Trump did not answer the call.

Rather, the commander in chief is presiding over the unauthorized expansion of US military involvement in Syria-and disregarding the Constitution's most serious dictates regarding war and peace.

The commentariat can and will debate when a president's refusal to seek congressional authorization for military action becomes impeachable. (There will even be attempts by the apologists for presidential overreach to make convoluted claims about how past authorizations of the use of military force somehow apply to every new conflict.) But, in Trump's case, there is no evidence to suggest that he will respect the requirements of the Constitution. As such, an article of impeachment is justified.

The Left/Right Challenge To The Failed 'War On Drugs'

To learn more about the need for drug policy reform, and the history of the failed war on drugs, watch this informative video from the Drug Policy Alliance.
(c) 2017 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is Unstoppable, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel).

Most people understand that human-caused climate change is a real and serious threat. True, some still reject the mountains of evidence amassed by scientists from around the world over many decades, and accepted by every legitimate scientific academy and institution. But as the physical evidence builds daily - from increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events like droughts and floods to disappearing polar ice to rising sea levels - it takes an incredible amount of denial to claim we have no reason to worry.

Climate change isn't an easy or pleasant subject, and massive efforts by the fossil fuel industry and its supporters to sow doubt and confusion have made it harder for people to grasp. With all the information out there, it's not always easy to distinguish between analysis based on rational, peer-reviewed evidence and propaganda from industry and deniers. But if more people truly understood the enormity of the crisis, we'd be engaged in an all-out effort, comparable to those undertaken during world wars, to reduce the threat.

That's why David Suzuki Foundation senior editor Ian Hanington and I wrote Just Cool It!: The Climate Crisis and What We Can Do. The book provides a clear and comprehensive overview of global warming, climate science and solutions. We examine the science's history, from 1824 when natural philosopher Joseph Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect - although he didn't call it that - through to the discovery of feedback loops, and up to the present, following the 2015 Paris Agreement, which was based on the current evidence outlined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report.

The book then delves into climate consequences and impacts - from extreme weather to melting Arctic ice and ocean acidification to species extinction and impacts on human physical and mental health to the refugee crisis and more.

With extensive knowledge about climate change and its consequences and impacts, one has to ask why we're moving so slowly to confront such an urgent problem. We're already in a troubling state and it will quickly get worse if we fail to tackle it head-on. The book's next section explores some reasons behind this lack of resolve. Although there's progress in many areas, we still have to come to terms with outmoded ways of thinking and living that prevent us from acting in our own best interests. We also have to deal with issues like population growth and industrialization in the developing world. And we're still up against wealthy, powerful interests that would like us to ignore the issue so they can continue to reap enormous fossil fuel profits.

Despite the barriers, there's a wide range of solutions, and most of the book focuses on those. Some are already in place and some are being developed. Some show more promise than others, and some have their own pitfalls. Ultimately, though, this is what gives us hope. As we point out, no single technology, action or idea will get us out of this mess. It will take concerted efforts from individuals, governments at all levels and people in every sector, from agriculture to science and technology.

The benefits of many solutions go beyond their climate implications. Burning less coal, oil and gas helps the climate but also cuts pollution, which protects human health and brings health-care costs down. Those who are able to walk, bike or take transit instead of driving will improve their physical and mental health (avoiding gridlock aggravation, for example) and save significant amounts of money. Improving agricultural methods can increase the carbon stored in soils and plants and prevent loss of fertile soils, which is also a serious problem for humanity.

Julian Assange has been vindicated because the Swedish case against him was corrupt. The prosecutor, Marianne Ny, obstructed justice and should be prosecuted. Her obsession with Assange not only embarrassed her colleagues and the judiciary but exposed the Swedish state's collusion with the United States in its crimes of war and "rendition."

Had Assange not sought refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, he would have been on his way to the kind of American torture pit that Chelsea Manning had to endure.

This prospect was obscured by the grim farce played out in Sweden. "It's a laughing stock," said James Catlin, one of Assange's Australian lawyers. "It is as if they make it up as they go along."

It may have seemed that way, but there was always serious purpose. In 2008, a secret Pentagon document prepared by the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch" foretold a detailed plan to discredit WikiLeaks and smear Assange personally.

The "mission," as the Pentagon document says, was to destroy the trust that was WikiLeaks' "center of gravity." This would be achieved with threats of "exposure [and] criminal prosecution." Silencing and criminalizing such an unpredictable source of truth-telling was the aim.

Perhaps this was understandable. WikiLeaks has exposed the way America dominates much of human affairs, including its epic crimes, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale, often homicidal killing of civilians and the contempt for sovereignty and international law.

These disclosures are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor of constitutional law, lauded whistleblowers as "part of a healthy democracy [who] must be protected from reprisal."

In 2012, the Obama campaign boasted on its website that Obama had prosecuted more whistleblowers in his first term than all other U.S. presidents combined. Before Manning had even received a trial, Obama had publicly pronounced the former Army intelligence analyst guilty.

Few serious observers doubt that should the U.S. get its hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. According to documents released by Edward Snowden, Assange is on a "manhunt target list." Threats to kidnap or assassinate him became almost political and media currency in the U.S. following then-Vice President Joe Biden's slur that the WikiLeaks founder was a "cyber-terrorist."

Hillary Clinton, the destroyer of Libya and, as WikiLeaks revealed last year, the secret supporter and personal beneficiary of forces underwriting Islamic State, proposed her own expedient solution: "Can't we just drone this guy?" [Clinton later said she was joking.]

According to Australian diplomatic cables, Washington's bid to get Assange is "unprecedented in scale and nature." In Alexandria, Va., a secret grand jury has sought for almost seven years to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy.

The First Amendment protects any publisher, journalist or whistleblower, whether he or she is the editor of The New York Times or the editor of WikiLeaks. The very notion of free speech is described as America's "founding virtue" or, as Thomas Jefferson called it, "our currency."

Faced with this hurdle, the U.S. Justice Department has contrived charges of espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, conversion (theft of government property), computer fraud and abuse (computer hacking) and general conspiracy. The favored Espionage Act, which was meant to deter pacifists and conscientious objectors during World War I, has provisions for life imprisonment and the death penalty.

Assange's ability to defend himself in such a Kafkaesque world has been severely limited by the U.S. declaring his case a state secret. In 2015, a federal court in Washington state blocked the release of all information about the "national security" investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was "active and ongoing" and would harm the "pending prosecution" of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rothstein, said it was necessary to show "appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security." This is a kangaroo court.

For Assange, his trial has been trial by media. On Aug. 20, 2010, when the Swedish police opened a "rape investigation," they coordinated it, unlawfully, with the Stockholm tabloids. The front pages said Assange had been accused of the "rape of two women." The word "rape" can have a very different legal meaning in Sweden than in Britain or the United States; a pernicious false reality became the news that went round the world.

Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in canceling the arrest warrant, saying, "I don't believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape." Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying, "There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever."

Enter Claes Borgstrom, a highly contentious figure in the Social Democratic Party then standing as a candidate in Sweden's imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor's dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well, personally and politically.

On Aug. 30, 2010, Assange went to a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered the questions put to him. As he understood it, that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was reopening the case.

At a press conference, Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed. The reporter cited one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied, "Ah, but she is not a lawyer."

On the day that Ny reactivated the case, the head of Sweden's military intelligence service-which goes by the acronym MUST-publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article titled "WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers [under U.S. command in Afghanistan]."

Both the Swedish prime minister and foreign minister attacked Assange, who had been charged with no crime. Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO, had been told by its U.S. counterparts that U.S.-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be "cut off" if Sweden sheltered him.

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the renewed "rape investigation" to take its course. The London-based newspaper The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq "War Logs," based on WikiLeaks' disclosures, which Assange was to oversee in London.

Finally, he was allowed him to leave Sweden. As soon as he had left, Ny issued a European arrest warrant and an Interpol "red alert" normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals.

Assange went to a police station in London, was arrested and spent 10 days in Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on bail of 340,000 pounds [more than 440,000 U.S. dollars], he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

He still had not been charged with any offense. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned in London, by video or personally, pointing out that Ny had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard commonly used by the Swedish and other European authorities for that purpose. Ny refused.

For almost seven years-a period in which Sweden questioned 44 people in the U.K. in connection with police investigations-Ny refused to question Assange.

Writing in the Swedish press, a former Swedish prosecutor, Rolf Hillegren, accused Ny of losing all impartiality. He described her personal investment in the case as "abnormal" and demanded she be replaced.

Assange asked the Swedish authorities for a guarantee that he would not be "rendered" to the U.S. if he was extradited to Sweden. This was refused. In December 2010, the British newspaper The Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his extradition to the U.S.

Contrary to its reputation as a bastion of liberal enlightenment, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret CIA "renditions"-including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the U.N. Committee Against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and in WikiLeaks cables.

"Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England," wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and dangers that faced Assange, "clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights."

The war on Assange now intensified. Marianne Ny refused to allow his Swedish lawyers, and the Swedish courts, access to hundreds of text messages that the police had extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the "rape" allegations.

Ny said she was not legally required to reveal this critical evidence until a formal charge was laid and she had questioned him. Then why wouldn't she question him? Catch-22.

When Ny announced last week that she was dropping the Assange case, she made no mention of the evidence that would destroy it. One of the text messages makes clear that one of the two women did not want any charges brought against Assange, but, the woman said, "the police were keen on getting a hold on him." She was "shocked" when they arrested him because she only "wanted him to take [an HIV] test." She "did not want to accuse JA of anything," and she said "it was the police who made up the charges." In a so-called witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been "railroaded by police and others around her."

Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both denied they were raped, and one of them has since tweeted, "I have not been raped." The women were manipulated by police, whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they too are the victims in this sinister saga.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: "The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction. ... The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?"

Assange's choice was stark: extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the U.S. or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety.

Supported by most of Latin America, the government of tiny Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the U.S.; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington.

The Labor government of Australia's then-prime minister, Julia Gillard, had even threatened to take away his Australian passport-until it was pointed out to her that this would be unlawful.

The renowned human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, who represents Assange in London, wrote to the then-foreign minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd: "Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions ... it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged."

It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting I attended with her, the Australian consul general, Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew "only what I read in the newspapers" about the details of the case.

In 2011, in Sydney, I spent several hours with a conservative member of Australia's Federal Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull. We discussed the threats to Assange and their wider implications for freedom of speech and justice, and why Australia was obliged to stand by him. Turnbull then had a reputation as a free speech advocate. He is now the prime minister of Australia.

I gave him Peirce's letter about the threat to Assange's rights and life. He said the situation was clearly appalling and promised to take it up with the Gillard government. Only his silence followed.

For almost seven years, this epic miscarriage of justice has been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. There are few precedents. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the U.S. threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, and to the principle of free speech, was lost in a sordid and ambitious "anti-journalism."

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

The previous editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years." Yet no attempt was made to protect The Guardian's provider and source. Instead, the "scoop" became part of a marketing plan to raise the newspaper's cover price.

With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a "damaged personality" and "callous." They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing U.S. embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh."

Journalism students might well study this period to understand the most ubiquitous source of "fake news"-as from within a media self-ordained with a false respectability and as an extension of the authority and power it courts and protects.

The presumption of innocence was not a consideration in Kirsty Wark's memorable live-on-air interrogation in 2010. "Why don't you just apologize to the women?" she demanded of Assange, followed by: "Do we have your word of honor that you won't abscond?"

On the BBC's "Today" program, John Humphrys bellowed: "Are you a sexual predator?" Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded to know how many women he had slept with.

"Would even Fox News have descended to that level?" wondered the American historian William Blum. "I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: 'You mean including your mother?' "

Last week, on BBC World News, on the day Sweden announced it was dropping the case, I was interviewed by Greta Guru-Murthy, who seemed to have little knowledge of the Assange case. She persisted in referring to the "charges" against him. She accused him of putting Donald Trump in the White House, and she drew my attention to the "fact" that "leaders around the world" had condemned him. Among these leaders she included Trump's CIA director. I asked her, "Are you a journalist?"

The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons the British Parliament reformed the Extradition Act in 2014. "His case has been won lock, stock and barrel," Gareth Peirce told me, "these changes in the law mean that the U.K. now recognizes as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit." In other words, he would have won his case in the British courts and would not have been forced to take refuge.

Ecuador's decision to protect Assange in 2012 was immensely brave. Even though the granting of asylum is a humanitarian act, and the power to do so is enjoyed by all states under international law, both Sweden and the United Kingdom refused to recognize the legitimacy of Ecuador's decision.

Ecuador's embassy in London was placed under police siege and its government abused. When the British Foreign Office threatened to violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, warning that it would remove the diplomatic inviolability of the embassy and send the police in to get Assange, outrage across the world forced the government to back down.

During one night, police appeared at the windows of the embassy in an obvious attempt to intimidate Assange and his protectors.

Since then, Assange has been confined to a small room without sunlight. He has been ill from time to time and refused safe passage to the diagnostic facilities of a hospital. Yet, his resilience and dark humor remain quite remarkable in the circumstances. When asked how he put up with the confinement, he replied, "Sure beats a supermax [prison]."

It is not over, but it is unravelling. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention-the tribunal that adjudicates and decides whether governments comply with their human rights obligations-last year ruled that Assange had been detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden. This is international law at its apex.

Both Britain and Sweden participated in the 16-month-long U.N. investigation and submitted evidence and defended their position before the tribunal. In previous cases ruled upon by the Working Group-Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Burma, imprisoned opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, detained Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian in Iran-both Britain and Sweden gave full support to the tribunal. The difference now is that Assange's persecution endures in the heart of London.

The Metropolitan Police say they still intend to arrest Assange for bail infringement should he leave the embassy. What then? A few months in prison while the U.S. delivers its extradition request to the British courts?

If the British government allows this to happen, it will, in the eyes of the world, be shamed comprehensively and historically as an accessory to the crime of a war waged by rampant power against justice and freedom, and all of us.
(c) 2017 John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film"maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and InterAction (a coalition of U.S. human rights groups) have published a report on how to protect civilians when waging war on cities. They seek to catalog the "humanitarian challenges specific to urban warfare."

While I would not (one wishes it were needless to say) prefer that they strive to maximize the human destruction possible in urban warfare, I want to note that any report seeking to address the humanitarian challenges specific to slavery or rape or child abuse or the slaughter of kittens (rather than humans) would be dismissed with outrage. Nowhere do these human rights advocates hint at the possibility of ceasing to bomb cities. Nowhere do they recognize the illegality of all recent U.S. bombings of cities under the U.N. Charter or, for that matter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Instead, the authors treat the practice of bombing cities as inevitable and natural, and attribute the growth of urban warfare to the migration of people from rural to urban areas.

What should be done? While the authors discuss various types of massive slaughter and destruction as "intended or not," they also suggest that the key reform to be sought is better intentions and more careful planning. The "development" types should work better with the "humanitarians," provide more "flexible" funding for the human rights groups, and do "proportionality analysis," we're told.

The word "proportionality" appears in every Just War theory and in thousands of mainstream news reports, yet nobody, including these authors, has ever devised a test whereby one can determine whether a war or a particular bombing was "proportional" or not. If I say killing 14 children in order to kill a particular man was disproportional, what's to stop someone else arguing that this particular man needed to be killed to an extent that would have justified killing anywhere up to 16.37 children? Of course, I can point out that most wars kill mostly civilians, so that launching them is an act that guarantees great injustice, but I can't stop someone else claiming that "proportionally" killing 500,000 children is "worth it" in the context of some just cause (as then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once claimed).

The most serious recommendation that these authors make is that no more large bombs, only small bombs, be dropped on cities, with the large bombs saved for rural areas. It's worth noting that the U.S. government is developing "more usable" nuclear bombs and tends to ignore such restrictions, that small bombs like large bombs still commit mass-murder while endangering us and costing a fortune and poisoning the environment, that a number of small bombs adds up to a large bomb, and that large bombs in rural areas do all of the same destructive things even if hitting fewer people and less centralized infrastructure.

The most disturbing recommendations in this report include creating safe exit routes (even while claiming people should have the right not to leave), moving schools and hospitals underground, avoiding ground floor windows, and taking up arms and developing local militias.

Dear Deputy Fuhrer Acosta,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your willingness to bust unions and take away their rights, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 06-24-2017. We salute you Herr Acosta, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence