic that has recently broken out in the prison where he is being held. I ask you to pardon Mr. Assange, because he is not, and has never been, an enemy of the American people. His organization, WikiLeaks, fights secrecy and corruption throughout the world and, therefore, acts in the public interest both of the American people and of humanity as a whole.

“I ask because Mr. Assange has never published false information. The cause for any reputational harm that may have resulted from his publications is not to be found in any misconduct on his part, but in the very misconduct which he exposed.

“I ask because Mr. Assange has not hacked or stolen any of the information he published. He has obtained it from authentic documents and sources in the same way as any other serious and independent investigative journalists conduct their work. While we may personally agree or disagree with their publications, they clearly cannot be regarded as crimes.

“I ask because prosecuting Mr. Assange for publishing true information about serious official misconduct, whether in America or elsewhere, would amount to `shooting the messenger’ rather than correcting the problem he exposed. This would be incompatible with the core values of justice, rule of law and press freedom, as reflected in the American Constitution and international human rights instruments ratified by the United States.

“I ask because you have vowed, Mr. President, to pursue an agenda of fighting government corruption and misconduct; and because allowing the prosecution of Mr. Assange to continue would mean that, under your legacy, telling the truth about such corruption and misconduct has become a crime.

“In pardoning Mr Assange, Mr. President, you would send a clear message of justice, truth and humanity to the American people and to the world.

“You would rehabilitate a courageous man who has suffered injustice, persecution and humiliation for more than a decade, simply for telling the truth.

“Last but not least, you would give back to Mr. Assange’s two young sons the loving father they need and look up to. You would also reassure these children, and through them all children of the world, that there is nothing wrong with telling the truth, but that it is the right thing to do; that it is honourable to fight for justice and, indeed, that these are the values America and the world stand for.”

“For these reasons, I respectfully appeal to you to pardon Julian Assange. Whatever our personal views and sympathies may be, I believe that, after a decade of persecution, this man’s unjust suffering must end now. Please, use your power of pardon to right the wrongs inflicted on Julian Assange, to end his unjust ordeal and reunite him with his family!

“I respectfully thank you for considering this appeal with foresight, generosity and compassion. Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration.”

Register for Sept. 5-6 Schiller Institute Conference

This week’s webcast is an abbreviated promotional for this weekend’s Schiller Institute conference. Helga discusses why this conference is necessary, given the strategic tensions and dangers which are growing. In the last days, there have been numerous “near misses” of U.S. aircraft with Russian planes, near collisions at sea with Chinese vessels, and an escalation of war talk coming from U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Esper.

By bringing together representatives of major governments, the conference will be a crucial opportunity to show that dialogue, rather than threats and troop movements, represents the way forward out of the present dangerous paradigm. In the webcast, Helga reviews what will be presented in the four panels and appeals to viewers to join us in the mobilization to succeed in an urgently needed paradigm shift.

Californians for decades have been taught to live in fear of “the big one” – the likelihood of a major earthquake originating in the San Andreas Fault that will cause untold damage and loss of life. It would appear that the state is now experiencing that “big one” – only it is the COVID pandemic, and not an earthquake.

Populous Los Angeles County appears to be the epicenter; as of this weekend all of Southern California and the 12-county San Joaquin Valley to the north had exhausted their regular intensive care unit capacity. Some hospitals are now using “surge” space, although the greater shortage is reportedly of skilled medical personnel, and not space per se.

AP reports that the city of Los Angeles on Saturday had nearly 17,400 people “hospitalized with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infections — more than double the previous peak reached in July — and a state model that uses current data to forecast future trends shows the number could reach an unfathomable 75,000 by mid-January. More than 3,600 confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients were in intensive care units. Some areas of California are `just right at that cusp of getting overrun,’ Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, said during an event organized by the California State University system.”

In total, California’s remaining ICU capacity this weekend stood at just 3%, with the Southern California region already at zero, the San Joaquin Valley region at .7% and the Greater Sacramento region at 11.3%. The Bay Area is now also being hit: “COVID-19 cases are surging in San Francisco and across the country. Hospitals in the Bay Area are close to being overwhelmed,” said Mayor Breed in a news release.

Various forms of triage are already being implemented. In Fresno and three neighboring counties, paramedics are being sent on emergency calls to determine if patients should be taken to the emergency room, or if “they could go to an urgent care facility or wait a few days to talk to their doctors,” local medical authorities report. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We are getting crushed,” said Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. “And it isn’t just COVID patients,” he said. “It’s car accidents and heart attacks and victims of violence. They need a place to go to receive critical care.”

AP reports: “Many hospitals are preparing for the possibility of rationing care. A document recently circulated among doctors at the four hospitals run by Los Angeles County asking them to shift strategy: instead of trying everything to save a life, their goal during the crisis is to save as many patients as possible. `Some compromise of standard of care is unavoidable; it is not that an entity, system, or locale chooses to limit resources, it is that the resources are clearly not available to provide care in a regular manner,’ the document obtained by the Los Angeles Times reads.”

The chief executive of the Corona Regional Medical Center of southeast of Los Angeles, Mark Uffer, stated: “Whatever’s coming, I don’t think any of us are going to be able to manage it. You have a dam that’s about to break, and you’ve got to stop putting water into the dam.”

Speaking to China Daily after his press conference on December 19, Wu Yunhua, the Vice Administrator of the China National Space Agency, also mooted the possibility that the next Chang’e mission could be a sample retrieval from the far side of the Moon. At the press conference he had indicated that Chang’e-6 would land on the south pole of the Moon. Here he said: “But if the Queqiao (relay satellite) still functions real well, we may also consider sending it to the far side to take some samples there. This is because there has never been a mission to return samples from the far side, and if we do so…that will be very meaningful for scientists around the world.” He also added that Chang’e 7 and 8 will be tasked with, among things, exploring the technological feasibility of international cooperation on jointly  building a robotic scientific research outpost on the Moon.

Join us today LIVE at 2pm EST. Today’s meeting will feature Diane Sare, Harley Schlanger and guests from around the country.

The Russian and the Syrian governments have exposed over the past three days the intention of the British-backed terrorists in Syria, together with their “White Helmet” terrorist support apparatus, to stage a fake chemical weapon attack, film the White Helmets “saving” the victims, blast the videos around the world on fake news outlets, and induce President Trump to allow the war party to unleash a missile and air assault on Syria. It worked twice before, although Trump restricted the attacks to minor, limited attacks, with few casualties. However, with ISIS largely defeated by the Syrian army, the British intend to provoke a wider war, both to prevent President Trump from carrying out his intention to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, and to destroy the effort by both Presidents Trump and Putin to bring the U.S. and Russia into a friendly and cooperative relationship. In the eyes of the British Empire, the Helsinki Summit between Trump and Putin marked a deadly threat to the Empire itself.

Let there be no doubt: The British would vastly prefer a thermonuclear showdown, or even a thermonuclear war, between the United States and Russia, rather than see the imperial division of the world between East and West torn down. The power of the City of London and its Wall Street subsidiary depends absolutely on that division.

The first fake chemical attack in Syria took place while Trump was meeting with Xi Jinping in Florida in April 2017, aimed at undermining Trump’s personal cooperation with China’s leader. The second attack came in April of this year, based on a White Helmet video which was proven by multiple witnesses, and even the testimony of the supposed “victims” themselves, to have been completely staged by the White Helmets.

The difference now is that the Russians and the Syrians have the evidence ahead of the fake chemical weapons attack, and have made it public, calling on the world to stop it. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Igor Konashenkov told the press on Aug. 25: “To carry out the alleged `chemical attack’ in the city of Jisr al-Shugur in the province of Idlib, militants from the Tahrir al-Sham [Jabhat al Nusra in Syria]…, had delivered eight tankers with chlorine to a village a few kilometers from Jisr al-Shugur. This provocation, with the active participation of the British special services will serve as another pretext for the U.S., U.K., and France to conduct a missile strike on the Syrian government and economic facilities.” He identified both the White Helmets and the Olive Group, a 5,000-strong British mercenary organization based in Abu Dhabi, as active participants in preparing the provocation.

When the British claimed that Assad was using chemical weapons in 2013, without evidence, President Obama ordered preparation for a full-scale military assault on Syria. Only the mass mobilization of the citizenry forced Obama to back down, after an outcry against yet another illegal and genocidal war against a Southwest Asian country which was no threat the West, and which in fact was staunchly anti-terrorist.

A similar mobilization today can and must prevent the current British plan for war. The fact that President Trump, unlike Obama, is opposed to regime change, wants to pull out of Syria as soon as ISIS is fully eliminated, and wants the U.S. and Russia to collaborate in this and other tasks, means that exposing this British provocation will also greatly contribute to stopping the British coup attempt against Trump through the Mueller Russiagate witch hunt.

In fact, President Trump was elected precisely because he is intent on breaking the “Special Relationship” with the British, a relationship which has turned the U.S. into a post-industrial junk heap, with a drugged up and demoralized population and a policy of permanent warfare. The LaRouche movement knows what is needed to make Trump a great President and to truly make America great again: He must be liberated from the coup attempt, freeing him to join with Russia and China and India in a New Bretton Woods agreement, to put the Western financial system through bankruptcy proceedings and restore the industrial economies of the West, in league with the New Silk Road development of the entire world. Without the United States taking that dramatic step, there is no possibility of the world avoiding disaster, and no possibility of the United States taking that step if Trump is brought down by the war party.

The New Paradigm is within our grasp, if we rise to the moment as a human race, to end geopolitics and Empire from the face of the Earth.

If you believe the popular gossip that you have to choose between bringing the economy to a halt to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, or “reopening” the economy and letting the disease rip, you’re being snookered – once again – by the British financial crowd that brought you both catastrophes in the first place: the City of London and their Wall Street sidekicks. As Lyndon LaRouche warned four decades ago, and the LaRouche organization restated explicitly as early as February 2020, the then-emerging pandemic was caused by 50 years of catastrophic British economic policies which had brought the world’s Potential Relative Population Density well below the actual population on the planet. The solution to {both} crises does not lie in some trade-off between the two, but in a single global solution to both, revolving around the application of LaRouche’s famous Four Laws. This was elaborated by EIR in its May 2020 “The LaRouche Plan To Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.”

Consider a recent indication of the problem. As China was announcing that it had fully eliminated absolute poverty in the country, and that they had created 11 million new urban jobs in the period January-November of 2020 (meeting their annual target a month early), a new study of poverty in the U.S. reported that the poverty rate rose sharply in the five months from June to November, from 9.3% to 11.7%, with 7.8 million more Americans falling below the poverty line. According to the study released Dec. 16, of the 7.8 million new poor, about 2.3 million are children under 17.

Continuing widespread unemployment, combined with the end of government support in late July, were cited as the two key causes of the problem. The average unemployment payment was over $900 per week from March to the end of July, and after that it dropped by two-thirds, down to an average $300 per week. The federal poverty line is $26,200 for a family of four.

James X. Sullivan, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, who co-authored the study with Bruce D. Meyer, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, stated: “We’ve seen a continual rise in poverty every month since June.” Predictably, things are worse for Blacks (up 3.1 percentage points, or 1.4 million people since June) and for Americans with high school degrees or less (up 5.1 percentage points, or 5.2 million people). These are the people who tend to work in low-wage restaurant, travel and retail positions. The GAO recently reported that many states now pay gig workers and self-employed workers unemployment aid that is below the poverty level.

Back to China: President Xi Jinping stated that innovation is the “primary driving force” of the economy. And Xinhua, in reporting on the November data, stated: “China needs scientific and technological solutions, more than ever, to boost economic and social development. In the first 11 months, the output of high-tech manufacturing sectors increased 6.4 percent, markedly outpacing the overall growth in industrial output.”

Leading officials from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) held a press briefing to report on the results of the Chang’e-5 mission, which was deemed a resounding success. But the press was obviously very curious about where China would go in space after this, and, of course, when they would send people to the Moon.

Yuanhua, the Vice Administrator of the CNSA, said that Chang’e-5 was the result of over a decade of development. The 23-day mission now enters the stage of scientific investigation. An entire institute has been built to conduct, store and study the samples and a back-up storage facility has been constructed in Shaoshan in Hunan province, the birthplace of Mao Tsetung, because of his push for a Chinese space program in the 1950s  [“Two Bombs and One Satellite”, was the motto in the 50s]. Hu Hao, the chief designer of the China Lunar Exploration Stage 3, said that the handling of the samples also represents a new capability for China which would aid in its technological advancement. “We need to explore more in space in order to advance our technology,” Hu said. The samples would also be available to research and university institutions for their study. And in the not too distant future, some of the samples would be placed on view in the National Museum of China.

Wu also congratulated the countries that had worked with China on the program, including ESA, Namibia, Argentina and Pakistan. In reply to a question about China’s cooperation, he said that China was prepared to work with “like-minded institutions” in other countries. At one point he was asked specifically by Reuters about cooperation with the U.S. Wu then discussed the restrictions of the Wolf Amendment, which prevented cooperation with the U.S. and at one point  he said that cooperation had to be based on equality,  mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.

He also noted that the series of Chang’e missions had involved thousands of institutions and tens of thousands of scientists and engineers. He noted that China through this process had now developed a tremendous capability for space development in the interest of mankind. “Our goal will be different from the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Wu said. “In those days, it became something of a “star wars.” We want to conduct scientific research and serve mankind.”

The Chang’e-5 mission was more complicated than it had to be for a simple sample return. But Wu indicated that the technologies that were used would also be a vital element for a  human exploration mission. As China’s newly named “space ambassador,” Professor Yang Yuguang, succinctly put it: “We did it that way not because it was easy, but because it was hard,” reflecting the words of Kennedy with regard to Apollo.

Wu Yunhua was also queried about China’s future space plans and he was not reticent in talking about them. “We have a number of plans for the coming years, some of which have been made public,” he said. In exploration, they still have Chang’e-3 and Chang’e-6, which were backup missions If other missions failed. They would now be utilized in some form, perhaps to do a sample return from the South Pole of the Moon. Then there is Chang’e-7 and 8, which he said would be used to work with other countries in exploring  the possibilities of establishing a lunar space center.

There were also other planetary missions, he noted. Tianwen-1 is already on its way to Mars and is scheduled to land on Mars in May of next year. There are also three other planetary missions, an asteroid-return mission, a Mars return mission and a Jupiter exploration mission. In terms of manned space, there will be 11 missions in the next two years, utilizing the space station, including the launch of a core capsule with 4 people.

And there will also be innovation in China’s launch capability. Long March-5 which carried the Chang’e-5 (labeled the “Fat Five mission”) will continue to be utilized. China also announced the development of a new Long March-8 rocket which will fly at the end of December. With the Long March series of 5, 6, 7 and 8, Wu said “we will be working with a whole system of new generation rockets to meet the need of the space missions

China is also making progress in its satellite department, Wu noted, which created the basic infrastructure for the Chang’e-5 mission. These include navigation satellites, communications satellites and remote-sensing satellites. “These are an important staple for our civilian space program,” Wu said, “and an important supply-side component of our  country’s development.” Wu also noted that space innovation needed science satellites, and pointed to China’s collaboration with Italy on the development of an electromagnetic satellite, which will help improve earthquake predictions.

In reflecting on the just-concluded Schiller Institute two-day conference, Helga Zepp LaRouche emphasized the significance of the question posed by Jacques Cheminade, a former candidate for President of France, in his address during the 4th panel.  Cheminade asked, “Why is there no mass movement to counter the present global crisis?”

In her review of the developments of the last week — from the ongoing battle to overturn election fraud in the U.S., the escalation of anti-Russia, anti-China actions by the same networks behind the fraudulent Russiagate, and aggressive moves to impose the Global Reset — Zepp LaRouche came back to the importance of creating a cultural Renaissance to address the systemic collapse underway.  It is crucial that we take the advice of her late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, to “Think Like Beethoven,” so that we can rise to the level of thinking needed to overcome what otherwise is a crisis which threatens the survival of humanity.  She urged people to celebrate the 250th birthday of Beethoven by listening to his music, viewing the Schiller Institute (SI) conference, and then joining the SI to move mankind into a new paradigm.