radiofree.asia

Category: Afghanistan

  • International Press Institute: in 2021 45 journalists died doing their work

    A total of 45 journalists died in 2021 while practicing their profession, with Mexico being the most dangerous country in the world for reporters, the International Press Institute (IPI) reported today in Vienna.

    Seven Mexican journalists were assassinated this year for their work, with which the Latin American country once again leads the annual list of dead reporters. India and Afghanistan follow, each with six journalists killed, ahead of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with three.

    In 2020, 55 journalists died around the world, eleven of them in Mexico. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/05/04/world-press-freedom-day-2020-a-few-more-links/

    According to the IPI, a global network of media owners and editors, the safety of journalists remains a global challenge. For this reason, the Institute “urges the authorities to end impunity for these crimes and to guarantee the protection of journalists, who must be able to carry out their work freely and safely.”

    Of the 45 journalists killed, 40 were men and five were women, the IPI detailed. Twenty-eight of them were killed for their work, three died while working in a conflict zone and two when covering internal disturbances in a country.

    In eleven cases the causes of the deaths are still being investigated, while a journalist drowned while covering the rescue of an elephant from a river in India, showing how dangerous the profession can be.

    The number of journalists killed this year is the lowest recorded by the IPI since 1997. However, the IPI emphasizes that the decrease in the number of journalists killed and assassinated is not an indication of the good state of press freedom in the world.

    “Waves of violence against the press can lead to self-censorship when journalists avoid certain topics that put their lives in danger,” says IPI.

    “This is made even worse in a climate of impunity in which murderers must not answer for their actions. IPI stands in solidarity with the families and colleagues of all journalists killed for their work in 2021 and demands that those responsible be held accountable for their actions” the statement concludes.

    IPI Death Watch: 45 journalists killed in 2021
    https://codelist.biz/2021/12/30/45-journalists-died-in-2021-in-the-exercise-of-their-profession-mexico-leads-the-list/

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

  • Aafia Siddiqui, Political Prisoner

    The media coverage of the hostage-taking at a synagogue in Texas has been predictably hysterical, Islamophobic and inaccurate about Aafia Siddiqui, the apparent political cause of the hostage-taker Malik Faisad Akram.  According to his family in England he has “mental health issues.”  He was “said to have” weapons and explosives.  He was “said to have” threatened the four hostages but everyone seems to agree no one was harmed. He wanted Siddiqui free from the near-by maximum security Carswell Prison; he wanted to speak to her.   Under heavy criticism the FBI has said that his hostage-taking had nothing to do with their being Jews, “not his issue.”  But to the press, Siddiqui “has a history of anti-semitism,” hence the universal media criticism. To the police, FBI, government, killing Akram represented a successful outcome to the crisis.  Siddiqui’s lawyer and family distanced themselves from Akram’s actions, but to say they remain completely frustrated by their thwarted attempts to free a very ill, frail, and innocent Aafia Siddiqui, after repeated pleas to the US government and unfulfilled promises by the Pakistani government, would be to vastly understate the case.

    Pakistani-born Boston graduate student Aafia Siddiqui’s crime was to be caught in America’s post 9/11 anti-Muslim hysteria.  She had come to America in 1990 to study, earning a biology degree and then a Ph.D in neuroscience from MIT.  Her colleagues called her quiet and religious (but not a fundamentalist).  Her marriage to Mohammed Amjad Khan ended in divorce when he proved to be violent and more fundamentalist than Siddiqui.  She was mistakenly accused of anti-American Muslim activism initially (partially because of mistaken identity), but the accusations ballooned. In the early War On Terror days, “associations” became much more significant and damning.  Siddiqui ended up on Attorney General John Ashcroft’s “Watchlist.” As the Big Lies of government grew, soon the New York Post was calling her “Lady Al Queda.”

    Once the government labeled her a “terrorist,” she had no chance of escaping the Empire’s punishment. When her true story began to emerge, it was necessary to take action.  While visiting in Pakistan, helped by Pakistani American operatives, she was “disappeared.”  Her youngest child was killed when she was taken, and her other two children imprisoned separately for years. She was beaten, raped, tortured and kept in solitary in black site prisons of the American Empire, particularly in Afghanistan. Other prisoners have testified that they saw her at Bagram, a prison from which the Obama administration prevented prisoners’ court appearances because they might talk about the conditions of their imprisonment. Eventually Aafia Siddiqui would be set up for final punishment and disposal.

    From my book Women Politicals in America:

    At the trial—in January 2010—the soldiers said that Aafia Siddiqui, accused would-be assassin and presumed Al Qaeda terrorist, did, in fact, get hold of an unsecured M-4 automatic rifle and open fire on US soldiers and FBI agents in Ghazni, Afghanistan.  The day before, she had been picked up by local policemen as a “possible suicide bomber” because she had been “loitering” in a public square with a young boy [whose identity is not clear].  She carried instructions to create biological weapons, descriptions of US “military assets,” numerous jars containing “chemical substances,” and documents containing words like “Empire State Building” and “Brooklyn Bridge.”  The soldiers said that the day after her discovery and arrest, an American army captain, a warrant officer, two army interpreters and two FBI agents came to question Siddiqui at Ghazni police headquarters.  The soldiers said that none of those men were “aware that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind [a] curtain.”  Oddly, no one looked behind it.  And also oddly, the American warrant officer placed his M-4 rifle next to the curtain.  What happened next, said the soldiers, was that Siddiqui pulled the rifle to her, unlatched the safety, pointed the gun  at the captain, and while one of the interpreters grabbed for the gun, Siddiqui fired the gun twice.  The soldiers agreed she had said, “Get the fuck out of here!”  She hit no one.

    The soldiers said the interpreter knocked her to the ground and the warrant officer fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s stomach.  She collapsed, unconscious.  FBI special Agent Eric Negron testified at her trial that he saw the rifle raised (although he could not see her face behind the curtain).  Negron said that after she was shot he helped restrain the struggling Siddiqui.  “I had to strike her several times with a closed fist across the face.”  Finally she “either fainted or faked that she had fainted” and was handcuffed.  The soldiers had successfully restrained the suspected terrorist Siddiqui.  Although her prints were not on the rifle, the holes in the police station wall put there by the rifle Siddiqui allegedly fired were proved to have been there before the July 2008 incident, and since, if she had tried to kill the soldiers, she missed and was herself grievously shot in the abdomen, her sentence seemed disproportionate.  Aafia Siddiqui was given 86 years in prison.  She had been labeled a terrorist enemy of the Empire and its soldiers, and her case was disposed of accordingly.

    Siddiqui had been extradited for the offense of attempting to kill soldiers, but she was tried, completely illegally, as a notorious female terrorist. She was not allowed to speak of her torture or the killing of her baby.  The trial—then as now—of a “terrorist, as with Julian Assange, allows for only the government/prosecutorial side.  The defendant cannot win.  Siddiqui was also in very bad shape, physically and mentally during her trial, with a badly dressed stomach wound that the judge had to intervene to have treated.  She was forced to undergo strip searches every day and was forced to testify.  When she mentioned being in a secret prison, with her children tortured in front of her, the testimony was stricken from the record.  She also, and this is arguably something the hostage-taker Malik Faisad Akram was aware of, did not want “Zionists” chosen as jurors and said her guilty verdict came from Israel, not America.  Some said she was irrational which was entirely possible, but with the anti-Muslim elements of her trial, perhaps not so irrational.

    She has been in prison since 2010 and has, according to her family, suffered unjust punishments within the prison, and her medical problems are not treated.  For much of the last 11 years, she has also not been able to communicate with her family.  According to the Free Aafia website, maintained by her family and friends, she was attacked last July and suffered serious injuries.  After a number of years, she and her family are still waiting for Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to follow through on promises to help free her from the Empire’s prison.  For the press to continue to call her a hardened terrorist and to overlook the treatment, the torture she has endured at American hands, echoes the ignorant liberal sentiment that Afghanistan is so much worse off without the American government there to torture and kill.  I would like to end this with a 2012 statement from Moazzam Begg, prisoner at US Air Force Base,  Bagram, Afghanistan:

    Of all the abuses [prisoner Abu Yahya al-Libi] describes in his account, the presence of a woman and her humiliation and degradation were the most inflammatory to all the prisoners [at Bagram]—they would never forget it.  He describes how she was regularly stripped naked and manhandled by guards, and how she used to scream incessantly in isolation for two years.  He said prisoners protested her treatment, going on hunger strike, feeling ashamed they could do nothing to help.  He described her in detail:  a Pakistani mother—torn away from her children—in her mid-thirties, who had begun to lose her mind.  Her number, he said, was 650.

    The post Aafia Siddiqui, Political Prisoner first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Are Western Wealthy Countries Determined To Starve The People Of Afghanistan?

    On January 11, 2022, the United Nations (UN) Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths appealed to the international community to help raise $4.4 billion for Afghanistan in humanitarian aid, calling this effort, “the largest ever appeal for a single country for humanitarian assistance.” This amount is required “in the hope of shoring up collapsing basic services there,” said the UN. If this appeal is not met, Griffiths said, then “next year [2023] we’ll be asking for $10 billion.”

    The post Are Western Wealthy Countries Determined To Starve The People Of Afghanistan? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Is the West determined to starve the people of Afghanistan?

    Afghanistan is facing a worsening humanitarian crisis, writes Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Why Washington’s Focus on “Credibility” is a Recipe for War

    The most pressing threat to global security right now isn’t so-called “provocations” by either Russia or China. It is the United States’ misplaced obsession with its own “credibility”.

    This rallying cry by Washington officials – echoed by the media and allies in London and elsewhere – is code for allowing the US to act like a global gangster while claiming to be the world’s policeman. US “credibility” was apparently thrown into question last summer – and only when President Joe Biden held firm to a pledge to pull US troops out of Afghanistan.

    Prominent critics, including in the Pentagon, objected that any troop withdrawal would both suggest the US was backing off from a commitment to maintain the so-called “international order” and further embolden the West’s “enemies” – from the Taliban and Islamic State (IS) group to Russia and China.

    In a postmortem in September, General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, echoed a view common in Washington: “I think that our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go – and I think that damage is one word that could be used.”

    At the same time, a former defence official in the George W Bush administration judged US credibility after the Afghanistan withdrawal at “rock bottom“.

    The only way this understanding of US “credibility” makes sense is if one disregards the disastrous previous two decades of Washington’s role in Afghanistan. Those were the years in which the US army propped up a bunch of wildly unpopular kleptocrats in Kabul who ransacked the public coffers as the US launched an arms’ length drone war that ended up killing large numbers of Afghan civilians.

    To bolster its apparently diminished “credibility” after the troop withdrawal, the US has imposed crushing sanctions on Afghanistan, deepening its current famine. There have also been reports of CIA efforts to run covert operations against the Taliban by aiding its opponents.

    Cold War relic

    Washington’s “credibility” was also seemingly in peril when US and Russian officials met in Geneva this week for negotiations in the midst of a diplomatic, and potential military, standoff over Ukraine.

    The background are demands from Moscow that Washington stops encircling Russia with military bases and that Nato end its relentless advancement towards Russia’s borders. Nato should be a relic of a Cold War-era that officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Moscow dissolved its own version of Nato, the Warsaw Pact, more than three decades ago.

    Russia had been given verbal assurances in 1990 by George HW Bush’s administration that Nato would not expand militarily beyond the borders of what was then West Germany. Seven years later, President Bill Clinton signed the Nato-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, which committed Russia and Nato not to treat each other “as adversaries”, while Nato reiterated that there would be no “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” in former Eastern bloc states.

    Every subsequent US administration has flagrantly broken both of these pledges, with Nato troops now stationed across eastern Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, Moscow feels as menaced by Nato’s aggressive posturing, which serves to revive its Cold War fears, as Washington would if Russia placed military bases in Cuba and Mexico.

    No one should forget that the US was prepared to bring the world to the brink of armageddon in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union in 1962 to prevent Moscow from stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

    Historic alliance

    Despite the current clamour about the need for the US to maintain its “credibility”, Washington was in fact only being asked at the Geneva talks to start honouring, 30 years late, commitments it made long ago and has repeatedly violated.

    The latest flashpoint is Ukraine, Russia’s neighbour, which has been roiling since a coup in 2014 overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Moscow. The deeply divided country is split between those who want to prioritise their historic ties with Russia and those who want to be embraced by the European Union.

    Moscow – and a proportion of Ukrainians – believe Washington and Europe are exploiting the push for an economic pact to engineer Ukraine’s subordination to Nato security policies, directed against Russia. Such fears are not misplaced. Each of what were formerly Soviet states that became an EU member has also been recruited to Nato. In fact, since 2009 it has been an official requirement, through the Treaty of Lisbon, that EU member states align their security policies with Nato.

    Now US “credibility” apparently depends on its determination to bring Nato to Russia’s front door, via Ukraine.

    US perfidy

    Reporting on a working dinner with Russian diplomats last Sunday, before the Geneva meeting, Wendy Sherman, the US deputy secretary of state, recast that perfidy as the US stressing its commitment to “the freedom of sovereign nations to choose their own alliances”.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is being widely made out to be the aggressor after he posted tens of thousands of troops at the border with Ukraine.

    One can argue whether those soldiers are massed for an invasion of Ukraine, as is being widely assumed in the western media, or as a show of force against a US-led Nato that believes it can do whatever it pleases in Russia’s backyard. Either way, a miscalculation by either side could prove disastrous.

    According to the New York Times, General Milley has warned the Russians that an invasion force would face a prolonged insurgency backed by US weaponry. There are reports that Stinger anti-aircraft missiles have already been delivered to Ukraine.

    Similarly, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has threatened“confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine”.

    Drumbeat of war

    This reckless way of projecting “credibility” – and thereby making confrontations and war more, not less, likely – is currently on show in relation to another nuclear-armed power, China. For many months, the Biden administration has been playing what looks like a game of chicken with Beijing over China’s continuing assertion of a right to use force against Taiwan, a self-governing island off the coast of China that Beijing claims as its territory.

    Few countries formally recognise Taiwan as a state, and nothing in relations between Taipei and China is settled. That includes heated disagreements over the division of airspace, with Taiwan – backed by the US – claiming that a whole chunk of southeast mainland China falls within its “defence zone”. That means the scaremongering headlines about record numbers of Chinese warplanes flying over Taiwan need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

    The same disputes apply to China and Taiwan’s respective claims to territorial waters, with a similar potential for provocation. The pair’s conflicting views of what constitutes their security and sovereignty are a ready hair-trigger for war – and in circumstances where one party possesses a large nuclear arsenal.

    Nonetheless, the Biden administration has stomped into this long-simmering feud by feeding the media with alarmist headlines and security analysts with talking points about a possible US war with China over Taiwan. Top Pentagon officials have also stoked concerns of an imminent invasion of Taiwan by China.

    Diplomatically, President Biden snubbed his nose at Beijing by inviting Taiwan to attend his so-called “democracy summit” last month. The event further inflamed Chinese indignation by showing Taiwan and China in separate colours on a regional map.

    The CIA has announced the establishment of a new espionage centre with an exclusive focus on China. According to CIA director William Burns, it is necessary because the US is faced with “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”. That “adversary”, however, poses no direct threat to US security – unless Washington chooses provocatively to bring Taiwan under its security umbrella.

    Washington’s drumbeat has been so constant that a recent poll showed more than half of Americans supported sending US troops to defend Taiwan.

    Nuclear hard line

    The picture is the same with Iran. US “credibility” is being cited as the reason why Washington needs to take a hard line against Tehran – goaded, as ever, by Israel – on its presumed ambitions to build a nuclear bomb.

    Israel, of course, has had its own large arsenal of nuclear weapons for decades – entirely unmonitored and in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both the US and Israel fear Iran wants to level the nuclear playing field in the Middle East. Israel is determined to make sure that only it has the power to make nuclear-backed threats, either against others in the region or as leverage in Washington to get its way.

    President Barack Obama’s administration signed an agreement with Iran in 2015 placing strict limits on Tehran’s development of nuclear technology. In return, Washington lifted some of the most punishing sanctions on the country. Three years later, however, President Donald Trump reneged on the deal.

    Now Iran suffers the worst of both worlds. The US has again intensified the sanctions regime while demanding that Tehran renew the deal on worse terms – and with no promise, according to US Secretary of State Blinken, that the next US administration won’t tear up the agreement anyway.

    US “credibility” does not depend, it seems, on Washington being required to keep its word.

    In the background, as ever, is the threat of joint military reprisals from Israel and the US. In October, Biden reportedly asked his national security adviser to review Pentagon plans for a military strike if this one-sided “diplomatic process” failed. A month later, Israel approved $1.5bn for precisely such an eventuality.

    Drunk on power

    Washington’s emphasis on its “credibility” is actually a story the US elite tells itself and western publics to obscure the truth. What is really prized is America’s ability to enforce its economic interests and military superiority unchallenged across the globe.

    After the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the US overthrow of the elected government of Iran to reinstall its dictator-monarch, there is barely a corner of the planet where the US has not meddled. In Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and its so-called “backyard”, Latin America, US “credibility” has required interventions and war as an alternative to diplomacy.

    In October 2019, as Trump suggested that US troops would be pulled out of Syria – where they had no authorisation from the United Nations to be in the first place – Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and former head of the CIA, observed that the decision had “weakened the US” and “undercut our credibility in the world”.

    He added: “There isn’t an ally that we’ve around the world that doesn’t now distrust us and worry about whether or not we will stand by our word.”

    But this kind of credibility is built not on principle, on respecting others’ national sovereignty, or on peace-building, but on the gangsterism of a superpower drunk on its own power and its ability to intimidate and crush rivals.

    Washington’s “word” is only selectively kept, as its treatment of Russia and Iran highlight. And enforcement of its “credibility” – from breaking commitments to threatening war – has had a predictable effect: they have driven Washington’s “enemies” into an opposition camp out of necessity.

    The US has created a more menacing adversary, as Russia and China, two nuclear powers, have found a common purpose in asserting a countervailing pressure on Washington. Since the late summer, the two have held a series of war games and joint military exercises, each of them a first.

    The world is entering what looks like a new, even more complex cold war, in which any misunderstanding, mishap or false move could rapidly escalate into nuclear confrontation. If it happens, the pursuit of US “credibility” will have played a central part in the catastrophe.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Why Washington’s Focus on “Credibility” is a Recipe for War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • More Afghans May Die From US Sanctions Than at the Hands of the Taliban

    More Afghans May Die From US Sanctions Than at the Hands of the Taliban

    As Afghanistan faces a dire humanitarian crisis, we look at how more Afghans may die from U.S. sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban. The U.S.’s attempts to block support for the new de facto government have prevented vital funding from flowing to the nation’s civil servants, particularly in education and the health sector. Dr. Paul Spiegel says conditions in the hospitals he visited in Kabul as part of a World Health Organization emergency team are rapidly deteriorating, and he describes the lack of heat and basic amenities as winter descended. “There’s been a drought. There’s food insecurity. And all of this has been exacerbated due to this economic crisis and due to lack of the U.N. and NGOs being able to pay people in the field,” says Spiegel. “What we see now is that it’s not the Taliban that is holding us back. It is the sanctions,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    This week the United Nations launched a nearly $5 billion aid appeal for international donors to Afghanistan. U.N. Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said, without immediate assistance, a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe looms in Afghanistan.

    MARTIN GRIFFITHS: A million children potentially suffering severe acute malnutrition. A million children. Figures are so hard to grasp when they’re this kind of size, but a million children in Afghanistan at risk of that kind of malnutrition, if these things don’t happen, is a shocking one.

    AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the Congressional Progressive Caucus is demanding the Biden administration lift economic sanctions imposed after the Taliban overran Afghanistan in August. The caucus tweeted, if the current U.S. economic policy toward Afghanistan continues, quote, “there could be more civilian deaths this year than there were in 20 years of war.”

    For more, we’re joined in Oslo, Norway, by Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. And in Baltimore, Maryland, we’re joined by Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. He returned last month from a five-week visit to Afghanistan as a consultant for the World Health Organization; his Washington Post opinion piece headlined “Hospitals are collapsing in Afghanistan. At this rate sanctions will kill more people than the Taliban.”

    We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dr. Spiegel, let’s begin with you. You just recently returned from Afghanistan. Explain exactly what’s happening there and how that relates to U.S. sanctions.

    DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Thank — excuse me. Thank you, Amy.

    What is happening is there’s a country in freefall, economic freefall, which is affecting all aspects of their lives, and particularly on the health situation. All salaries stopped being paid on August 15th, when the Taliban took over the country. And while there has been some now salaries being paid for basic healthcare, the hospitals are not being — the salaries are not being paid. Healthcare workers are still coming, but there’s no medicines, no — no medicines, no heat. And what we’re seeing are people can’t even afford to get to the hospitals, even if there were medicines to be had.

    AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk specifically about the West’s approach to the Taliban right now.

    DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Right. We call — we were told to call them the de facto authorities. And what has happened in the West is that they have very hard-hitting sanctions that do not allow any funds to go to the de facto authorities, but in a very broad way. And it means that government-run hospitals cannot receive money. Government-run schools cannot receive money. Ministries of health, for technocrats, they’re not able to receive money. And so you have a healthcare system — particularly the higher levels, because there are some differences in the lower levels — that are not receiving funds whatsoever. Yet these are civil servants, just like in the U.S. and other areas, that are required to be able to ensure that healthcare services, educational services are running. And everything is falling down. And it’s not just the sanctions, but it’s also a huge issue in terms of the banking system, the central bank and a massive liquidity problem. So, even when I was there and we were paying polio workers and measles workers to try to get vaccines, there was insufficient money in the country to actually pay these people to do their jobs.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, in terms of the population, the U.N. reports Afghanistan’s population, nearly 23 million people, are facing extreme hunger. At least a million children are at risk of dying of starvation?

    DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Yes, yes. And I would add that it’s not — the crisis is already happening. It’s not as if we can stave off or we can prevent this from happening. What we need to be able to do is minimize the incredibly negative effects that we’re seeing. There’s been a drought. There’s food insecurity. And all this has been exacerbated due to this economic crisis and due to the lack of U.N. and NGOs being able to pay people in the field, particularly anyone related to the de facto authorities, because of the very strong U.S. sanctions.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Jan Egeland into this conversation, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. You have been to Afghanistan scores of times since, what, back to 1996, when you were deputy foreign minister of Norway in Afghanistan. Can you talk about how the situation today compares and what you think needs to happen?

    JAN EGELAND: Well, there hasn’t been this kind of a dramatic collapse in the economy of Afghanistan within months ever before, I think. What happened, really, in August, when the Taliban took over and the NATO countries went for the door, was that they left behind 40 million civilians, the same 40 million civilians whom they had defended with a trillion-dollar military campaign over the last 20 years. Those were left behind, the same women and children, the same doctors and nurses and teachers and so on.

    So, what we’ve seen — and I have 1,400 colleagues on the ground. Norwegian Refugee Council has 1,400 relief workers on the ground. What we see now is that it’s not the Taliban that is holding us back. It is the sanctions. It’s that there is no banking at all and that the teachers and nurses and doctors and so on are not being paid because their salaries are sitting in Washington, and it’s with the World Bank. And the U.S. and all of the other members of the World Bank are not releasing this money. So, a lot of things has to happen tomorrow, unless we will see epic loss of life.

    AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for a suspension of rules blocking the use of international funding in Afghanistan. Some $9.5 billion in Afghan central bank reserves remain blocked outside the country, mainly here in the United States, in response to Taliban rule since August. Guterres addressed the Taliban also.

    SECRETARY–GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: As I appeal to the international community to step up support for the people of Afghanistan, I make an equally urgent plea to the Taliban leadership to recognize and protect fundamental human rights, and, in particular, the rights of women and girls. Across Afghanistan, women and girls are missing from offices and classrooms. A generation of girls is seeing its hopes and dreams shattered. Women scientists, lawyers and teachers are locked out, wasting skills and talents that will benefit the entire country and, indeed, the world. No country can thrive while denying the rights of all of its population.

    AMY GOODMAN: To be clear, he was calling for the lifting of the blocking, of the sanctions against Afghanistan. Jan Egeland, if you can talk about the Taliban and also the U.S. approach?

    JAN EGELAND: Well, number one, I mean, the Taliban, we need to actively engage on all levels, so that there is gender equality in Afghanistan commensurate with that of other Islamic countries. We are doing that. I met with the Taliban top leadership at the end of September. This was only a few weeks after they took over. I brought up the need for our female staff to have the same freedom of movement as the male colleagues have. No male guardian should ever be needed to accompany that. And I got a yes and a yes in my meetings in Kabul, and then we have negotiated with the 14 provinces where we operate the same. We have started with schools for girls and female teachers now in all the 14 provinces, but we have not yet gotten the secondary and tertiary education. And we need to fight for that, really. But it would be the ultimate insult to these girls and their mothers if they have to starve and freeze to death before we are getting through to all of the local Taliban commanders on all of these issues.

    So, that’s the message also to the U.S. We’ve never held money back from starving people because there has been discrimination from the authorities. I constantly hear the phrase “not a penny, not a cent to the Taliban.” I agree with that. It’s not the Taliban that are receiving this funding. It’s going through international organizations, the United Nations, the international nongovernmental organizations, the local nongovernmental organizations, NRC, my own organization, directly to the people. We have full operational freedom at the moment.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to get Dr. Paul Spiegel’s response to State Department spokesperson Ned Price describing the U.S. as “the world’s humanitarian leader for the Afghan people.” At this point, would you agree?

    DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Yes. They are providing a tremendous amount of money still to Afghanistan. The problem is that we’re talking hundreds of millions when billions are needed. And the issue is, in my view, is that it needs to be twofold. There needs to be sufficient liquidity in the system. And it gets — when you get into the details, it’s complicated, because the afghani, the currency, there isn’t sufficient supply, so it needs to be — there needs to be printed more money, actually, coming into the country. My concern is that that’s going to take far too long. It needs to be done very, very quickly.

    But on top of that, I would say, in terms of you can — the U.S. can still provide humanitarian assistance. It needs to be significantly more. And as Jan Egeland said, it’s not a black-and-white situation. You need to be able to — it’s no good to ensure that women have equal rights, but they’re dead. And it is such a severe situation right now that the priority of humanity must take over, while ensuring that there are sufficient safeguards that money is not going to the Taliban, the Taliban leadership. But right now the communication of where the money can go is unclear. And there is such unclarity that many organizations, most organizations, are very anxious to provide money to civil servants, to hospitals, to government-run schools. And that has to change immediately.

    AMY GOODMAN: So Dr. Spiegel, your response to the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanding the Biden administration lift economic sanctions imposed after the Taliban took over, the congressional caucus tweeting, if the current U.S. economic policy toward Afghanistan continues, quote, “there could be more civilian deaths this year than there were in 20 years of war”? What has been the Biden response to the progressives?

    DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Yeah. I would nuance the idea of saying lifting sanctions versus ensuring there are sufficient humanitarian exceptions, as we’ve seen in Venezuela and as we’ve seen in Yemen, amongst other countries. So, whether it is completely stopping the sanctions — I think that’s a political decision. But regardless whether it’s stopped, there can be very clear humanitarian exemptions to be able to ensure the money, or at least the — yeah, the money flows, and the people are able to undertake their interventions.

    Since I returned — I returned around mid-December — the Biden administration has made clear some of the humanitarian exemptions. And I’ve spoken to the field, and what they’ve said is there is more clarity, but it hasn’t yet trickled down to — let’s say, to the field and to the operations, number one. But there needs to be even, I would say, more clarity than the Biden administration has provided since — in December, particularly to ensure that funding can go to some of the technocrats in the ministries, because even if funding can go to the United Nations and the nongovernmental organizations, the ministries themselves are functioning, are the glue of how authorities and others respond to humanitarian emergencies. And, for example, when I was there, there were six concurrent disease outbreaks, yet the surveillance system is hardly functioning. And so, if you want to know about what is happening in COVID, for example, with COVID in that country, the disease system is not being funded, and it’s extremely difficult to know what is happening and prepare accordingly.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, two quick final questions. One is: Is the Norwegian Refugee Council, your organization, pushing Norway and all of Europe to open its doors wider for Afghan refugees? But also, you’ve spoken to the head of the World Bank. You’ve spoken to the U.N. secretary-general. What have been their responses? And what are your demands to them?

    JAN EGELAND: I wrote to the World Bank President Malpass and Secretary-General Guterres when I came back from Afghanistan in the beginning of October. And the question was: Can you please release the World Bank health money, which is sitting there, for the doctors and teachers and so on, that I met, the public sector people, and through U.N. trust funds? So, the U.N. is really funneling the salaries. And the answer back from the secretary-general was, “Yes, I can. We can, the U.N.” And some trust funds have been set up, and some of the public sector work has already been provided with some donor money. And the World Bank said, “Well, we’ll do it as soon as our member states say yes.” And it’s still not there.

    And it’s the U.S. that has to be the leader. The U.S. is the leader in the international financial institutions, like the World Bank. The U.S. also has to tell the risk-averse global banking system that they can start again to transfer money and set up banking on both sides. We cannot transfer our Norwegian aid money to Kabul at the moment. We have to truck stuff over from Pakistan and Iran, and thereby contributing to the downward spiral in the Afghan economy. It’s not rocket science to do these things. It has to happen tomorrow. Actually, next week we’re meeting virtually with the U.S. Treasury. And we’ll be very clear: Please, go ahead and give the green lights to all of these places.

    And are we asking Europeans, including Norwegians, to open our doors for Afghans who may flee? Yes. Unfortunately, Europe is specializing in a European championship of barbed wire erection at the moment, a little bit like it was with the U.S. under the previous administration, so I’m not too optimistic. My own country has now declared that there will be a sizable quota for quota refugees. When I was in Iran, the Afghans there told me, “All of our relatives in Afghanistan have given up. They’re wandering towards the border to Iran. They’ll come here, and many want to go to Europe.” I think it will be a desperate situation. And one thing that has to happen now is that we have to recreate hope in Afghanistan. If not, millions will leave, and they will meet barbed wire all the way as they flee.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, we want to thank you for being with us, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

    Next up, as the nation heads into the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, attempts by Democrats to pass major new voting rights legislation appear to have been stalled. We’ll look at a stunning new documentary titled Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America. Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: Lara Downes performing “Troubled Water” by Margaret Bonds. Bonds was one of the first Black composers to gain recognition in the United States.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Report on press freedom finds mix of problems and progress under Biden administration

    New York, January 13, 2022 – One year into office, President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized the importance of global press freedom and improved daily relations with U.S. media – but has yet to turn many promises into action, according to a special report by Leonard Downie Jr. for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

    The report, ‘Night and day’: The Biden administration and the press, finds an almost complete reversal of the Trump administration’s hostile anti-media rhetoric and a return to a more traditional relationship between the press and the White House. However, while journalists and press freedom advocates welcome the administration’s commitment to keeping the public informed, the report found that they see persistent problems, including issues like the backlog of freedom of information requests, restrictions on journalists at the U.S. southern border, and the use of the Espionage Act against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

    “The Biden administration has stopped the poisonous rhetoric against the media of the Trump years. That’s a great start. Now it needs to go further by expanding reporters’ timely access to information and removing the threat of prosecution under the Espionage Act. The United States cannot be an effective champion of media freedoms globally unless it vigorously upholds those freedoms domestically,” said Robert Mahoney, CPJ deputy executive director.

    Barriers to accessing government documents and other information also continue to frustrate and concern journalists, as do fears that the espionage indictment against Assange could set a dangerous precedent for use against investigative reporters globally. Despite public commitments by Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to increase government transparency, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) experts have seen little improvement in the slow and often uncooperative response of government agencies to journalists requests for information.

    Structural or substantive changes to address the plight of endangered journalists are lacking, the report found. Press freedom advocates were especially critical of the chaotic evacuation and handling of Priority 2 (P-2) visas for journalists under threat in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal and Taliban takeover in August 2021, as media companies and organizations like CPJ had to work with other governments to extract journalists facing imminent danger.

    “The Biden administration still has an opportunity to help Afghan journalists by swiftly processing P-2 visas and by providing assistance for those who fled to safety or remain in the country, reporting in defiance of a repressive Taliban,” said Mahoney. “The U.S. can also heed the lessons of this tragedy by taking the lead in establishing emergency visas for journalists at risk, a critical tool that CPJ has pursued globally.”

    On the positive side, journalists interviewed for the report said there have been significant improvements in daily information gathering involving the White House, State Department, Defense Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Biden has also restored the editorial independence of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, home of the Voice of America, which the Trump administration had tried to turn into a propaganda agency. However, access to the president is limited, with Biden giving just 22 news interviews by the end of 2021, compared to 92 by Donald Trump, or the 150 by Barack Obama during the same period in their presidencies.

    The legacy of former President Donald Trump’s vitriolic anti-press rhetoric also lingers in the form of aggressive actions against reporters. At least 59 journalists were arrested or detained by police in 2021, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, and 142 journalists were assaulted either by law enforcement officers or by members of the public while covering events like protests or anti-vaccine rallies.

    The report also includes a set of comprehensive policy recommendations by CPJ to the Biden administration to improve compliance and transparency with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, end the unauthorized search of electronic devices and prohibit singling out reporters for their work, among other areas of concern. CPJ sent a letter today to the White House with a copy of the report, the recommendations, and a request for a meeting with Biden.

    Note to Editors:

    ‘Night and day’: The Biden administration and the press, is written Leonard Downie Jr., the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and executive editor of The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008. It is based on interviews with more than 30 journalists, academic news media observers, press freedom advocates, and Biden administration officials. Downie also wrote CPJ’s 2013 report on the Obama administration and 2020 report on the Trump administration.

    The report is available on CPJ’s website. A video with report highlights is available here and can be reshared in news stories with credit to CPJ.

    For questions or to arrange an interview with CPJ experts, email press@cpj.org.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden and the media: CPJ’s press freedom recommendations

    CPJ is concerned that U.S. President Joe Biden has not addressed many of the Obama and Trump-era limitations on press freedom. In ‘Night and Day’, a CPJ special report on the Biden administration’s relationship with the press during its first year in office, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. found that while some progress has been made, key problems outlined in his reports on the previous two administrations remained. These range from freedom of information requests that remain backlogged, stymieing reporters’ ability to cover matters of public interest; limited access to the southern border; and the use of the Espionage Act against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. 

    Based on the report by Downie, who also wrote CPJ reports on The Obama Administration and the Press and The Trump Administration and the Media, CPJ makes the following recommendations to the Biden administration:

    • Embrace good practice and transparency in dealing with the press by speaking to reporters on the record and avoiding overuse of on background briefings and quote approval. Make the president more accessible to reporters.
    • Instruct all government departments to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in a timely manner without regard to the media organizations or reporters filing those requests. Enforce prompt and less restrictive responses to FOIA requests to facilitate greater transparency. 
    • Implement restrictions that would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to obtain warrants before searching electronic devices. Require both agencies to release transparency reports about such searches. 
    • Prohibit DHS and CBP agents from intimidating and singling out journalists for questioning and/ or asking journalists about their work . 
    • Codify the new DOJ policy restricting federal prosecutors’ ability to obtain journalists’ phone and email records in government leak investigations. 
    • Prioritize and support passage of legislation – such as Senator Ron Wyden’s PRESS Act – that would protect journalists’ First Amendment rights against government prosecution for using and receiving confidential and classified information. The legislation should expansively define journalists, and shield reporters’ communication records, ensuring that the government cannot compel journalists to disclose sources or unpublished reporting information. 
    • Stop the misuse of the Espionage Act to hinder press freedom: Drop the espionage charges against Julian Assange and cease efforts to extradite him to the U.S. Put into place legislation that would prevent the use of the Espionage Act as a means to halt news gathering activity. 
    • Ensure that U.S. companies or individuals are not contributing to the secret surveillance of journalists abroad, and that foreign companies face targeted sanctions for enabling authoritarian governments to spy on journalists.   
    • Take action against impunity in the murder of journalists: Impose sanctions on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, holding the leader to account for his role in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.  
    • Process P-2 visa applications for Afghan journalists as rapidly as possible and be communicative about which cases are being processed; allow P-2 processing for individuals who have reached the U.S.; and provide support and protection to journalists still in Afghanistan or who have escaped to third countries.
    • Support the creation of an emergency visa for journalists at-risk around the world (such as in section 6 of the International Press Freedom Act of 2021) to ensure solutions are in place for future crises like the one in Afghanistan. 


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • First planeload of Afghan human rights defenders has landed in Ottawa

    Immigration Minister Sean Fraser rises during Question Period, in Ottawa, Dec. 10, 2021. Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press

    Six months after the federal government promised to help thousands of Afghan women leaders, human- rights activists and journalists flee to Canada, the first planeload has landed.

    Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced the arrival of 252 Afghan refugees on Tuesday, including the first 170 admitted through a special program for people the government deems to be human-rights defenders.

    “It is a privilege to welcome today this cohort of Afghan refugees, who face persecution as a result of their work to protect the human rights of others,” Mr. Fraser said in a statement.

    “I am grateful for their work to document and prevent human rights abuses and proud that they now call our country home.”

    The Liberal government launched the special program in July after weeks of criticism from angry Canadian veterans upset Ottawa wasn’t doing more to help Afghans facing possible Taliban reprisals for having worked with Canada in the past.

    Mr. Fraser’s office said the 170 who arrived through the special program had been referred to Canada by the Ireland-based human-rights organization Front Line Defenders, which has been working to identify those most at risk.

    The Liberals have promised to resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees to Canada, but nearly all of those are expected to be people living in UN camps in Pakistan and other neighbouring countries.

    With Monday’s arrivals, the government says it has so far resettled about 6,750 Afghan refugees in Canada. Fraser suggested last month that it could take up to two years for the government to meet its promise of bringing in 40,000 Afghans.

    Veterans and refugee groups aren’t the only ones who have lamented the pace of the government’s efforts when it comes to helping Afghans escape to Canada, with opposition parties also joining the chorus of criticism in recent months.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-first-afghan-human-rights-activists-arrive-six-months-after-ottawas/

    https://pajhwok.com/2022/01/12/over-250-afghans-including-rights-defenders-arrive-in-canada/

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

  • Hey, Hey, USA! How Many Bombs Did You Drop Today?

    August 2020 U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 Afghan civilians. (Credit: Getty Images)

    The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.

    Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries. That is an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years. This endless bombardment has not only been deadly and devastating for its victims but is broadly recognized as seriously undermining international peace and security and diminishing America’s standing in the world.

    The U.S. government and political establishment have been remarkably successful at keeping the American public in the dark about the horrific consequences of these long-term campaigns of mass destruction, allowing them to maintain the illusion of U.S. militarism as a force for good in the world in their domestic political rhetoric.

    Now, even in the face of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, they are doubling down on their success at selling this counterfactual narrative to the American public to reignite their old Cold War with Russia and China, dramatically and predictably increasing the risk of nuclear war.

    The new Airpower Summary data reveal that the United States has dropped another 3,246 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (2,068 under Trump and 1,178 under Biden) since February 2020.

    The good news is that U.S. bombing of those 3 countries has significantly decreased from the over 12,000 bombs and missiles it dropped on them in 2019. In fact, since the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from Afghanistan in August, the U.S. military has officially conducted no air strikes there, and only dropped 13 bombs or missiles on Iraq and Syria – although this does not preclude additional unreported strikes by forces under CIA command or control.

    Presidents Trump and Biden both deserve credit for recognizing that endless bombing and occupation could not deliver victory in Afghanistan. The speed with which the U.S.-installed government fell to the Taliban once the U.S. withdrawal was under way confirmed how 20 years of hostile military occupation, aerial bombardment and support for corrupt governments ultimately served only to drive the war-weary people of Afghanistan back to Taliban rule.

    Biden’s callous decision to follow 20 years of colonial occupation and aerial bombardment in Afghanistan with the same kind of brutal economic siege warfare the United States has inflicted on Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela can only further discredit America in the eyes of the world.

    There has been no accountability for these 20 years of senseless destruction. Even with the publication of Airpower Summaries, the ugly reality of U.S. bombing wars and the mass casualties they inflict remain largely hidden from the American people.

    How many of the 3,246 attacks documented in the Airpower Summary since February 2020 were you aware of before reading this article? You probably heard about the drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians in Kabul in August 2021. But what about the other 3,245 bombs and missiles? Whom did they kill or maim, and whose homes did they destroy?

    The December 2021 New York Times exposé of the consequences of U.S. airstrikes, the result of a five-year investigation, was stunning not only for the high civilian casualties and military lies it exposed, but also because it revealed just how little investigative reporting the U.S. media have done on these two decades of war.

    In America’s industrialized, remote-control air wars, even the U.S. military personnel most directly and intimately involved are shielded from human contact with the people whose lives they are destroying, while for most of the American public, it is as if these hundreds of thousands of deadly explosions never even happened.

    The lack of public awareness of U.S. airstrikes is not the result of a lack of concern for the mass destruction our government commits in our names. In the rare cases we find out about, like the murderous drone strike in Kabul in August, the public wants to know what happened and strongly supports U.S. accountability for civilian deaths.

    So public ignorance of 99% of U.S. air strikes and their consequences is not the result of public apathy, but of deliberate decisions by the U.S. military, politicians of both parties and corporate media to keep the public in the dark. The largely unremarked 21-month-long suppression of monthly Airpower Summaries is only the latest example of this.

    Now that the new Airpower Summary has filled in the previously hidden figures for 2020-21, here is the most complete data available on 20 years of deadly and destructive U.S. and allied air strikes.

    Numbers of bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the United States and its allies since 2001:

    Iraq (& Syria*)       Afghanistan    Yemen Other Countries**
    2001             214         17,500
    2002             252           6,500            1
    2003        29,200
    2004             285                86             1 (Pk)
    2005             404              176             3 (Pk)
    2006             310           2,644      7,002 (Le,Pk)
    2007           1,708           5,198              9 (Pk,S)
    2008           1,075           5,215           40 (Pk,S)
    2009             126           4,184             3     5,554 (Pk,Pl)
    2010                  8           5,126             2         128 (Pk)
    2011                  4           5,411           13     7,763 (Li,Pk,S)
    2012           4,083           41           54 (Li, Pk,S)
    2013           2,758           22           32 (Li,Pk,S)
    2014         6,292*           2,365           20      5,058 (Li,Pl,Pk,S)
    2015       28,696*              947   14,191           28 (Li,Pk,S)
    2016       30,743*           1,337   14,549         529 (Li,Pk,S)
    2017       39,577*           4,361   15,969         301 (Li,Pk,S)
    2018         8,713*           7,362     9,746           84 (Li,Pk,S)
    2019         4,729*           7,423     3,045           65 (Li,S)
    2020         1,188*           1,631     7,622           54 (S)
    2021             554*               801     4,428      1,512 (Pl,S)
    Total     154, 078*         85,108   69,652     28,217

     Grand Total = 337,055 bombs and missiles

    **Other Countries: Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia.

    These figures are based on US. Airpower Summaries for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the Yemen Data Project‘s count of bombs and missiles dropped on Yemen (only through September 2021); the New America Foundation’s database of foreign air strikes in Libya; and other sources.

    There are several categories of air strikes that are not included in this table, meaning that the true numbers of weapons unleashed are certainly higher. These include:

    Helicopter strikes: Military Times published an article in February 2017 titled, “The U.S. military’s stats on deadly air strikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.” The largest pool of air strikes not included in U.S. Airpower Summaries are strikes by attack helicopters. The U.S. Army told the authors its helicopters had conducted 456 otherwise unreported air strikes in Afghanistan in 2016. The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter strikes has been consistent throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they still did not know how many missiles were fired in those 456 attacks in Afghanistan in the one year they investigated.

    AC-130 gunships: The U.S. military did not destroy the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in 2015 with bombs or missiles, but with a Lockheed-Boeing AC-130 gunship. These machines of mass destruction, usually manned by U.S. Air Force special operations forces, are designed to circle a target on the ground, pouring howitzer shells and cannon fire into it until it is completely destroyed. The U.S. has used AC-130s in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria.

    Strafing runs: U.S. Airpower Summaries for 2004-2007 included a note that their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped… does not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the 30mm cannons on A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons, originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks. A-10s can fire 65 depleted uranium shells per second to blanket an area with deadly and indiscriminate fire. But that does not appear to count as a “weapons release” in U.S. Airpower Summaries.

    “Counter-insurgency” and “counter-terrorism” operations in other parts of the world: The United States formed a military coalition with 11 West African countries in 2005, and has built a drone base in Niger, but we have not found any systematic accounting of U.S. and allied air strikes in that region, or in the Philippines, Latin America or elsewhere.

    The failure of the U.S. government, politicians and corporate media to honestly inform and educate the American public about the systematic mass destruction wreaked by our country’s armed forces has allowed this carnage to continue largely unremarked and unchecked for 20 years.

    It has also left us precariously vulnerable to the revival of an anachronistic, Manichean Cold War narrative that risks even greater catastrophe. In this topsy-turvy, “through the looking glass” narrative, the country actually bombing cities to rubble and waging wars that kill millions of people, presents itself as a well-intentioned force for good in the world. Then it paints countries like China, Russia and Iran, which have understandably strengthened their defenses to deter the United States from attacking them, as threats to the American people and to world peace.

    The high-level talks beginning on January 10th in Geneva between the United States and Russia are a critical opportunity, maybe even a last chance, to rein in the escalation of the current Cold War before this breakdown in East-West relations becomes irreversible or devolves into a military conflict.

    If we are to emerge from this morass of militarism and avoid the risk of an apocalyptic war with Russia or China, the U.S. public must challenge the counterfactual Cold War narrative that U.S. military and civilian leaders are peddling to justify their ever-increasing investments in nuclear weapons and the U.S. war machine.

    The post Hey, Hey, USA! How Many Bombs Did You Drop Today? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Capitalist Death-Drive. Afghan Sanctions, Attack On Medicare.

    Lee Camp looks at how the capitalist system sits at the heart of the worst problems facing society. In this history lesson, Camp takes you back to the feudal system, to the creation of corporations and currency, to the modern system that’s destroying the lives of the poor today. The ruling class don’t even try to hide the inhumanity that keeps the system running anymore, now that it has become almost impossible to ignore. This leaves it up to popular movements to end the capitalist system and create something new. Then, Camp reports on the police brutality victims who don’t gain as much attention as those murdered by cops, and Marilyn Manson’s #MeToo allegations.

    The post The Capitalist Death-Drive. Afghan Sanctions, Attack On Medicare. appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Cover up of civilian deaths from US airstrikes exposed

    The deaths of thousands of civilians killed in US drone strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria were covered up by the Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations, reports Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Sir Tony Blair: Bloody Knight of the Realm

    Awards and honours bestowed by States or private committees, republican or monarchical, are bound to be corrupted by considerations of hypocrisy, racketeering and general, chummy disposition.  From the Nobel Peace Prize to the range of eccentric and esoteric orders bestowed each year in Britain by Her Majesty, diddling and manipulating is never far behind.  You are bestowed such things as a reminder of your worth to the establishment rather than your unique contribution to the good quotient of humanity.  Flip many a peace prize over and you are bound to find the smouldering remains of a war criminal’s legacy.

    The recently knighted Tony Blair is certainly not one to bother.  His name appeared in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list, having been made a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.  “It is an immense honour,” came the statement from the foundation that bears his name, “to be appointed Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, and I am deeply grateful to Her Majesty the Queen.”

    Others begged to differ.  Within hours, a petition launched by Angus Scott calling for the rescission of the award garnered thousands of signatures.  (To date, the number is 755,879.)  The award, says the petition, is “the oldest and most senior British Order of Chivalry.”  It asserts that Blair “caused irreparable damage to both the constitution of the United Kingdom and to the very fabric of the nation’s society.  He was personally responsible for causing the death of countless innocent, civilian lives and servicemen in various conflicts.  For this alone he should be held accountable for war crimes.”

    The evangelical Blair of war adventurism will be forever associated with Iraq’s invasion in 2003, though most current commentary avoids his role in promoting humanitarian imperialism in NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999.  (Never one to be too firmly attached to his ideals, Blair is currently advising the government of President Aleksandar Vučić who, as information minister of the Milošević regime, knew a thing or two in how to demonise Muslim Kosovars.)

    The Chilcot inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War did not openly challenge the legality of the Iraq invasion in 2003 by Coalition forces but noted that Saddam Hussein posed no immediate threat to Western states.  It was also clear that peaceful options had not been exhausted.  The slippery Blair preferred another reading.  “The report should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit.”

    Sir Tony’s performance before the Chilcot inquiry should be, for students of legal history, placed alongside that of Hermann Göring at the International Military Tribunal proceedings at Nuremberg in 1946.  The latter’s sparring with the poorly briefed US Supreme Court justice turned prosecutor Robert Jackson was eminently superior, but the recently ennobled one could play the trained politician wary of being implicated in past misdeeds.

    Defenders of Sir Tony can be found in the ranks, all of whom essentially follow institutional logic.  The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey insisted that calls to rescind the knighthood showed disrespect for the Queen.  Sir Keir Starmer, his crown as Labour leader looking increasingly unsettled, defended the knighthood as rightfully earned, Blair having “made Britain a better country”.

    Others preferred to see Blair’s critics as incurably diseased.  “Blair Derangement Syndrome is a curious malady,” charges a smug Jack Kessler of The Evening Standard.  Kessler’s point is sensible enough: The entire honours system is slimed and soiled, so much so that getting upset about Blair as the “least deserving” of recipients is an act of meaningless stroppiness.

    Consider the entire awards system to begin with.  “From major donors to political parties to chief executives of soon-to-be insolvent banks, even a cursory glance at the history of our honours system would suggest this is somewhat of a reach.”

    Kessler’s parlour room logic presumes that a person party to what was described by the victors of the Second World War as a crime against peace can somehow be equated to rewarding banksters for financial misconduct or wealthy donors.  It certainly cannot be equated to King George V’s decision to make Lord Lonsdale a Knight of the Garter in 1928 in what was described at the time by a courtier as “sheer tomfoolery”.

    Others are simply indifferent to the culpability of a figure who richly deserves a grilling in the dock of the International Criminal Court.  (So much for the liberal international order of things, including the rule of law.)  The Spectator, through a piece by Stephen Daisley, shuns the issue, merely acknowledging Blair’s shabby treatment of Parliament, his “unduly presidential” manner, or a “New Labour project” spun to bankrupt politics.  These are deemed valid criticisms but hardly an impediment to receiving a knighthood.

    For Daisley, Blair Derangement Syndrome is a condition that must be rebuffed, rebuked and repudiated.  “Blair’s gravest sin, what he cannot and must not and will not be forgiven for, is that he won.”  He led his country “with moral imagination and personal fortitude and left Britain fairer, healthier, more modern and more at ease with itself.”  Pity the same cannot be said of Iraq or Afghanistan.

    It should be noted that this line of reasoning is entirely acceptable to a magazine that used to be edited by the current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and who made the Labour Prime Minister its 2002 Parliamentarian of the Year despite him showing an utter contempt for Parliament.  “It is hard to think of another party leader who, for eight years, has exercised such unchallenged dominance of the political landscape,” Johnson declared at the award ceremony.

    It was the classic affirmation that the Tories had, if only vicariously, won through the guise of one Blair.  Johnson, for his part, publicly mused that the award could aggravate the Cain-Abel relationship between Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown, “all other strategies so far having proved not wholly successful”.

    The justifications advanced by Daisley have been used for leaders past who made the trains run on time, built spiffy, smooth roads for vehicles (military and civilian) and ensured that everything operated to a neat schedule, irrespective of whether death camps or slave labour were involved.  Many made the mistake of losing the wars they began, facing noose, poison or firing squad.

    In the British context, where the benevolent, benign ruler assumes the force of majesty, the latitude for forgiveness is even greater.  Reducing colonies to penury, aiding the conditions of famine, initiating social experiments that distorted and destroyed, molested and plundered extant, thriving and sovereign cultures, has never been accounted for in a court of law, international or domestic.  In the absence of a hanging judge, it has been deemed fitting that any such figures be given knighthoods and rendered into statuary instead.

    The post Sir Tony Blair: Bloody Knight of the Realm first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out

    The deaths of at least 27 people who drowned as they tried to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy in search of asylum have quickly been overshadowed by a diplomatic row engulfing Britain and France.

    As European states struggle to shut their borders to refugees, the two countries are in a war of words over who is responsible for stopping the growing number of small boats trying to reach British shores. Britain has demanded the right to patrol French waters and station border police on French territory, suggesting that France is not up to the job. The French government, meanwhile, has blamed the UK for serving as a magnet for illegal workers by failing to regulate its labour market.

    European leaders are desperate for quick answers. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of regional leaders a week ago to address the “migration” crisis, though Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, was disinvited.

    Britain’s post-Brexit government is readier to act unilaterally. It has been intensifying its “hostile environment” policy towards asylum seekers. That includes plans to drive back small boats crossing the Channel, in violation of maritime and international law, and to “offshore” refugees in remote detention camps in places such as Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. UK legislation is also being drafted to help deport refugees and prosecute those who aid them, in breach of its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

    Not surprisingly, anti-immigration parties are on the rise across Europe, as governments question the legitimacy of most of those arriving in the region, calling them variously “illegal immigrants”, “invaders” and “economic migrants”.

    The terminology is not only meant to dehumanise those seeking refuge. It is also designed to obscure the West’s responsibility for creating the very conditions that have driven these people from their homes and on to a perilous journey towards a new life.

    Power projection

    In recent years, more than 20,000 refugees are estimated to have died crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Europe, including at least 1,300 so far this year. Only a few of these deaths have been given a face – most notably Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose body washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after he and others in his family drowned on a small boat trying to get to Europe.

    The numbers trying to reach the UK across the Channel, though smaller, are rising too – as are the deaths. The 27 people who drowned two weeks ago were the single largest loss of life from a Channel crossing since agencies began keeping records seven years ago. Barely noted by the media was the fact that the only two survivors separately said British and French coastguards ignored their phone calls for help as their boat began to sink.

    But no European leader appears ready to address the deeper reasons for the waves of refugees arriving on Europe’s shores – or the West’s role in causing the “migration crisis”.

    The 17 men, seven women, including one who was pregnant, and three children who died were reportedly mostly from Iraq. Others trying to reach Europe are predominantly from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of North Africa.

    That is not accidental. There is probably nowhere the legacy of western meddling – directly and indirectly – has been felt more acutely than the resource-rich Middle East.

    The roots of this can be traced back more than a century, when Britain, France and other European powers carved up, ruled and plundered the region as part of a colonial project to enrich themselves, especially through the control of oil.

    They pursued strategies of divide and rule to accentuate ethnic tensions and delay local pressure for nation-building and independence. The colonisers also intentionally starved Middle Eastern states of the institutions needed to govern after independence.

    The truth is, however, that Europe never really left the region, and was soon joined by the United States, the new global superpower, to keep rivals such as the Soviet Union and China at bay. They propped up corrupt dictators and intervened to make sure favoured allies stayed put. Oil was too rich a prize to be abandoned to local control.

    Brutal policies

    After the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the Middle East was once again torn apart by western interference – this time masquerading as “humanitarianism”.

    The US has led sanctions regimes, “shock and awe” air strikes, invasions and occupations that devastated states independent of western control, such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. They may have been held together by dictators, but these states – until they were broken apart – provided some of the best education, healthcare and welfare services in the region.

    The brutality of western policies, even before the region’s strongmen were toppled, was trumpeted by figures such as Madeleine Albright, former US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state. In 1996, when asked about economic sanctions that by then were estimated to have killed half a million Iraqi children in a failed bid to remove Saddam Hussein, she responded: “We think the price is worth it.”

    Groups such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State quickly moved in to fill the void that was left after the West laid waste to the economic and social infrastructure associated with these authoritarian governments. They brought their own kind of occupation, fragmenting, oppressing and weakening these societies, and providing additional pretexts for meddling, either directly by the West or through local clients, such as Saudi Arabia.

    States in the region that so far have managed to withstand this western “slash and burn” policy, or have ousted their occupiers – such as Iran and Afghanistan – continue to suffer from crippling, punitive sanctions imposed by the US and Europe. Notably, Afghanistan has emerged from its two-decade, US-led occupation in even poorer shape than when it was invaded.

    Elsewhere, Britain and others have aided Saudi Arabia in its prolonged, near-genocidal bombing campaigns and blockade against Yemen. Recent reports have suggested that as many as 300 Yemeni children are dying each day as a result. And yet, after decades of waging economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, western states have the gall to decry those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants”.

    Climate crisis

    The fallout from western interference has turned millions across the region into refugees, forced from their homes by escalating ethnic discord, continued fighting, the loss of vital infrastructure, and lands contaminated with ordnance. Today, most are languishing in tent encampments in the region, subsisting on food handouts and little else. The West’s goal is local reintegration: settling these refugees back into a life close to where they formerly lived.

    But the destabilisation caused by western actions throughout the Middle East is being compounded by a second blow, for which the West must also take the lion’s share of the blame.

    Societies destroyed and divided by western-fuelled wars and economic sanctions have been in no position to withstand rising temperatures and ever-longer droughts, which are afflicting the Middle East as the climate crisis takes hold. Chronic water shortages and repeated crop failures – compounded by weak governments unable to assist – are driving people off their lands, in search of better lives elsewhere.

    In recent years, some 1.2 million Afghans were reportedly forced from their homes by a mix of droughts and floods. In August, aid groups warned that more than 12 million Syrians and Iraqis had lost access to water, food and electricity. “The total collapse of water and food production for millions of Syrians and Iraqis is imminent,” said Carsten Hansen, the regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

    According to recent research, “Iran is experiencing unprecedented climate-related problems such as drying of lakes and rivers, dust storms, record-breaking temperatures, droughts, and floods.” In October, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted that climate change was wreaking havoc in Yemen too, with extreme flooding and an increased risk of waterborne diseases.

    Western states cannot evade their responsibility for this. Those same countries that asset-stripped the Middle East over the past century also exploited the resulting fossil-fuel bonanza to intensify the industrialisation and modernisation of their own economies. The US and Australia had the highest rates of fossil fuel consumption per capita in 2019, followed by Germany and the UK. China also ranks high, but much of its oil consumption is expended on producing cheap goods for western markets.

    The planet is heating up because of oil-hungry western lifestyles. And now, the early victims of the climate crisis – those in the Middle East whose lands provided that oil – are being denied access to Europe by the very same states that caused their lands to become increasingly uninhabitable.

    Impregnable borders

    Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial interference, its wars and the climate crisis that its consumption-driven economies have generated. Countries such as Britain are not just worried about the tens of thousands of applications they receive each year for asylum from those who have risked everything for a new life.

    They are looking to the future. Refugee camps are already under severe strain across the Middle East, testing the capacities of their host countries – Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – to cope.

    Western states know the effects of climate change are only going to worsen, even as they pay lip service to tackling the crisis with a Green New Deal. Millions, rather than the current thousands, will be hammering on Europe’s doors in decades to come.

    Rather than aiding those seeking asylum in the West, the 1951 Refugee Convention may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles they face. It excludes those displaced by climate change, and western states are in no hurry to broaden its provisions. It serves instead as their insurance policy.

    Last month, immediately after the 27 refugees drowned in the Channel, Patel told fellow legislators that it was time “to send a clear message that crossing the Channel in this lethal way, in a small boat, is not the way to come to our country.”

    But the truth is that, if the British government and other European states get their way, there will be no legitimate route to enter for those from the Middle East whose lives and homelands have been destroyed by the West.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We Dance into the New Year Banging Our Hammers and Swinging Our Sickles

    P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.

    P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.

    Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines. Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek alphabet from the variants named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge.

    Cuba leads the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous vaccines to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity. The countries with the lowest vaccination rates – currently led by Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, South Sudan, Chad, and Yemen – are amongst the poorest in the world, reliant on foreign aid since their resources are essentially stolen, such as by being acquired at outrageously low prices by multinational companies. With 0.04% of Burundi’s 12 million people vaccinated as of 15 December 2021, at its current rate of vaccination the country would only achieve 70% coverage by January 2111.

    In May 2021, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation, said that ‘the world is in vaccine apartheid’. Little has changed since then. In late November, the African Union’s vaccine delivery co-chair Dr Ayoade Alakija said of the emergence of Omicron in southern Africa, ‘What is going on right now is inevitable. It’s a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner. It is as a result of hoarding [vaccines] by high-income countries of the world, and quite frankly it is unacceptable’. In mid-December, Ghebreyesus appointed Alakija as the WHO Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Her task is not easy, and her goal will only be met if, as she put it, ‘a life in Mumbai matters as much as in Brussels, if a life in São Paulo matters as much as a life in Geneva, and if a life in Harare matters as much as in Washington DC’.

    Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.

    Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.

    Vaccine apartheid is a part of a broader problem of medical apartheid, one of the four apartheids of our time, the others being food apartheid, money apartheid, and education apartheid. A new report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says that the population of undernourished people in Africa has increased by 89.1 million since 2014, reaching 281.6 million in 2020. It is worthwhile to consider Dr Alakija’s question about humanity, about the worth assigned to different human beings: can a life in Harare be valued as much as a life in Washington DC? Can we, as a people, overcome these apartheids and solve the elementary problems that are faced by the people of our planet and end the barbarous ways in which the current economic and political system tortures humankind and nature?

    A question like that sounds naïve to those who have forgotten what it means to believe in something – if not in the idea of humanity itself, then at least in the binding United Nations Charter (1945) and the partly binding UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The Declaration calls upon us as a people to commit to upholding each other’s ‘inherent dignity’, a standard that has collapsed in the years since heads of governments signed onto the final text.

    Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.

    Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.

    Despite these apartheids, several advances for humankind are worth highlighting:

    1. The Chinese people eradicated extreme poverty, with nearly 100 million people lifting themselves out of absolute misery over the past eight years. Our first study in the series ‘Studies in Socialist Construction’, entitled Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, details how this remarkable feat was achieved.
    2. Indian farmers bravely fought for the repeal of three laws which threatened to uberise their working conditions, and – after a year of struggle – they prevailed. This is the most significant labour victory in many years. Our June dossier, The Farmers’ Revolt in India, catalogued the struggle over land in India and the farmers’ militancy over the past decade.
    3. Left governments came to power in Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras, overturning a history of coups and regime changes in these countries that run from 1973 (Chile) to 2009 (Honduras) to 2019 (Bolivia). A year ago, our January dossier, Twilight, considered the erosion of US control over global affairs and the emergence of a multipolar world. The failure of the United States to attain its objectives in these countries and to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and the Venezuelan revolutionary process through hybrid wars is a sign of great possibility for people in the American hemisphere. Trends show that in 2022, Lula da Silva will defeat whoever is the right’s candidate in Brazil, ending the atrocity of Jair Bolsonaro’s governance. Our May dossier, The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left, is a good place to read up on the political dilemmas in Latin America’s largest country.
    4. A rising tide of anger on the African continent against the increasing military presence of the United States and France found expression in the town of Kaya in the western part of Burkina Faso. When a French military convoy drove near the town in November, a crowd of demonstrators stopped it. At that point, the French launched a surveillance drone to monitor the crowd. Aliou Sawadogo (age 13) shot down the drone with his slingshot, ‘a Burkinabé David against the French Goliath’, wrote Jeune Afrique. Our July dossier, Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, was co-published with the Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group and tracks the growth of the Western military presence on the continent.
    5. We have seen strikes by care workers of all kinds across the world, from health workers to domestic workers. These workers have been hit hard by the cruelty of neoliberalism and by what we have called CoronaShock. But these workers have refused to cower, refused to surrender their dignity. Our March dossier, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus, provides a map of the pressures weighing on these workers and opens a window into their struggles.
    Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in K abul market, 1953.

    Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in Kabul market, 1953.

    Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. These are merely some of the benchmarks of progress. Not every advance is clear-cut. After twenty years, the United States was forced to finally withdraw from Afghanistan as it lost the war to the Taliban. None of the United States’ aims for its war seem to have been attained, and yet it continues to threaten this country of close to 39 million people with starvation. The United States has prevented Afghanistan from accessing its $9.5 billion in external reserves that sit in US banks, and it has prevented Afghanistan’s government from taking its place in the UN system. As a consequence of the collapse of foreign aid, which accounted for 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP last year, the UN Development Programme calculates that the country’s GDP will fall by 20% this year and then by 30% in subsequent years. Meanwhile, the UN report estimates that by 2022, the country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels. It is estimated that 97% of the population of Afghanistan will fall below the poverty line, with mass starvation a real possibility this winter. A life in the Wakhan Corridor is not valued as much as a life in London. The ‘inherent dignity’ of the human being – as the UN Declaration puts it – is not upheld.

    This is not merely an Afghanistan matter. The newly released World Inequality Report 2022 shows that the poorest half of the world’s people owned merely 2% of the total private property (business and financial assets, net of debt, real estate), while the richest 10% owned 76% of the total private property. Gender inequality shapes these numbers, since women received barely 35% of labour income compared to men who received 65% (a slight improvement over 1990 figures, when women’s share was 31%). This inequality is another way of measuring the differential dignity afforded to people along class lines and along the hierarchies of gender and nationality.

    In 1959, the Iranian communist poet Siavash Kasra’i wrote one of his elegies, Arash-e Kamangir (‘Arash the Archer’). Using the popular mythology of the ancient battle fought by the heroic archer Arash to liberate his country, Kasra’i depicts the anti-imperialist struggles of his time. But the poem is not only about struggles, for we also wonder about possibilities:

    I told you life is beautiful.
    Told and untold, there is a lot here.
    The clear sky;
    The golden sun;
    The flower gardens;
    The boundless plains;

    The flowers peeping up through the snow;
    The tender swing of fish dancing in crystal of water;
    The scent of rain-swept dust on the mountainside;
    The sleep of wheat fields in the spring of moonlight;
    To come, to go, to run;
    To love;
    To lament for humankind;
    And to revel arm-in-arm with the crowd’s joys.

    The post We Dance into the New Year Banging Our Hammers and Swinging Our Sickles first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Media Forget Afghan Plight As US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk

    Since November 1, well into the worsening crisis, FAIR identified only 37 TV news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC that mentioned “humanitarian” in the same sentence as Afghanistan. That’s 37 segments in seven weeks. For perspective, as the US withdrew in August, journalists from those shows mentioned “women’s rights” in the same sentence as Afghanistan more often—42 times—in just seven days. Today, as those women and girls face starvation, the deeply concerned TV reporters are virtually nowhere to be seen.

    The post Media Forget Afghan Plight As US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Year in, Biden Hasn’t Fulfilled Promise to Repair Refugee Resettlement Program

    A migrant man holds a baby at the Rio Grande near the Del Rio Port of Entry in Del Rio, Texas, on September 18, 2021.

    On June 20, 2020, World Refugee Day, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden made his most sweeping statement to date on how his administration would differ from his predecessor’s on the rights of migrants. Gone would be the “xenophobia and racism” that were “the unabashed tenets of Trump’s refugee and immigration policy.” Biden pledged to increase the cap on refugees allowed into the United States to 125,000 in his first year in office, and to restore “America’s historic role as leader in resettlement and defending the rights of refugees everywhere.”

    His first year did not go as promised.

    In the fiscal year ending in October 2021, the United States only resettled 11,411 refugees through regular channels. That’s 400 fewer than the previous fiscal year — which itself saw historically low resettlement — and far short of the 62,500 that Biden eventually ordered to be allowed to resettle in the United States in his first year in office. The U.S. has only released data for the first month of the new fiscal year, which shows 401 refugees have been resettled. Biden did finally raise the cap to 125,000, which, if met by the end of September 2022, would represent a massive turnaround not just over previous years, but of the last two decades: The last time the U.S. resettled more than 100,000 refugees was in 1994.

    An additional 40,000 Afghans were temporarily allowed into the United States under a program called humanitarian parole, though they have not been issued green cards, and in most cases, their status expires in a year or two. Roughly 30,000 Afghans still housed on military bases are waiting to be allowed into the United States.

    Sunil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Program, told Truthout that Biden’s low numbers have a lot to do with Donald Trump’s successful dismantling of the resettlement infrastructure, but plenty of blame rests with the current administration as well. Biden’s “rhetoric of a human rights-centric approach to migration and foreign policy may not be an overarching, guiding principle, but one of many competing considerations,” Varghese said.

    Other refugee advocates echo the degree to which Trump dismantled the refugee screening and support apparatuses. “The process of facilitating the resettlement of displaced persons into the U.S. is not like a light switch that can be turned on and off,” said Danielle Grigsby, director of external affairs at the Community Sponsorship Hub, which connects refugees with local sponsors and advocates. “The damage inflicted on the resettlement infrastructure will take significant time to repair.”

    Biden’s immigration, asylum and refugee policies in general have been a decidedly mixed bag. His administration has followed through on some long-held progressive priorities, but many others have fallen to the side. In mid-December, the administration ended the longstanding U.S. policy of holding immigrant families in prison-like detention centers, according to Axios. “This is truly a good development, even though the treatment of migrant families writ large continues to be poor,” American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted in response to the news. Families can still be subject to confusing and arbitrary seeming court hearings and procedures, and many face significant economic hardships.

    Even this development is tempered, as the Department of Homeland Security will continue to rely at least partially on using GPS-enabled ankle bracelets to surveil migrants. Advocates have long criticized the use of bracelets, saying they lead to stigma and are unnecessary to compel migrants to appear in court.

    In other areas, the Biden administration is acting with near-total continuity to Trump. Biden continues to invoke a 1944 public health act called Title 42, which allows border agents to turn away asylum seekers without providing them an opportunity to make their case before a judge. Trump used the pandemic as an excuse to implement the rule, which many saw as a flimsy pretext to pursue his openly bigoted policies at the southern border. Biden has also reimplemented Trump’s so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy, which denies asylum seekers the right to live in the United States while their case is pending. Legal scholars say this practice is illegal and in violation of U.S. treaty obligation and international law.

    “It took a couple years for the Trump administration to figure out the nuances of the various immigration programs,” Varghese said. By the time Trump left office, though, he and his team had been very successful in jamming up almost every refugee and asylum assistance program in the executive branch. He and his top adviser, Stephen Miller, took an “all of the above” approach to limiting refugees and immigrants into the country. “That could be changing internal policies, it could be writing new regulations, it could be creating new policies and bureaucracies,” Varghese continued. “It could be by bankrupting [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services], it could be closing offices.”

    The plight of refugees is no longer in the corporate headlines, but in 2016, the subject was a major political issue. Then-candidate Donald Trump demonized refugees and asylum seekers constantly, especially Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war. Following his lead, nearly every other Republican candidate promised restricted refugee resettlement to the United States.

    Trump and Miller attempted to ban people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the country in the administration’s first week in office. After initially striking the policy down, the Supreme Court ultimately gave the ban its blessing once North Korea and Venezuela were added. The outrage over the “Muslim ban” was perhaps only matched by the administration’s family separation policy at the southern border.

    For all the criticism Trump deserves for dismantling the existing refugee apparatus, the Biden administration has not made rebuilding it a top priority, despite early promising signs. In February 2021, Biden issued Executive Order 14013, which called for the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program to be “rebuilt and expanded, commensurate with global need.” The order also revoked the discriminatory restrictions Trump had imposed, and called for additional reporting from the responsible executive agencies to determine what other changes could be made to address the refugee backlog.

    Then, somewhat inexplicably to outside observers, in April, Biden refused to raise the resettlement cap from Trump’s historically low 15,000. He reversed course two weeks later, bowing to pressure from progressives and refugee advocates. His administration’s new policy to resettle 125,000 refugees by September signals, on paper at least, a renewed commitment to expanding the assistance program. Whether the executive branch will actually devote the resources, time and political efforts to achieve those goals remains to be seen.

    The issue of refugee resettlement in the United States, and migrant humanitarian concerns throughout Europe and the rest of the world, will likely become more pressing with every year. The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, along with continuing conflicts throughout the Middle East and Africa, all but ensure migration levels will stay at near-record highs for the foreseeable future.

    Deeply intertwined with migration from conflict zones is migration driven by climate change. The United Nations predicts that 200 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 due to rising temperatures, drought, flooding, extreme weather and conflict over resources.

    The treatment of refugees has largely taken a backseat to other liberal priorities under Biden. The administration has prioritized its COVID response and push for a bipartisan infrastructure bill, two of Biden’s few major legislative accomplishments to date, all while trying to balance demands for increased attention to voting rights, gun control, health care costs, and other headline issues. The record-low number of refugees admitted barely made a blip in the mainstream media ecosystem. The State Department refused to comment on the record.

    Varghese and other refugee advocates would like to see Biden take a holistic approach to migrant rights and assistance, and to redouble his administration’s efforts. “What we’ve seen is basically a political calculation” from Biden to treat refugee issues as “just one factor among many,” Varghese said. “The Trump administration was so singularly focused on paring down humanitarian immigration programs” that Biden’s measured approach “is not enough to combat four years of a whole-of-government approach to tear down refugee resettlement.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • No USA Christmas Love for Afghans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Syrians, Iranians, and North Koreans

    This Christmas season, as always, CIA controlled mainstream media is filled with unctuous images of the hungry homeless in America being charitably served food by private citizens and institutions. It has long become an American tradition of kindness during the season celebrating the birth of all loving Jesus along with gift giving Santa Claus, and along with the encouragement and participation of churches, this tradition often receives government support.

    The Christmas time Christian tradition of charitable feeding of the hungry homeless in capitalist USA never extends to include those millions of men, women and children made hungry by heartless US sanctions on countries overseas. The hard-hearted Deep State investors in war of the Military Industrial Complex would never allow any of its captive US presidents to be gracious to the hungry in sanctioned nations at Christmas time.

    It does no good for those suffering US sanctions to protest even if suffering starvation that always threatens death for their children first, but protests still go on.

    “Let Us Eat”: Kabul Protesters Demand Release of Frozen Afghan Assets

    CommonDreams reports protests three days before Christmas eve, December 21, 2021.

    Hundreds of protesters marched through the streets of Kabul toward the shuttered U.S. Embassy on Tuesday, urging the release of Afghanistan’s frozen assets.

    Holding banners reading, “Let us eat” and “Give us our frozen money,” the protesters chanted slogans and marched down a central avenue, with the ruling Taliban providing security. International funding to Afghanistan has been suspended and billions of dollars of the country’s assets abroad, mostly in the U.S., were frozen once the Taliban took control.

    The Taliban is again governing all of Afghanistan as it was when the US invaded 20 years ago on the pretext of needing to find Osama bin Laden, who the CIA had welcomed into Afghanistan years before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

    In 1979 President Carter had had the CIA fund, arm and train war lord terrorists to overthrow a popular women-liberating Socialist Kabul government. This brought about a civil war which brought in Soviet Military to aid the beleaguered Kabul government. This was followed by a second even more destructive civil war between US heavily armed war lords causing mayhem and chaos, in which rape was common. In 1992, Kabul came to be a bullet riddled city, a center of lawlessness, crime and atrocities fueled by complex tribal rivalries. This gave birth to the Taliban (‘student’ in Dali language) who defeated the war lords and stopped the raping, instituted strict Islamic dress code, and limited the movement and schooling of women. Though Taliban now promises education for women through university and a relaxed dress code, President Biden sanctimoniously cites Taliban prohibiting women’s education as reason not to release Afghanistan’s bank deposits desperately needed to buy food and medicine.

    US Sanctions Against Venezuela Rob People of Basic Human Rights: UN Expert’s Report

    The United Nations has protested for Venezuelans against US seizure of Venezuelan bank deposits and sanctions blocking the sale of its oil and imports of almost everything, even medicines and food.

    According to the report, unilateral sanctions against Venezuela are politically motivated and violate international law.

    The Guardian writes of UN finding that one-third of Venezuelans are underfed.

    One of every three people in Venezuela is struggling to put enough food on the table to meet minimum nutrition requirements as the nation’s severe economic contraction and political upheaval persists, according to a new study by the UN World Food Program….

    According to the UN Rapporteur sent to Venezuela on their behalf to compile a UN Human Rights Council Report in 2017 and 2018 the United States has used the illegal sanctions and financial blockade against Venezuela to create a humanitarian crisis and are therefore is criminally liable for the increased deaths of children and the infirm being denied vital medical supplies directly because of the sanctions.

    His damning report stated categorically that the US sanctions kill and therefore America should face prosecution at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity….

    In November 2017 one US bank blocked the transfer of funds to pay for 300,000 doses of insulin. Another retained $1.65 billion Venezuela had paid for the purchase of food and medicine. Another blocked the transfer of over $9 billion profits generated by the US subsidiary of the publicly owned Venezuelan oil company. In May last year, Wells Fargo bank in America cancelled a payment of $7.5 million from Brazil to Venezuela for the supply of electricity and also blocked a $7 million purchase of dialysis supplies for patients in Venezuela, including thousands of children.

    UN General Assembly calls for US to end Cuba embargo for 29th consecutive year

    A total of 184 countries on Wednesday voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with the United States and Israel voting against.

    Sanctions have made it harder for Cuba to acquire the medical equipment needed to develop COVID-19 vaccines as well as equipment for food production.

    US Blockade on Cuba is a Crime against Humanity says the Havana Times.

    From Cuba’s draft resolution, “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba,” before the UN General Assembly:

    The blockade continues to be a massive and flagrant violation of the Cuban people’s human rights and qualifies as an act of genocide according to the 1948 Convention Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

    Over the period since the last report the blockade has caused Cuba losses worth 4.305 billion dollars.

    The human rights of all Cuban people are being — and have been for nearly 60 years — assaulted. This is a crime against humanity.

    The US admits they are to blame for the Syrian hunger

    The Syrians see the increasing sanctions as economic-warfare after the US failure to bring about ‘regime change’ by using terrorists supported by the CIA. Damascus declares the sanctions violate human rights and international law as they affect the Syrian population.

    Human Rights and US Sanction Against Iran

    Over-compliance with United States-imposed sanctions against Iran is harming the right to health, and people with a rare skin disease are among those affected, many of them children, experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Tuesday.

    These patients suffer from epidermolysis bullosa (EB), a severe and life-threatening skin condition, which causes extremely painful wounds. Many are children, who are often referred to as “butterfly kids” because of their fragile skin.

    A Swedish company which makes the bandages that reportedly are the most effective treatment for their condition, has decided to halt shipments to Iran due to fear of secondary sanctions as part of over-compliance.

    The experts explained that many banks and businesses worldwide, including pharmaceutical and medical companies, over-comply to avoid risk of any potential penalties.

    “They refuse to finance exempted trade or to conduct the corresponding transactions with sanctioned countries. This has prevented the Iranian business partner of that Swedish company from being able to import the bandages, even though medical and other humanitarian goods were announced to be exempt from the sanctions,” they said in a statement.

    The Humanitarian Impact of Sanction on the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea

    Women Mobilizing to End the War – Korea Peace Now! write,

    In direct contravention of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, sanctions punish North Korean civilians for the actions of their government. Here’s how sanctions harm ordinary North Koreans:

    Sanctions hinder urgently needed humanitarian aid and could result in devastating long-term effects.

    • According to a 2018 UNICEF report, 200,000 North Korean children already suffer from acute malnutrition, and sanctions put 60,000 of these vulnerable children at risk of starvation due to the disruption in the availability of humanitarian supplies caused by tightening sanctions.
    • Unilateral US sanctions delay or outright block vital humanitarian shipments to the North Korean people. One NGO recently reported that it took them over a year and a half to ship 16 boxes of beans to the DPRK.
    • Sanctions passed in 2017 prohibit the transport of any metal goods, significantly hampering the shipment of basic medical supplies. A shipment of reproductive health kits was subjected to significant delay because it contained aluminum steam sterilizers —the most important part of the kit.

    Sanctions target North Korea’s civilian economy and harm the most vulnerable members of its population.

    • Current sanctions have the greatest impact not on the power elites who are the intended targets, but on the most vulnerable North Koreans: working-class families, particularly children and seniors living in remote areas with restricted access to medical supplies, food, and fuel for cooking and heating.

    Sanctions do not convey the Christmas spirit!

    The post No USA Christmas Love for Afghans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Syrians, Iranians, and North Koreans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The military: the year in review – war crimes, withdrawals and secrecy

    2021 was a year of decline and reorganisation for the British military. It was also a year when historical war crimes allegations resurfaced, secrecy was expanded and a major defeat became undeniable. We decided to look back over some of the key themes in military affairs which emerged over the year.

    This article is another in The Year In Review series. You’ll be able to catch up on the many of the other review articles here.

    Cut and run

    The Afghanistan occupation finally ground to an end as the Taliban took Kabul in August. Bringing to an end 20 years of military occupation. While generals maintained the military had never been defeated, the rapid and messy withdrawal told another story. The narrative around the chaos of the pull-out was being revised even as it happened. Mainstream media focus was on ‘human interest’ – namely via images of soldiers carrying children and a bizarre story about an evacuation of dogs.

    The defeat caused major dissonance, with the guilty nations arguing about who was to blame for failure. And one Tory MP even arguing that Afghanistan should be reinvaded. The government was less keen, however, on a proper inquiry into the disaster.

    War crimes

    Yet the real face of British military operations did peek through. Allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, this time by SAS troops, re-surfaced again. The allegations included that in 2011 special forces troops murdered 17 people over a two day period during house raids in Afghanistan. And that key documents relating to the cases were kept hidden by the military. One senior officer was quoted as saying of the alleged killings:

     I find it depressing it has come to this. Ultimately a massive failure of leadership.

    Ireland

    And Britain’s violent history in Ireland also reared its head. Former soldier Dennis Hutchings died while on trial for the Troubles-era killing of John Pat Cunningham, a disabled man from Country Tyrone. At the last minute, the military u-turned under pressure from veterans groups and former Tory minister Johnny Mercer on Hutchings’s funeral. They allowed him to be buried with military honours on Remembrance Day.

    And it looks as if the British establishment is attempting to rewrite the British military’s record in Ireland. In November, a Tory MP announced that the Ireland occupation would also be given an official history. The aim: to provide an official version of the conflict which favoured the British.

    Accountable?

    2021 also saw military secrecy deepened. Parts of the military were reorganised into new ‘Ranger’ regiments in November. Meaning that over 1,000 troops will now be protected from Freedom of Information requests and parliamentary questions. The Canary was ahead of the game on this, first warning of the threat to accountability in March 2021.

    Military chief general Nick Carter tastefully chose Remembrance to announce that the UK needed an army of killer robots. Clearly, another step away from accountability and towards less accountable military operations. And November also saw a new head of the military, admiral Tony Radakin, lay out his dystopian vision of future warfare. Central to his strategy: more deployments and deeper integration between the military and arms firms.

    Overseas Operations Bill

    Another major story in 2021 was the Overseas Operations Bill. The Bill aimed to stop investigations into alleged crimes by UK troops. As The Canary reported critics included everyone from the Quakers to the Royal British Legion.

    While top military lawyer Hilary Meredith warned that, far from protecting troops, the bill would strip personnel of their ability to hold the MOD to account:

    It is totally unacceptable for the Government to legislate to deny those who put their lives on the line for our country overseas the same employer liability rights as the UK civilians they defend. The section must be scrapped – it clearly breaches the Armed Forces Covenant.

    However, due to the large Tory majority the bill passed despite substantial criticism from outside parliament in April 2021.

    Fightback

    However, the military and warmongers didn’t get it all their own way. A special statue of a soldier went up in Margate to highlight the disaster of British foreign policy. The Tories were roundly mocked for trying to hide, well, everything behind the Union Jack. And over the pond, ex-US president George W Bush found one of his public events had been penetrated by an angry Iraq war veteran who demanded he account for his crimes.

    In 2022, the fight against war and militarism will continue. And The Canary will be there to report on it.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Cpl Rebecca Brown.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Media Forget Afghan Plight as US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk 

     

    As the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan in August, US TV news interest in the plight of the country’s citizens spiked, often focusing on “the horror awaiting women and girls” (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21) to argue against withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21).

    Four months later, as those same citizens have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis due in no small part to US sanctions, where is the outrage?

    UN: Afghanistan on ‘countdown to catastrophe’ without urgent humanitarian relief

    UN News (10/25/21) quoted the head of the World Food Programme: “Afghanistan is now among the world’s worst humanitarian crises – if not the worst – and food security has all but collapsed.”

    Experts warned of an impending humanitarian crisis in the wake of the US withdrawal (IRC, 8/20/21). In recent months, the messages have become more urgent. A UN report (10/25/21) warned that “combined shocks of drought, conflict, Covid-19 and an economic crisis in Afghanistan have left more than half the population facing a record level of acute hunger.” One million children are so malnourished they are at risk of dying in the coming months (IRC, 12/3/21).

    Decades of conflict, invasion and occupation left Afghanistan with a highly precarious economy. In 2019, well before withdrawal, a record 50% of Afghans reported finding it “very difficult” to get by on their household income (Gallup, 9/23/21). While drought and the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to the current humanitarian crisis, it is largely driven by the imploding economy. The entire banking system is collapsing, with government employees going unpaid, and citizens unable to access their money or receive funds from relatives abroad.

    As many have pointed out, the Taliban shoulder some blame, having banned women from most paid jobs outside of teaching and healthcare, costing the economy up to 5% of its GDP (UNDP, 12/1/21). But a much bigger driver of the crisis has been the US-led sanctions on the Taliban. The US occupation left Afghanistan dependent on aid for 40% of its GDP and 80% of its budget. After withdrawal, the US froze some $9 billion of the country’s central bank reserves, and US and UN sanctions cut off the central bank from the international banking system and drastically limited the aid flowing into the country (UNDP, 12/2/21).

    Despite pleas from around the globe, even, most recently, from former US military commanders in Afghanistan and dozens of members of Congress (Washington Post, 12/20/21), the Biden administration has made only slight tweaks to its policies, which are ostensibly meant to punish and provide leverage over the Taliban, but, like other supposedly targeted sanctions, have the effect of putting millions of civilian lives in peril.

    Vanishing interest

    Since November 1, well into the worsening crisis, FAIR identified only 37 TV news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC that mentioned “humanitarian” in the same sentence as Afghanistan. That’s 37 segments in seven weeks.

    For perspective, as the US withdrew in August, journalists from those shows mentioned “women’s rights” in the same sentence as Afghanistan more often—42 times—in just seven days. Today, as those women and girls face starvation, the deeply concerned TV reporters are virtually nowhere to be seen.

    Even when reports did mention the crisis, they rarely highlighted the US role. Of the 37 mentions, FAIR was able to find only four that named sanctions as a factor.

    MSNBC twice (11/23/21, 12/16/21) brought on spokespeople from the International Rescue Committee to discuss the crisis, and CBS did so once (12/12/21); all three of these guests named the role sanctions play in Afghanistan’s economic collapse.

    ABC: Country in Crisis

    “One Million Children at Risk of Dying of Starvation” was the secondary point of ABC‘s report (12/15/21); the main focus of the story was “Taliban Authority Being Challenged by ISIS Terrorists.”

    ABC World News Tonight‘s Ian Pannell (12/15/21), in a report from Afghanistan, made the only other mention of sanctions, in a vague and brief reference that named no names: “A mix of sanctions and drought has brought the country to the brink of catastrophe.” After showing an emaciated two-year-old and telling the child’s mother, “You must feel very hopeless, very helpless,” Pannell wrapped up his report by noting:

    $280 million in emergency aid has been OKed by the United States and others, but it’s likely not enough. It won’t reach hungry mouths until the end of the year. And the situation right now in Afghanistan seems as bad as I can remember it in 20 years of reporting here.

    With no mention of what was causing the crisis, or what kind of help was actually needed, Pannell’s report had the effect of painting the US as a benevolent actor that just wasn’t doing quite enough to address a largely inevitable situation. The segment and its top-of-the-show preview were the only two mentions FAIR’s study found of Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis on ABC during the study period.

    More often, the crisis was covered with a brief soundbite that emphasized women’s rights over the broader humanitarian crisis, as on CNN Newsroom (11/28/21):

    A group of female Afghan students graduated from a private university in Kandahar on Saturday. They were forced to wear veils, due to a rule imposed by the Taliban. Before the Taliban takeover, an estimated 100,000 girls were attending universities. The graduates fear finding jobs might be difficult, because of both the Taliban rule and the country’s worsening humanitarian crisis.

    Finding jobs is also difficult when a powerful enemy has frozen the funds of your nation’s central bank—but that’s not the kind of problem US corporate media is likely to dwell on.

    The post Media Forget Afghan Plight as US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk  appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Warning of ‘humanitarian collapse,’ dozens of House Democrats urge Biden to unfreeze Afghan funds

    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Dec. 20, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Warning that the US freeze on Afghanistan’s central bank reserves and sanctions risk deadly “economic pain and humanitarian collapse,” 46 House Democrats on Monday implored President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to “urgently” lift financial restrictions on the Taliban-ruled nation.

    “Mark my words: If this is not done, you will have Afghans fleeing en masse on foot—they’re already doing it—carrying their babies in one hand and their belongings in the other.”

    Shah Mehrabi, Professor of Economics at Montgomery College, Maryland, and senior member Afghanistan’s central bank board

    While expressing gratitude for the administration’s efforts to end the longest war in US history and evacuate tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, the lawmakers’ letter—which is led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), and Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL)—recommends “conscientiously but urgently modifying current US policy regarding the freeze of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and ongoing sanctions” in order to “avoid harsh economic measures that will directly harm Afghan families and children.”

    “We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in 20 years of war,” the lawmakers caution.

    “United Nations officials are warning that millions of Afghans could run out of food before winter, with one million children at risk of starvation,” they note. “World Food Program surveys indicate that 95% of Afghan households are not consuming enough food. Afghanistan will face ‘universal poverty by the middle of next year,’ with the poverty rate expected to rise from 72% to as high as 98%. Afghanistan’s economic pain and humanitarian collapse both threaten to trigger a new refugee crisis throughout the region.”

    The letter continues:

    For these reasons, we are deeply concerned by the continued U.S. freeze of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s choice to deny Afghanistan access to special reserve assets intended to help developing countries alleviate the impact of the pandemic, and U.S. sanctions’ impacts on Afghanistan. The U.S. confiscation of $9.4 billion in Afghanistan’s currency reserves held in the United States is contributing to soaring inflation and the shuttering of commercial banks and vital private businesses, plunging the country—which relies overwhelmingly on imports that require hard currency—deeper into economic and humanitarian crisis.

    The lawmakers recommend “providing Afghanistan’s central bank access to hard currency reserves,” as well as working with the IMF to “allow access to the emergency financing that was recently allocated” for the country.

    Additionally, the lawmakers warn that “failure to maintain open communication not only risks humanitarian devastation but also directly threatens U.S. national security interests.”

    “An economic collapse could result in the Taliban’s retrenchment from U.S. engagement and cooperation on counterterrorism, create ungoverned spaces, and enable resentment against the U.S.,” they write, “producing fertile ground for groups like ISIS to gain strength and use the territory as a staging ground for plots against the U.S. and its allies.”

    Advocacy groups have described the Biden administration’s policy as a form of collective punishment.

    Advocacy groups have described the Biden administration’s policy as a form of collective punishment.

    Shah Mehrabi, an economics professor at Montgomery College in Maryland and a senior member Afghanistan’s central bank board for nearly 20 years, told The Washington Post that “if these funds are not released, what is going to happen is the central bank will not be able to perform its main functions, and the impact on the economy overall will be devastating.”

    “Mark my words: If this is not done, you will have Afghans fleeing en masse on foot—they’re already doing it—carrying their babies in one hand and their belongings in the other,” he added. “And soon Europe will have a massive refugee crisis on its hands.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge

    It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows.

    His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it published just over a decade ago hundreds of thousands of leaked materials – documents we were never supposed to see – detailing war crimes committed by the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    These two western countries killed non-combatants and carried out torture not, as they claimed, in the pursuit of self-defence or in the promotion of democracy, but to impose control over a strategic, resource-rich region.

    It is the ultimate, ugly paradox that Assange’s legal and physical fate rests in the hands of two states that have the most to lose by allowing him to regain his freedom and publish more of the truths they want to keep concealed. By redefining his journalism as “espionage” – the basis for the US extradition claim – they are determined to keep the genie stuffed in the bottle.

    Eyes off the ball

    Last week, in overturning a lower court decision that should have allowed Assange to walk free, the English High Court consented to effectively keep Assange locked up indefinitely.  He is a remand prisoner – found guilty of no crime – and yet he will continue rotting in solitary confinement for the foreseeable future, barely seeing daylight or other human beings, in Belmarsh high-security prison alongside Britain’s most dangerous criminals.

    The High Court decision forces our eyes off the ball once again. Assange and his supposed “crime” of seeking transparency and accountability has become the story rather than the crimes he exposed that were carried out by the US to lay waste to whole regions and devastate the lives of millions.

    The goal is to stop the public conducting the debate Assange wanted to initiate through his journalism: about western state crimes. Instead the public is being deflected into a debate his persecutors want: whether Assange can ever safely be allowed out of his cell.

    Assange’s lawyers are being diverted from the real issues too. They will now be tied up for years fighting endless rearguard actions, caught up in the search for legal technicalities, battling to win a hearing in any court they can, to prevent his extradition to the United States to stand trial.

    The process itself has taken over. And while the legal minutiae are endlessly raked over, the substance of the case – that it is US and British officials who ought to be held responsible for committing war crimes – will be glossed over.

    Permanently silenced

    But it is worse than the legal injustice of Assange’s case. There may be no hack-saws needed this time, but this is as visceral a crime against journalism as the dismemberment of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials back in 2018.

    And the outcome for Assange is only slightly less preordained than it was for Khashoggi when he entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The goal for US officials has always been about permanently disappearing Assange. They are indifferent about how that is achieved.

    If the legal avenue is a success, he will eventually head to the US where he can be locked away for up to 175 years in severe solitary confinement in a super-max jail – that is, till long past his death from natural causes. But there is every chance he will not survive that long. Last January, a British judge rejected extraditing Julian Assange to the US over his “suicide risk“, and medical experts have warned that it will be only a matter of time before he succeeds.

    That was why the district court blocked extradition – on humanitarian grounds. Those grounds were overturned by the High Court last week only because the US offered “assurances” that measures would be in place to ensure Assange did not commit suicide. But Assange’s lawyers pointed out: those assurances “were not enough to address concerns about his fragile mental health and high risk of suicide”. These concerns should have been apparent to the High Court justices.

    Further, dozens of former officials in the Central Intelligence Agency and the previous US administration have confirmed that the agency planned to execute Assange in an extrajudicial operation in 2017. That was shortly before the US was forced by circumstance to switch to the current, formal extradition route. The arguments now made for his welfare by the same officials and institutions that came close to killing him should never have been accepted as made in good faith.

    In fact, there is no need to speculate about the Americans’ bad faith. It is only too apparent in the myriad get-out clauses in the “assurances” they provided. Those assurances can be dropped, for example, if US officials decide Assange is not being cooperative. The promises can and will be disregarded the moment they become an encumbrance on Washington’s ability to keep Assange permanently silenced.

    ‘Trapped in a cage’

    But if losing the extradition battle is high stakes, so is the legal process itself. That could finish Assange off long before a decision is reached, as his fiancee Stella Moris indicated at the weekend. She confirmed that Assange suffered a small stroke during a hearing in October in the endless extradition proceedings. There are indications he suffered neurological damage, and is now on anti-stroke medication to try to stop a recurrence.

    Assange and his friends believe the stroke was brought on by the constant double strain of his solitary confinement in Belmarsh and a legal process being conducted over his head, in which he is barely allowed to participate.

    Nils Melzer, the United Nations expert on torture, has repeatedly warned that Assange has been subjected to prolonged psychological torture in the nine years since he fled into Ecuador’s embassy in London seeking asylum from US efforts to persecute him.

    That form of torture, Melzer has pointed out, was refined by the Nazis because it was found to be far more effective at breaking people than physical torture. Moris told the Daily Mail: “[The stroke] compounds our fears about [Assange’s] ability to survive the longer this long legal battle goes on. … Look at animals trapped in cages in a zoo. It cuts their life short. That’s what’s happening to Julian.”

    And that indeed looks to be the prize for US officials that wanted him assassinated anyway. Whatever happens to Assange, the lawless US security state wins: it either gets him behind bars forever, or it kills him quietly and quite lawfully, while everyone is distracted, arguing about who Assange is rather what he exposed.

    Political prisoner

    In fact, with each twist and turn of the proceedings against Assange we move further from the realities at the heart of the case towards narrative distractions.

    Who remembers now the first extradition hearings, nearly two years ago, at which the court was reminded that the very treaty signed by Britain and the US that is the basis for Assange’s extradition explicitly excludes political cases of the kind being pursued by the US against Assange?

    It is a victory for state criminality that the discussion has devolved to Assange’s mental health rather than a substantive discussion of the treaty’s misapplication to serve political ends.

    And similarly the focus on US assurances regarding Assange’s wellbeing is intended to obscure the fact that a journalist’s work is being criminalised as “espionage” for the first time under a hurriedly drafted, draconian and discredited piece of First World War legislation, the 1917 Espionage Act. Because Assange is a political prisoner suffering political persecution, legal arguments are apparently powerless to save him. It is only a political campaign that can keep underscoring the sham nature of the charges he faces.

    The lies of power

    What Assange bequeathed us through Wikileaks was a harsh light capable of cutting through the lies of power and power of lies. He showed that western governments claiming the moral high ground were actually committing crimes in our name out of sight in far-off lands. He tore the mask off their hypocrisy.

    He showed that the many millions who took to the streets in cities around the world in 2003 because they knew the US and UK would commit war crimes in Iraq were right to march. But he also confirmed something worse: that their opposition to the war was treated with utter contempt.

    The US and UK did not operate more carefully, they were not more respectful of human rights, they did not tread more lightly in Iraq because of those marches, because of the criticism beforehand. The western war machine carried on regardless, crushing the lives of anyone who got caught up in its maw.

    Now with Assange locked up and silenced, western foreign policy can return comfortably to the era of zero accountability that existed before Assange shook up the whole system with his revelations. No journalist will dare to repeat what Assange did – not unless they are ready to spend the rest of their days behind bars.

    The message his abuse sends to others could not be clearer or more chilling: what happened to Assange could happen to you too.

    The truth is journalism is already reeling from the combined assaults against Khashoggi and Assange. But the hounding of Assange strikes the bigger blow. It leaves honest journalism with no refuge, no sanctuary anywhere in the world.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Despite Repeated Appeals, US Denies Possibility Of Unfreezing Afghan Assets

    US White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified on Tuesday, December 14 said that the government has no plan to unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets. Psaki was responding to a public call by Afghanistan’s foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi made a day earlier to unfreeze the assets. The US government had announced a freeze of nearly USD 10 billion worth of Afghanistan’s assets days after the Taliban took over power in the country on August 15, claiming the possibility of misuse of the funds. It also severed all diplomatic relations with Afghanistan after the complete withdrawal of its troops on August 30.

    The post Despite Repeated Appeals, US Denies Possibility Of Unfreezing Afghan Assets appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘The Taliban say they’ll kill me if they find me’: a female reporter still on the run speaks out

    We return to the story of a journalist forced to flee as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August. Unable to return home without putting at risk everyone she loves and hounded by threatening calls, she remains in hiding in the country four months on

    I am an Afghan female journalist and I have been on the run for more than four months. I have lived in numerous safe houses and the homes of people who’ve offered me refuge. I am constantly moving to avoid being caught, from province to province, city to city.

    The Taliban insurgents have been threatening to kill me and my colleagues for two years, for our reports exposing their crimes in our province. But when they seized control of our provincial capital, they started to hunt for those who had spoken out against them. I decided to escape, for my own and my family’s safety.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Fresh evidence on UK’s botched Afghan withdrawal backs whistleblower’s story

    MPs’ inquiry given further details of Britain’s mismanagement of Afghanistan exit with ‘people left to die at the hands of the Taliban’

    Further evidence alleging that the government seriously mishandled the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been handed to a parliamentary inquiry examining the operation, the Observer has been told.

    Details from several government departments and agencies are understood to back damning testimony from a Foreign Office whistleblower, who has claimed that bureaucratic chaos, ministerial intervention, and a lack of planning and resources led to “people being left to die at the hands of the Taliban”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • High Court hands Priti Patel final decision on US extradition of Julian Assange

    Wikileaks editor Julian Assange has lost his appeal against extradition to the US. Judge Holdroyde ruled that the US appeal was allowed. Assange has been detained in Belmarsh prison since 2019. Prior to that, he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The speed of any extradition now appears to depend on home secretary Priti Patel.

    Assange is wanted by the US in connection with the publication of thousands of documents about the Iraq War. Previously a judge ruled against Assange being extradited due to his mental health. The US appealed this decision.

    US journalist Kevin Gosztola was in the courtroom:

    The extradition case will now be handed over to the US Secretary of State:

    It appears that Assange still has options for appeal. Though this is being described as a very serious loss:

    Barrister Adam Wagner tweeted some of the specifics of the decision. The courts claim that the US has provided a satisfactory “package of assurances”.

    Assange’s treatment at the hands of the authorities has been a topic of controversy. In 2020, the Lancet medical journal argued that his treatment amounted to torture and medical neglect.

    Some have argued that due to alleged CIA plans to assassinate Assange, he should not be handed over to the US.

    As Wikileaks pointed out yesterday, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) share this view:

    For now, Assange’s fate lays with home secretary Priti Patel.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Ten Contradictions That Plague Biden’s Democracy Summit

    Protest by students in Thailand. AP

    President Biden’s virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 is part of a campaign to restore the United States’ standing in the world, which took such a beating under President Trump’s erratic foreign policies. Biden hopes to secure his place at the head of the “Free World” table by coming out as a champion for human rights and democratic practices worldwide.

    The greater possible value of this gathering of 111 countries is that it could instead serve as an “intervention,” or an opportunity for people and governments around the world to express their concerns about the flaws in U.S. democracy and the undemocratic way the United States deals with the rest of the world. Here are just a few issues that should be considered:

    (1)  The U.S. claims to be a leader in global democracy at a time when its own already deeply flawed democracy is crumbling, as evidenced by the shocking January 6 assault on the nation’s Capitol. On top of the systemic problem of a duopoly that keeps other political parties locked out and the obscene influence of money in politics, the U.S. electoral system is being further eroded by the increasing tendency to contest credible election results and widespread efforts to suppress voter participation (19 states have enacted 33 laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote).

    A broad global ranking of countries by various measures of democracy puts the U.S. at # 33, while the U.S. government-funded Freedom House ranks the United States at # 61 in the world for political freedom and civil liberties, on a par with Mongolia, Panama and Romania.

    (2)  The unspoken U.S. agenda at this “summit” is to demonize and isolate China and Russia. But if we agree that democracies should be judged by how they treat their people, then why is the U.S. Congress failing to pass a bill to provide basic services like health care, child care, housing and education, which are guaranteed to most Chinese citizens for free or at minimal cost?

    And consider China’s extraordinary success in relieving poverty. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress. You have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world, while helping more than 800 million people to lift themselves out of poverty – the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.”

    China has also far surpassed the U.S. in dealing with the pandemic. Little wonder a Harvard University report found that over 90% of the Chinese people like their government. One would think that China’s extraordinary domestic achievements would make the Biden administration a bit more humble about its “one-size-fits-all” concept of democracy.

    (3)  The climate crisis and the pandemic are a wake-up call for global cooperation, but this Summit is transparently designed to exacerbate divisions. The Chinese and Russian ambassadors to Washington have publicly accused the United States of staging the summit to stoke ideological confrontation and divide the world into hostile camps, while China held a competing International Democracy Forum with 120 countries the weekend before the U.S. summit.

    Inviting the government of Taiwan to the U.S. summit further erodes the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, in which the United States acknowledged the One-China policy and agreed to cut back military installations on Taiwan.

    Also invited is the corrupt anti-Russian government installed by the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, which reportedly has half its military forces poised to invade the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, who declared independence in response to the 2014 coup. The U.S. and NATO have so far supported this major escalation of a civil war that already killed 14,000 people.

    (4)  The U.S. and its Western allies—the self-anointed leaders of human rights—just happen to be the major suppliers of weapons and training to some of the world’s most vicious dictators. Despite its verbal commitment to human rights, the Biden administration and Congress recently approved a $650 million weapons deal for Saudi Arabia at a time when this repressive kingdom is bombing and starving the people of Yemen.

    Heck, the administration even uses U.S. tax dollars to “donate” weapons to dictators, like General Sisi in Egypt, who oversees a regime with thousands of political prisoners, many of whom have been tortured. Of course, these U.S. allies were not invited to the Democracy Summit—that would be too embarrassing.

    (5)  Perhaps someone should inform Biden that the right to survive is a basic human right. The right to food is recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, and is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

    So why is the U.S. imposing brutal sanctions on countries from Venezuela to North Korea that are causing inflation, scarcity, and malnutrition among children? Former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has blasted the United States for engaging in “economic warfare” and compared its illegal unilateral sanctions to medieval sieges. No country that purposely denies children the right to food and starves them to death can call itself a champion of democracy.

    (6)   Since the United States was defeated by the Taliban and withdrew its occupation forces from Afghanistan, it is acting as a very sore loser and reneging on basic international and humanitarian commitments. Certainly Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a setback for human rights, especially for women, but pulling the plug on Afghanistan’s economy is catastrophic for the entire nation.

    The United States is denying the new government access to billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves held in U.S. banks, causing a collapse in the banking system. Hundreds of thousands of public servants have not been paid. The UN is warning that millions of Afghans are at risk of starving to death this winter as the result of these coercive measures by the United States and its allies.

    (7)  It’s telling that the Biden administration had such a difficult time finding Middle Eastern countries to invite to the summit. The United States just spent 20 years and $8 trillion trying to impose its brand of democracy on the Middle East and Afghanistan, so you’d think it would have a few proteges to showcase.

    But no. In the end, they could only agree to invite the state of Israel, an apartheid regime that enforces Jewish supremacy over all the land it occupies, legally or otherwise. Embarrassed to have no Arab states attending, the Biden administration added Iraq, whose unstable government has been racked by corruption and sectarian divisions ever since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Its brutal security forces have killed over 600 demonstrators since huge anti-government protests began in 2019.

    (8)  What, pray tell, is democratic about the U.S. gulag at Guantánamo Bay? The U.S. Government opened the Guantanamo detention center in January 2002 as a way to circumvent the rule of law as it kidnapped and jailed people without trial after the crimes of September 11, 2001. Since then, 780 men have been detained there. Very few were charged with any crime or confirmed as combatants, but still they were tortured, held for years without charges, and never tried.

    This gross violation of human rights continues, with most of the 39 remaining detainees never even charged with a crime. Yet this country that has locked up hundreds of innocent men with no due process for up to 20 years still claims the authority to pass judgment on the legal processes of other countries, in particular on China’s efforts to cope with Islamist radicalism and terrorism among its Uighur minority.

    (9)  With the recent investigations into the March 2019 U.S. bombing in Syria that left 70 civilians dead and the drone strike that killed an Afghan family of ten in August 2021, the truth of massive civilian casualties in U.S. drone strikes and airstrikes is gradually emerging, as well as how these war crimes have perpetuated and fueled the “war on terror,” instead of winning or ending it.

    If this was a real democracy summit, whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who have risked so much to expose the reality of U.S. war crimes to the world, would be honored guests at the summit instead of political prisoners in the American gulag.

    (10)  The United States picks and chooses countries as “democracies” on an entirely self-serving basis. But in the case of Venezuela, it has gone even farther and invited an imaginary U.S.-appointed “president” instead of the country’s actual government.

    The Trump administration anointed Juan Guaidó as “president” of Venezuela, and Biden invited him to the summit, but Guaidó is neither a president nor a democrat, and he boycotted parliamentary elections in 2020 and regional elections in 2021. But Guaido did come tops in one recent opinion poll, with the highest public disapproval of any opposition figure in Venezuela at 83%, and the lowest approval rating at 13%.

    Guaidó named himself “interim president” (without any legal mandate) in 2019, and launched a failed coup against the elected government of Venezuela. When all his U.S.-backed efforts to overthrow the government failed, Guaidó signed off on a mercenary invasion which failed even more spectacularly. The European Union no longer recognizes Guaido’s claim to the presidency, and his “interim foreign minister” recently resigned, accusing Guaidó of corruption.

    Conclusion

    Just as the people of Venezuela have not elected or appointed Juan Guaidó as their president, the people of the world have not elected or appointed the United States as the president or leader of all Earthlings.

    When the United States emerged from the Second World War as the strongest economic and military power in the world, its leaders had the wisdom not to claim such a role. Instead they brought the whole world together to form the United Nations, on the principles of sovereign equality, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, a universal commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and a prohibition on the threat or use of force against each other.

    The United States enjoyed great wealth and international power under the UN system it devised. But in the post-Cold War era, power-hungry U.S. leaders came to see the UN Charter and the rule of international law as obstacles to their insatiable ambitions. They belatedly staked a claim to universal global leadership and dominance, relying on the threat and use of force that the UN Charter prohibits. The results have been catastrophic for millions of people in many countries, including Americans.

    Since the United States has invited its friends from around the world to this ”democracy summit,” maybe they can use the occasion to try to persuade their bomb-toting friend to recognize that its bid for unilateral global power has failed, and that it should instead make a real commitment to peace, cooperation and international democracy under the rules-based order of the UN Charter.

    The post Ten Contradictions That Plague Biden’s Democracy Summit first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • House Passes Largest Military Budget Since WWII Despite Afghanistan War’s End

    House Passes Largest Military Budget Since WWII Despite End of Afghanistan War

    President Biden may soon approve the largest military spending bill since World War II, which ramps up spending to counter China and Russia. Separately, the Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia amid the devastating ongoing war in Yemen. “The last thing we need to do is be throwing more money at the Pentagon,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “This whole idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States has primarily been manufactured to jump up the military budget.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: President Biden may soon vote to approve the largest military spending bill since World War II, with a 5% increase over last year’s military spending bill. The $768 billion military budget is $24 billion higher than what Biden requested despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The package includes funds aimed at countering China’s power and to build Ukraine’s military strength. It also includes nearly $28 billion in nuclear weapons funding.

    The bill is headed to the Senate, then to President Biden, after the House approved the bill late Tuesday night with more Republicans than Democrats voting for it. Among those who voted no was progressive New York Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, who tweeted, quote, “It is astounding how quickly Congress moves weapons but we can’t ensure housing, care, and justice for our veterans, nor invest in robust jobs programs for districts like mine.” Bowman also criticized how the compromise bill strips funding that would have established an office for countering extremism in the Pentagon, saying the bill, quote, “must also protect the Black men and women who are disproportionately the target of extremism and a biased military justice system,” unquote.

    Also absent from the bill is a provision to require women to register for the draft.

    Separately, the Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia amidst the devastating ongoing war on Yemen.

    For more, we’re joined by Bill Hartung, director of Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, author of a new report, “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden,” his latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

    Bill Hartung, welcome back to Democracy Now! First of all, if you can just respond to the House passage of the largest weapons spending bill in U.S. history since World War II?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think it’s an outrage, if you look at what we really need. You know, in the roundup, you talked about the need to spend on pandemic preparedness. The world is on fire with the impacts of climate change. We’ve got deep problems of racial and economic injustice in this country. We’ve got an insurrection and violence trying to undermine our democracy. So the last thing we need to do is be throwing more money at the Pentagon. And it’s a huge amount. It’s more than we spent in Vietnam, the Korean War, the Reagan buildup of the ’80s, all throughout the Cold War. And as you said, even at the time as Biden has pulled out U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget keeps going up and up.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Bill Hartung, could respond specifically to the fact that the budget is $24 billion more than what was requested? Is it common to have such a huge difference in terms of the amount requested and the amount granted, $24 billion?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, Congress often adds money for pet projects — Boeing aircraft in Missouri, attack submarines in Connecticut and Virginia — but nothing at this level. You know, $24 billion is the biggest congressional add-on that I can think of in recent memory. So it’s kind of extraordinary, especially, as we said, when the endless wars should be winding down.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And can you talk about some of the key figures in Congress who have been pushing for an increase?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, you’ve got people like James Inhofe, who’s the Republican lead on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who’s basically said we need to spend 3 to 5% more per year in perpetuity, which would push the budget over a trillion dollars within five to six years. He is always touting a report called the National Defense Strategy Commission report, which was put together primarily by people who were from the arms industry, from think tanks funded by the arms industry. Basically, it was a kind of a special interest collection that were pushing this.

    And then you have Mike Rogers from Alabama, who’s the key player on House Armed Services. He’s got Huntsville in his state, and Huntsville is sort of the missile capital of America — Army missiles, missile defense systems. He also gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from the weapons industry for his reelection. So, there’s a strong kind of pork barrel special interest push by the military-industrial complex that help bring about this result.

    AMY GOODMAN: The Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt the $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, this amidst the devastating ongoing war on Yemen. I want to play a clip of Senators Paul and Sanders addressing the Senate Tuesday.

    SEN. RAND PAUL: The U.S. should end all arms sales to the Saudis until they end their blockade of Yemen. President Biden said he would change the Trump policy of supporting Saudi’s war in Yemen, but it’s not all that apparent that policy has changed. … We commission these weapons, and we should not give them to countries who are starving children and are committing, essentially, genocide in Yemen.

    SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: President, I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable and unusual position of agreeing with Senator Paul.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Senator Sanders and Paul. Bill Hartung, you’re the author of the new report headlined “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden.” Can you talk about the significance of this, what was voted down?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, these missiles are air-to-air missiles, which can be used to enforce the air blockade that’s been put over Yemen. So, the Saudis have bombed the Sana’a airport runways. They’ve tried to keep ships from coming in with fuel. And as a result, costs of medical supplies now are out of the reach of the average person of Yemen. People haven’t been able to leave the country for medical treatment. Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE say 32,000 people have probably died just for lack of being able to leave the country for that specialized care. Four hundred thousand children are at risk, according to the World Food Programme, of starvation because of the blockade. Millions of Yemenis need humanitarian aid just to survive, and the Saudi blockade is making it increasingly difficult to get that aid or to get commercial goods that they need.

    So, basically, this is a criminal enterprise run by Mohammed bin Salman. And Joe Biden said, when he was a candidate, Saudi Arabia, we’d treat it like an pariah; he wouldn’t arm them. In his first foreign policy speech, he said the U.S. should stop support for offensive operations in Yemen. And yet he’s approved a contract for maintenance of Saudi planes and attack helicopters, and now this deal for the missiles. So he’s basically gone back on his pledge to forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia and to use U.S. leverage to end the blockade and the war itself.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Bill, before we conclude, just to go back to the military budget, could you comment specifically on the $28 billion earmarked for nuclear weapons?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, unfortunately, this bill doubles down on the Pentagon’s buildup of a new generation of nuclear weapons, a new generation of nuclear warheads, which is, of course, the last thing we need at a time of global tensions. You know, in particular, there was even a provision that said it’s not allowed to reduce the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are the most dangerous weapons in the world because they could easily be used by accident if there were a false alarm of attack, because the president has only minutes to decide whether to use these things. So, I think that’s one of the biggest stains on this bill, is basically continuing to stoke the nuclear arms race, not only at great cost but at great risk to the future of the planet.

    AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the China and Russia being used as justification for weapons sales and increased military budget, can you compare the U.S. military budget to theirs?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the U.S. spends about 10 times what Russia spends, about three times what China spends. It has 13 times as many active nuclear warheads in its stockpile as China does. We’ve got 11 aircraft carriers of a type that China doesn’t have. We’ve got 800 U.S. military bases around the globe, while China has three. So this whole idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States has primarily been manufactured to jump up the military budget. And so far, unfortunately, at least in the halls of Congress and the Biden administration, that’s been successful.

    AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. We’ll link to your new report, “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden.” Hartung’s latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

    Next up, calls are growing for President Biden to extend the moratorium on student debt payments as millions face a debt crisis during the pandemic. We’ll speak with the Debt Collective’s Astra Taylor about her new animated film, Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Humaira Rasuli is the recipient of the 2021 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award

    The Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) has named Afghan human rights lawyer and feminist Humaira Rasuli as the recipient of the 2021 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award. [For more on this award and its laureates, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/607BB850-4813-489B-A47D-3965F2078E1F]

    It is hoped that the award will “further inspire the world to pay closer attention to human rights in Afghanistan, especially women’s rights” and “encourage human rights defenders and those who have been deprived of human rights,”

    According to the TFD, Rasuli has been actively involved in social activism and the promotion of women’s rights at a young age and thorough her years of work, “Afghan women have gradually been able to receive justice from judicial procedures.”

    As the co-founder and executive director of the Women for Justice Organization, Rasuli has led lawyers, gender experts and activists in efforts to increase women’s access to justice, uphold the rule of law in Afghanistan, and investigate some of the most emblematic sex crime cases in the country over the years, the TFD said in its statement.

    She also previously served as director of Medica Afghanista, another organization that provides psychosocial counseling and legal support to female survivors of sexual violence. However, in an interview with the European public broadcaster, Arte, aired in September, Rasuli revealed that she has relocated to the U.S. following the U.S. military pull-out from Afghanistan.

    The TFD on Tuesday declined to confirm Rasuli’s current whereabouts, but said she would deliver her acceptance speech in a pre-recorded video that would be published on its website on 10 December.

    The foundation said it would not host a physical award ceremony this year due to COVID-19.

    https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202111300019

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

  • How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

    Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share – over 65% – of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act.

    The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.

    Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for however many hundreds of billions in funding Pentagon and arms industry lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committees they should cough up.

    Let’s make no mistake about this: Congress’s choice to keep investing in a massive, ineffective and absurdly expensive war machine has nothing to do with “national security” as most people understand it, or “defense” as the dictionary defines it.

    U.S. society does face critical threats to our security, including the climate crisis, systemic racism, erosion of voting rights, gun violence, grave inequalities and the corporate hijacking of political power. But one problem we fortunately do not have is the threat of attack or invasion by a rampant global aggressor or, in fact, by any other country at all.

    Maintaining a war machine that outspends the 12 or 13 next largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that the United States’ overwhelmingly destructive military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests anywhere in the world—even when there is clearly no military solution and when many of the underlying problems were caused by past misapplications of U.S. military power in the first place.

    While the international challenges we face in this century require a genuine commitment to international cooperation and diplomacy, Congress allocates only $58 billion, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, to the diplomatic corps of our government: the State Department even worse, both Democratic and Republican administrations keep filling top diplomatic posts with officials indoctrinated and steeped in policies of war and coercion, with scant experience and meager skills in the peaceful diplomacy we so desperately need.

    This only perpetuates a failed foreign policy based on false choices between economic sanctions that UN officials have compared to medieval sieges, coups that destabilize countries and regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that kill millions of people and leave cities in rubble, like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

    The end of the Cold War was a golden opportunity for the United States to reduce its forces and military budget to match its legitimate defense needs. The American public naturally expected and hoped for a “Peace Dividend,” and even veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50% over the next ten years.

    But no such cut happened. U.S. officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War “Power Dividend,” a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States, by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    In 1999, as Secretary of State under President Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia.

    The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” This was neither. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over NATO’s illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to “get new lawyers.”

    Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third-poorest country in Europe (after Moldova and post-coup Ukraine) and its independence is still not recognized by 96 countries. Hashim Thaçi, Albright’s hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at the Hague, charged with murdering at least 300 civilians under cover of NATO bombing in 1999 to extract and sell their internal organs on the international transplant market.

    Clinton and Albright’s gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results. But America’s failed wars have not led Congress or successive administrations to seriously rethink the U.S. decision to rely on illegal threats and uses of military force to project U.S. power all over the world, nor have they reined in the trillions of dollars invested in these imperial ambitions.

    Instead, in the upside-down world of institutionally corrupt U.S. politics, a generation of failed and pointlessly destructive wars have had the perverse effect of normalizing even more expensive military budgets than during the Cold War, and reducing congressional debate to questions of how many more of each useless weapons system they should force U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for.

    It seems that no amount of killing, torture, mass destruction or lives ruined in the real world can shake the militaristic delusions of America’s political class, as long as the “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex” (President Eisenhower’s original wording) is reaping the benefits.

    Today, most political and media references to the Military-Industrial Complex refer only to the arms industry as a self-serving corporate interest group on a par with Wall Street, Big Pharma or the fossil fuel industry. But in his Farewell Address, Eisenhower explicitly pointed to, not just the arms industry, but the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”

    Eisenhower was just as worried about the anti-democratic impact of the military as the arms industry. Weeks before his Farewell Address, he told his senior advisors, “God help this country when somebody sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” His fears have been realized in every subsequent presidency.

    According to Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, who helped him draft his Farewell Address, Ike also wanted to talk about the “revolving door.” Early drafts of his speech referred to “a permanent, war-based industry,” with “flag and general officers retiring at an early age to take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” He wanted to warn that steps must be taken to “insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.”

    As Eisenhower feared, the careers of figures like Generals Austin and Mattis now span all branches of the corrupt MIC conglomerate: commanding invasion and occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; then donning suits and ties to sell weapons to new generals who served under them as majors and colonels; and finally re-emerging from the same revolving door as cabinet members at the apex of American politics and government.

    So why does the Pentagon brass get a free pass, even as Americans feel increasingly conflicted about the arms industry? After all, it is the military that actually uses all these weapons to kill people and wreak havoc in other countries.

    Even as it loses war after war overseas, the U.S. military has waged a far more successful one to burnish its image in the hearts and minds of Americans and win every budget battle in Washington.

    The complicity of Congress, the third leg of the stool in Eisenhower’s original formulation, turns the annual battle of the budget into the “cakewalk” that the war in Iraq was supposed to be, with no accountability for lost wars, war crimes, civilian massacres, cost overruns or the dysfunctional military leadership that presides over it all.

    There is no congressional debate over the economic impact on America or the geopolitical consequences for the world of uncritically rubber-stamping huge investments in powerful weapons that will sooner or later be used to kill our neighbors and smash their countries, as they have for the past 22 years and far too often throughout our history.

    If the public is ever to have any impact on this dysfunctional and deadly money-go-round, we must learn to see through the fog of propaganda that masks self-serving corruption behind red, white and blue bunting, and allows the military brass to cynically exploit the public’s natural respect for brave young men and women who are ready to risk their lives to defend our country. In the Crimean War, the Russians called British troops “lions led by donkeys.” That is an accurate description of today’s U.S. military.

    Sixty years after Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, exactly as he predicted, the “weight of this combination” of corrupt generals and admirals, the profitable “merchants of death” whose goods they peddle, and the Senators and Representatives who blindly entrust them with trillions of dollars of the public’s money, constitute the full flowering of President Eisenhower’s greatest fears for our country.

    Eisenhower concluded, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” That clarion call echoes through the decades and should unite Americans in every form of democratic organizing and movement building, from elections to education and advocacy to mass protests, to finally reject and dispel the “unwarranted influence” of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

     

     

    The post How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.