Category: Afghanistan

  • Ministers from Muslim-majority nations to travel to Kabul to discuss women and girls schooling ban

    Foreign ministers from several Muslim-majority countries are planning to go to Kabul in part to urge the Taliban to recognise that the exclusion of women and girls from education is a distortion of the Islamic faith.

    The proposal has the support of western diplomats who recognise that calls from them concerning universal values are going to have less traction with the Taliban than if the call comes from leaders of largely Islamic states.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • US and Taliban delegations met in Qatar’s capital Doha on October 9-10, the first such meeting since the political developments of August when the latter took over the country. Following the meeting, the US has reportedly agreed to provide “humanitarian assistance” to Afghanistan. However, the foreign ministry in Afghanistan said that such assistance “should not be linked to political issues.”

    The post US And Taliban Delegations Meet In Doha appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Language is politics and politics is power. This is why the misuse of language is particularly disturbing, especially when the innocent and vulnerable pay the price.

    The wars in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries in recent years have resulted in one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes, arguably unseen since World War II. Instead of developing a unified global strategy that places the welfare of the refugees of these conflicts as a top priority, many countries ignored them altogether, blamed them for their own misery and, at times, treated them as if they were criminals and outlaws.

    But this is not always the case. At the start of the Syrian war, support for Syrian refugees was considered a moral calling, championed by countries across the world, from the Middle East to Europe and even beyond. Though often rhetoric was not matched by action, helping the refugees was seen, theoretically, as a political stance against the Syrian government.

    Back then, Afghans did not factor in the Western political discourse on refugees. In fact, they were rarely seen as refugees. Why? Because, until August 15 – when the Taliban entered the capital, Kabul – most of those fleeing Afghanistan were seen according to a different classification: migrants, illegal immigrants, illegal aliens, and so on. Worse, at times they were depicted as parasites taking advantage of international sympathy for refugees, in general, and Syrians, in particular.

    The lesson here is that Afghans fleeing their war-torn and US-occupied country were of little political use to their potential host countries. As soon as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, and the US, along with its NATO allies, were forced to leave the country, the language immediately shifted, because then, the refugees served a political purpose.

    For example, Italian Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese was one of the first to advocate the need for European support for Afghan refugees. She told a ‘European Union forum on the protection of Afghans’, on October 8, that Italy will work with its allies to ensure fleeing Afghans can reach Italy via third countries.

    The hypocrisy here is palpable. Italy, like other European countries, has done its utmost to block refugees from arriving at its shores. Its policies have included the prevention of refugee boats stranded in the Mediterranean Sea from reaching Italian territorial waters; the funding and the establishment of refugee camps in Libya – often depicted as ‘concentration camps’ – to host refugees who are ‘caught’ trying to escape to Europe; and, finally, the prosecution of Italian humanitarian workers and even elected officials who dared lend a hand to refugees.

    The latest victim of the Italian authorities’ campaign to crack down on refugees and asylum-seekers was Domenico Lucano, the former mayor of Riace in the Southern Italian region of Calabria, who was sentenced by the Italian Court of Locri to over 13 years in prison for “irregularities in managing asylum seekers”. The verdict also included a fine of €500,000 to pay back funds received from the EU and the Italian government.

    What are these “irregularities”?

    “Many migrants in Riace have obtained municipal jobs while Lucano was Mayor. Abandoned buildings in the area had been restored with European funds to provide housing for immigrants,” Euronews reported.

    The decision was particularly pleasing to the far-right Lega Party. Lega’s head, Matteo Salvini, was the Interior Minister of Italy from 2018-19. During his time in office, many had conveniently blamed him for Italy’s outrageous anti-immigrants’ policy. Naturally, the news of Lucano’s sentencing was welcomed by Lega and Salvini.

    However, only rhetoric has changed since Italy’s new Interior Minister, Lamorgese, has taken office. True, the anti-refugee language was far less populist and certainly less racist – especially if compared to Salvini’s offensive language of the past. The unfriendly policies towards the refugees remained in effect.

    It matters little to desperate refugees crossing to Europe in their thousands whether Italy’s policies are shaped by Lamorgese or Salvini. What matters to them is their ability to reach safer shores. Sadly, many of them do not.

    A disturbing report issued by the European Commission, on September 30, showed the staggering impact of Europe’s political hostility towards refugees. More than 20,000 migrants have died by drowning while attempting to cross the Mediterranean on their way to Europe.

    “Since the beginning of 2021, a total of 1,369 migrants have died in the Mediterranean”, the report also indicated. In fact, many of those died during the West-championed international frenzy to ‘save’ the Afghans from the Taliban.

    Since Afghan refugees represent a sizable portion of worldwide refugees, especially those attempting to cross to Europe, it is safe to assume that many of those who have perished in the Mediterranean were also Afghans. But why is Europe welcoming some Afghans while allowing others to die?

    Political language is not coined at random. There is a reason why we call those fleeing in search for safety ‘refugees’, or ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘illegal aliens’, ‘undocumented’, ‘dissidents’, and so on. In fact, the last term, ‘dissidents’, is the most political of all. In the US, for example, Cubans fleeing their country are almost always political ‘dissidents’, as the phrase itself represents a direct indictment of the Cuban Communist government. Haitians, on the other hand, are not political ‘dissidents’. They are hardly ‘refugees’, as they are often portrayed as ‘illegal aliens’.

    This kind of language is used in the media and by politicians as a matter of course. The same fleeing refugee could change status more than once over the duration of his escape. Syrians were once welcomed in their thousands. Now, they are perceived to be political burdens to their host countries. Afghans are valued or devalued, depending on who is in charge of the country. Those fleeing or escaping the US occupation were rarely welcomed; those escaping the Taliban rule are perceived as heroes, needing solidarity.

    However, while we are busy manipulating language, there are thousands who are stranded at sea and hundreds of thousands languishing in refugee camps worldwide. They are only welcomed if they serve as political capital. Otherwise, they remain a ‘problem’ to be dealt with – violently, if necessary.

    The post Heroes or Parasites: Europe’s Self-serving Politics on Refugees first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Taliban are hunting down women’s rights activists in Kabul. Yasmeen Afghan files this account of one such activist who is now underground.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • A view of a Kabul suburb

    Afghanistan’s humanitarian situation is spiraling into catastrophe.

    Millions of Afghans are now facing severe economic stress and food insecurity in the wake of the Taliban’s August takeover, set off by widespread lost income, cash shortages, and rising food costs. Officials with the UN and several foreign governments are warning of an economic collapse and risks of worsening acute malnutrition and outright famine.

    Surveys by the World Food Program (WFP) reveal over nine in ten Afghan families have insufficient food for daily consumption, half stating they have run out of food at least once in the last two weeks. One in three Afghans is already acutely hungry. Other United Nations reports warn that over 1 million more children could face acute malnutrition in the coming year.

    One main cause of the crisis is that governments in August stopped payments from the World Bank-administered Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, previously used to pay salaries to millions of civil servants, doctors, nurses, teachers, and other essential workers. Afghanistan’s health and education systems, among other sectors, are collapsing. Millions of Afghan families have lost their incomes.

    At the same time, Afghan banks and global financial institutions, including Western Union, MoneyGram, and the Central Bank of Afghanistan, now lack enough paper currency to cover withdrawals. Account holders receiving foreign transfers or with “money in the bank” — ordinary Afghans, companies, UN agencies, humanitarian aid organizations — can’t access their money.

    Donor governments are understandably concerned about actions that would bolster or appear to legitimate Taliban authorities who are arbitrarily arresting and attacking activists, journalists, and former government workers and adopting policies and practices that violate the rights of women and girls to education, employment, and freedom of movement. They have already imposed severe restraints on activists, women, and the media and resumed executions.

    But Afghanistan’s underlying economic and humanitarian problems, which disproportionately affect women and girls, cannot simply be ignored because of the Taliban’s record.

    The U.S. Treasury on September 24 did issue new guidance and licenses that authorize electronic transfers with Afghanistan banks and other entities for humanitarian purposes. The problem is that electronic transactions alone cannot address the crisis. The Afghan Central Bank needs to be able to supply physical dollars and afghanis.

    But after the Taliban takeover, the New York Federal Reserve cut off the Central Bank’s access to its U.S. dollar assets and capacity to settle U.S. dollar transactions with other banks — and its capacity to purchase paper dollars from the Federal Reserve to ensure liquidity and currency stability. The World Bank also stopped the bank from accessing its assets held by the International Monetary Fund.

    U.S. dollar transactions, including paper transactions, are integral to Afghanistan’s economy. Most of the country’s gross domestic product comes from outside the country in the form of dollars — donor money, remittances, export income. If the Afghan Central Bank isn’t provided with a method of settling dollar accounts and obtaining new paper currency in dollars, liquidity problems and cash shortages will only grow worse. Local currency issues also need to be addressed. Companies that print Afghan currency in Europe, concerned about sanctions, still cannot ship new bills to Kabul. Taliban authorities have no capacity to print money.

    Afghanistan’s economy has a limited capacity for resilience. The new Taliban authorities, like the previous government, do not possess adequate revenue sources to fund basic government services. This is a country that has relied on outside donors to help with such services for most of its modern existence.

    The UN has announced a plan to send $45 million to support the health sector via UN agencies — but this will not solve the paper and liquidity crises. It’s not the UN’s role to fly millions of physical U.S. dollars into Afghanistan. Foreign governments need to figure out how to restore funding to public services, not only health but also education, using the country’s banks and without enriching the Taliban or facilitating their abuses.

    In doing so, the U.S. government and other main donors to Afghanistan will need to adjust sanctions policies and reach agreements allowing the Central Bank to process selected transactions and obtain paper currency. Donors and the Taliban will also need to agree on methods for supporting vital services through independent organizations such as the UN or non-governmental organizations.

    The Taliban will have to accept that concerns about providing direct budgetary support, and preventing corruption, will require independent financial oversight of transactions — something UN and international financial authorities already do. The Taliban will also need to accept that donors will only support assistance and services that are equitably distributed to women and men, girls and boys, and allow systems to monitor and ensure that services benefit all Afghans.

    Inaction is untenable. The Taliban’s cruelties are horrendous, but walking away from past support for vital services, politically and economically isolating the country, and maintaining overbroad, blanket financial restrictions, won’t mitigate the abuses, but only hurt the Afghan people more.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Thousands who fled Taliban are living in hotels with inadequate healthcare in Operation Warm Welcome

    Afghans who recently arrived in the UK after fleeing the Taliban takeover have asked to be sent back, casting doubt over the success of Operation Warm Welcome, the government’s Afghan resettlement programme.

    It was launched by Boris Johnson on 29 August to help Afghan refugees arriving in the UK by providing support so they could “rebuild their lives, find work, pursue education and integrate into their local communities”.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The trial of former soldier Dennis Hutchings is underway in Belfast. And once again, the accused is from the lower ranks. Not one of the powerful commanders who gave the orders is facing trial.

    The former Household Cavalry trooper faces a charge of attempted murder. His alleged victim was John Pat Cunningham. Cunningham was 27 and had learning difficulties. He was shot in the back after fleeing an army patrol in 1974. Hutchings has pleaded not guilty to the offence.

    Hutchings has won the support of many in the military community. This includes former Tory veterans minister Johnny Mercer, who has been with him in Ireland. A DUP politician even joined the pair for a photo opportunity. Carla Lockhart claimed on Twitter that Hutchings was a victim of politicised courts:

    Familiar pattern

    Hutchings served in the Household Cavalry as a non-commissioned officer. That means he was part of the workforce not the boss class of officers. In fact, barring a few exceptions, most of the soldiers accused of war crimes from Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan served in ‘the ranks’. And here there is a question about accountability.

    What the average soldier does on the ground reflects how they are trained and led. Yet the burden of legal cases always seems to fall on low-ranking personnel and never on the generals and politicians in charge. So what’s the alternative?

    The poor bloody infantry

    Derry writer and politician Eamonn McCann captured this sentiment in a head-to-head debate with ex-general and peer Richard Dannatt in 2019.

    Speaking on the Bloody Sunday massacre, McCann said:

    What we’re seeing [is] what Kipling called the “poor blood infantry”. Your rank-and-file soldiers, they have to carry the can. Somebody organised it, somebody gave the Paras to understand that it would be okay if you go in there and shoot innocent people. Where are they?

    And he went on:

    And I agree with the person who said [gestures to the audience] where are the IRA leaders? Why are the foot soldiers being dragged up all the time? Where are the bosses? The bosses are sitting pretty, and none more so than the bosses of the British Army, now made Lords and the rest of it. And none of them were ever held to account.

    Real justice

    That’s not to say low-ranking soldiers who carry out atrocities should get away scot-free. However, the fact that courts only seem to look at working class squaddies, who have little say over the broader scope of operations, is intolerable.

    The senior officers with the actual power who give the orders should also be in the dock.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Kenneth Allen

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Kunduz,

    At least 50 people were killed in a bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in the Afghan city of Kunduz on Friday, in the latest violence to rock the country since the Taliban takeover in August.

    “We have received more than 90 wounded patients and 50 dead bodies, but the number will change. We are still receiving more people,” said a Doctors Without Borders, hospital worker, who did not want to be named.

    Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid had earlier said an unknown number of people had been killed and injured when “an explosion took place in a mosque of our Shiite compatriots” in Kunduz.

    There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but the Islamic State group, bitter rivals of the Taliban, has claimed similar recent atrocities.

    According to News agency, Residents of Kunduz, the capital of a province of the same name, blast hit a Shiite mosque during Friday prayers, the most important of the week for Muslims.

    Zalmai Alokzai, a local businessman who rushed to Kunduz Provincial Hospital to check whether doctors needed blood donations, described horrific scenes.

    “I saw more than 40 dead bodies,” he told foreign news agency. “Ambulances were going back to the incident scene to carry the dead.”

    An international aid worker at the MSF hospital in the city told news agency there were fears the death toll could rise.

    “Hundreds of people are gathered at the main gate of the hospital and crying for their relatives but armed Taliban guys are trying to prevent gatherings in case another explosion is planned,” he said.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Battles in the US Congress that erupted again this week, holding up an extra $1bn in military funding for Israel, underscored just how divorced from reality the conversation about US financial aid to Israel has become, even among many critics.

    For 48 hours last month, a small group of progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives succeeded in sabotaging a measure to pick up the bill for Israel to replenish its Iron Dome interception missiles. The Iron Dome system was developed by Israel, with generous financial backing from successive US administrations, in the wake of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Today, it ostensibly serves to protect Israel from short-range, largely improvised rockets fired intermittently out of Gaza.

    Supplies of the Iron Dome missiles, each of which cost at least $50,000, were depleted back in May, when Israel triggered widespread confrontations with Palestinians by intensifying its settlement of Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem’s Old City and violently raiding al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian militant groups fired large numbers of rockets out of Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel for the past 15 years. Iron Dome intercepted the rockets before they could land in Israel.

    The group of progressive Democrats, known popularly as the Squad, scotched an initial move by their congressional leadership to include the $1bn assistance to Israel in US budget legislation. But the money for Iron Dome was quickly reintroduced as a stand-alone bill that passed overwhelmingly, with 420 votes in favour and nine against. Two representatives, one of them the prominent Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,  voted “present” – counting effectively as an abstention.

    This week, the furore moved to the Senate when Rand Paul, a strong Republican critic of US foreign aid, refused to nod through the bill and thereby give it unanimous assent. It will now need to go through a more complicated legislative process.

    The latest funding for Iron Dome comes in addition to the $3.8bn Israel receives annually from the US in military aid, which has made Israel the biggest recipient, by far, of such largesse. Putting the new tranche of Iron Dome aid into perspective, it is twice what Washington contributes annually to Nato’s budget.

    The previous administration, under former President Donald Trump, turned US funding for Nato into a big domestic controversy, arguing that the US was shouldering too much of the burden. But there has been barely a peep about the massive military bill the US is footing for Iron Dome.

    Debate stifled

    The Squad’s main achievement in launching its brief blocking move was to force out into the open the fact that the US is paying for Israel’s stockpile of missiles. Like the House leadership, the Israel lobby had hoped the money could be transferred quietly, without attracting attention.

    What little debate did ensue related to whether Israel really needs US military assistance. A few commentators asked why Washington was kitting out one of the richer countries on the planet with missiles in the midst of a pandemic that has hit the US economy hard.

    But the lobby quickly stifled a far more important debate about whether the US should be encouraging Israel’s use of Iron Dome at all. Instead, US funding for the interception missile system was presented as being motivated solely by a desire to save lives.

    In attacking Paul’s decision to block the bill, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Congress, AIPAC, argued this week that his move would “cost innocent lives, make war more likely, and embolden Iran-backed terrorists”.

    It was precisely the claim that the Iron Dome is defensive that appeared to push Ocasio-Cortez, usually seen as one of the few US politicians openly critical of Israel, into a corner, leading to her abstention.

    Images from the House floor showed her tearful and being given a hug by another representative after the vote. She later attributed her distress in part to how Iron Dome funding had a polarising effect at home, noting that the House bill was a “reckless” move to “rip our communities apart”.

    That was an apparent reference to factional tensions within the Democratic Party between, on one side, many Jewish voters who back what they see as Israel’s right to defend itself and, on the other, many Black and Hispanic voters who think it is wrong for the US to financially support Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

    Some saw her indecision as evidence of her ambitions to run for the Senate, where positions critical of Israel would be more likely to damage her prospects of success.

    Expiring in silence

    In Israel, and in Jewish communities beyond, the conversation about US support for Iron Dome is even more detached from reality. The nine US representatives who voted against were roundly castigated for willing the deaths of Israelis by voting to deny them protection from rockets fired from Gaza. In predictable fashion, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called those who voted against “either ignorant or antisemitic”.

    But some liberals took the argument in a different, even more fanciful direction. They called the Squad “hypocrites” for voting against the $1bn funding, arguing that Iron Dome missiles not only save Israelis, but Palestinians too. One Haaretz commentator went so far as to claim that Palestinians were actually the main beneficiaries of the Iron Dome system, arguing: “The fact Israel has a defensive shield against rocket attacks makes a wide-scale military operation with thousands of – mainly Palestinian – casualties less likely.”

    Of course, there is the small question of whether Israel has indeed been “forced” into its attacks on Gaza. It is precisely its military superiority – paid for by the US – that has freed it to carry out those massive attacks, in which large numbers of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, are killed, rather than negotiate an end to its decades-long occupation.

    Just as in life, bullies resort to intimidation and violence because they feel no need to compromise. But even more to the point, Iron Dome is central to Israel’s efforts to keep Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, entirely subjugated and stripped of any power to resist.

    With Israel patrolling tiny Gaza’s land borders and coast, sealing off the enclave from the rest of the world, Palestinians have few options to protest their slow starvation – or to gain attention for their plight. Israeli snipers have fired on Palestinians staging unarmed, mass protests at the fence caging them in, killing and wounding thousands. The Israeli navy fires on or sinks Palestinian boats, including fishing boats, in Gaza’s waters if they stray more than a few kilometres from the shore.

    Iron Dome, far from being defensive, is another weapon in Israel’s armoury to keep Palestinians subdued, impoverished, corralled and silent. For those claiming to want peace in Israel-Palestine, the extra funding for Iron Dome just made that prospect even less likely. As long as Palestinians can be made to slowly expire in silence – their plight ignored by the rest of the world – Israel is free to seize and colonise yet more of what was supposed to become a future Palestinian state.

    Systems of domination

    But there is another reason why Ocasio-Cortez should have voted against the Iron Dome resupply, rather than tearfully abstaining – and that is for all our sakes, not just the sake of Palestinians.

    The US foots the bill for Iron Dome, just as it does for most of Israel’s other weapons development, for self-interested reasons: because it helps its own war industries, as Washington seeks to maintain its military dominance globally.

    With western populations less willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters for the sake of modern wars, which seem less obviously related to defence and more transparently about the control of key resources, the Pentagon has worked overtime to reframe the public debate.

    It is hard to disguise its global domination industries as anything but offensive in nature. This is where Israel has played a critical role. Not only has Israel helped to develop weapons systems like Iron Dome, but – despite being a nuclear-armed, belligerent, occupying state – it has leveraged its image as a vulnerable refuge for the long-persecuted Jewish people. It has been able to make more plausible the case that these domination systems really are defensive.

    In recent decades, Israel has developed and tested drone technology to surveil and assassinate Palestinians, which has proved invaluable in the US and UK’s long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel’s latest “swarm” technology – making drones even more lethal – may prove particularly attractive to the Pentagon.

    Israel has also been the ideal partner for the Pentagon in testing and refining the battlefield use of the new generation of F-35 fighter planes, the most expensivemilitary product in US history. Uniquely, Israel has been allowed to customise the jet, adapting its capabilities in new, unforeseen ways.

    Bowing to US hegemony

    The F-35’s ultimate role is to make sure major rival airforces, such as Russia’s and China’s, are elbowed out of the skies. And Israel has been at the forefront of developing and testing a variety of missile interception systems, such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which are intended to destroy incoming projectiles, from short-range rockets to long-range missiles.

    Last December, Israel announced it had successfully launched Iron Dome interception missiles for the first time from the sea. Reports noted that the US arms maker Raytheon and the US defence department were involved in the tests. That is because, behind the scenes, the US is not only paying for the development and testing of these systems; it is also guiding the uses to which they will be put. The Pentagon has bought two Iron Dome batteries, which, according to Israeli media, have been stationed in US military bases in the Gulf.

    The US has its own interception systems under development, and it is unclear which it will come to rely on most heavily. But what is evident is that Washington, Israel and their Gulf allies have Iran in their immediate sights. Any country that refuses to bow to US global hegemony could also be targeted.

    US interest in these missiles is not defensive. They are fundamental to its ability to neutralise the responses of rivals to either a US military attack, or more general moves by the US to dominate territory and control resources.

    Just as Palestinians have been besieged by Israel for 15 years, the US and Gulf states may hope one day to deal a knockout blow to Iran’s oil exports. Washington would be able to ignore current concerns that Tehran could retaliate by firing on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz or on hostile Middle Eastern capitals. If Iran’s missiles can be intercepted, it will be incapable of defending itself against increasing economic or military aggression from the US or its neighbours.

    Less safe world

    Following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, there has been plenty of naive talk that the US is seeking a diminished role in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Ultimately, the US is seeking global dominance at arm’s length – through a combination of long-range military power, cyber warfare, robotics and artificial intelligence – that it hopes will lift the restraints imposed by American casualties and domestic opposition.

    Israel’s playbook with regards to Palestinians is one that elites in Washington trust can be exported to other corners of the globe, and even outer space. Interception missiles lie at the heart of that strategic vision, as a way to neutralise and silence all resistance. This is why no one who cares about a less violent, exploitative and dangerous world should be indifferent to, or neutral on, congressional funding for Iron Dome.

    Missile interception systems are the face not of a more defensive, safer world, but of a far more nakedly hostile, aggressive one.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

    The post Iron Dome: Don’t be deceived, US aid to Israel is not about saving lives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On 5 October 2021 FORUM-ASIA presented its new publication, “Summary Report: 9th Asian Human Rights Defenders Forum”, an abridgement from an event that facilitates human rights defenders (HRDs) and women human rights defenders (WHRDs) to discuss work and advocacy efforts, and share the experiences and challenges they face.

    From 2019 to date, the situation of defenders and civil society organisations across Asia has grown increasingly challenging. Harassment and violations perpetrated against those defending human rights continue to increase and most perpetrators continue to benefit from impunity.

    The global COVID-19 crisis, which started in 2020, exacerbated the already worrying situation for defenders. In the past one year alone, from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021, at least 760 cases of abuses and violations against defenders were recorded across 19 Asian countries, based on FORUM-ASIA’s monitoring. More than half of the cases recorded were related to judicial harassment (409 cases), which is often followed by arbitrary arrest and detention (323 cases). The number of killings is alarming at 55 cases, most of which took place in Myanmar, the Philippines, and Afghanistan.

    Despite the restrictive atmosphere, human rights defenders and people from across Asia continue to bravely fight for their rights. Emblematic examples can be seen within the wave of pro-democracy protests that have been taking place in Thailand, the Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar, the Farmers Protest in India, and the anti-Omnibus Law protest in Indonesia, which have been held under the banner of the Milk Tea Alliance, alongside peoples’ movements from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

    Such movements show people’s determination to continuously find new ways to resist the shrinking civic space, and the rise of a new generation of defenders emerging to push for the realisation of human rights.

    This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first AHRDF, and despite all the challenges this year posed, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions on travel, FORUM-ASIA organised the event in an online format from 14 to 17 June 2021. This publication, “Summary report: 9th Asian Regional Human Rights Defender Forum,” highlights the key points discussed and provides the key recommendations made at the Forum.

    For the PDF version of the summary, click here.

    http://humanrightsinasean.info/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on September 25, 2021, in Perry, Georgia.

    As former President Donald Trump makes plans to run for president a third time, his lawyers are taking steps to sue social media sites that have banned him over his incendiary speech.

    According to three sources that spoke to The Washington Post, Trump reportedly wanted to announce a 2024 presidential run during the upheaval in Afghanistan, following the withdrawal of the United States military there in August. His aides talked him out of doing so, saying that he should be patient with a presidential announcement, as entering the race now would trigger several federal election rules — including limiting his ability to raise funds and providing equal time standards on broadcast television to his likely opponent, incumbent President Joe Biden.

    Advisers were also apprehensive about Trump announcing a run ahead of the 2022 midterm races, believing that Democrats could try to tie Republican candidates to the former president, making the race a referendum on their ties to him rather than other issues. If Republicans failed to win either house of Congress, it would also reflect poorly on Trump, his advisers warned.

    “The biggest point we drove home was that he doesn’t want to own the midterms if we don’t win back the House or Senate,” one of the sources told The Washington Post.

    According to recent polling from Quinnipiac University, most Americans are already opposed to a Trump presidential run in 2024.

    Trump’s aides added that offering his support to other Republicans during the midterms would be more beneficial if he wasn’t yet declared a candidate.

    Whether Trump announces a run now or after November of next year, self-promotion will prove a challenge, given that he’s still banned on several social media sites. On Friday, Trump’s lawyers sought to have his access to the site restored by filing a lawsuit against Twitter.

    The lawsuit claims that his First Amendment speech rights are being violated because of the ban, which was imposed on the former president after a mob of his loyalists attacked the Capitol on January 6. The attacks immediately followed an incendiary speech Trump gave that day against the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

    Twitter justified the ban by saying they were concerned his tweets — which contained numerous false allegations of fraud in the 2020 race — would incite additional acts of violence from his followers.

    Trump’s lawsuit contends that Twitter is being “coerced by members of the United States Congress” and “acting directly with federal officials” to continue the indefinite ban on the former president. It also claims that Twitter is “operating under an unconstitutional immunity” to keep him off the platform.

    It’s unclear how Trump’s First Amendment rights are being violated, however. That provision within the Constitution stipulates that no law shall be established by the government that restricts speech — but Twitter, being a private company, is allowed to create rules that users must abide by, and to enforce those rules by banning users that violate them.

    CNN legal analyst Elie Honig was brief in his assessment of Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter.

    “This won’t work,” Honig tweeted, adding no additional commentary to the issue.

    Harvard Law school professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent critic of the former president, was more direct in his opinion on the lawsuit’s chances.

    “Trump’s lawsuit to force Twitter to let him back on its platform is garbage. Pure BS,” Tribe said. “A pile of crap. Frivolous. An abuse of the judicial system. Zero merit. Got it?”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The so-called “Taliban 2.0” has banned secondary education for girls, higher education for women students and teachers, protests and women’s sports. Recent statements by Taliban figures banning perfume have been protested and derided in social media, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Civil disobedience and stay-at-home strikes continue in Kabul against the Taliban regime, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that Aug. 29 airstrike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul’s airport. At least, that’s what the Pentagon told the world.

    Within two weeks, a New York Times investigation would dismantle that official narrative. Seven days later, even the Pentagon admitted it. Instead of killing an ISIS suicide bomber, the United States had slaughtered 10 civilians: Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group; three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three children of Ahmadi’s brother Romal, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.

    The post The Names You’ll Never Know appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Freshta Karimi, 38, the founder of the Da Qanoon Ghushtonky (DQG) organisation, one of the largest suppliers of legal aid in Afghanistan, won the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize 2021, awarded by jurists to their peers.

    Her organisation works in particular on upholding the rights of woman and children in Afghanistan and she has regularly represented it abroad in recent years.

    Since the Taliban seized power last month however, she has kept a lower profile, lawyer Bertrand Favreau, the founder of the prize and chairman of its jury, told AFP.

    “For at least five years, she has received threats from the Taliban in all the cities where she has tried to open an office to inform women of their rights,” he said.

    That had not stopped her continuing her outreach work however, travelling to even the most remote villages, he added. “Today she is one of the most threatened lawyers in the world.”

    Last year, the prize was awarded to two Turkish lawyers, sisters Barkin and Ebru Timtik. Ebru had died the previous month after a 238-day hunger strike to protest her imprisonment on terror-related accusations. Barkin is serving a lengthy sentence on similar charges. see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/09/26/timtik-sisters-in-turkey-share-2020-ludovic-trarieux-prize/

    The Ludovic Trarieux Award is an annual prize which recognises lawyers of any nationality who have sought to defend human rights, often at great risk to themselves. The award was named after Trarieux, who in 1898 founded France’s Human Rights League (LDH). For more on this and other awards for jurists, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/7C413DBA-E6F6-425A-AF9E-E49AE17D7921.

    https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/35372/afghan-womens-rights-campaigner-wins-top-human-rights-prize

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • In this exclusive interview, Marcel Cartier speaks with Selay Ghaffar from the leftist Solidarity Party of Afghanistan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • In a day when America is ruling over a global Empire maintained with violent enforcement to insure universal subordination to its will;  and in a day when a military-style domestic police state relentlessly makes sure anti-government protest and dissent is contained,  the patriarchal part of that America has been enhanced and strengthened.

    Feminist movements have launched long, fierce struggles to undermine patriarchal culture:  to ensure female power, to assert woman’s image as showing woman’s strength, to refute women’s inferiority to men, to establish female equality, politically, economically, and personally.  In my own work, I’ve analyzed those struggles:  first, the National Woman’s Party’s heroic campaign for woman’s suffrage, which included jail, beatings and forced feeding;  second, the uphill battle of women athletes, from the late 19th century on, striving to rid themselves of the necessity to have an image of “sex appeal” and just play ball.  And last, I’ve written of the amazing courage of American women political prisoners, women who challenged a government and society which refused to recognize their right to be  dissenters against imperialism—racism—capitalist inequality and ecocide—and sexism.

    The Patriarchy, in spite of all the movements, campaigns and struggles, is not dead yet. The problems come from many directions, but they circle back to age-old conditions.  We feminists of the 1960s-70s thought we might have won some of the battles.  I almost got out of my car to object when I drove through a town near where I live to challenge workers sporting “men working” signs.  My Saratoga NOW chapter succeeded in eliminating separate sections for male and female in the local paper’s help wanted section in the 70s.  What happened to that?!  We feminists must continue to stubbornly insist on our equality, on woman’s image not being sexualized, and on changing women’s lack of power.  We must keep on insisting that women are not inferior to men, should be believed, should be listened to.

    American sports, still a stubbornly male-dominated institution, has largely held the line against real female equality.  All this was very evident last March when NCAA women’s basketball was not accorded anywhere near balanced attention, or its needs met in a comparable way to the men’s.  More ominously, the NCAA has shown their (lack of) concern for women athletes, especially vis-à-vis some criminally violent male athletes, when it decided, as Jessica Luther wrote in the LA Times, that “rape is not an NCAA violation.”  Between 2011 and 2016, 17 women reported assaults by Baylor University football players, including four gang rapes.

    In the spring of 2012 a woman volleyball player reported being assaulted by “multiple football players” at a party.  After her mother spoke to the athletic director and football coach Art Briles, nothing was done.  A player was convicted of sexual assault in 2015, but in 2016 and 2017 lawsuits against Baylor accused the school of continuing to ignore its “culture of sexual violence.”  Coach Briles was finally fired in 2016, and college president Ken Starr, who had belatedly started an investigation, also resigned.  Recently, citing pandemic delays, the NCAA finally ruled on Baylor’s culture of violence by deciding it “did not break NCAA rules.”  Although the NCAA panel punished them for an academic infraction, they did not find Baylor guilty for not reporting or addressing “sexual and interpersonal violence.”  They declared it was a failure of the coaching and athletic staff, but not an NCAA problem.  They who supposedly wanted (women) athletes to be safe, offered no assistance in the case of “gendered violence.”  Numerous attempts to get the NCAA to change this policy have not succeeded.  Remember Michigan State was cleared of blame for allowing gymnastics’ doctor Larry Nasser’s unspeakable sexual crimes against young women!

    The NFL also does not do well dealing with sexual violence.  Player violence against women has been commonplace, with few repercussions.  The recent case of accused multiple sexual assaulter DeShaun Watson is illustrative of valuable player versus serious female complaints about him.  The Houston quarterback has had a number of licensed massage therapists accuse him of unwanted sexual acts and assault.  At this time, Watson is facing 22 civil law suits and 10 criminal complaints, and is thus on the NFL’s “inactive” list.  The victims were interviewed by NFL investigators who treated them—said the women—in a “patronizing” and “victim-blaming” manner.  The NFL placed no restrictions on Watson during the investigation, who, according to his accuser Ashley Solis, not only assaulted her but threatened her career when she got upset.  When the investigator questioned what she wore for their massage sessions, she asked:  “What did they think I should wear to suggest that I don’t want you to put your penis in my hand?”  She has said that “the NFL is taking a stand against women and survivors of sexual assault.”  The NFL is also not so great in other areas regarding women’s worth and dignity.

    Cheerleading is a (predominantly) female sport which has encountered all kinds of indignities.  The NFL teams Buffalo, Cincinnati, Jets, Tampa Bay and Oakland all faced lawsuits from cheerleaders in 2014.  Two Buffalo Jills told HBO’s Real Sports they receive $125 a game, and nothing for ads, photo shoots or practices.  Some of these lawsuits were successful, but today there are still NFL cheerleaders making less than $1,000 a year.  The interviewed Jills also said they were rejected as dancers if they didn’t pass “the jiggle test” while doing jumping jacks. First female Jet football coach Collette Smith said on “Real Sports” that it does not seem right for cheerleaders, “athletes,” to just have to “shake with no clothes on, like sex kittens!”  There’s a new documentary film called “A Woman’s Work:  The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem,” about which Director Yu Gu says, that in a culture with “toxic masculinity… men feel entitled to women’s bodies.”  An even darker situation took place with youth cheerleaders.  In an unregulated sport, except by its own million-dollar profit-making organizations, abuses have been many.  Male cheerleading “coaches” supposedly training cheerleaders, instead sexually assaulted them—and continued to participate in the sport.  Two were even featured on the Netflix “Cheer” show, before finally being arrested and scheduled for trial.  Not much protection there, when, as usual, it might interfere with image and therefore profit.

    Image is also an issue regarding this year’s Tokyo Olympics.  I watched with admiration as silver medalist shot putter Raven Saunders demonstrated for human rights and against racism on the Olympic podium by crossing her arms over her head to show their intersection.  The IOC’s (International Olympic Committee) restrictions on protests held quite well, although hammer thrower Gwen Berry and the US women’s soccer team took a knee before competing.  Women Olympic athletes have not been afraid to speak out.  Track and field athlete Sara Goucher, with several other women, accused former champion marathoner and prominent track coach Alberto Salazar of “doping violations” and of abuse.  He is banned, at least for now.

    A problem which has always resonated with me is the way female athletes dress to do their sport.  It’s not new:  female baseball players had to wear short skirts and female basketball players sported red wigs in the 40s, but now it is beyond absurd.  Women have to wear (it’s mandatory) very revealing outfits as skaters, runners, beach volleyball players and gymnasts.  But some women are protesting this.  Norway’s women’s beach handball team (not yet an Olympic sport) were fined after they wore shorts instead of bikinis at EURO2021.  And at the Olympics, the German women’s gymnastics team wore unitards covering their whole body from the neck down.  They said they wanted to “push back against the sexualization of women in gymnastics.”  Male gymnasts wear shorts and loose pants.  It’s the Olympic women who wear revealing outfits to run, and bikinis to play beach volleyball.  It’s an extreme demonstration of “sexualization,” of a patriarchal culture limiting woman’s image to a sexual one, rather than one of a competent, strong athlete.

    In a patriarchal culture, male power attempts to supersede women’s.  In such an environment, women have little value and receive little respect.  And when powerful male politicians do this (and there are so many of them), it becomes very public.  (Former) Governor Andrew Cuomo is the latest to fall from grace after many years of getting away with sexual misconduct toward his staff, campaign organizers, and even a female state trooper.  Some of his fellow Democratic politicians have called him “a lecherous tyrant” who empowered his staff “to threaten and intimidate.”  Cuomo collected young, good-looking women to work for him and they were expected to always dress well, including makeup and high heels.  If a woman decided she didn’t like his demands and cruel work environment, it was made clear she’d have a hard time getting another job.  Inappropriate comments and touching were his trademarks.  He was able to maintain this extremely harmful situation for women in his employ until on August 3rd, New York Attorney General Letitia James, after taking on the growing complaints (which had gotten nowhere with senior staff), issued her thorough and well-investigated report which accused the governor of “sexually harassing 11 women in violation of the law.”  The report detailed “unwanted groping, kissing, hugging and inappropriate comments.”  Some were worse, such as the Albany staffers who reported that he grabbed their breasts.  And so the media darling who supposedly handled the COVID crisis so well (except for that pesky problem with covering up nursing home deaths), had to resign.  Most Democratic politicians abandoned him in the end:  but two who held out a long time were President Biden and Vice President Harris.

    President Trump’s sexual misadventures were numerous, as such things are very much bipartisan.  Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct got him impeached.  He admitted to relations with Monica Lewinsky, but faced more serious allegations of rape from Juanita Broaddrick.  Last March Kamala Harris held a discussion about “empowering women and girls”—something the Clinton Foundation states that it does around the world—which included Mr. Clinton.  Broaddrick asked in a tweet if conference host Howard University might “like to include me in their empowering event with Bill Clinton?”  Harris had no comment on that, nor, at that point, on the accusations surrounding Governor Cuomo.  The President also did not feel Cuomo should resign, until after the Letitia James report was revealed.  Funnily enough, Joe Biden has been accused of the self-same thing as Cuomo, for years.  During Biden’s presidential campaign, these proclivities were brought up, especially by Tara Reade, his former staffer.  Reade accused Biden of serious sexual assault, including pressing her against a Capitol corridor wall and digitally penetrating her.  She reported this incident to friends and family, and senior staff (to no avail), at the time.  Other women have complained of similar incidents of inappropriate touching, up to and including on the 2020 campaign trail.  Reade’s May 2020 interview with Megyn Kelly tells of her experience, but she also talks about the overwhelming hate she has received from the media and the utter disbelief from Democratic women protecting their candidate.  As Reade said to Kelly:  “Do we want [as president] someone who thinks of women as objects, who thinks that they can just take what they want in that moment for their pleasure and that’s it?”   She was not believed, an experience common to so many women who have undergone abuse by powerful men, from Dylan Farrow (re Woody Allen), to Ambra Gutierrez (re Harvey Weinstein), to Andrea Costand (re Bill Cosby), and to women aides and staff of important and powerful men.  #Me Too has been a good thing, to a point.  Women still shy away from believing accusations against certain men.

    Not believing women is inherent to patriarchal culture.  I remember going to the hospital when I was teaching in Fargo, where I was eventually admitted for severe dehydration and a bad case of the flu.  The male doctor who first saw me talked of “the so-called pain in my chest.”  He apparently didn’t believe me.  The value of women’s bodies certainly seems to be in question when yet another struggle supposedly won in the 70s—a woman’s right to choose abortion—is, thanks to the rise in power of Christian right fascists who are (!) patriarchal, again in jeopardy.  Women’s lives are in jeopardy on many fronts.  Attorney and John Jay professor Marcie Smith Parenti wrote a piece for the Grayzone, entitled “Why Won’t the US Medical Establishment Believe Women?”  She outlines a serious situation where the CDC and FDA, in their rush to vaccinate everyone (only 23% of pregnant women have at least one dose), have seriously downplayed and dismissed evidence that thousands of women have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 vaccines (most related to the mRNA vaccines).  Large numbers of vaccinated women have had their menstrual cycle disrupted:  extreme cramping, passing golf-ball size blood clots, and having “hemorrhagic bleeding.”  Parenti has several friends with such symptoms.  But beyond possibly anecdotal experience, by July of this year, the UK had 13,000 reports of “menstruation disruption,” with similar reports in Canada and India.

    The US, with its “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), had thousands of reports (they admit VAERS only catches a low percentage of adverse events) by July as well:  such reports included 88 “fetal deaths” and 25 “stillbirths” along with the hemorrhagic bleeding.   Although the FDA and CDC quickly warned of the myocarditis threat (a heart ailment) to young men posed by the vaccine, no warnings have been issued regarding menstrual disruption.  Parenti argues that menstruation is a central issue for women’s health and there are many incidents revealing that cycle’s disruption in myriad and very serious ways, including possible infertility.  She says that women deserve an investigation into these reports, with explanations and medical information, and “non-punitive accommodations if they decline a vaccine at this time.”  But no:  they can be barred from school and public places, and lose their jobs.  And if women are showing too much concern publicly, Parenti says they are “subjected to 1950s-style dismissal and demonization.”   After all, such concerns could “stoke unwarranted vaccine fears.”  And about such trivial health issues as menstruation, just “woman troubles.”

    Last June the National Institute of Health called for proposals to study a possible link between the vaccine and menstruation disruption.  And now, the NIH has at last ordered a study about that possible link, $1.67 million worth, with a half million (!) participants.  But Diana Bianchi, NIH head of child health and human development says the FDA should not be faulted for the investigation’s delay.  And the (of course, justifiable) reason for the delay has been echoed in every single item of media coverage I’ve read over the last few days.  The FDA was “worried this was contributing to vaccine hesitancy in reproductive-age women.”  Bianchi says the vaccine certainly does not cause infertility.  And (again echoing all the news reports on it), “really [menstruation} is not a life and death issue.”  Women should simply do what they’re told and ignore their “so-called bleeding.”

    Another area where there is a lack of confidence in what women say is when they warn of wider environmental dangers.  Traditionally women have tried to prevent harm and bring healing to the environment.  Women whistleblowers have suffered repercussions for warning against corporate entities’ disastrous policies; while indigenous women have sacrificed to try to protect Mother Earth from corporate disregard for the Earth’s destruction.  African-American women are all too familiar with environmental racism, from the drinking water of Flint, Michigan to the waters of Hurricane Katrina (and now Ida).  When Mississippi environmental analyst Tennie White, a Black woman, brought to light highly toxic wastes produced by Kerr-McGee endangering the people of Columbus, Mississippi, she was railroaded by the EPA’s “Green Enforcement” Unit and went to jail.  And recently, another woman whistleblower was ignored and punished.  Ruth Etzel was hired by the EPA as an expert in children’s health; a pediatrician and epidemiologist she has done stints at the WHO and CDC.  Etzel was to investigate lead poisoning in the chemical industry.  She found herself put on leave, demoted and then became a victim of an EPA smear campaign.  Etzel and other fellow scientists found that the EPA’s biggest concern is protecting chemical companies. Her suggested policy to help children avoid lead poisoning, formed after she found industries were doing “irreparable harm,” has yet to be put into effect.  Neither Obama, nor Trump, nor now Biden has changed the trend to protect corporations, and not the environment, humans, or even children.

    Native-American women fighting fiercely against the terrible poisons of oil pipelines are harassed and jailed.  Winona LaDuke, Green Party VP candidate and head of environmental advocacy group “Honor the Earth,” was arrested and jailed repeatedly last July for protesting against construction of a new Enbridge oil pipeline in northern Minnesota.  Minnesota recently granted Enbridge the right to displace five billion instead of the former half billion gallons of water.  Such a disastrous situation leads LaDuke to protest and thus be charged with trespassing, harassment, unlawful assembly and public nuisance charges.  She charges Minnesota governor Tim Walz with giving “the water, the land and our civil rights to a Canadian multinational.”

    The incomparable LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, died last April, fighting to the very end against the Dakota Access Pipeline.  As of a month ago, federal regulators had fined DAPL for safety violations like not doing necessary repairs and insufficient oil spill impact studies.  But Biden’s Army Corps of Engineers is still allowing the pipeline to operate.  The women of Standing Rock and Honor the Earth will never stop their campaigns against corporate poisoning of their lands.  As LaDonna Allard said, the movement is not just about a pipeline.  “To save the water, we must break the cycle of colonial trauma.”  And:  “We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Mako, Mother Earth.”  Women fight to protect the Earth from the American corporate state and women fight to protect people from the violence of the American police state.

    The penalties can be dire for those who dare challenge police violence.  Lillian House and Eliza Lucero of the Denver area’s Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) helped lead a persistent protest against the police and paramedics’ killing of the unarmed and unresisting young man, Elijah McClain.  Lucero and House faced felony charges of incitement to riot and kidnapping (of police) which could have meant sentences of 48 years.  Thanks to public pressure and a new district attorney, all charges were dropped on September 13th.  Earlier in the month, three police officers and two paramedics were indicted for McClain’s murder.  PSL’s Lillian House stated that “the indictments are a major victory, but they’re not convictions yet.  This is just the beginning of the people here taking power.”  And this is what these women activists want:  a dismantling of the police state in favor of “the people” being in charge.

    This is the goal of the movement, bringing huge numbers of people into the streets after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s executions.  But these demonstrations, gradually called “riots” by the corporate media, have been hard-pressed to continue.  A report by the Movement for Black Lives found there has been a major crackdown on dissenters against police violence.  Charges against protesters were made into more serious federal crimes, with harsher penalties.  Surveillance, violence, and intimidation, in a coordinated vast federal enterprise, has been the usual response to potentially viable movements to change the corporate police state.  Because Rev. Joy Powell tried to curb police violence in Rochester, NY, she’s served 14 years inside, framed for crimes she didn’t commit.  But she is never cowed, despite solitary, COVID, and all the harassment they dish out.  She recently wrote me (and I get some of her letters, but she gets very few of mine) that she “made it to an interview” with Essence magazine, which did a great job of gaining her deserved attention.  The Police State is an entrenched corporate/capitalist/patriarchal institution, as is the American Empire.

    The Empire is not feminist.  It is dangerously extreme in its macho Patriarchy.  The military, particularly one which has for years fed on death and destruction against helpless civilians, many of them women and children, is not feminist in its aims.  Expecting an occupying army to initiate and protect women’s rights is insane.  The women of Afghanistan have been tortured and murdered by US forces for over 20 years.  Perhaps a few elite women were helped and protected under American occupation, but their numbers are few.

    Aafia Siddiqui, Muslim woman prisoner of the Empire is serving her 86 years in a Texas maximum security prison—or not, it’s not clear if she’s still alive.  Siddiqui was raped, mutilated and tortured in American black sites, including Bagram (US) Air Force Base, Afghanistan, and was grievously shot in Ghazni, Afghanistan by American soldiers who needed her to be seen as a “terrorist” and so staged what was supposed to be her attack on the soldiers.  This is women’s rights in Afghanistan.

    As the incredible Caitlin Johnstone has written:  “If the US empire hadn’t manufactured consent for the invasion by aggressive narrative management about Taliban oppression westerners would give 0 fucks about women in Afghanistan, just like they give 0 fucks about women in all the other oppressive patriarchal nations.”  Was it worse for women to have a Taliban government, or to endure a 20-year occupation which has brought untold death and destruction to Afghan women and their families?  Occupying and controlling Afghanistan is not a feminist undertaking.  And so-called American feminist leaders should know better than to support it.  But NOW leaders urge you to write your Congress people to protect Afghan women (from the Taliban).  The “advances in [Afghan] women’s rights of the last 20 years are in jeopardy.”  The Feminist Majority web page asks for money for the same purpose, telling us that in 2009 Obama showed concern for “Afghans’ security” and the Americans “have brought much progress for women there,” in the last 20 years.  With all Obama’s drone killings?  Are you people serious?  This is not feminism.

    “Feminists” are also proud to see female warmongers as part of President Joe Biden’s Team.  There is Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who helped engineer the Iran deal (not a great one for them) and spent her early days in office busily scolding China to ramp up our newest Cold War.  Or Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, who famously helped arrange the neo-Nazi takeover of Ukraine in a power play vs. Russia, with her also famous leaked diplomatic conversation where she said “fuck the EU” re involving American allies.  Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth has a strong police/Homeland Security background; and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks will oversee a “modernization of our nuclear triad.” Avril Haines, Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, from the CIA, directed the drones program for Obama, sometimes having to get up in the middle of the night to decide who should be killed by a drone next.  Of course, there was never “collateral damage,” as we’ve seen just recently in our Afghanistan drone hit which killed an entire family (they were not ISIS K).  Wonderful to have such feminist examples!  As commentator Richard Medhurst (half Syrian, half British) has said:  isn’t it great for Biden to have all these women involved?  Will they drop pink bombs—rainbow bombs?—on my country?

    The real feminists are the stalwart anti-war women who fight the very real threats of Empire.  The women to be truly admired are women like Elizabeth McAlister, Martha Hennesy (Dorothy Day’s granddaughter) and Clare Grady. In 2018 they entered Kings Bay, Georgia naval base to bear witness against the Empire’s potential for nuclear war.  They have all now served time, 10 to 12 months, for trying to, as McAlister said, “slow the mad rush to the devastation of our magnificent planet.”  They too would save Mother Earth.  They too, like the tortured and ruined Julian Assange, are truth-tellers against the Empire.  Dismissed, ignored, not believed, imprisoned.  These are what 1980s political prisoner Marilyn Buck called “noncompliant women”—women who the patriarchal authorities believe should be put back into subordinate, quiet and compliant status.  Such authorities believe women should wear bikinis and makeup as athletes, not question if a vaccine has deleterious side effects on them, and overlook a governor’s inappropriate behavior.  Let’s not be compliant.  Let the struggle continue.

    The post Patriarchy:  The Struggle Continues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Today, Watchdog host Lowkey is joined by a man who knows the war from both inside and out. Matthew Hoh was at the forefront of the American empire’s campaign in the Middle East, first serving as a captain in the U.S. Marines, then moving to the Department of Defense and the State Department. In 2009, he publicly resigned from his position in the State Department in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, over U.S. policy in the country, which he saw as both illogical and immoral.

    The post War Is A Racket: Ex-State Department Official Matthew Hoh Speaks Out appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Taliban deny Morteza Samadi, 21, has been sentenced to death but family concerned for his safety after he was detained while covering women’s protests in Herat

    Fears are growing for a photojournalist who has been detained by the Taliban for more than three weeks after being arrested while covering the women’s protests in Herat.

    Morteza Samadi, 21, a freelance photographer, was one of several journalists who were arrested at street protests at the beginning of September. All were quickly released except Morteza, whose whereabouts is not known. Some of those detained in Kabul have alleged they were badly beaten and tortured.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought Award Ceremony 2020
    Last year’s Sakharov Prize ceremony  

    This year’s nominations for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought were presented in a joint meeting of the foreign affairs and development committees and the human rights subcommittee in Brussels on 27 September 2021. They are:

    Alexei Navalny, nominated by the EPP and Renew Europe for his courage in fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights, is a Russian opposition politician, anti-corruption activist and major political opponent of the country’s president Vladimir Putin. Known through his LiveJournal blog, YouTube and Twitter, where he has millions of followers he came to international prominence by organising demonstrations, running for office and advocating reforms against corruption in Russia, Putin and his government. In August 2020, while on a trip to Siberia, he was poisoned. He spent months recovering in Berlin, but returned to Moscow in January 2021 where he was arrested. In February he was sentenced to 2½ years in prison. Now incarcerated in a high-security penal colony, he went on a 23-day hunger strike in April to protest the lack of medical care. In June 2021, a Russian court banned Navalny’s regional offices and his Anti-Corruption Foundation.

    Afghan women, nominated by S&D and the Greens/EFA for their brave fight for equality and human rights. Under the previous Taliban regime, women experienced forced marriage, high maternity mortality, low literacy, forced virginity tests and couldn’t travel without a male. Following the Taliban’s return to power, women are again excluded from government and education and their rights and freedoms are threatened. The women included in the nomination are:

    • Shaharzad Akbar – chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC)
    • Mary Akrami – head of the Afghan Women’s Network [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/C78046E0-F42F-8A60-205C-CC55E54281CD]
    • Zarifa Ghafari – mayor of Maidan Shar since 2018
    • Palwasha Hassan – activist and the director of the Afghan Women Educational Centre (AWEC)
    • Freshta Karim – founder of a mobile library and advocate for education and learning
    • Sahraa Karimi – first female president of the Afghan state film company
    • Metra Mehran – women empowerment and education advocate and co-founder of the Feminine Perspectives Movement
    • Horia Mosadiq – human and women’s rights activist
    • Sima Samar – human rights advocate, former Minister of Women’s Affairs and former chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/4AEEBC97-C788-49F5-8DE1-33F7855D2192]
    • Habiba Sarabi – member of the negotiating team of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
    • Anisa Shaheed – political reporter


    Jeanine Áñez,
    nominated by the ECR, is a Bolivian politician and symbol of repression against dissidents and deprivation of due process and rule of law in Latin America. She became interim president in November 2019, after alleged electoral fraud by incumbent Evo Morales. In November 2020, after free and fair elections there was a peaceful transfer of power. However, on 13 March 2021 she was arrested on charges of “terrorism, sedition and conspiracy”. Accused of plotting a coup d’état against Morales, she has been imprisoned ever since.

    Sultana Khaya, nominated by The Left, is a Sahrawi activist and human rights defender based in the Western Sahara, promoting the right to self-determination for the Sahrawi people. She is the president of the organisation League for the Defence of Human Rights and against Plunder of Natural Resources in Boujdour/Western Sahara and member of the Saharawi Organ against the Moroccan Occupation (ISACOM). She has been under de facto house arrest without a warrant since 19 November 2020. Since 2005, she has suffered physical attacks, death threats, torture and sexual assaults. Over the last year, the Moroccan authorities have intensified repression against Saharawi activists and journalists, who are subjected to ill-treatment, arbitrary arrests and harassment in order to silence or punish them for non-violent action against the occupation of Western Sahara. On 1 July 2021, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor strongly condemned the reprisals against Sultana Khaya.

    Global Witness, nominated by Marie Toussaint and other 42 MEPs, is a UK-based NGO, which for more than 25 years has investigated and exposed environmental and human rights abuses in the oil, gas, mining and timber sectors, tracking money and influence through the global financial and political system. Nowadays, it also focuses on the issue of the climate emergency, attacks on public space and civic freedoms and the protection of environmental defenders throughout the world. Since 2011, Global Witness and its 22 local partners have addressed abuses of power to protect human rights, verifying and publishing each year the number of defenders killed worldwide. Sewe also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/09/13/global-witness-2020-the-worst-year-on-record-for-environmental-human-rights-defenders/

    For more on the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/BDE3E41A-8706-42F1-A6C5-ECBBC4CDB449 

    https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/20210916STO12702/sakharov-prize-2021-the-nominees

    https://www.aninews.in/news/world/asia/european-group-nominates-11-afghan-women-for-human-rights-award20210928181723/

    https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-navalny-nominated-eu-rights-prize-2021-09-27/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Afghan evacuees at the Bechtel Enka camp near a U.S. military base in Kosovo released videos on September 28, 2021, of a protest that occurred over the weekend. The evacuees say they worked alongside the U.S. and its coalition allies in Afghanistan but fear being forcibly relocated to different countries or being turned over to the United Nations as refugees.

    Adil Khan has lived as a refugee for much his life. Khan’s family fled Afghanistan in 1980 as the Soviet Union invaded and sparked a bloody war, and he grew up in Pakistan before finally returning to his home country in 2016. Khan studied law and politics at a university in Kabul, but his education was cut short as the Taliban overran the city in August. A member of an organization that opposes traditional practices that encourage violence against women, Khan has met with officials from the former U.S.-backed government and fears the Taliban would accuse him of being a “spy” rather than a member of Afghan civil society. So, he decided to flee.

    Khan booked a flight to Pakistan that was soon canceled. The airport in Kabul had become the scene of a frenzied evacuation effort as 20 years of occupation by the United States came to a bloody close. Khan attempted to cross a border checkpoint on foot, where he was beaten by guards and forced to pay bribes. Khan is now in northern Pakistan, having retained his status as a refugee with the United Nations. The Taliban has long operated out of northern Pakistan, and Khan says he is still not safe.

    After decades of violence and instability, Afghans already made up one of the largest refugee populations in the world before the recent Taliban takeover caused a mass evacuation in the wake of the U.S.’s withdrawal from its longest-running war. Many evacuated with help from the U.S., which is working to screen and resettle up to 95,000 people within its borders. U.S. officials say they are prioritizing U.S. citizens, Afghans who assisted the U.S. coalition, and others who are vulnerable to the Taliban for resettlement. However, many journalists, human rights activists and members of civil society were left behind and are living in fear of Taliban reprisal, or are currently stranded in neighboring countries and refugee camps across Europe.

    “When NATO and USA came to Afghanistan, they told us to support human rights and work for human rights, and I started working for human rights and women’s rights,” Khan said in an interview. “But when they left my country, who will save me?”

    An estimated 3.5 million people are internally displaced in Afghanistan after fleeing their homes due to poverty, famine and years of violent conflict. More than 2.2 million Afghan refugees are currently living in neighboring countries, such as Pakistan, Iran and Turkmenistan. Since January, nearly 37,000 people have fled across the borders of Afghanistan and applied for international refugee status as fighting between the Taliban and the former U.S-backed government intensified, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. Another 634,800 people are estimated to have been displaced inside Afghanistan in 2021 alone.

    Huge numbers of Afghan evacuees are also waiting in packed refugee camps across the U.S. and Europe as potential host nations process visa applications. Some 10,000 Afghans are currently living in a crowded tent city at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and another 53,000 are scattered across military bases in the U.S, according to CNN. Others have joined the masses of migrants attempting to enter Europe through countries such as Serbia, where 1.5 million people have passed through since 2015.

    At the Bechtel Enka camp near a U.S. military base in Kosovo, Afghan evacuees released videos of a protest on Tuesday over alleged plans to forcibly relocate them or turn them over to United Nations. Up to 2,000 Afghans were airlifted to Kosovo during the evacuation as the U.S. and coalition allies, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, conduct security screenings and process a massive backlog of visa applications. However, about 600 Afghans fear they have been stranded, according to M.E.M, an evacuee and journalist from Kabul who is among them. M.E.M said many are waiting on Special Immigrant Visas that allow Afghans who assisted the U.S. mission to be relocated there, but camp officials told evacuees to accept refuge in any country that offers, including Greece and Turkey, two nations already facing a massive influx of migrants and refugees.

    “We want to be relocated to those countries which we worked for, and … our friends and family members and [religious ties] are there,” said M.E.M, who asked to be identified by his initials due to a pending immigration case. “And no, not one of us has been registered with the UN so far, but we have been told to be taken there forcibly.”

    Back in Pakistan, Khan said he is running out of money and options. Khan believes his brother was murdered last year by a pro-Taliban gang of Afghans in Turkey, and Khan fears he made himself visible by organizing a protest calling for an investigation at the Turkish consulate in Kabul. Khan said he would go to any country that would accept him to avoid the same fate. However, resettlement is an option for less than 1 percent of refugees globally, and the UN’s resettlement efforts were ground to a halt by the COVID pandemic.

    “I need a third country, whatever it is,” Khan said.

    Khan applied for resettlement with the UNHCR but was told that finding a third country to call home was not currently an option. Indeed, a website for registered asylum seekers in Pakistan warns that the UNHCR does not have an “active” resettlement program in Pakistan, where 10,000 Afghan refugees have arrived since January. Resettlement is reserved for the “most vulnerable” refugees who meet “precise criteria,” according to the agency.

    Chris Boian, a senior communications officer for UNHCR in Washington, D.C, said refugee resettlement efforts have been “severely curtailed” by the pandemic and its restrictions on travel. The United Nations hopes this will change and more governments will increase the number of refugees they are willing to accept. The Biden administration has plans to raise the refugee cap in the U.S. to 125,000, but there are millions of refugees around the world.

    “Resettlement is still a solution that only a tiny fraction of the world’s refugees benefit from,” Boian said in an interview. “We estimate that around 1.4 million refugees are in urgent need of resettlement to a third country, and the need for refugee resettlement far outstrips the numbers of places that governments make available for that humanitarian solution.”

    Pakistan has not joined the UN’s longstanding convention on refugees and does not have a process for protecting those seeking asylum, although the UNHCR says the country generally accepts its refugees. Still, Khan says Pakistan has no interest in permanently integrating Afghans like him, and he fears both remaining there and returning to Afghanistan under the Taliban.

    “I need a third country where I can live peacefully,” Khan said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • An Army crew chief aboard a CH-47F Chinook helicopter observes a test of threat countermeasures during a training flight in Afghanistan, March 14, 2018.

    A Monday announcement from the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor saying his office is seeking approval to resume its investigation into potential war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State — but excluding alleged atrocities committed by U.S. forces — sparked a flurry of outrage from human rights defenders.

    “It seems there is no end to the betrayal of Afghans — now so many victims of torture and other abuses by U.S. and former Afghan government forces have been told there is no justice for you,” Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director for Human Rights Watch, tweeted Monday in response to the announcement.

    The International Criminal Court (ICC) on March 5, 2020 overturned its previous decision and authorized then-Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to formally probe crimes as far back as 2002 committed by members of the U.S. armed forces, the CIA, the Taliban, affiliated armed groups, and Afghan government forces. It would also have covered crimes committed at so-called CIA black sites in Poland, Lithuania, and Romania.

    The prospect of the probe elicited fierce backlash from the Trump administration, which slapped retaliatory sanctions on Bensouda and another top ICC official.

    The investigation was deferred last year, however, when the Afghan government in March sought to take on the investigation itself. But given the “significant change of circumstances” in Afghanistan including the absent prospect of “adequate and effective proceedings” to be carried out by Afghan authorities, current ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said in a statement Monday, a resumed investigation carried out by the ICC is warranted.

    At the same time, Khan pointed to “the limited resources available to my office relative to the scale and nature of crimes within the jurisdiction of the court that are being or have been committed in various parts of the world” as motivating his decision to narrow the scope of the Afghan probe to “crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (‘IS-K’) and to deprioritize other aspects of this investigation.”

    “The gravity, scale, and continuing nature of alleged crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State, which include allegations of indiscriminate attacks on civilians, targeted extrajudicial executions, persecution of women and girls, crimes against children, and other crimes affecting the civilian population at large, demand focus and proper resources from my office,” he said, “if we are to construct credible cases capable of being proved beyond reasonable doubt in the courtroom.”

    Khan’s announcement drew criticism from Katherine Gallagher, a human rights attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing victims in the ICC investigation into the situation in Afghanistan.

    In a Monday Twitter thread, Gallagher wrote that she was “stunned” and only found out about the development from Khan’s public press statement despite meeting with the prosecutor’s office “about why it should prioritize investigation of U.S. torture — war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed or furthered on scores of member states territories — for a decade.”

    While acknowledging the “deeply problematic” under-resourcing of the ICC which Khan referenced, Gallagher said the parameters of the investigation laid out fall well short of the justice Afghan victims deserve.

    “I fully support re-opening the investigation into crimes by the Taliban (and other forces) in Afghanistan — it should never have been halted by ‘deferral,’” said Gallagher. “Afghan civilians have only known impunity and this has fueled further crimes, especially against the most vulnerable.”

    However, she added, the “shuttering of [the] investigation of U.S. torture committed on ICC states territory (Afghanistan, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Jordan, Djibouti) is deeply flawed. Allowing powerful states to get away with multi-year, multi-continent torture against so many feeds impunity for all.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Web Desk:

    Taliban have been vying for international recognition. Recently, the group claimed the right to represent Afghanistan in the United Nations General Assembly. However, most countries have remained skeptical and are yet to recognize the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

    Meanwhile, microblogging and social networking website Twitter has removed the verified badges from the accounts of various Afghan government ministries. The official social media accounts of several Afghan ministries are currently being handled by the Taliban since the announcement of an interim government in Afghanistan by the group.

    Photo Courtesy: AFP

    The accounts that have been deprived of the blue ticks include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Interior Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, and the Ministry of Finance and the official account of the Afghan Presidential Palace, Arg. All these accounts were previously verified by Twitter. However, some of the previous Afghan government figures still have the verified badges.

    Photo Courtesy: Afghan Media

    On the other hand, hackers have taken over the former Afghan president’s Facebook page and are posting messages suggesting that people support the Taliban, according to his official Twitter account.

    A message posted to Ashraf Ghani’s Facebook page on Monday afternoon urged the international community to “interact with the current government,” as Ghani’s government no longer has control of the country.  The message added that the current rulers of Afghanistan need “a hand of friendship” in order for the country to prosper.

    Less than an hour later, Ashraf Ghani confirmed via a tweet that somebody had gained unauthorized access to his Facebook account.

    He tweeted, “Urgent: The official Facebook page of Dr. Mohammad Ashraf Ghani has been hacked since yesterday. Until it is retrieved, the content published from yesterday onwards on the Facebook page is no longer valid.”

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Since the Taliban occupation, women largely stay at home because they are scared of being beaten and humiliated by the Taliban for just being women, reports Yasmeen Afghan.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • A drone flies over the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2021.

    Three weeks after his administration launched a drone attack that killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, President Joe Biden addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He proudly declared, “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” The day before, his administration had launched a drone strike in Syria, and three weeks earlier, the U.S. had conducted an air strike in Somalia. The commander-in-chief also apparently forgot that U.S. forces are still fighting in at least six different countries, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Niger. And he promised to continue bombing Afghanistan from afar.

    Unfortunately Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan is substantially less meaningful when analyzed in light of his administration’s pledge to mount “over-the-horizon” attacks in that country from afar even though we won’t have troops on the ground.

    “Our troops are not coming home. We need to be honest about that,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey) said during congressional testimony by Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month. “They are merely moving to other bases in the same region to conduct the same counterterrorism missions, including in Afghanistan.”

    As Biden pulled U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, his administration launched a hellfire missile from a U.S. drone in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, and then lied about it. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley immediately said it was a “righteous strike” to protect U.S. troops as they withdrew.

    Nearly three weeks later, however, an extensive investigation conducted by The New York Times revealed that Zemari Ahmadi was a U.S. aid worker, not an ISIS operative, and the “explosives” in the Toyota that the drone strike targeted were most likely water bottles. Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, then called the strike “a tragic mistake.”

    This senseless killing of civilians was not a one-off event, although it received more publicity than most past drone strikes. Biden is following in the footsteps of his four predecessors, all of whom also conducted illegal drone strikes that killed myriad civilians.

    The Kabul drone strike “calls into question the reliability of the intelligence that will be used to conduct the [over-the-horizon] operations,” the Times noted. Indeed, this is nothing new. The “intelligence” used to conduct drone strikes is notoriously unreliable.

    For example, the Drone Papers disclosed that nearly 90 percent of those killed by drone strikes during one five-month period during January 2012 to February 2013 were not the intended targets. Daniel Hale, who revealed the documents that comprise the Drone Papers, is serving 45 months in prison for exposing evidence of U.S. war crimes.

    Drone Strikes Conducted by Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden Killed Countless Civilians

    Drones do not result in fewer civilian casualties than piloted bombers. A study based on classified military data, conducted by Larry Lewis from the Center for Naval Analyses and Sarah Holewinski of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, found that the use of drones in Afghanistan caused 10 times more civilian deaths than piloted fighter aircraft.

    These numbers are probably low because the U.S. military considers all people killed in those operations presumptive “enemies killed in action.” George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden all presided over drone strikes that killed countless civilians.

    Bush authorized approximately 50 drone strikes that killed 296 people alleged to be “terrorists” and 195 civilians in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

    The Obama administration conducted 10 times more drone strikes than his predecessor. During Obama’s two terms in office, he authorized 563 strikes — largely with drones — in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, killing between 384 and 807 civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

    Trump, who relaxed Obama’s targeting rules, bombed all the countries that Obama had, according to Micah Zenko, former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. During Trump’s first two years in office, he launched 2,243 drone strikes, compared to 1,878 in Obama’s two terms in office. Since the Trump administration was less than forthcoming with accurate civilian casualty figures, it is impossible to know how many civilians were killed on his watch.

    Drones hover above towns for hours, emitting a buzzing sound that terrorizes communities, especially children. They know a drone could drop a bomb on them at any moment. The CIA launches a “double tap,” deploying a drone to kill those trying to rescue the wounded. And in what should be called a “triple tap,” they often target people at funerals mourning their loved ones killed in drone attacks. Rather than making us less vulnerable to terrorism, these killings make people in other countries resent the United States even more.

    Drone Strikes During the “War on Terror” Are Illegal

    Drone attacks mounted during the “war on terror” are illegal. Although Biden pledged in his General Assembly speech to “apply and strengthen … the U.N. Charter” and promised “adherence to international laws and treaties,” his drone strikes, and those of his predecessors, violate both the Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

    The UN Charter forbids the use of military force against another country except when acting in self-defense under Article 51. On August 29, after the U.S. drone killed 10 civilians in Kabul, the U.S. Central Command called it “a self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike.” The Central Command claimed that the strike was necessary to prevent an imminent attack on the Kabul Airport by ISIS.

    But the International Court of Justice has held that countries cannot invoke Article 51 against armed attacks by non-state actors that are not attributable to another country. ISIS is at odds with the Taliban. Attacks by ISIS cannot therefore be imputed to the Taliban, which once again controls Afghanistan.

    Outside areas of active hostilities, “the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal,” Agnès Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, tweeted. She wrote that “intentionally lethal or potentially lethal force can only be used where strictly necessary to protect against an imminent threat to life.”

    Civilians can never legally be the target of military strikes. Targeted or political assassinations, also called extrajudicial executions, violate international law. Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions which is punishable as a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. A targeted killing is only lawful if it is deemed necessary to protect life, and no other means — including capture or nonlethal incapacitation — is available to protect life.

    International humanitarian law requires that when military force is used, it must comply with both the conditions of distinction and proportionality. Distinction mandates that the attack must always distinguish between combatants and civilians. Proportionality means that the attack can’t be excessive in relation to the military advantage sought.

    Moreover, Philip Alston, former UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, reported, “The precision, accuracy and legality of a drone strike depend on the human intelligence upon which the targeting decision is based.”

    The Drone Papers included leaked documents revealing the “kill chain” the Obama administration used to determine whom to target. Innumerable civilians were killed using “signals intelligence” — foreign communications, radar and other electronic systems — in undeclared war zones. Targeting decisions were made by tracking cell phones that might or might not be carried by suspected terrorists. Half of the intelligence used to identify potential targets in Yemen and Somalia was based on signals intelligence.

    Obama’s Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG), which contained targeting rules, outlined procedures for the use of lethal force outside “areas of active hostilities.” It required that a target pose a “continuing imminent threat.” But a secret Department of Justice white paper promulgated in 2011 and leaked in 2013 sanctioned the killing of U.S. citizens even without “clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” The bar was presumably lower for killing non-U.S. citizens.

    The PPG said there must be “near certainty that an identified HVT [high-value terrorist] or other lawful terror target” is present before lethal force could be directed against him. But the Obama administration launched “signature strikes” that didn’t target individuals, but rather men of military age present in areas of suspicious activity. The Obama administration defined combatants (non-civilians) as all men of military age present in a strike zone, “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

    “Intelligence” upon which U.S. drone strikes are based is extremely untrustworthy. The United States has engaged in repeated violations of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. And the unlawful U.S. killing with drones violates the right to life enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, another treaty the U.S. has ratified. It says, “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”

    Kabul Drone Strike: “The First Act of the Next Stage of Our War”

    “That drone strike in Kabul was not the last act of our war,” Representative Malinowski said during Blinken’s congressional testimony. “It was unfortunately the first act of the next stage of our war.”

    “There must be accountability,” Sen. Christopher S. Murphy (D-Connecticut), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a Twitter post. “If there are no consequences for a strike this disastrous, it signals to the entire drone program chain of command that killing kids and civilians will be tolerated.”

    In June, 113 organizations dedicated to human rights, civil rights and civil liberties, racial, social environmental justice and veterans rights wrote a letter to Biden “to demand an end to the unlawful program of lethal strikes outside any recognized battlefield, including through the use of drones.” Olivia Alperstein from the Institute for Policy Studies tweeted that the United States should “apologize for all the drone strikes, and put an end to drone warfare once and for all.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott is seen on field before Game 1 of the 2020 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays at Globe Life Field on October 20, 2020, in Arlington, Texas.

    Earlier in September, two significant events occurred that would shape women’s rights. First, the U.S. finally withdrew from Afghanistan, ending its 20-year war and occupation. Second, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 not to block a Texas law that prohibits most abortions in that state. The media were awash in stories of the Talibanization of Afghan society and the loss of women’s rights in that country. We also saw stories on the attack on women’s rights right here in the U.S.

    However, rather than see these incidents halfway around the world as a product of right-wing forces wanting to control women and their lives, some have revived an older narrative that tries to explain white supremacy, neo-Nazism and right-wing ascendancy as the product of the encounter with the colonized “other.”

    Thus, Thomas Friedman in a recent op-ed in The New York Times posed the question of whether U.S. intervention in the Middle East has achieved its publicly stated goal of getting the region to embrace “pluralism and the rule of law,” or instead has wound up “mimicking” its “tribalism.”

    Meanwhile, a photoshopped image of Supreme Court justices in which the three female judges are shown wearing burqas with their faces covered appeared on social media.

    The logic of the image, presumably posted by someone who supports the right to abortion, is that of a Talibanized Supreme Court, one that has “mimicked” the Middle East or Central Asia and brought “alien values” into the heart of the United States.

    This image was part of a media landscape in which the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban was once again dominant. Just like in 2001, the media suddenly discovered Afghan women. (My study with a colleague showed a dramatic increase in stories about Afghan women in the media in lead up to the U.S. invasion which served to justify it.) In a repeat of themes articulated in 2001, media pundits and political elites alike promoted the idea that decades of “progress” under U.S. occupation would be undone by the Taliban’s return to power. Once again, feminism and women’s rights were weaponized to serve imperial aims. This time, however, it was deployed to justify a 20-year occupation and to paper over the U.S.’s defeat at the hands of the Taliban.

    In reality, the situation for women in Afghanistan, by and large, did not improve under U.S. occupation. An April 2021 National Intelligence Council report states that while “some policies” that negatively impacted Afghan women may have ended after the fall of the Taliban in the early 2000s, “many continue[d] in practice even in government-controlled [i.e., U.S.-backed] areas, and years of war have left millions of women maimed, widowed, impoverished, and displaced.” The explanation for the ongoing plight of Afghan women, the report suggests, is Afghan “cultural norms.”

    The common logic underlying Friedman’s op-ed, the photoshopped Supreme Court image, as well as the National Intelligence Council report is that of a “clash of civilizations.” We have on the one hand an enlightened “West” that champions women’s rights, and on the other, a backward and misogynistic “Muslim world.” While the Taliban are indeed a retrograde force, it is important to look more deeply at the role the U.S. played in Afghanistan. Indeed, the U.S.’s failure to “liberate” women is not so much the product of the backward “culture” of Afghan people, but rather its choice of allies: the very same misogynistic warlords who began the attacks on women’s rights in the early 1990s.

    Journalist Anand Gopal has documented the complex picture for Afghan women through his extensive interviews with women in the countryside where the vast majority of Afghans live. Far from the hapless victim, the picture that emerges from his account is not only one that shows how the U.S. threw these women from the frying pan into the fire through its support for the warlords, but also one that highlights the determination of women to survive and fight both U.S. occupation and Talibanization.

    Yet, such stories that grant agency to Afghan women are in a minority. The narrative of Muslim women as oppressed victims has animated U.S. culture to such an extent that portrayals of the rescue of Brown women from Brown men is ubiquitous. This narrative, which scholars have referred to as colonial or imperial feminism, has a long history that goes back to the height of European colonization of much of the world in the 19th century when women’s rights were weaponized in service to empire. But imperial feminism benefits neither women in colonized spaces nor the vast majority of women right here in the imperial center.

    At its core, imperial feminism erases not only the agency of women in the Global South but also that of women in the U.S. Indeed, the two are historically and inextricably connected.

    It took women suffragists no less than a century of struggle to secure the right to vote in the U.S. against a fierce and demeaning opposition, as seen in this anti-suffrage postcard from the early 20th century. However, racist gerrymandering practices have sought to undo the voting power of women of color.

    This was not a product of the Taliban or the colonial encounter with “backward people” but very much a product of deep-rooted sexism and racism indigenous to U.S. culture.

    Similarly, it took a women’s movement to win not only the right to terminate a pregnancy, but also, thanks largely to feminists of color, the right to carry a pregnancy to term and not be forced to undergo sterilization. The Christian right has since been trying to undo women’s reproductive rights, as evident in the recent Texas law, not because of some external factors but due to homegrown misogyny.

    To be sure, the colonizer and colonized, the imperial center and the periphery, have always been marked by a symbiotic relationship, as Edward Said argued in Culture and Imperialism. Ironically, the forces of the right in the U.S. have more in common with the Taliban than they do with women’s rights advocates in either context.

    Moreover, as noted above, imperial feminism also erases the agency of women in the Global South, and its own role in undermining the struggle for women’s rights globally. Thus, against the wishes of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), founded in 1977 and perhaps the country’s most significant women’s rights organization, the U.S. decided to invade the country.

    RAWA’s founder, Meena, was killed in 1987 by Afghan agents of the KGB in connivance with U.S. agents, particularly the misogynist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As is now well documented, in order to defeat the Soviet Union, the U.S. supported groups with reactionary social goals with full knowledge of their violent and repressive tendencies. Hekmatyar of the Islamist group Hezb-e-Islami, for instance, received large sums of U.S. aid in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion in 1979, even though, as journalist Tim Wiener notes, Hekmatyar’s “followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.” Wiener’s CIA and State Department sources described Hekmatyar as “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist” and “definite dictatorship material.” Yet, they supported him in order to advance U.S. geopolitical interests.

    RAWA opposed U.S. intervention right from the start and demanded that U.S./NATO forces withdraw. In a recent interview that the Afghan Women’s Mission conducted with RAWA, the organization states quite clearly that over the “past 20 years, one of our demands was an end to the US/NATO occupation.” They go on to add:

    [E]ven better if they take their Islamic fundamentalists and technocrats with them and let our people decide their own fate. This occupation only resulted in bloodshed, destruction and chaos. They turned our country into the most corrupt, insecure, drug-mafia and dangerous place especially for women.

    However, with the exception of a rare op-ed here and there, mainstream discourse in the U.S. has largely failed to give voice to RAWA. If anything, to the extent that we have seen images of Afghan women protesting Taliban rule in the mainstream media, it is framed in ways that suggest that it was the U.S. occupation that made that possible. Again, the agency of Afghan feminists and women’s rights organizations are erased and rendered invisible.

    What is relatively new is the repackaging of an older narrative that seeks to cast blame on the “other” for problems in the domestic context. This thread runs through the op-ed by Friedman and the doctored image of the Supreme Court.

    Today, you can buy a t-shirt of Joe Biden wearing a turban and scarf with the slogan “Make the Taliban Great Again.”

    The t-shirt, undoubtedly produced by Donald Trump’s supporters playing on Trump’s signature slogan, is designed to equate Biden with the Taliban. Recently, a series of billboards with the same image appeared in Pennsylvania, the work of a former senator from the state, Scott Wagner.

    By depicting Biden in this way, the image seeks to convey the message that the U.S. has been Talibanized by Biden. Even though it was Trump who promised to end the “forever wars” and withdraw from Afghanistan, the right has chosen to direct its ire at Biden. This anger is a product of various factors, including support for the U.S. war on Afghanistan. However, what is noteworthy here is that Biden is presented as part of the Taliban because he is dressed, in this photoshopped image, in a turban and scarf. Cultural racism works by depicting aspects of a religion or culture as backward as a means to create “others.” Thus, Muslim women who wear hijabs bear the brunt of xenophobic violence.

    This is not just a tactic of the right. The Clinton campaign in 2008 was criticized for circulating a picture of Barack Obama in a turban as a way to garner white support for Hillary Clinton by creating Obama as a racialized “other.”

    However, this has been taken to a whole new level with Biden being depicted as an agent of the Taliban. While there is a long history of the right claiming that Obama is a “secret Muslim” and an agent of Muslim-majority countries, to represent a white person, i.e. Biden, as a Taliban fighter, speaks to how “race” and the construction of enemies is an ever-shifting process. Significantly, the “America” of white supremacy, rather than be restored to its “greatness,” has been defiled by people like Biden per this billboard. Biden’s ejection from whiteness marks a new phase in the evolution of the rhetoric of anti-Muslim racism.

    Unfortunately, this form of Islamophobia is not just the province of the right. The doctored image of the Supreme Court accepts this logic, as does Friedman’s op-ed, albeit in different and more subtle ways.

    This sort of argument has a long lineage, harking back, for example, to analyses of Nazism. Even such an astute critic of Nazism as Hannah Arendt, in volume three of The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote that the Nazi Holocaust was due not to factors internal to European history, but rather to Europeans’ encounter with those whom they colonized. According to Arun Kundnani, Arendt’s “model for this process of alien corruption was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. European colonizers, confronted by the ‘savagery’ of the colonized population, degenerated into ‘savages’ themselves, setting the precedent for the would-be totalitarian rulers of the European ‘mob.’ Thus, the origin of ‘our’ savagery lies in ‘their’ culture; Western civilization can be corrupted by the barbarism of others but does not give rise to any distinctive barbarism of its own.”

    In fact, the causality has often proceeded in the opposite direction: the subjugation and dehumanization that imperial powers have inflicted on colonized peoples has been brought back home to reinforce dominant class interests in the metropole. As Aimé Césaire argued forcefully in his book, Discourse on Colonialism, the genocide of Jews in Europe was nothing but the application internally of what European colonial powers had been practicing externally. The two were intimately tied. European fascism, even beyond Germany, applied practices to white people that were “until then … reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘n….s’ of Africa.” In short, Césaire argued that fascism in its various manifestations was very much a product of factors internal to Europe.

    W. E. B. Du Bois, in The World and Africa, made a similar argument, asserting that: “There was no atrocity — concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood — which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”

    It therefore behooves progressives to eschew arguments that blame the Taliban or the Middle East for the attack on women’s rights in the U.S. Let us not displace the source of threat to women’s rights to external forces through a contorted racist logic. At the end of the day, women all over the world face oppression, even if their oppression looks different in parts of the world and is inflected by various factors, including their class position within a neoliberal order. Only an anti-imperialist politics can build the kind of internationalism needed to liberate women around the globe and dismantle neoliberal imperialism.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Four corpses taken to main square and hung from cranes by Afghanistan’s Islamist regime

    Taliban authorities in the western Afghan city of Herat killed four alleged kidnappers and hung their bodies up in public to deter others, a local government official has said, in a sign of Afghanistan’s new rulers’ return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.

    Graphic footage shows the dead bodies of at least four men with their clothes covered in blood hanging from cranes in the city’s main squares as people watch.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  •  

    As the US after 20 years finally began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the story dominated TV news. Just as they did when the war began (Extra!, 11–12/01), corporate journalists overwhelmingly leaned on government and military sources, while offering no clear antiwar voices and vanishingly few perspectives from civil society leaders in either Afghanistan or the United States.

    FAIR studied a week of Afghanistan coverage (8/15–21/21), starting with the day the Taliban took back Kabul. We looked at the three primetime broadcast news shows, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, identifying 74 sources across the three shows.

    Who got to speak?

    ABC: Crisis in Afghanistan

    Afghan women made up just 5% of sources in nightly news stories on the Afghanistan withdrawal (ABC, 8/16/21).

    Of these sources, 23 sources were Afghans (20) or identified as Afghan Americans (3)—31% of all sources. Only 11 of these 23—fewer than half—were identified by at least a first name, and only four were women. (Afghans often have only one name.) While three Afghan sources were identified as professionals who might have offered informed commentary on the broader political or historical situation—a journalist, a member of parliament and a nonprofit director—the vast majority of questions to all Afghan and Afghan American sources were about their personal risk and situation, essentially providing “color” rather than expert opinion to the story.

    Americans who were not Afghans comprised the remaining 51 sources, with no other nationalities represented. Of these US sources, 31 were non-Pentagon government officials, and 16 were current or former military, from the secretary of Defense to enlisted soldiers. The remainder were three parents of Americans killed in the war, and a non-Afghan US citizen evacuating from Afghanistan.

    The partisan breakdown of US officials was 29 Democrats to eight Republicans, with President Joe Biden accounting for 14 of the Democratic sources, and other members of his administration accounting for 12.

    No scholars or antiwar activists from either the US or Afghanistan were featured. Only two civil society leaders made appearances: the director of a nonprofit women’s organization in Afghanistan (8/16/21) and the president of a New York City veterans’ organization (8/16/21).

    Despite the media’s emphasis on the plight of women in Afghanistan as a result of US withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21), women were rarely considered experts, or even voices worth hearing on this story: Only eight sources were female (11% of the total), two of whom were unnamed.

    No independent defense of withdrawal 

    Mitch McConnell on NBC News

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (NBC, 8/16/21): The Afghan situation is “a stain on the reputation of the United States of America.”

    Biden, who played a key role in leading the country into the Iraq War (FAIR.org, 1/9/20), was essentially the strongest “antiwar” voice in the conversation. While he and his administration frequently defended their decision to uphold the withdrawal agreement, there were no other sources who did so.

    Of the three non-administration Democratic sources, two encouraged an extension of the withdrawal deadline. All of the Republican sources criticized either the commitment to or the process of withdrawal. Most of the remaining sources were also critical of the process.

    The final days of the occupation were without question chaotic. But by only featuring sources who emphasized the “stain” on the US’s “reputation” (Sen. Mitch McConnell, NBC, 8/16/21), or the idea that “the Americans left us behind, and left us to those people who are not human and cut our heads off in front of our families” (Abdul, ABC, 8/20/21), a discussion of the tragedy of the 20-year occupation itself was completely foreclosed.

    Journalists’ continued jingoism

    And corporate journalists themselves, who have often been the loudest cheerleaders for the Afghanistan War (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/17/01, 8/25/09, 1/31/19), continued their jingoism in the face of the withdrawal.

    NBC‘s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel (8/16/21), for instance, offered an echo of—rather than a counterpoint to—McConnell and Abdul: “A 20-year war, the longest in US history, today ended a disgrace. The US leaving behind a country its citizens are too terrified to live in.”

    Similarly, CBS‘s Norah O’Donnell (8/16/21) declared: “When America leaves, for many, so does the hope—the hope of freedom, the hope for human rights. And in its place comes the sheer terror of what’s next.” O’Donnell went on to detail the number of Americans killed and wounded, plus the unspecified “cost to America’s national security.”

    New Yorker: The Other Afghan Women

    Anand Gopal (New Yorker, 9/13/21): “To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.”

    Given that the withdrawal was an acknowledgement that after 20 years of occupation, the US had little control over what kind of country it would be “leaving behind,” it’s hard to imagine a withdrawal that Engel would not have considered a disgrace. But while he and O’Donnell highlighted the plight of “many” Afghans, neither made any mention of the number of Afghans killed and wounded in the 20-year war, which was at least 27 times higher than US casualties, according to the Costs of War project (9/1/21) at Brown University. That project estimated at least 46,000 Afghan civilians were killed, including more than 500 humanitarian workers and journalists, along with over 69,000 national military and police and more than 52,000 opposition fighters.

    But these tallies—which do not even include the wounded, or excess (indirect) deaths—are almost certainly undercounts. New Yorker reporter Anand Gopal, who has spent years covering the war, including time in rural Afghanistan, believes that the available death tolls have “grossly undercounted” civilian casualties, as much of the ongoing conflict has taken place in outlying areas where deaths frequently go unrecorded (Democracy Now!, 9/16/21).

    Gopal’s recent article (New Yorker, 9/13/21) on rural Afghan women recounted his investigation in the largely rural Helmand province, where he interviewed a random selection of 12 households, finding that each had lost, on average, 10 to 12 civilians to the war. While Taliban rule was not popular among those he interviewed, it was clearly preferred to US occupation, which had empowered even more ruthless warlords and ensured unending conflict, airstrikes and terror in the region.

    This perspective was not to be found on US TV news coverage of the withdrawal, with its correspondents reporting from the airbase in Kabul, an Afghanistan a world apart from that known by the majority of the country’s population.

    Rosy picture of occupation

    Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News

    Lester Holt (NBC, 8/16/21): “Traveling across Afghanistan a decade into the war, it was hard not to feel some optimism, as if we were witness to a country emerging from darkness.”

    NBC‘s Lester Holt (8/16/21), who visited Afghanistan in 2010 and 2012, offered a typical assessment, painting the occupation as a sensitive operation bringing Afghanistan out of darkness into a brighter future:

    Traveling across Afghanistan a decade into the war [2012], it was hard not to feel some optimism, as if we were witness to a country emerging from darkness…. Through the war, epic American-led battles reclaim cities and villages from the Taliban. US commanders nurture trust among village elders believing in Afghanistan’s future. And now, in the chaos, we’re left to wonder how that future has been so rapidly rewritten with chapters from Afghanistan’s past.

    Two weeks later, on the eve of the official withdrawal, CBS‘s O’Donnell (8/30/21) asked longtime Pentagon correspondent David Martin, “What does this moment mean?” Martin responded:

    To me, it’s on all of us. All of us as American citizens. We as a country could not summon the will to outlast the Taliban. We sent more than 800,000 troops to fight in the war. The vast majority of them did everything we asked of them. They would have gone back for another 20 years if we had asked them. But the country grew tired of the war, and they elected political leaders, both Democratic and Republican, who wanted to end it. History will decide whether that was right or wrong. But either way, Norah, it’s on us.

    CBS's Norah O'Donnell

    Norah O’Donnell (CBS, 8/26/21): “The American military is the greatest in the world, not only because of its superior force, but because of its humanity.”

    O’Donnell herself (CBS, 8/26/21) painted a rosy picture of the occupation a few days prior :

    This is what American troops were doing before terrorists struck today: feeding children, playing with kids, lending an arm to the elderly. The American military is the greatest in the world, not only because of its superior force, but because of its humanity—soldiers providing a helping hand, pulling Afghan infants to safety. This child kept warm by the uniform of a US soldier during her evacuation. This mother delivered her baby in the cargo bay of a C-17, naming the newborn Reach, after the call sign of the aircraft that rescued her.

    For the last two decades, our mission has been about keeping us safe at home and improving the lives of Afghans. The 13 US service members who made the ultimate sacrifice today did not die in vain. One hundred thousand people have been evacuated because of their heroic actions. They answered the call and did what they were trained to do. A reminder of the high price of freedom. And God bless our US troops.

    Obviously, the families of the thousands of Afghan civilians killed in US airstrikes—many of them children—or those victimized by rogue soldiers, might have a different perspective on the US military. Those voices, too, might have helped explain to journalists like Holt, and his viewers, why Afghanistan’s future looks the way it does, rather than the rosy, peaceful outcome those journalists seem to have expected the US to have supplied.

    Veteran voices

    The perspectives of US troops were occasionally presented, but segments featuring veterans’ voices seemed largely intended to reassure viewers that the 20-year war was worth it. “Some veterans are thinking, was it worth it? Were our sacrifices worth it?”  O’Donnell (CBS, 8/18/21) said, followed immediately by a soundbite from a veteran: “It was worth it…. We gave Afghanistan two decades of freedom. It made the world a better place.”

    Notably, post–9/11 veterans had soured on the war over the past decade. While a 2011 Pew poll found that 50% believed the Afghanistan War had been worth fighting, the outfit’s 2019 poll found that number had dropped to 38%—roughly on par with the general public. Afghanistan veterans were more likely than the general public to support the withdrawal—58% vs. 52%—even after it was well underway and the subject of widespread one-sidedly hostile media coverage (Morning Consult, 9/9/21).


    Research assistance: James Baratta, Elias Khoury, Dorothy Poucher, Jasmine Watson

    Featured image: NBC Nightly News (8/16/21)

    The post Missing Voices in Broadcast Coverage of Afghan Withdrawal appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • During last week’s Tory Cabinet reshuffle, ITV political editor Robert Peston inadvertently summed up the primary function of political journalists:

    ‘I simply pass on’

    His tweet was in reference to a ministerial source saying that Priti Patel was ‘not looking happy’. She remained in her job as Home Secretary.

    Peston’s phrase was a tragicomic echo of a remark by Nick Robinson, ITV political editor during the Iraq war, who infamously declared that:

    ‘It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do.’

    (‘“Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor’, The Times, 16 July, 2004)

    In 2012, Robinson, by now the BBC’s political editor, mourned:

    ‘The build-up to the invasion of Iraq is the point in my career when I have most regretted not pushing harder and not asking more questions’.1

    However, Robinson’s career certainly did not appear to have been harmed having abdicated this basic responsibility of journalism; namely, holding those in power to account. After a ten-year stint as the BBC political editor, he became a presenter on the high-profile BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

    Peston’s counterpart at the BBC, political editor Laura Kuenssberg, also performs the required function of ‘I simply pass on’, broadcasting and amplifying the words of those in power with minimal ‘analysis’, far less critical appraisal. Relaying Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s words on the current crisis in gas supply in the UK, as he flew to New York to attend climate talks, she tweeted:

    ‘Speaking on the plane Johnson said..

    1. gas supply probs shd be “temporary”, the squeeze is a result of world waking up from pandemic shutdowns like everyone “going to put the kettle on at the end of the TV programme” and he said he was confident in UK supply chains’

    Gary Neville, the football pundit and former Manchester United defender, replied to Kuenssberg’s tweet:

    ‘Hi Laura do you believe this guys crap ?’

    A tad blunt perhaps. But, judging by the number of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’, it was a welcome challenge from someone with a public profile to the endless channelling by highly-paid political journalists of Johnson’s twaddle – and worse (as we will see below).

    Daniel Finkelstein, the Tory peer and Times columnist, defended Kuenssberg and responded that reporting the Prime Minister’s words ‘is a part of her job’ so that the public can judge them for themselves. Three obvious glaring holes in his argument are that the BBC political editor:

    (a) rarely challenges Johnson (or other government ministers) to any significant extent;

    (b) provides very few perspectives or opinions from outside the narrow range of ‘mainstream’ Parliamentary debate (Labour hardly counts as an effective ‘Opposition’ under the Blair-lite Sir Keir Starmer;

    (c) ignores Johnson’s many lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations which have been well-documented by several independent political observers, including Peter Oborne and Peter Stefanovic. Kuenssberg and her corporate media peers have given the Prime Minister a free pass on his serial deceptions.

    There are countless examples of establishment bias by Kuenssberg (and her predecessors as BBC political editor). Recall, for example, that for years she channelled a one-sided account of Labour’s supposed antisemitism crisis, including an infamous BBC Panorama programme that was demolished as a ‘catalogue of reporting failures’ by the Media Reform Coalition. Recall, too, her evident disapproval when Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, refused to give her a commitment in a BBC News television interview that he was willing to press the nuclear button to launch weapons that would cause untold death and suffering.

    On 20 September, 2021, The National newspaper in Scotland reported that the flagship BBC News at Six ‘did not run a single negative news story about the UK Government’ during the previous week, 13-17 September. This was probably not an unusual week in that regard. Genuinely hard-hitting critical reporting of the Tory government is notable by its absence on BBC News and other establishment news media.

    The truth is, that on one issue after another, leading journalists like Kuenssberg, Peston, and all the high-profile correspondents ‘reporting’ on politicians, the military and intelligence services spend too much time performing as mere stenographers to power. Rational and critical opposing voices are routinely ignored, marginalised or ridiculed.

    Media Lens has documented and explained over the past two decades how ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ are alien concepts to state-corporate journalism. As the US commentator Michael Parenti once noted:

    ‘Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for “objectivity”. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.’

    Similarly, Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, a vital resource for independent journalism, put it well:

    ‘If you’re sympathetic to the weak, it’s activist journalism. If you’re sympathetic to the powerful, it’s objective journalism.’

    The public are, in effect, constantly being subjected to gaslighting by corporate journalists purporting to inform the public what is happening around us. We are being told, explicitly and implicitly, that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the system of economics and power politics that prevail in the world. We are being misled that any serious problems that arise – even climate instability – can be ‘fixed’ by ‘incentivising’ changes to consumer behaviour, rejigging the economy by redirecting public subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, but all still within a corporate-driven ‘market’ framework to maximise private profit, and by implementing technical ‘solutions’, such as capturing and storing carbon emissions (which have failed to live up to the grandiose PR promises made, while fossil fuel companies have received large injections of public cash from governments).

    In fact, ‘mainstream’ news is characterised by serial deceptions and omissions that hide essential truths about the world. We are being drip-fed propaganda that preserves the current inequitable system of power, privilege and class – even as we hurtle towards the abyss of climate chaos.

    Any one of the topics addressed here could merit a media alert in its own right. Indeed, in each case, we have done so several times before. The objective here is to provide something of an overview of the propaganda system that is leading us towards ever greater levels of inequality and misery, even human extinction; a timely reminder of what is at stake.

    Endless War

    Consider the recent pull-out of US troops from Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation. In an excellent article for the Morning Star, Ian Sinclair observed that BBC News and other outlets continued to promote ‘misleading narratives about the Afghan invasion and its motives’. As just one example, Sinclair highlighted Johnson’s ‘astonishingly deceitful claim’ that:

    ‘It was no accident that there has been no terrorist attack launched against Britain or any other Western country from Afghanistan in the last 20 years.’

    Sinclair countered:

    ‘First, terrorist attacks have taken place in Britain and the US that have been inspired by the US-British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.’

    He continued:

    ‘Second, it is widely understood by intelligence agencies and experts that the West’s military intervention in Afghanistan led to a heightened terrorist threat to the West.’

    Sinclair added:

    ‘The final problem with the government’s claim that the war stopped terrorism on the West from Afghanistan is that it’s based on a simplistic understanding of the September 11 2001 terror attacks — that it was necessary for terrorists to “have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilised nations,” as president George W Bush explained in 2006.’

    However, the 9-11 attacks were planned initially in Germany, training was implemented in the US and most of the hijackers were Saudi. A recent article in CovertAction Magazine noted that:

    ‘The invasion of Afghanistan was launched following the NATO invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but eventually it emerged that the report presented to NATO by U.S. Ambassador Frank Taylor contained no actual forensic evidence to support the assertion that the terror attacks had been orchestrated in Afghanistan.’

    The 7 July 2005 bomb attacks in London, and the Manchester Arena bombing and London Bridge attacks in 2017, required no ‘safe haven’ for terrorists to commit atrocities in Britain.

    Sinclair summed up:

    ‘The omissions and distortions that have been made by politicians about Afghanistan over the last few weeks, echoed by much of the media, have been so big and unremitting it’s easy to start questioning one’s own grip on reality.’

    But following corporate news media daily can have precisely that effect. In gaslighting media audiences, ‘mainstream’ news routinely skews the agenda in favour of what Washington and its allies wish to project. Thus, as Julie Hollar noted in a piece for US-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the corporate media only rediscovered Afghan women and their human rights when US troops left:

    ‘[corporate media] coverage gives the impression that Afghan women desperately want the US occupation to continue, and that military occupation has always been the only way for the US to help them. But for two decades, women’s rights groups have been arguing that the US needed to support local women’s efforts and a local peace process. Instead, both Democrat and Republican administrations continued to funnel trillions of dollars into the war effort, propping up misogynist warlords and fueling violence and corruption.’

    Hollar continued:

    ‘The US did not “rescue” Afghan women with its military invasion in 2001, or its subsequent 20-year occupation. Afghan women need international help, but facile and opportunistic US media coverage pushes toward the same wrong kind of help that it’s been pushing for the last two decades: military “assistance,” rather than diplomacy and aid.’

    She concluded:

    ‘For more than 20 years, US corporate media could have listened seriously to Afghan women and their concerns, bringing attention to their own efforts to improve their situation. Instead, those media outlets are proving once again that Afghan women’s rights are only of interest to them when they can be used to prop up imperialism and the military industrial complex.’

    FAIR has summarised a 20-year-long pattern of corporate media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography since 9-11. The US ‘war on terror’ has likely killed more than one million people at a cost of $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The report states:

    ‘Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars – because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and water-related disease.’

    Cost of War co-director Stephanie Savell said:

    ‘Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – long after US forces are gone.’

    The corporate media played a major role in bringing about this catastrophe, then covering it up afterwards.

    Meanwhile, the Biden administration is continuing its immoral mission to prosecute Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks co-founder and publisher, for telling the truth about US crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Assange rightly said in 2011 that the US goal was ‘an endless war, not a successful war’. The aim is to line the pockets of the narrow sector of society that profits from the military-industrial complex, at the expense of the general population.

    In a piece for Newsweek, Daniel Ellsberg, Alice Walker and Noam Chomsky wrote that:

    ‘When Assange published hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the public was given an unprecedented window into the lack of justification and the futility of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth was hidden by a generation of governmental lies. Assange’s efforts helped show the American public what their government was doing in their name.’

    As we have noted in previous media alerts, Assange’s continued incarceration and long-term confinement, described as torture by Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, is a damning indictment of Western ‘democracy’.

    Political commentator Philip Roddis observes astutely that ‘Western democracy is ninety-five percent bogus’ because:

    ‘(a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when they are “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other large corporations” [quoting Noam Chomsky].’

    A recurring feature of ‘democracy’ and its ‘free press’ is judicious silence or quiet mumbling when a ‘mistake’ is made. Consider the BBC’s limited apology, and dearth of follow-up by almost all media, when the BBC conceded its coverage of an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Syrian city of Douma on 7 April, 2018 was ‘seriously flawed’.

    As we have described in numerous media alerts, the corporate media declared with instant unanimity and certainty that Syria’s President Bashar Assad was responsible for the attack. One week later, the US, UK and France launched missiles on Syria in response to the unproven allegations. Since then, there has been a mounting deluge of evidence, in particular from whistleblowers, that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the UN poison gas watchdog, has perpetrated a cover-up to preserve the Western narrative that Assad gassed civilians in Douma.

    Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens had complained to the BBC following last November’s Radio 4 broadcast of ‘Mayday: The Canister On The Bed’, which propagated the official Western narrative of the attack. In particular, Hitchens had objected to the slurs against an anonymous OPCW whistleblower named ‘Alex’. The BBC had claimed that ‘Alex’ only cast doubt on the official narrative because he had been promised $100,000 by WikiLeaks. The claim was false, as the BBC later admitted. There was no evidence to suggest that ‘Alex’, described as ‘a highly qualified and apolitical scientist’, was motivated by anything other than a desire for truth in sharing his doubts about the attack.

    Aaron Maté, an independent journalist with The Grayzone, has vigorously and repeatedly pursued the story, shaming both ‘mainstream’ media and most progressive media outlets who, like the corporate media, have blanked the scandal. He recently wrote a devastating account of the deceptions and evasions by OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias when appearing before the UN. Now, in a must-watch interview with Jimmy Dore about the BBC’s apology, Maté said that the BBC only retracted part of its attack on the OPCW whistleblowers and that ‘the retraction only scratches the surface of its deceit.’

    Steve Sweeney, international editor of the Morning Star, noted in response to the BBC’s apology on its Douma coverage that:

    ‘None of the major British newspapers such as The Times, The Telegraph, or the liberal mouthpiece for war with a human face, The Guardian, gave it column space despite the serious nature of the matter.’

    The Stark Reality Of Newspeak

    But, of course, ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’. And when evidence emerges to the contrary, it is shunted to the margins or buried. Other countries might be ‘belligerent’, but not us. Hence the deeply skewed reporting of the recent ‘Aukus pact’ between the US, UK and Australia which will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. This was largely presented by state-corporate news, including the BBC and the Guardian, as a ‘defence’ deal to ‘counter’ China in its ‘belligerent behaviour’ in the Indo-Pacific.

    BBC News at Ten declared on 16 September:

    ‘The deal will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian navy to promote stability in the Indo-Pacific region which has come under increasing pressure from China.’

    The BBC might as well admit that they are reading out press releases on behalf of Western power.

    An online BBC News article included the deceptive wording:

    ‘Aukus is being widely viewed as an effort to counter Beijing’s influence in the contested South China Sea.’

    The weasel phrase ‘widely viewed’ is newspeak for ‘the view from Washington and London’.

    Likewise, the Guardian dutifully carried the official US-UK view and framed its reporting accordingly:

    ‘In Washington, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, made clear that the administration had chosen to close ranks with Australia in the face of belligerent Chinese behaviour.

    ‘Austin said he had discussed with Australian ministers “China’s destabilising activities and Beijing’s efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms”, adding: “While we seek a constructive results-oriented relationship with [China], we will remain clear-eyed in our view of Beijing’s efforts to undermine the established international order.”’

    Imagine if western journalists regularly wrote news reports about the plentiful examples of belligerent US behaviour. And about America’s destabilising activities and efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms. But that would be real journalism. Instead, a Guardian editorial oozed its approval:

    ‘A firm and unified response to China’s actions by democratic nations is both sensible and desirable.’

    There was no mention in any of the current reporting, as far as we could see, that the UK is set to increase its number of nuclear warheads by over 40 per cent, breaking international law. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is encouraging the public to report the UK government to the UN.

    This behaviour by the UK is no exception. ‘We’ routinely flout the law on arms, nuclear or conventional. Andrew Feinstein and Alexandra Smidman recently reported for Declassified UK, that Britain’s ‘robust’ arms export controls are a fiction:

    ‘In practice, UK controls on arms exports are all but voluntary, and Britain routinely arms states abusing human rights and those at war.

    ‘Britain exported more than £11-billion worth of arms around the world in 2019 but UK ministers claim this trade is properly administered in a mantra that goes like this:

    ‘“HM Government takes its export control responsibilities very seriously and operates one of the most robust arms export control regimes in the world. We consider all export applications thoroughly against a strict risk assessment framework and keep all licences under careful and continual review as standard.”’

    However, Feinstein and Smidman pointed out that:

    ‘These contentions are not true and the stark, unavoidable reality is that the British government and its weapons manufacturers, between whom there is a symbiotic relationship, repeatedly violate domestic law and international agreements on arms controls with no repercussions.’

    In short:

    ‘The British arms industry, politicians, the military and intelligence services can all essentially do what they want, with limited scrutiny and virtually no accountability.’

    As just one damning example: in supplying arms and other support, including military training and maintenance services to Saudi Arabia, Britain is an active contributor to the brutal Saudi subjugation of the Yemeni people.

    The UK also defies its own arms exports criteria in relation to Israel, to whom the UK has sold military equipment worth more than £400 million since 2015. Even this year’s deadly Israeli attacks in Gaza caused no let-up in UK sales to Israel.

    These are all yet more examples of the gaslighting that state-corporate news media are guilty of: the constant framing of the UK as a ‘defender’ and ‘promoter’ of ‘security’ and ‘stability’, while the state and military companies pursue arms sales and a wider foreign policy that kills and endangers people abroad and at home.

    ‘Nothing Is Moving’ On Climate

    Almost inevitably, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg makes a return in this alert for another dishonourable mention. ‘Boris Johnson aims to push for more climate action during trip’, she gushed after travelling as part of a press pack with him and his entourage on a plane headed to New York for climate talks. She wrote that Johnson was ‘delighted’ to be:

    ‘acting as the host of the government plane he has had repainted with the Union Jack on the tail, urging journalists to approve of the new paint job.’

    But the most significant ‘paint job’ here was the BBC’s depiction of Johnson as some kind of climate hero. ‘Brokering climate deals a political priority’, was one headline in Kuenssberg’s report. She added:

    ‘the prime minister’s main task on this trip to New York is to push other countries to make more meaningful promises on cash and climate.’

    The notion that Johnson, who has frequently cast doubt on global warming and made derogatory remarks about ‘bunny-hugging’, is a true champion of climate and environmental protection is bogus and dangerous. As recently as December 2015, when it was unseasonably warm, he published a Telegraph piece titled, ‘I can’t stand this December heat, but it has nothing to do with global warming’.

    He wrote:

    ‘We may all be sweating in the winter air, but remember, we humans have always put ourselves at the centre of cosmic events.’

    Referring to the leaders of state who had been at the 2015 Paris climate talks, Johnson added:

    ‘I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation.

    ‘There may be all kinds of reasons why I was sweating at ping-pong [in December] – but they don’t include global warming.’

    The reference to ‘ping-pong’, and his flippant remarks on the climate talks, suggest the whole thing was all just a game to Johnson; a ‘jolly wheeze’ to provide ammo to churn out another newspaper column.

    In this month’s Cabinet reshuffle, Johnson appointed Anne-Marie Trevelyan as his new International Trade Secretary. She had previously rejected climate science in a series of tweets between 2010 and 2012, stating in one:

    ‘Clear evidence that the ice caps aren’t melting after all, to counter those doom-mongers and global warming fanatics.’

    People can, of course, change their minds when confronted by cast-iron evidence and solid arguments. Johnson himself said this month that ‘the facts change and people change their minds’. But the facts had not changed. Certainly not since 1988 when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up and renowned climate scientist James Hansen testified to the US Congress about the already-known dangers of climate instability.

    Moreover, how sincere can someone like Johnson be with his appalling track record? Has his understanding around the serious reality and implications of catastrophic climate change really changed? Or does he just say whatever he believes is politically expedient to retain his grip on power?

    In April 2021, Johnson waffled about ‘building back greener’ after the pandemic.

    ‘It’s vital for all of us to show that this is not all about some expensive, politically correct, green act of bunny hugging.

    ‘What I’m driving at is this is about growth and jobs.’

    Experienced observers of political rhetoric will recognise that ‘jobs’ is often newspeak for ‘corporate profits’.

    Johnson’s insincerity and disregard for those he considers beneath him surfaced once more in the grossly insensitive remarks he made in ‘joking’ about Margaret Thatcher’s ‘green legacy’. During a visit to a windfarm off the Aberdeenshire coast in July, he was asked if he would set a deadline for ending fossil fuel extraction. He replied with what he clearly thought was a witty remark:

    ‘Look at what we’ve done already. We’ve transitioned away from coal in my lifetime.

    ‘Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether.’

    Continuing his track record of serial deceptions, Johnson boasted this month that:

    ‘The fact is the UK is leading the world [in tackling the climate crisis] and you should be proud of it.’

    The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was scathing of this ‘lie’ that has been channelled repeatedly by Johnson and other cabinet ministers ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this November:

    ‘There’s a lie that the UK is a climate leader and that they have reduced their emissions by 45 per cent since 1990.’

    She pointed out that the statistics do not include the UK’s share of emissions from international aviation, shipping and imported goods:

    ‘Of course, if you don’t include all emissions of course the statistics are going to look much nicer. I’m really hoping that we stop referring to the UK as a climate leader, because if you look at the reality that is simply not true. They are very good at creative carbon accounting, I must give them that, but it doesn’t mean much in practice.’

    Rational analysis also shows that none of the world’s major economies – in particular, the entire G20 (which includes the UK) – is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate.

    The watchdog Climate Action Tracker (CAT) analysed the policies of 36 countries, as well as the 27-nation European Union, and found that all major economies were off track to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The countries together make up 80 per cent of the world’s emissions.

    Niklas Höhne, a founding partner of the NewClimate Institute, a CAT partner, warned that:

    ‘there has been little to no improvement: nothing is moving. Anyone would think they have all the time in the world, when in fact the opposite is the case.’

    The lack of seriousness given by UK broadcasters to the crisis is evident in the results of a recent study that showed that the word ‘cake’ appeared 10 times more on British television than ‘climate change’ in 2020 while ‘dog’ was mentioned 22 times more. Mentions of climate change and global warming fell by 10 per cent and 19 per cent respectively compared with 2019, the report from BAFTA-backed sustainability initiative Albert found.

    Joanna Donnelly of Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Service, told viewers of the ‘Claire Byrne Live’ programme on Irish television that:

    ‘when it comes to climate change, we are in an emergency situation’

    Irish journalist John Gibbons highlighted the TV clip on Twitter, praising Donnelly’s forthright words, adding:

    ‘We’re in a Code Red national/global emergency, might be a good time to start acting like it (yes, media friends, that means YOU)’

    A soberly-worded, but terrifying, assessment of climate change risk published last week by Chatham House warned that, unless countries dramatically increase their commitments in carbon cuts:

    ‘many of the climate change impacts described in this research paper are likely to be locked in by 2040, and become so severe they go beyond the limits of what nations can adapt to.’

    The report added that:

    ‘Any relapse or stasis in emissions reduction policies could lead to a plausible worst case of 7°C of warming by the end of the century’

    That prospect is terrifying. John Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, warned a decade ago that:

    ‘the difference between two degrees and four degrees [of global warming] is human civilisation.’

    In other words, we are potentially talking about the end of human life as we know it; perhaps even human extinction.

    James Hansen, the previously mentioned climate expert, remains sceptical about a truly successful outcome of COP26 in Glasgow. He wrote earlier this month:

    ‘The bad news: we approach the gas bag season – the next Conference of the Parties (COP26) is scheduled for November 1-12.  Gas bag politicians won’t show you the data that matter because that would reveal their miserable performances.  Instead, they set climate goals for their children while adopting no polices that would give such goals a chance.  Some of them may have been honestly duped about the science and engineering, but many must be blatant hypocrites.’ 2

    Other than the ever-present risk of nuclear war, there is no greater threat to humanity than the climate crisis. And there is no more damning example of gaslighting by state-corporate media when they tell us we can trust governments and corporations to do what is required to avert catastrophe.

    1. Nick Robinson, ‘Live From Downing Street’, Bantam Books, London, 2012, p. 332
    2. James Hansen, ‘August Temperature Update & Gas Bag Season Approaches’, email, 14 September 2021.
    The post Gaslighting The Public: Serial Deceptions By The State-Corporate Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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