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, 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.”
In other words, Gonzalo dared exercise the “free speech” Washington claims it is defending in Ukraine to tell the truth about what is actually going on in a country where billions of US dollars have simply “disappeared” and all opposition parties and media have been shut down. Where the Orthodox Church has been violently suppressed.
We are all – those of us who have come to realize that the government lies non-stop – Gonzalo Lira. (Though most of us are nowhere near as brave as he was.) We are all potentially targets of a murderous regime that will stop at nothing to keep its own war machine going at the expense of us all. And particularly anyone who calls out the lies.
I have been so utterly depressed since I heard of Gonzalo’s horrible, lonely death. I myself benefitted from his on-the-ground reporting when there was nothing coming out of Ukraine but MSM pro-war propaganda from Kiev.
One call from anyone in the United States government to Ukraine demanding that an American held for exercising free speech be released would have saved Gonzalo’s life. The US government and specifically the Biden regime knew it could save American citizen Gonzalo but it decided that it was better for him to die than to have any challenge to its narrative.
Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute.
Daniel McAdams is Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.
