Political Prisoners

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange speaks following Swedish prosecutors dropping their case on him. He’s now said he will work with US Justice Department about their case on him.

Protesters gather under a banner with a picture of jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouti during a rally supporting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, who have been on an open-ended hunger strike in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 3, 2017. The prisoners launched the protest to press for better conditions, including family visits. The International Committee of the Red Cross issued a rare statement, urging Israeli authorities to stop what it called the “systematic suspension” of family visits for the hunger strikers. (AP/Nasser Nasser)

Abdel-Qader Abul-Fahem, the first Palestinian to pass martyr in hunger strike on July 11th 1970. Recently arrested and recovering from 72 shots in his body, Abdel-Qader insisted to share his comrades in the first collective hunger strike for the Palestinian …

The Israeli state has violated international law more than any other country, yet has rarely, if ever, been held accountable for crimes and misconduct.
Israel’s successful public relation campaigns through the ever-willing western media partners, coupled with the relentless work and pressure carried out by its powerful backers in Washington DC, London, Paris and elsewhere, has borne stupendous results.

Tears flowed freely down my face as I told my partner that Chelsea’s imprisonment is commuted.
Contradictions galore! The jingoist nation’s most warring president just committed the one decent thing in his eight years of war-making against seven nations, conjuring up false enemies with competing capitalist states Russia and China, and harsh treatment against all the whistle-blowers during his contentious term.

The bona fide war criminal Barack Obama commuted the unjust prison sentence of political prisoner and courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning (along with Oscar López Rivera and others). It is a big deal. But does it mitigate the numerous heinous crimes of Barack Obama?

In the last full week of Barack Obama’s eight year tenure as President of the United States of America, dozens of political prisoners still sit in cages across the nation’s prisons, rotting away as Obama consciously chooses not to exercise the power to simply free them with the stroke of a pen. Many activists for Puerto Rican independence, Native American and African American rights, and other causes were targeted by the political police’s illegal COINTELPRO program and convicted in sham trials.

The Uppity Negro

Ever since the telling of biblical fairy tales, few stories have lived up to the hype around the mismatch between the shepherd boy David and the giant Goliath. In the biblical encounter, David prevailed by keeping his foe Goliath at a distance with a formidable weapon, his sling.
Today a modern-day version of David and Goliath is playing out.