By Danaka Katovich, Truthout

One year ago this July, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale stood in front of Judge Liam O’Grady at his sentencing and explained himself. After a lengthy investigation and prosecution, it was finally the day when Hale would find out if he would spend years in prison for doing something he felt morally obligated to do: Tell the truth about the United States’ drone program.

By Jeffrey Sterling

It is difficult to talk about happenings in the world other than the continued, appalling Russian invasion of Ukraine and the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Chicagoland, and elsewhere. Then, there is the Supreme Court which continues down a judicial road of eroding personal rights and towing the conservative party line. I don’t want to take attention away from those outrages. However, the shadow of one tragedy is not dispelled by the light of another.

By Sam Biddle — The Intercept
Google employees, who have been kept in the dark about the “Nimbus” AI project, have concerns about Israeli human rights abuses.

By James Risen — The Intercept

The antiquated measure is an abuse of the legal system, but the Justice Department has no incentive to stop using it.

For more than 100 years, the Espionage Act, one of the worst laws in American history, has stayed on the books, impervious to reform.

By Janine Jackson — FAIR.org

CounterSpin interview with Chip Gibbons on why Assange matters

Janine Jackson interviewed Chip Gibbons about the latest updates in the Julian Assange case for the July 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

By Rebecca Chowdhury – Time

Alejandra Pablos leans into the camera, and her curly black hair frames her face. “We are going to hear about abortions,” she says to viewers watching via Instagram Live. Every Tuesday, Pablos hosts virtual Abortion Speak Outs.

By Robert Pallitto, Foreign Policy in Focus

The U.S. government doesn’t want to acknowledge a Polish torture site that everyone knows about.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled recently on the government’s use of the state secrets doctrine in an opinion that will make it easier for intelligence agencies to evade accountability in future individual rights cases. In U.S. v. Zubaydah, government torture policy and state secrets converge. A torture victim requested information related to his treatment at a CIA “black site,” and the government blocked that request, citing national security interests. Seven members of the Court joined parts of an opinion siding with the government, with only Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch dissenting. The case has implications for other torture-related cases and for government accountability more broadly as it expands state secrecy powers based on a doctrine that was already overbroad, and suspect in its origins.

By Eoin Higgins

There’s no plausible way to dispute that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is spreading racist conspiracy theories, but Glenn Greenwald has been trying anyway.

Ed Pilkington in New York – The Guardian

The subpoena that was used by the US justice department to obtain details of a Guardian reporter’s phone account, as part of a leak inquiry, was issued by the Biden administration within the opening weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency.

by Elizabeth Goitein, opinion contributor – The Hill

When Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had misused foreign intelligence surveillance laws to collect millions of Americans’ phone records, the resulting public outcry eventually led Congress to ban the practice. How would Americans and their lawmakers react if they learned that the government was misusing these powers to access the actual contents of millions of Americans’ communications, without a warrant or even a factual basis to suspect criminal activity?