if you support the empire in any fashion this essay shows you how wrong you are;

One call from the White House or State Department could have saved California-born journalist Gonzalo Lira’s life. Living in Ukraine-controlled Kharkov (to be close to his children), Lira saw early on, from his unique vantage point, that the propaganda being fed to the American people from the mainstream media about that “plucky little democracy” in Ukraine fighting to protect “our values” was, as is all pro-war propaganda, utterly false.

War propaganda. We don’t need to go down the whole line, but “yanking babies from incubators” and “giving Viagra to the troops” and “mobile rape vehicles” and “mobile chemical weapons delivery devices” and “these Iraqi weapons could decimate New York!” and so on and so on.

You know the routine. You know how war propaganda works.

And you know how furious the US regime becomes when anyone dares to refute that war propaganda.

When Julian Assange dared reveal to the American people that their own government was not on a “liberation” mission but rather on a murder mission in Iraq, the permanent state began plotting its revenge. When Wikileaks exposed the secret murder and surveillance workings of the CIA, Assange’s fate was sealed. His whistleblower organization became, in the words of neocon former CIA director Mike Pompeo, a “hostile intelligence service,” a determination Assange himself explained to Ron Paul Institute DC Conference attendees in 2017.

The life of American citizen and journalist Gonzalo Lira ended on Friday, all alone in a cold Ukrainian dungeon. Freezing, he slowly suffocated to death with a collapsed lung and double pneumonia. His body was swollen with systemic edema from fluid-filed heart and lungs. He was left to slowly die from October when he developed pneumonia, until December when his captors finally admitted that he was sick, to this past Friday, January 12th (yesterday), when, with no medical treatment, his 55 year old body finally gave out.

His young children are forever denied another day with their daddy.

He had been held in gulag conditions, incommunicado, for eight months, for the “crime” of, according to the US client state, “justifying Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine.”......more........