China has accused the United States of overreacting after President Joe Biden ordered a suspected spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Sunday. China maintains the balloon, first spotted over U.S. airspace last week, was a civilian aircraft blown off course. The U.S. and China have been conducting surveillance on each other for years using spy satellites, hacking and other means.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The United States military shot down a Chinese balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, according to the Associated Press.
“An operation was underway in U.S. territorial waters to recover debris from the balloon, which had been flying at about 60,000 feet and estimated to be about the size of three school buses,” AP reported. “Before the downing, President Joe Biden had said earlier Saturday, ‘We’re going to take care of it,’ when asked by reporters about the balloon. The Federal Aviation Administration and Coast Guard worked to clear the airspace and water below.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed in a statement that “at the direction of President Biden, U.S. fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command” successfully downed the balloon “off the coast of South Carolina in U.S. airspace.”
The U.S. has said it believes the high-altitude balloon was a part of a surveillance operation, something China has denied.
“The airship is from China,” a spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry said Friday. “It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into U.S. airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the U.S. side and properly handle this unexpected situation.”
The U.S. first detected the balloon over the state of Montana earlier in the week, leading Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel his planned trip to China as tensions between the two countries continue to rise.
As Jake Werner of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft wrote Friday, members of Congress have “used the incident to hype fears about China,” citing House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher’s (R-Wis.) claim that the balloon posed “a threat to American sovereignty” and “a threat to the Midwest.”
Werner stressed that “foreign surveillance of sensitive U.S. sites is not a new phenomenon,” nor is “U.S. surveillance of foreign countries.”
“The toxic politics predominating in Washington seems to have convinced the Biden administration to further restrict communications with Beijing by calling off Blinken’s trip,” Werner added. “Letting war hawks set America’s agenda on China can only end in disaster. Conflict is not inevitable, but avoiding a disastrous U.S.-China military confrontation will require tough-minded diplomacy—not disengagement.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
At the beginning of November, when Israel and the United States held elections within days of each other, it seemed clear that the pull in opposite directions embodied in the disappointing showing for the American far-right and the strong showing for their Israeli counterparts portended tension in the “unshakeable” alliance between the two countries. Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t even formed his government yet, but already we are beginning to see how that new government will make things difficult for the White House.
And the early indications from Joe Biden’s administration indicate a continuation of the weak responses that have characterized his policy toward Israel for decades.
The hand-wringing was frantic as the vote count in Israel was finalized and it became clear that, while Netanyahu’s Likud was once again going to be the largest party in the Knesset — as it had been in the previous six elections — the Religious Zionism bloc would be the second biggest in the incoming governing coalition. The two main parties in that coalition were led by Bezalel Smotrich, whose blatantly racist policies are reminiscent of the late radical Meir Kahane, a man so honestly racist he was banned from the Knesset; and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who openly espouses his admiration for and adherence to Kahane’s ideology.
The first concern Washington had was Smotrich’s ambition to be the Minister of Defense. Biden administration officials immediately told Netanyahu that this wasn’t going to work for them, and Netanyahu made it clear that he wouldn’t give Smotrich that post, prompting some faux outrage from the head of Religious Zionism. But Smotrich never really had a chance at the Defense portfolio. He has much less military experience than most Israelis, which made him a highly dubious choice even for his fellow right-wingers. And Netanyahu wanted to keep Defense for Likud anyway.
But it was a welcome opportunity to craft a performance for Washington, suggesting that Netanyahu would “listen to reason.” With that illusion cast, the provocative steps began to coalesce. Ben-Gvir got the Public Security ministry he wanted. That puts him in control of Israel’s police and border patrol, two entities that interact a great deal with Palestinians in 1948 Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank. It also controls firearms licenses, and Israel’s International Homeland Security Forum, meaning Ben-Gvir will have an enormous influence all over the world on such matters as cybersecurity and so-called “counter-terrorism” procedures.
Another prominent feature that has emerged from the coalition talks is that Netanyahu has apparently conceded to Smotrich’s demand that he be given control of the so-called “Civil Administration,” which is the military regime that administers both the Palestinian areas (except for those meager powers doled out to the Palestinian Authority in the Oslo-designated Areas A and B) and Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The Religious Zionist platform calls for dismantling this administration and reverting authority to the relevant Israeli ministries and authorities, no different than in 1948 Israel.
As Shaqued Morag of Peace Now put it, “Smotrich sees Area C as Israeli territory and he is going to implement his vision of Jewish supremacy there, meaning he will allow settlements to take Palestinian land and do everything in his power to suppress the minority of Palestinians living in Area C, meaning the de facto annexation of the territory.”
Yet thus far, there has been little buzz from the Biden administration over this possibility, a stark contrast with the uproar over the question of Israeli annexation of West Bank that we witnessed just a few years ago. While Israel would not make a formal declaration of annexation if Smotrich has his way — at least, not immediately — de facto annexation would be the result.
The potential fault lines between even the meek Biden administration and Israel don’t stop with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Netanyahu remains under indictment, and there’s a good chance that if his trial is ever completed, he will face severe penalties, including prison time. Fortunately for him, much of Israel’s right wing, including some in the opposition, support a law that would severely curb the power of Israel’s judiciary, by allowing the government to bypass the court with a vote.
Netanyahu has a clear personal interest in such a law, but the ramifications would be far wider. The High Court of Justice is a tool of the Israeli apartheid regime, but part of the role it plays is to offer a small modicum of democracy and the rule of law to the state. It usually sides with the Israeli military when Palestinians bring cases before it (which is very difficult for Palestinians to do, as the first judicial line for them are military courts), but sometimes they do not, creating a veneer of fairness and angering the Israeli right. If the court becomes subordinate to the government, that veneer will disappear and will weaken even further the frequent arguments in support of Israel of its being the “only democracy in the Middle East” and its having such symmetry and “shared values” with the United States.
While these moves remain speculative — the government hasn’t been formed yet, and the potential backlash from Europe, the United Arab Emirates, and even the U.S. has yet to be measured with any certainty — there can be little doubt that they will serve to further damage the perception of Israel among liberal Americans, American Jews, and Democrats. But what will matter most will be the response of the Biden administration, particularly the reactions of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Biden himself.
Their track record, of course, suggests they will bend over backwards, even beyond the breaking point, to try to maintain business as usual with Israel. Recent events give us some clues about where Biden might want to go in facing Israeli actions that are obviously contrary to the wishes of the Democrats, and those clues don’t paint a promising picture.
The most high-profile event was the Justice Department deciding to open an investigation into the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. Both the White House and State Department were very quick to declare that the decision to have the FBI open this investigation had nothing to do with them, and that they were unaware of it. This last is almost certainly untrue. DoJ had decided several days before the announcement was made to launch this investigation. It beggars belief that they made such a potentially explosive decision and sat on it for days without telling the White House or State Department. Still, the fact that Biden and Blinken probably knew about the decision but apparently did nothing to change it, despite their obvious discomfort with it, reflects the considerable political downturn Israel’s image has taken within the Democratic party.
They clearly did not want to be seen as interceding with DoJ on Israel’s behalf in this matter. In part, that has to do with Biden’s need for DoJ to be seen as politically independent as it pursues investigations around the corruption of his predecessor. But it also reflects the pressure that was brought by the Abu Akleh family, their supporters and advocates, and the response to that from leading Democrats in Congress, such as Senator Chris Van Hollen. Biden would have a hard time defending an intercession with DoJ to members of Congress regarding an investigation into the killing of an American citizen.
The investigation into Shireen’s death is not likely to go anywhere as Israel refuses to cooperate and Biden and Blinken have made it clear that they are not going to press Israel on this matter. On the contrary, they are trying to figure out how to work with this far-right Israeli coalition. They have already dropped a strong hint to Netanyahu about one familiar face they’d like to see come back, and it’s none other than former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer.
That would be the same Ron Dermer who snuck past the White House of Barack Obama and engineered the infamous 2015 address by Netanyahu to a joint session of Congress that attempted to undermine Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. It’s the same Dermer who called that his “proudest moment.” It’s the same Dermer who defiantly accepted an award from the Center for Security Policy, an Islamophobic hate group and, in his defiance also stood up for extremist anti-Muslim figures including Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Maajid Nawaz, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Yet a Biden administration official told Axios, “We had our differences with Dermer, but we would be happy to work with him in the next government.”
In other areas, the U.S. is putting genuine pressure on Israel. Bowing to pressure from Washington, the outgoing Israeli government decided to tighten government oversight of their investments. It’s a move the Biden administration has been demanding for some time, as a response to increasing Israeli cooperation with China. Israel had been reluctant to give in to this demand as it sees China as a great source of potential investment in the coming years, but finally relented under pressure from the United States.
The decision shows that the United States is capable of moving Israel when it wants to. It simply doesn’t care enough about Palestinian rights to push Israel in that regard. Of course, the politics are very different. China is seen very negatively in the United States, and pro-Israel forces here are not eager to defend growing Israeli-Chinese cooperation anymore than they want to try to defend Israel’s relative lack of support for Ukraine. Still, if the Biden administration wanted to make an argument against Israel’s increasing legal discrimination against Palestinians or potentially annexing West Bank settlements, they could certainly do so within the bounds of political viability.
But the dedicated Zionists Biden and Blinken seem to have no intention of doing that. Instead, they will try to buy Palestinian acquiescence by promoting their Palestinian interlocutor for all occasions, Assistant Secretary of State Hady Amr, to the post of special representative for Palestinian affairs. It’s not an ambassador-level position, but Biden and Blinken hope that this will somehow soften the blow of their unwillingness or inability to deliver on their promises to the Palestinians of reopening the PLO office in Washington and the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.
It won’t soften the blow. And as Israel takes bolder steps to consolidate its possession of West Bank land and dispossession of Palestinians, Palestinian anger and frustration will continue to grow, alongside increasing Israeli fascism. It’s an explosive combination into which Biden and Blinken are pouring gasoline. The coming explosion, which is entirely avoidable with the simple application of a modicum of justice, will be as tragic as it will be bloody.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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I will never get used to living in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously pontificate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.
Just today US State Department spokesman and CIA veteran Ned Price tweeted disapprovingly about the Kyrgyz Republic’s decision to deport investigative journalist Bolot Temirov to Russia, where press freedom groups are concerned that the Russian citizen could face conscription to fight in Ukraine.
“Dismayed by the decision to deport journalist Bolot Temirov from the Kyrgyz Republic,” said Price. “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job. The Kyrgyz Republic has been known for its vibrant civil society — attempts to stifle freedom of expression stain that reputation.”
This would be an entirely reasonable statement for anyone else to make. If you said it or I said it, it would be completely legitimate. But when Ned says it, it is illegitimate.
Dismayed by the decision to deport journalist Bolot Temirov from the Kyrgyz Republic. Journalists should never be punished for doing their job. The Kyrgyz Republic has been known for its vibrant civil society — attempts to stifle freedom of expression stain that reputation.
— Ned Price (@StateDeptSpox) November 23, 2022
This is after all the same government that is working to extradite an Australian journalist from the United Kingdom with the goal of imprisoning him for up to 175 years for exposing US war crimes. Price says “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job,” but that is precisely what the government he represents is doing to Julian Assange, who has already spent three and a half years in Belmarsh Prison awaiting US extradition shenanigans. This is in top of the seven years he spent fighting extradition from the Ecuadorian embassy in London under what a UN panel ruled was arbitrary detention.
A UN special rapporteur on torture determined that Assange has been subjected to psychological torture by the allied governments which have conspired to imprison him. Scores of doctors have determined that his persecution is resulting in dangerous medical neglect. Yet he is being pulled toward the notoriously draconian prison systems of the most powerful government in the world, where he will face a rigged trial where a defense of publishing in the public interest will not be permitted.
All to establish a legal precedent that will allow the most powerful empire that has ever existed to extradite journalists from anywhere in the world for exposing inconvenient truths about it. But sure, Ned, “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job.”
No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job. On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, we vow to continue protecting and promoting the rights of a free press and the safety of journalists. https://t.co/qXYyVoVlbM
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) November 2, 2022
Earlier this month US secretary of state Antony Blinken posted a tweet of his own commemorating the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, without the slightest trace of self-awareness.
“No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job,” Blinken said. “On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, we vow to continue protecting and promoting the rights of a free press and the safety of journalists.”
Two weeks later, the Biden administration shockingly granted Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman immunity from lawsuits regarding the gruesome assassination of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, thereby slamming the final door on all attempts to hold the tyrannical ruler responsible for his brazen assault on the press.
“No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job.”
Two weeks.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Biden administration moves to shield #SaudiArabia crown prince from lawsuits over his role in killing of #US-based journalist
— Matt Lee (@APDiploWriter) November 18, 2022
We are ruled by tyrannical, hypocritical freaks who do not care about truth and freedom; they care only about power and what they can use to obtain it. The only press they support are those whose persecution can be politically leveraged, and those who can be used to peddle propaganda like the notorious AP editor who recently said she “can’t imagine” a US intelligence official being wrong.
Pointing out hypocrisy is important not because hypocrisy is an especially terrible thing in and of itself, but because it draws attention to the fact that the hypocrite does not really stand where they claim to stand and value what they purport to value. The rulers of the western empire care about press freedoms only exactly insofar as they can use them to concern troll foreign governments they don’t like to advance their global power agendas. And not one molecule further.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
The ninth Summit of the America’s opened in Los Angeles on Monday, June 6. This is the second time that the summit has been hosted in the United States. The Biden administration chose to exclude the elected governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, inviting members of the US-backed far right ‘opposition’ instead. That decision caused the presidents of other American countries to boycott the summit, notably Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras and Guatemala.
In protest, social movements from the United States and Latin America organized a counter summit, The People’s Summit, which begins on June 8. Journalists involved in the People’s Summit disrupted Biden’s sham Summit, confronting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the head of the US-controlled Organization of American States, Luis Amalgro.
The post Biden’s Exclusionary ‘Summit Of The Americas’ Disrupted By Journalists appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tested positive for the coronavirus. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday Blinken would isolate at home according to CDC guidelines. Blinken met Wednesday with Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde shortly before his positive test result. A day earlier, he met with Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard. On Saturday, he joined a crowd of 2,600 celebrities, journalists and Washington elites who packed the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where few in attendance wore masks. “You guys spent the last two years telling everyone the importance of wearing masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings. Then, the second someone offers you a free dinner, you all turn into Joe Rogan,” said comedian Trevor Noah in his address at the event, which has since been linked to a growing number of COVID-19 cases. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization estimates the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the deaths of nearly 15 million people around the world.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tested positive for coronavirus. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday Blinken will isolate at home according to CDC guidelines.
NED PRICE: The good news is that he is fully vaccinated, he is boosted. He is experiencing only mild symptoms.
AMY GOODMAN: Blinken met Wednesday with Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde shortly before his positive test result. A day earlier, he met with Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard. On Saturday , Secretary Blinken joined a crowd of 2,600 celebrities, journalists and Washington elites who packed the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, D.C., where few in attendance wore masks. The event has since been linked to a growing number of COVID cases, including journalists with Voice of America, NBC News, CBS News and Politico. Also testing positive was ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, who was seated next to the reality TV star Kim Kardashian. Karl also interacted briefly with President Biden, who attended without wearing a mask. The comedian Trevor Noah addressed the crowd, opening with these remarks.
TREVOR NOAH: It is my great honor to be speaking tonight at the nation’s most distinguished superspreader event. No, for real, people, what are we doing here? Let’s be honest. What are we doing? Like, did none of you learn anything from the Gridiron Dinner? Nothing, huh? Like, do any of you read your own newspapers? I mean, I expect this from Sean Hannity, but the rest of you? What are you doing here? You guys spent the last two years telling everyone the importance of wearing masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings. Then, the second someone offers you a free dinner, you all turn into Joe Rogan.
AMY GOODMAN: The World Health Organization estimates the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the deaths of nearly 15 million people around the world.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an utter disaster for Ukraine, and the war is not going well for the Russian forces who are experiencing heavy losses and may be running low on both supplies and morale. Perhaps this is the reason why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also encouraged by the support that Ukraine has received from Western countries, claimed a few days ago on the Greek state-run broadcaster ERT that “the war will end when Ukraine wins.”
In this exclusive interview, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky considers the implications of Ukraine’s heroic stance to fight the Russian invaders till the end, and why the U.S. is not eager to see an end to the conflict.
Chomsky, who is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive, is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C.J. Polychroniou: After months of fighting, it’s obvious that the invasion is not going according to the Kremlin’s plans, hopes and expectations. NATO figures have claimed that Russian forces have already suffered as many deaths as they did during the entire duration of the Afghan war, and the position of the Zelenskyy government now seems to be “peace with victory.” Obviously, the West’s support for Ukraine is key to what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of diplomatic solutions. Indeed, there is no clear path to peace, and the Kremlin has stated that it is not seeking to end the war by May 9 (known as Victory Day, which marks the Soviets’ role in defeating Nazi Germany). Don’t Ukrainians have the right to fight to death before surrendering any territory to Russia, if they choose to do so?
Noam Chomsky: To my knowledge, no one has suggested that Ukrainians don’t have that right. Islamic Jihad also has the abstract right to fight to the death before surrendering any territory to Israel. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s their right.
Do Ukrainians want that? Perhaps now in the midst of a devastating war, but not in the recent past.
President Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 with an overwhelming mandate for peace. He immediately moved to carry it out, with great courage. He had to confront violent right-wing militias who threatened to kill him if he tried to reach a peaceful settlement along the lines of the Minsk II formula. Historian of Russia Stephen Cohen points out that if Zelenskyy had been backed by the U.S., he could have persisted, perhaps solving the problem with no horrendous invasion. The U.S. refused, preferring its policy of integrating Ukraine within NATO. Washington continued to dismiss Russia’s red lines and the warnings of a host of top-level U.S. diplomats and government advisers as it has been doing since Clinton’s abrogation of Bush’s firm and unambiguous promise to Gorbachev that in return for German reunification within NATO, NATO would not expand one inch beyond Germany.
Zelenskyy also sensibly proposed putting the very different Crimea issue on a back burner, to be addressed later, after the war ends.
Minsk II would have meant some kind of federal arrangement, with considerable autonomy for the Donbass region, optimally in a manner to be determined by an internationally supervised referendum. Prospects have of course diminished after the Russian invasion. How much we don’t know. There is only one way to find out: to agree to facilitate diplomacy instead of undermining it, as the U.S. continues to do.
It’s true that “the West’s support for Ukraine is key into what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of diplomatic solutions,” though I would suggest a slight rephrasing: The West’s support for Ukraine is key into what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of undermining instead of facilitating diplomatic solutions that might end the horror.
Congress, including congressional Democrats, are acting as if they prefer the exhortation by Democratic Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee of Intelligence Adam Schiff that we have to aid Ukraine “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Schiff’s warning is nothing new. It is reminiscent of Reagan’s calling a national emergency because the Nicaraguan army is only two days marching time from Harlingen, Texas, about to overwhelm us. Or LBJ’s plaintive plea that we have to stop them in Vietnam or they will “sweep over the United States and take what we have.”
That’s been the permanent plight of the U.S., constantly threatened with annihilation. Best to stop them over there.
The U.S. has been a leading provider of security assistance to Ukraine since 2014. And last week, President Biden asked Congress to approve $33 billion to Ukraine, which is more than double what Washington has already committed since the start of the war. Isn’t it therefore safe to conclude that Washington has a lot riding on the way the war ends in Ukraine?
Since the relevant facts are virtually unspeakable here, it’s worth reviewing them.
Since the Maidan uprising in 2014, NATO (meaning basically the U.S.) has “provided significant support with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained, and then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter,” before the invasion, according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg).
I’ve already mentioned Washington’s refusal to back newly elected President Zelenskyy when his courageous effort to implement his mandate to pursue peace was blocked by right-wing militias, and the U.S. refused to back him, preferring to continue its policy of integrating Ukraine into NATO, dismissing Russia’s red lines.
As we’ve discussed earlier, that commitment was stepped up with the official U.S. policy statement of September 2021 calling for sending more advanced military equipment to Ukraine while continuing “our robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.” The policy was given further formal status in the November 10 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The State Department has acknowledged that “prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO.”
So matters continued after Putin’s criminal aggression. Once again, what happened has been reviewed accurately by Anatol Lieven:
A U.S. strategy of using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia is also of course completely incompatible with the search for a ceasefire and even a provisional peace settlement. It would require Washington to oppose any such settlement and to keep the war going. And indeed, when in late March the Ukrainian government put forward a very reasonable set of peace proposals, the lack of public U.S. support for them was extremely striking.
Apart from anything else, a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality (as proposed by President Zelensky) is an absolutely inescapable part of any settlement — but weakening Russia involves maintaining Ukraine as a de facto U.S. ally. U.S. strategy as indicated by [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would risk Washington becoming involved in backing Ukrainian nationalist hardliners against President Zelensky himself.
With this in mind, we can turn to the question. The answer seems plain: judging by U.S. actions and formal pronouncements, it is “safe to conclude that Washington has a lot riding on the way the war ends in Ukraine.” More specifically, it is fair to conclude that in order to “weaken Russia,” the U.S. is dedicated to the grotesque experiment that we have discussed earlier; avoid any way of ending the conflict through diplomacy and see whether Putin will slink away quietly in defeat or will use the capacity, which of course he has, to destroy Ukraine and set the stage for terminal war.
We learn a lot about the reigning culture from the fact that the grotesque experiment is considered highly praiseworthy, and that any effort to question it is either relegated to the margins or bitterly castigated with an impressive flow of lies and deceit.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
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The United States is suddenly very concerned about human rights violations in India, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken telling the press on Monday that “we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials.”
While it is true that India’s right-wing government is guilty of human rights abuses and has been for years, it is also true that the US State Department does not actually care about human rights abuses.
A leaked State Department memo from the early days of the Trump administration showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.
“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.
“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote. “We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”
And it begins…
— Maitreya Bhakal (@MaitreyaBhakal) April 12, 2022
India was a "natural ally" as long as it did what the US wanted. But the minute the regime doesn't get what it wants, it is monitoring a "rise" in human rights abuses in India.
They're so transparent it's almost funny…😅 pic.twitter.com/1DUv6gK6jq
No, the US State Department does not care about human rights abuses. Blinken’s remarks are just the latest in a series of shots across the bow that the US empire has been firing at New Delhi to warn it against moving into alignment with Moscow.
In an article last week titled “India to Face Significant Cost If Aligned With Russia, U.S. Says,” Bloomberg reported the following:
President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser said the administration has warned India against aligning itself with Russia, and that U.S. officials have been “disappointed” with some of New Delhi’s reaction to the Ukraine invasion.
“There are certainly areas where we have been disappointed by both China and India’s decisions, in the context of the invasion,” the director of the White House National Economic Council, Brian Deese, told reporters at a breakfast Wednesday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
The U.S. has told India that the consequences of a “more explicit strategic alignment” with Moscow would be “significant and long-term,” he said.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1511733819832819715
This new tone is a significant shift from the jovial relations between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Trump administration, or even between Modi and the Biden administration as recently as last year. Just yesterday Biden made it clear in a call with Modi that it would be against India’s interests to increase its oil imports from Russia. Reuters reports that Biden “told Modi India’s position in the world would not be enhanced by relying on Russian energy sources,” according to US officials.
“The president conveyed very clearly that it is not in their interest to increase that,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said when asked about India’s imports of Russian oil.
We can expect to see more and more feigned concern about Indian human rights abuses from the US government if these increasingly unsubtle messages are disobeyed, with destructive acts of economic sabotage soon to follow.
The US empire is correct to be concerned about a potential future Indian pivot out of Washington’s sphere of influence. While it has succeeded thus far in weaponizing New Delhi in its grand chessboard maneuverings against China, the world’s two most populous nations uniting with the Russian nuclear superpower in the emerging bloc of nations who are rejecting absorption into the US-centralized power structure would be disastrous for the empire.
But the fact that the US sees it as its business who foreign nations choose to align with reveals its true dynamic on the world stage, and makes a mockery of the lip service this empire has been paying to the importance of respecting national sovereignty in its narrative management about Ukraine. The US is the single most tyrannical regime on earth, using whatever amount of violence, coercion and bullying are necessary in its efforts to bring the entire planet under its lasting control.
This empire truly believes it has a right to rule the world, and that no nation has a right to refuse it. The re-emergence of a true multipolar world is crashing headlong into an imperial doctrine that demands securing unipolar domination at all cost, and it’s getting very ugly very fast.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
Listen to a reading of this article:
❖
The Washington Post has a new article out bemoaning the fact that Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon to discuss their operations in Ukraine (I dunno guys, might have something to do with the fact that the US is sharing extensive military intelligence on exactly those operations directly with the Ukrainian government). Tucked all the way down in the eighteenth paragraph of the article, we find a much more interesting revelation: that Washington’s top diplomat has made no attempt to contact his counterpart in Moscow since the war began on the 24th of February.
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reports.
So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>The amazing part of this column is that U.S. officials are saying out loud that they want the war to last in order to "bleed Putin". They don't care a fig about Ukraine. It stands completely alone (and Zelenskiy knows it, btw). https://t.co/NBOKvmT63K
— Leonid Bershidskiy (@Bershidsky) March 22, 2022
Building on an earlier report from The New York Times that the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire,” Ferguson writes that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:
“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”
I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.
Earlier this month when The Intercept’s Ryan Grim was able to get a word in edgewise at a White House press briefing amid the throngs of mass media reporters demanding to know why Biden still hasn’t started World War 3, Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a very revealing answer.
“So, aside from the request for weapons, President Zelensky has also requested that the US be more involved in negotiations toward a peaceful resolution to the war. What is the U.S. doing to push those negotiations forward?” asked Grim.
“Well, one of the steps we’ve taken — a significant one — is to be the largest provider of military and humanitarian and economic assistance in the world, to put them in a greater position of strength as they go into these negotiations,” Psaki answered, completely dodging the question of whether the US was actually doing anything to help negotiate peace.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>This is wild pic.twitter.com/CNZZ1wVzcz
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 16, 2022
As we’ve discussed previously, the US government has a well-documented history of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires with the goal of preoccupying its military forces and draining its coffers. Former US officials are on record publicly boasting about having done so in both Afghanistan and Syria. This is an agenda geared toward sapping the Russian government, manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare designed (though perhaps ineptly) to crush the Russian economy, to foment discord and rebellion, and ultimately to effect regime change in Moscow.
The US empire doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives, and it’s insulting that its operatives continually pretend to. The empire will happily feed every man, woman and child in the entire nation into the mouth of this war if it means unseating a disobedient leader from a nuclear-armed seat of power which has become unacceptably cozy with Beijing and intolerably comfortable with intervening against US imperial agendas. And all the Ukrainian-flag-waving propagandized westerners with their #StandWithUkraine Instagram activism and blue and yellow profile pics will cheer for it every step of the way.
I hope this brutal proxy war ends and peace comes to Ukraine very quickly. But from what we’re seeing today there appears to be an immense globe-spanning power structure holding its foot against the door of the only exit from this horror.
___________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
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Designation could put global pressure on military-led government, which faces accusations at international court of justice
The US has declared Myanmar’s mass killing of the Rohingya Muslim population to be a “genocide”.
The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, made the announcement at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
On Monday, 14 March, 2022 Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, hosted the annual International Women of Courage (IWOC) Awards in a virtual ceremony at the U.S. Department of State. The 2022 IWOC Award ceremony honours a group of twelve extraordinary women from around the world. The First Lady of the United States, Dr. Jill Biden, delivered remarks in recognition of the courageous accomplishments of this year’s IWOC awardees. For more on this award and its laureates, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/A386E593-5BB7-12E8-0528-AAF11BE46695
Out of an abundance of caution due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in order to practice safe social distancing, the ceremony was live streamed on www.state.gov.
Now in its 16th year, the Secretary of State’s IWOC Award recognizes women from around the globe who have demonstrated exceptional courage, strength, and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equity and equality, and the empowerment of women and girls, in all their diversity – often at great personal risk and sacrifice. U.S. diplomatic missions overseas nominate one woman of courage from their respective host countries and finalists are selected and approved by senior Department officials. Following the virtual IWOC ceremony, the awardees will participate in an International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) Virtual exchange to connect with their American counterparts and strengthen the global network of women leaders. The 2022 awardees are:
Rizwana Hasan – Bangladesh [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/48B5C07A-458C-4771-97F9-FAD0CA89F478]
Simone Sibilio do Nascimento – Brazil
Ei Thinzar Maung – Burma
Josefina Klinger Zúñiga – Colombia
Taif Sami Mohammed – Iraq
Facia Boyenoh Harris – Liberia
Najla Mangoush – Libya
Doina Gherman – Moldova
Bhumika Shrestha – Nepal
Carmen Gheorghe – Romania
Roegchanda Pascoe – South Africa
Phạm Đoan Trang – Vietnam Vietnam’s official reaction: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/vietnam-irked-by-unsuitable-us-prize-jailed-dissident-2022-03-17/
https://www.state.gov/2022-international-women-of-courage-award-recipients-announced/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
It must be a sure handicap to be saddled with such a name when piloting a large government department, but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken shows no sign of that bothering him. It has, however, become a hallmark of a policy that is markedly devoid of foresight and heavily marked by stammering confusion.
On his trip to Australia, Blinken showed us, again, how morality and forced ethics in the international scene can be the stuff of particularly bad pantomime. He sounded, all too often, as an individual sighing about the threats to US power while inflating those of its adversaries. Russia and China were, as they tend to be these days, at the front of the queue of paranoid agitation.
In an interview with The Australian, Blinken was adamant that “there’s little doubt that China’s ambition over time is to be the leading military, economic, diplomatic and political power not just in the region, but in the world.” He admitted that the US had its own version of an “international order” – but that vision was “liberal”. Beijing’s was profoundly inappropriate. “China wants an (international) order, but the difference is its world order would be profoundly illiberal.”
Blinken was also pleased at what he saw on his visit to the University of Melbourne. “My stepfather is an alumnus, so that was wonderful to reconnect, also just to talk to some remarkable young Australians who are really the future of the relationship, the partnership between us – incredibly engaged, incredibly smart, incredibly thoughtful about the present and the future.” And, no doubt, handpicked for the occasion.
Russia’s behaviour was also the subject of the Blinken treatment. Australians, warned the secretary, faced a solemn choice before Moscow’s stratagems. “Russia, right now,” he told an Australian news program on the ABC, “poses an immediate challenge, not just to Ukraine … but to some very basic principles that are relevant to the security not just to people in Europe, but throughout the world, including Australia.” That’s considerable reach for a power with an economy that is only marginally larger than Australia’s.
Blinken’s babble about international liberal orders and territorial integrity echoes the Truman Doctrine in the early stages of the Cold War, one that ended up bloodied and sodden in the rice fields and jungles of Indochina. In time, variations of this same, pathetic overreading of imminent crises and threats would propel US forces into Iraq and Afghanistan, and what a supreme mess those engagements turned out to be. All that mattered were the substitutes: in the case of Afghanistan, Islamic fundamentalism twinned with terrorism; in the case of Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction never found and forced links with al-Qaeda never proved.
Blinken’s visit had also inspired the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to wax lyrical about the sanctity of borders, something that proved somewhat irrelevant when Australia’s defence personnel found themselves serving as auxiliaries of US military efforts. He wanted “to send a very clear message on behalf of Australia, a liberal democracy who believes in freedom and the sovereignty of states, not just in Europe, but in our region as well – that the autocratic, unilateral actions of Russia [are considered] to be threatening, and bullying Ukraine is something that is completely and utterly unacceptable.”
Despite such statements, little is being done to stop the trains heading towards the precipice of conflict. Everything is being said about getting citizens of other countries out of Ukraine before the bloody resolution. In late January, of the 129 diplomatic missions based in Ukraine, four had announced the departure of family members of personnel: the US, UK, Australia and Germany.
US President Joe Biden has been the leading voice on this move, adding kindling in urging that, “American citizens should leave, and should leave now.” In an interview with NBC News, he did nothing to quell concerns. “We’re dealing with one of the largest armies in the world. This is a very different situation and things could go crazy quickly.”
The Australians, unimaginatively obedient, have also issued similar calls of evacuation, suggesting imminent conflict. Canberra has become rather adept at evacuating embassy staff and shutting down operations in the face of a crisis. “Given the deteriorating security situation caused by the build up of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border,” Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne stated, “the Government has directed the departure of staff at the Australian embassy at Kyiv.”
Ukrainian officials have not been too impressed by these very public sentiments of jumping ship. Volodymyr Shalkivskyi, based at the Ukrainian embassy in Canberra, wished to “avoid panic and different kind of rumours that the invasion is inevitable.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also told reporters in southern Ukraine that, “The best friend of enemies is panic in our country.”
The Ukrainian premier even went so far as to invite Biden to visit Kyiv to ease tensions, something he is unlikely to do, given the calls to evacuate US citizens. “I am convinced that your arrival in Kyiv in the coming days, which are crucial for stabilising the situation, will be a powerful signal,” Zelensky is supposed to have said in a call to the US president. He hoped that this would “help prevent the spread of panic.”
While Zelensky’s role seems increasingly marginal, one blowed sideways by the winds of events increasingly beyond his control, Blinken’s focus, and that of the Biden administration, remains affixed to the Indo-Pacific. Last year’s AUKUS agreement, negotiated in secret and in defiance of other alliances, including that with France, suggests that whatever Moscow’s intentions, China remains the primary, nerve racking concern.
The post Blinken Foreign Policy first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The propaganda war against China and Russia got a whole lot worse in the past week. The very real danger of war either in our region, or in Europe, was made abundantly clear, argues William Briggs.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Government spokespeople and the media have been a little coy, but now the gloves are off: China is the enemy. William Briggs argues that the Quad meeting is the latest propaganda assault.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee, two top members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, implored the Biden administration on Wednesday to urgently pursue a diplomatic outcome in Ukraine, warning that “there is no military solution” to surging tensions with Russia.
“Diplomacy needs to be the focus,” Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the CPC, and Lee (D-Calif.), the head of the caucus’ Peace and Security Taskforce, said in a statement.
While voicing support for the Biden administration’s efforts to “extend and deepen the dialogue” with Russia amid fears of a disastrous war involving two nuclear-armed nations, the two progressive lawmakers raised alarm over the flow of U.S. arms into Ukraine and the prospect of American troops being deployed to Eastern Europe.
“We have significant concerns that new troop deployments… and a flood of hundreds of lethal weapons will only raise tensions and increase the chance of miscalculation,” Jayapal and Lee said as their party’s leadership planned to fast-track legislation authorizing $500 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
The pair also warned against imposing “sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions” on Russia, arguing such a tactic would do more harm than good.
“In past crises, where events are moving quickly and intelligence is unclear, vigorous, delicate diplomacy is essential to de-escalation,” the lawmakers said. “We call upon our colleagues to allow the administration to find a diplomatic way out of this crisis.”
Jayapal and Lee’s statement came shortly before the U.S. on Wednesday delivered a written response to Russia’s security demands on Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance that Ukraine is looking to join. Russia sees the admission of Ukraine into NATO as a serious security threat.
As the Associated Press reported, “Moscow has demanded guarantees that NATO will never admit the country and other ex-Soviet nations as members and that the alliance will roll back troop deployments in other former Soviet bloc nations.”
“Some of these, like the membership pledge, are nonstarters for the U.S. and its allies, creating a seemingly intractable stalemate that many fear can only end in a war,” AP noted.
While the details of the U.S. response to Russia have not been made public, Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated Wednesday that the Biden administration did not make any concessions to Moscow’s top demands, which are laid out in a draft security pact.
“We make clear that there are core principles that we are committed to uphold and defend, including Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the right of states to choose their own security arrangements and alliances,” said Blinken, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in person last week.
Lavrov, for his part, told reporters Wednesday that “if the West continues its aggressive course, Moscow will take the necessary retaliatory measures.”
“We won’t allow our proposals to be drowned in endless discussions,” he added.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A broad coalition of nearly 300 U.S.-based social justice groups on Friday urged the Biden administration to “immediately and unequivocally” condemn the Israeli government’s recent decision to classify a half-dozen Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations.”
“These actions by the Israeli government are a clear attack on human rights,” says the coalition in its letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “As such, we urge you to issue a swift rejection of this unprecedented attack on Palestinian human rights organizations and the attempt by the Israeli government to shut down, delegitimize, isolate, and chill a growing human rights movement.”
Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s punitive designation targeted six groups — Addameer, AlHaq, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.
Under the apartheid regime’s Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016, “these human rights organizations now face possible mass arrest and being shut down by the Israeli government, and anyone identifying with the groups can also be subject to imprisonment,” the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), one of the groups that spearheaded Friday’s letter, warned in a statement.
Israel’s move was quickly rebuked by progressive lawmakers, including U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), and advocates from CCR, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and 21 Israel-based groups.
In their letter to Blinken, the coalition points out that “smearing the promotion and defense of human rights as ‘terrorist’ activity is a dangerous, well-worn tactic of authoritarian regimes and a shameful political maneuver to undermine the vital work of these organizations.”
Describing the six recently criminalized groups as “trusted partners in our collective work to secure human rights for all,” the coalition notes that they “form part of the bedrock of Palestinian civil society that has been protecting and advancing Palestinian human rights for decades across the full spectrum of issues of global concern, including children’s rights, prisoners’ rights, women’s rights, socio-economic rights, the rights of farmworkers, and justice and accountability for international crimes.”
Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), said in a statement that “Israel’s authoritarian attack on these six leading Palestinian human rights organizations is designed to stop their work exposing Israel’s government for what it is: a separate-and-unequal apartheid regime engaging in ongoing settler-colonial violence against the Palestinian people.”
288 US orgs are calling the Biden admin to immediately & unequivocally condemn Israel’s criminalization of 6 Palestinian human rights orgs. Their letter: https://t.co/c9Gh56b8o9 @POTUS, pick a side: Palestinian human rights or Israeli apartheid?#StandWithThe6 pic.twitter.com/TMs6Ksv52w
— The CCR (@theCCR) October 29, 2021
The letter cites last week’s joint statement from HRW and Amnesty, which said that “for decades, Israeli authorities have systematically sought to muzzle human rights monitoring and punish those who criticize its repressive rule over Palestinians.”
“Palestinian human rights defenders have always borne the brunt of the repression,” HRW and Amnesty noted, warning that Gantz’s “appalling and unjust” attempt to outlaw certain groups is “an alarming escalation that threatens to shut down the work of Palestine’s most prominent civil society organizations.”
HRW and Amnesty attributed Israel’s brazen authoritarianism to “the decadeslong failure of the international community to challenge grave Israeli human rights abuses and impose meaningful consequences for them.”
Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, concurred. Fox argued Friday that “the Israeli government is openly attacking prominent Palestinian human rights organizations and threatening human rights defenders with mass arrest… because for decades, the Israeli apartheid government has faced little to no accountability for its repressive actions.”
Calling Israel’s “outrageous” decision to ostracize Palestinian civil society organizations “an attack… on the international human rights movement,” HRW and Amnesty stressed last week that “how the international community responds will be a true test of its resolve to protect human rights defenders.”
The coalition, for its part, has answered by arguing that international responses to Israel’s ongoing human rights violations have been “inadequate” and “should change.”
“A threat against the Palestinian human rights movement is a threat against movements for social justice everywhere,” the letter states, “and in order to protect human rights and human rights defenders, all states must be held accountable for taking such manifestly unjust actions.”
“As groups committed to social justice, civil rights, and universal human rights,” the letter continues, “we have seen first hand the ways that the charge of ‘terrorist’ and the so-called ‘war on terror’ threatens not only international human rights defenders, but also social movements and marginalized communities here in the U.S.: Indigenous, Black, brown, Muslim, and Arab activists and communities have similarly faced silencing, intimidation, criminalization, and surveillance under such baseless charges.”
Although the U.S. government “has long offered unconditional support to the Israeli government,” the letter adds, “our movements and organizations will always stand first and foremost with the rights and safety of people.”
To that end, signatories demanded that Blinken take the following steps:
In addition to CCR, the letter was initiated by USCPR, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, and Adalah Justice Project. It garnered support from a wide array of groups, including CodePink, Just Foreign Policy, and Oxfam America.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The military leaders from three countries had assembled with their interpreters in Beijing’s historic Forbidden City. Chinese general Wei Fenghe hosted North Korean vice-marshal Kim Jong-gwan and the Russian army general Valery Gerasimov. Those gathered were feeling quite jovial, as they clinked glasses of champagne.
“Fight fire with fire. Isn’t that what they say,” said vice-marshal Kim.
They all raised their glasses again.
Kim likened the newly formed CHRUNK (China-Russia-North Korea) to the AUKUS collaboration where the United States and United Kingdom agreed to partner and supply nuclear submarines to Australia. CHRUNK would see North Korea being provided with nuclear submarines by China and Russia.
“Uncle Sam isn’t going to like this,” added Kim with a wry grin.
“And what is Uncle Sam going to do about it?” said the usually dour-faced Gerasimov.
“What can Uncle Sam do about it?” said the wispy-haired general Wei. “Nothing.”
Kim and Gerasimov smiled at their Chinese host.
“You can probably expect an increase of American navy ships through the South China Sea,” said Gerasimov, waving his right arm off to his side. “And they’ll probably come with a flotilla of nuclear submarines. I hope they can navigate the sea,” he added referring to the USS Connecticut‘s recent collision.
“Let them come,” said Wei. “We each will have our own nuclear submarines now.”
“But the Americans, and of course the Brits and Aussies — the barking pets of the Americans — will complain about us contributing to nuclear proliferation,” considered Kim.
“Well, the Americans should have thought about that before providing nuclear submarines to Australia, and pissing Macron off in the process,” countered Gerasimov.
“The thing is that the Aussies don’t have nuclear weapons and you do,” said Wei looking at Kim.
“True, but we have a no-first-use policy just like China does,” demurred Kim.
Gerasimov struck a pose with his left arm across his body, his right elbow on his left hand, and his right hand tucked under his chin like Rodin’s “The Thinker.”
“There is nothing much more to sanction in any of us, as it is,” chuckled Gerasimov.
“And it helps that we cooperate to overcome the sanctions. At any rate, we Koreans will maintain our juche,” said Kim.
Back in Washington, the mood was decidedly different than in Beijing. In the Oval Office president Joe Biden was fuming. “How dare they do this,” he bellowed, thumping his clenched fist on the table.
His inner circle sat silently. Vice-president Kamala Harris switched placement of her hands, one on top of the other on the lap of her pantsuit, à la the fashionista Hillary Clinton. National security adviser Jake Sullivan nodded his head. Secretary of defense Lloyd Austin sat stern-faced. Secretary of state Antony Blinken chimed in, “We have to do something about these communist upstarts.”
Austin turned to his colleague and looked at him solemnly. He thought to inform the secretary of state that Russia was no longer communist, but he bit his tongue. Then he spoke, “What do you propose we do? We have sanctioned them, done our best to get our allies to not do business with them, had their tech CFO holed up with extradition proceedings. We broke our One-China undertaking, and we sent gunboats to try and scare them. Where has all that gotten us?”
The air in the room grew heavy and tense. Aside from Biden, who now appeared to be nodding off, the others knew what the retired general Austin hinted at: the unthinkable. War. War with nuclear-armed adversaries.
The Beijing meeting of CHRUNK concluded with a next agenda that proposed discussing freedom of navigation flotillas in the Straits of Florida, support for Puerto Rican independence, and possible CHRUNK expansion to Cuba and provisioning it with nuclear submarines.
The post CHRUNK first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Agreeing a post-Brexit free trade deal between Britain and the United States will take “some time”, US secretary of state Antony Blinken has warned.
Blinken said president Joe Biden’s new trade negotiator Katherine Tai would be taking time to review the discussions that had taken place with the Trump administration before progressing with the talks.
Blinken, who’s been in London for the meeting of G7 foreign ministers, said he believed the US and the UK were “profoundly in sync”. However he said that the US wanted to ensure any trade agreement would benefit American workers and their families. He said:
Our trade negotiator just got on the job, so she’s taking the time to go back and review everything that was discussed and that’s going to take some time.
We want to make sure that, whether it’s with the United Kingdom or anyone else, any agreements reached are consistent with the principles that President Biden has established to focus on making sure that these agreements really advance the wellbeing of our workers and their families. That’s our focus.
In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Blinken stressed the importance the president placed on ensuring that the gains of the peace process in the north of Ireland were maintained.
With continuing tensions in the north over the implementation of the Brexit “divorce” settlement, Blinken said the US was “very focussed” on ensuring the Good Friday Agreement was maintained. He said:
We want to make sure that, whether it’s with the United Kingdom or the EU, whether it’s anything we’re doing, that we make sure that the tremendous gains from the Good Friday Agreement are sustained and that the economic as well the political wellbeing of Northern Ireland is taken fully into account
On Iran, Blinken said the US had shown its “seriousness and purpose” in seeking to strike a new nuclear deal after Donald Trump tore up the internationally agreed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). However, he said Tehran had to show it was willing to comply with the terms of the agreement – intended to curb its ability to develop a nuclear weapon – amid concerns it was close to achieving a “breakout” capability. He said:
Compliance is compliance and what we don’t know is whether Iran is prepared to make the same decision and to move forward.
He added:
Right now, unfortunately, Iran has itself lifted many of the constraints imposed on it by the agreement because we pulled out, and it is now getting closer and closer again to that point where its breakout time is going to be down to a few months and eventually even less.
So there’s nothing naive about this. On the contrary, it’s a very clear way of dealing with a problem that was dealt with effectively by the JCPOA and we’ll have to see if we can do the same thing again.
By The Canary
This post was originally published on The Canary.
US President Joe Biden’s cancellation of punitive sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court (ICC) removes a serious obstacle to the court’s providing justice to the victims of the world’s worst crimes, Human Rights Watch said on 2 April 2, 2021. Biden revoked a June 2020 order by then-President Donald Trump authorizing asset freezes and entry bans to thwart the ICC’s work. This was expected after an appeal by many NGOs, see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/02/19/large-group-of-ngos-call-on-biden-administration-to-repeal-icc-sanctions/
In announcing the repeal of the executive order, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “[t]hese decisions reflect our assessment that the measures adopted were inappropriate and ineffective.” The State Department also lifted existing visa restrictions.
“The Trump administration’s perversely punitive sanctions against the ICC showed stark contempt for the victims of grave international crimes and the prosecutors who seek to hold those responsible to account,” said Richard Dicker, international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “In removing this unprecedented threat to the global rule of law, President Biden has begun the long process of restoring US credibility on international justice through the ICC.”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/02/us-rescinds-icc-sanctions
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
During the March 23-24 meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) council, Anthony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, encouraged NATO members to join the U.S. in viewing China as an economic and security threat to the U.S. as well as to NATO countries, thereby expanding NATO’s areas of focus to include the Pacific. This is a dangerous move that must be challenged.
To gain insight into what transpired at the March NATO meeting, we can look to a roadmap for NATO’s future, which was released last fall. The report, entitled “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” is intended to be a guide for the military alliance in meeting the challenges it will face in the next decade.
The post NATO Is Increasingly Positioning Itself In Opposition To China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
On Tuesday, March 30, 2021, the 2020 edition of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices was released by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. The Secretary of State is required by law to submit an annual report to the U.S. Congress on “the status of internationally recognized human rights” in all countries that are members of the United Nations. This annual report, called the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices but commonly known as the Human Rights Report (HRR), provides information that is used by Congress, the Executive Branch, and courts in making policies and/or decisions; thus accurate information on human rights conditions is critical. The HRR also informs the work at home and abroad of civil society, human rights defenders, lawmakers, scholars, immigration judges and asylum officers, multilateral institutions, and other governments.
The country reports are prepared by U.S. diplomatic missions around the world, which collect, analyze, and synthesize information from a variety of sources, including government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and the media. The reports do not attempt to catalogue every human rights-related incident, nor are they an effort by the U.S. government to judge others. Instead, they claim to be factual in nature and focus on a one-year period, but they may include illustrative cases from previous reporting years.
Conor Finnegan for ABC News on 30 March 2021 compared the report with those of the Trump administration:
Blinken launched the department’s 45th annual human rights report Tuesday which The report covers 2020 and found a further deterioration for human rights in many countries, particularly as governments used the coronavirus pandemic to curb their citizens’ rights.
The first report under the Biden administration also included changes that eliminated the conservative take of the Trump years, like ending former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “hierarchy” of rights and re-introducing a section on women’s reproductive rights that will be published later this year.
When human rights defenders “come under attack, they often look to the United States to speak up on their behalf. Too often in recent years, these defenders heard only silence from us,” Blinken said. “We are back for those brave advocates as well. We will not be silent.“
In particular, Blinken “decisively” repudiated Pompeo’s “Unalienable Rights Commission,” a panel of academics that said in a report last July that freedom of religion and right to property were the most important human rights. While Pompeo touted the report and said it would lay a foundation for future administrations, critics accused it of minimizing minority rights. Blinken essentially jettisoned the report, saying Tuesday, “There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others. Past unbalanced statements that suggest such a hierarchy, including those offered by a recently disbanded State Department advisory committee, do not represent a guiding document for this administration.” [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/07/11/trump-marches-on-with-commission-on-unalienable-rights/]
Human rights are increasingly under threat around the world, Blinken said, saying the trend lines “are in the wrong direction.”
In particular, he highlighted what he called the Chinese government’s genocide of Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province, attacks on civil society and political opposition in Russia, Uganda and Venezuela and on pro-democracy protesters in Belarus, war crimes in Yemen, atrocities “credibly reported” in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and abuses by the Syria’s Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
While the report doesn’t touch on Myanmar’s coup and the military’s bloody crackdown on protests, because they happened in 2021, Blinken took time to again condemn the events. But after weeks of steadily increasing U.S. sanctions that have not deterred the ruling junta, he had no specific answer on what else the U.S. could do to change the darkening trajectory there.
Mandel Ngan/Pool/ReutersU.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during the release of the “2020 Country…Chinese officials and state-run outlets have increasingly raised U.S. race relations to say American officials are in no position to criticize Beijing — comparing Uighur slave labor in Xinjiang to Black slaves in the U.S. South.
“We know we have work to do at home. That includes addressing profound inequities, including systemic racism. We don’t pretend these problems don’t exist. … We deal with them in the daylight with full transparency, and in fact, that’s exactly what separates our democracy and autocracies,” he said, adding that open reckoning gives the U.S. “greater legitimacy” to address other countries’ records, too.
The Biden administration will use all tools available to impose consequences on human rights abusers and encourage better behavior, Blinken said, including the new Khashoggi policy that imposes visa restrictions on officials that target or harass their countries’ dissidents.
“Standing up for human rights everywhere is in America’s interests, and the Biden-Harris administration will stand against human rights abuses wherever they occur, regardless of whether the perpetrators are adversaries or partners,” he said.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
Secretary of state takes veiled swipe at Trump administration and says change of approach is ‘in America’s interests’
The United States will speak out about human rights everywhere including in allies and at home, secretary of state Antony Blinken has vowed, turning a page from Donald Trump as he bemoaned deteriorations around the world.
Presenting the state department’s first human rights report under President Joe Biden, the new top US diplomat took some of his most pointed, yet still veiled, swipes at the approach of the Trump administration.
Related: Pompeo claims private property and religious freedom are ‘foremost’ human rights
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
On March 18, the world was treated to the of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sternly lecturing senior Chinese officials about the need for China to respect a “rules-based order.” The alternative, Blinken warned, is a world in which might makes right, and “that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.”
Blinken was clearly speaking from experience. Since the United States dispensed with the UN Charter and the rule of international law to invade Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and has used military force…
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Living close to Turkey, I follow the situation there perhaps with more worry than others. And nothing good seems to happen:
Turkish police detained three district heads of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and seven others in Istanbul on Friday over alleged links to militants, police said, two days after a court case began over banning the party.
Separately, Turkey’s Human Rights Association (IHD) co-chairman Ozturk Turkdogan was arrested by police at his home, IHD said, prompting human rights groups to call for his release. Turkdogan was then released on Friday evening, the association said.
Responding to the arrest today of Öztürk Türkdoğan, the president of Turkey’s Human Rights Organisation, Esther Major, Amnesty International’s Senior Research Adviser for Europe, said:
“The detention of Öztürk Türkdoğan is outrageous. With ink barely dry on the Human Rights Action Plan announced by President Erdoğan two weeks ago, his arrest reveals that this document is not worth the paper it is written on.
After over three years in jail without a conviction, one of Turkey’s highest-profile detainees, Osman Kavala, is “not optimistic” that President Tayyip Erdogan’s planned reforms can change a judiciary he says is being used to silence dissidents.
A philanthropist, 63-year-old Kavala told Reuters that after decades of watching Turkey’s judiciary seeking to restrict human rights, it was now engaged in “eliminating” perceived political opponents of Erdogan’s government.
Kavala was providing written responses via his lawyers to Reuters’ questions days after Erdogan outlined a “Human Rights Action Plan” that was said will strengthen rights to a free trial and freedom of expression. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/09/16/osman-kavala-and-mozn-hassan-receive-2020-international-hrant-dink-award/ and
Not surprisingly this is leading to reactions, such as a bipartisan letter penned by 170 members of the US Congress to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which the lawmakers have urged President Joe Biden’s administration to consider the “troubling human rights abuses” in Turkey. “President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party have used their nearly two decades in power to weaken Turkey’s judiciary, install political allies in key military and intelligence positions, crack down on free speech and (the) free press,” the letter said. Dated 26 February but made public on 1 March, the letter asks Washington to formulate its policy regarding Turkey considering human rights, saying that the Erdogan administration has strained the bilateral relationship.
On top of this Turkey has pulled out of the world’s first binding treaty to prevent and combat violence against women by presidential decree, in the latest victory for conservatives in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party. The 2011 “Istanbul Convention| [SIC], signed by 45 countries and the European Union, requires governments to adopt legislation prosecuting domestic violence and similar abuse as well as marital rape and female genital mutilation. Conservatives had claimed the charter damages family unity, encourages divorce and that its references to equality were being used by the LGBT community to gain broader acceptance in society. The publication of the decree in the official gazette early Saturday sparked anger among rights groups and calls for protests in Istanbul. Women have taken to the streets in cities across Turkey calling on the government to keep to the 2011 Istanbul Convention.
Gokce Gokcen, deputy chairperson of the main opposition CHP party said abandoning the treaty meant “keeping women second class citizens and letting them be killed.” “Despite you and your evil, we will stay alive and bring back the convention,” she said on Twitter. Last year, 300 women were murdered according to the rights group We Will Stop Femicide Platform.
The platform called for a “collective fight against those who dropped the Istanbul convention,” in a message on Twitter.
“The Istanbul convention was not signed at your command and it will not leave our lives on your command,” its secretary general Fidan Ataselim tweeted.
Kerem Altiparmak, an academic and lawyer specializing in human rights law, likened the government’s shredding of the convention to the 1980 military coup. “What’s abolished tonight is not only the Istanbul convention but the parliament’s will and legislative power,” he commented.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1822001/middle-east
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1828581/middle-east
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1818641/middle-east
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
At a virtual ceremony on 8 March 2021 (international women’s day) US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken hosted First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden. It was live streamed on www.state.gov. For more on this award and its laureates of previous years, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/A386E593-5BB7-12E8-0528-AAF11BE46695
This year includes an honorary award for seven women leaders and activists from Afghanistan who were assassinated for their dedication to improving the lives of Afghans:
Fatema Natasha Khalil, an official with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission who was killed, along with her driver, in June 2020 by an IED in Kabul, on her way to her office.
General Sharmila Frough, the head of the Gender Unit in the National Directorate of Security (NDS) was one of the longest-serving female NDS officers, having served as chief of the anti-kidnapping division and working undercover combating criminal networks. General Frough was assassinated in an IED explosion targeting her vehicle in March 2020 in Kabul.
Maryam Noorzad, a midwife who served remote locations in Wardak and Bamyan provinces before working for Médecins Sans Frontières Kabul PD13 hospital. On May 12, 2020, three gunmen attacked the maternity ward of the hospital, but Maryam refused to leave her patient, who was in labor. Maryam, her patient, and the newborn baby were killed in the delivery suite.
Fatima Rajabi, a 23-year-old police officer originally from Ghazni province and a member of the anti-narcotics division. She was traveling to her home village in Jaghori district in a civilian minibus in July 2020 when the Taliban stopped the vehicle and took her captive. Two weeks later, the Taliban killed her and sent her remains, which had gunshot wounds and signs of torture, to her family.
Freshta, daughter of Amir Mohamed, a 35-year-old prison guard with the Office of Prison Administration. She was walking from her residence in Kandahar City to a taxi on her way to work when she was murdered by an unknown gunman on October 25, 2020.
Malalai Maiwand, a reporter at Enikas Radio and TV, was shot and killed, along with her driver, by a gunman on December 10, 2020, in an attack on her vehicle in Jalalabad. Malalai was not the first in her family to be targeted. Five years earlier, her mother, an activist, was also killed by unknown gunmen.
Freshta Kohistani, a 29-year-old women’s rights and democracy activist, was assassinated by unknown gunmen near her home in Kapsia province on December 24, 2020. Kohistani regularly organized events advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan and used social media as a platform for her messaging.
The other 2021 awardees are:
Belarus – Maria Kalesnikava
Ahead of the August 9, 2020, presidential election, Belarusian women emerged as a dominant political force and driver of societal change in Belarus due in no small part to Maria Kalesnikava. After authorities jailed or exiled the three most popular male opposition candidates, Maria and her partners mounted a historic and sustained challenge to the 26-year rule of Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Maria continues to be the face of the opposition inside Belarus, courageously facing imprisonment in the aftermath of the disputed election. Despite her detention, Maria continues to keep the democratic movement alive inside Belarus and serves as a source of inspiration for all those seeking to win freedom for themselves and their countries.
Burma – Phyoe Phyoe Aung
An emerging leader who is likely to play a role in shaping the country in the coming years, Phyoe Phyoe Aung is the co-founder of the Wings Institute for Reconciliation, an organization that facilitates exchanges between youth of different ethnic and religious groups. Her work promotes peacebuilding and reconciliation and enables a vital dialogue on federalism and transitional justice. She organized a 2015 protest march from Mandalay to Yangon that was violently suppressed by the Myanmar Police Force as it neared Yangon, and she and her husband were arrested and imprisoned. Phyoe Phyoe was released in April 2016 after 13 months as part of a broad pardon of political prisoners facing court trials. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/05/11/finalists-runners-up-front-line-defenders-award-human-rights-defenders-2016-announcement/#more-7981
Cameroon – Maximilienne C. Ngo Mbe
Maximilienne C. Ngo Mbe has demonstrated extraordinary leadership, courage, and perseverance through adversity in promoting human rights in Cameroon and Central Africa. She has been an outspoken voice among civil society actors, often sacrificing her personal safety, in the push for a peaceful solution to the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon. She has called for an end to human rights abuses committed by separatists and security forces in the Northwest and Southwest regions and by security forces in the Far North. Maximilienne has also spoken out against the increased constraints placed on civil society, journalists, and political opposition by the Government of Cameroon. Her commitment to promoting human rights has been unwavering despite the intimidation, threats, and assault she has endured.
China – Wang Yu
Wang Yu was one of the country’s most prominent human rights lawyers until her arrest and imprisonment following China’s nationwide persecution of lawyers and rights advocates during the “709 crackdown.” She had taken on multiple politically sensitive cases, representing activists, scholars, Falun Gong practitioners, farmers, and petitioners in cases involving a wide array of issues, including women’s and children’s rights, and the rights to religion, freedom of expression, assembly, and association. She is now under an exit ban and has been harassed, threatened, searched, and physically assaulted by police since she began to take on rights abuse cases in 2011. [see also https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/08/02/another-chinese-human-rights-lawyer-wang-yu-spontaneous-video-confession/]
Colombia – Mayerlis Angarita
Mayerlis Angarita has courageously advanced peace and human rights in Colombia, often at great personal risk. Her work has improved the security, livelihoods, and resilience of countless women leaders, conflict victims, and her community. Finding healing in storytelling after her own mother was forcibly disappeared during Colombia’s conflict, she founded the civil society organization “Narrate to Live,” which now serves over 800 women victims of conflict. Additionally, after the most recent attempt on her life, she engaged the highest levels of the Colombian government to advance a comprehensive action plan to prevent violence against women leaders in her community. Her constructive engagement across 27 government entities, civil society, and the international community has been key to the plan’s success and propelled it to become a model for human rights defender protection throughout Colombia.
Democratic Republic of the Congo – Julienne Lusenge
Since 1978, Julienne Lusenge has been the leading female activist in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) fighting against gender-based violence (GBV) and the promotion of the rights of women and girls in conflict situations. In 2000, she created Women’s Solidarity for Peace and Integral Development, the DRC’s foremost organization defending the rights of women and girls against impunity for GBV. Julienne’s vocal testimony has contributed to the adoption of international agreements such as UN 1820, which recognizes sexual violence as a weapon of war. Julienne has touched the lives of millions of women across the DRC, harnessing the attention of the international community to acknowledge and act on the extent of sexual violence shattering DRC’s communities.
Guatemala – Judge Erika Aifan
Judge Erika Lorena Aifan is a trial judge working in the High-Risk Criminal Court with responsibility for high-impact crimes. She has presided over high-profile corruption and war atrocity cases, leading to defamation and threats of violence against her. Despite these challenges, Judge Aifan persisted as a Guatemalan judge independent of political influence. She has demonstrated determination and fortitude in upholding the rule of law in Guatemala. Despite the strong opposition she has faced throughout her tenure, Judge Aifan has become an icon in Guatemala in the fight against corruption, efforts to increase transparency, and actions to improve independence in the justice sector.
Iran – Shohreh Bayat
When Shohreh Bayat boarded her flight on her way to the 2020 Women’s Chess World Championship, she had no idea she might be seeing her native Iran for the last time. Shohreh, the first female Category A international chess arbiter in Asia, was photographed at the Championship without her hijab visible, which is compulsory in Iran. Within 24 hours, the Iranian Chess Federation – which Shohreh had previously led – refused to guarantee Shohreh’s safety if she returned to Iran without first apologizing. Fearing for her safety and unwilling to apologize for the incident, Shohreh made the heart-wrenching decision to seek refuge in the UK, leaving her husband – who lacked a UK visa – in Iran. In that moment, Shohreh chose to be a champion for women’s rights rather than be cowed by the Iranian government’s threats.
Nepal – Muskan Khatun
Muskan Khatun has been instrumental in bringing about new legislation criminalizing acid attacks and imposing strong penalties against perpetrators in Nepal. When Muskan was 15, she was critically injured in an acid attack after she rejected a boy’s romantic propositions. With the help of a social worker, Muskan lobbied for stronger legal action against the perpetrators of acid attacks under duress of threats and the strong social stigma associated with acid attack victims. She went before a parliamentary committee, wrote a letter to Nepal’s Prime Minister, and eventually met with him in person, to request a stronger law. Within a year of her attack, Nepal’s President issued an ordinance with harsh penalties for acid attacks and regulations on the sale of acids, a testament to Muskan’s significant advocacy.
Somalia – Zahra Mohamed Ahmad
For more than 20 years, Zahra Mohamed Ahmad has been at the forefront of defending human rights in Somalia, especially for its most vulnerable groups. As an accomplished lawyer, Zahra began providing legal aid, for sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) survivors, women on remand status, and women in pre-trial detention. Zahra is the founder of and legal advisor for the Somali Women Development Center, an organization that reports on human rights violations and cases of abuse; supports survivors through legal assistance; established Somalia’s first free hotline service to combat SGBV; and operates one-stop centers for SGBV survivors, mobile legal clinics, family care centers, safe spaces for women and girls, and community child protection centers for internally displaced children.
Spain – Sister Alicia Vacas Moro
A registered nurse, Sister Alicia Vacas Moro ran a medical clinic in Egypt for eight years, helping 150 low income patients a day treat their maladies. She then moved to the biblical town of Bethany to help an impoverished Bedouin community, especially women and children. She set up training programs for women that provided them with previously unavailable economic opportunities, and established kindergartens in Bedouin camps, providing an educational foundation for children. In an environment shaped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sister Alicia also assisted traumatized refugees and asylum seekers, a job she continues to perform on a larger scale in her current role as the regional coordinator for the Comboni Sisters in the Middle East. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck northern Italy, she flew to Italy to assist and treat fellow sister nuns, undeterred by extreme danger to herself.
Sri Lanka – Ranitha Gnanarajah
Ranitha Gnanarajah, a lawyer, continues to fight for and defend the rights of the marginalized and vulnerable communities in the country, despite threats and challenges by the state. Ranitha has dedicated her career to accountability and justice for victims of enforced disappearances and prisoners detained often for years without charge under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act by providing free legal aid and related services. As an individual personally affected by the conflict and based on her extensive experience working with victims and their families, Ranitha has demonstrated tremendous passion and dedication to justice and accountability, especially for Sri Lanka’s most vulnerable populations.
Turkey – Canan Gullu
Canan Gullu has been an activist and organizer for 31 years and is the president of the Turkish Federation of Women’s Associations, an umbrella organization of women’s NGOs; she leads186 branches and 52,500 members. Canan has been a steadfast champion of gender equality, working to promote women’s participation in governance, labor force, and education. In 2007, the Turkish Federation of Women Associations established the first emergency hotline for victims of violence in Turkey, which continues its operations. Over the past two years, Canan launched an education and advocacy campaign focused on failures in the Turkish government’s implementation since 2012 of the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Canan’s activism has been critical to educating the public about the convention and reinforcing the need to combat gender-based violence, which quelled some politicians’ calls for Turkey’s withdrawal.
Venezuela – Ana Rosario Contreras
As president of the Caracas Nurses’ Association, Ana Rosario Contreras has been on the front lines in the fight for the rights of healthcare professionals, patients, and labor unions. Contreras’ fierce activism has generated widespread support from the Venezuelan people and is at the center of the civil-political movement pushing for democratic change. In a climate where the government routinely jails, tortures, harasses, threatens, or restricts the movement of its opponents, Contreras defends citizens’ rights at great personal risk. She has advocated for labor rights and has worked tirelessly to ensure that healthcare workers could receive a subsidy through Interim President Juan Guido’s Health Heroes program..
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
We’re also stepping up our diplomacy to end the war in Yemen — a war which has created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe. I’ve asked my Middle East team to ensure our support for the United Nations-led initiative to impose a ceasefire, open humanitarian channels, and restore long-dormant peace talks….
And to underscore our commitment, we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.
This announcement does not augur peace in Yemen any time soon. Rather it looks a bit like political mystification that some have chosen to celebrate now, regardless of what it actually means, apparently in hope of making it a meaningful, self-fulfilling prophecy some time in the future. This does not seem likely, given what Biden actually said, but we shall see.
For the foreseeable future, Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, will remain the victim of a Saudi war of aggression and Saudi war crimes. Since March 2015, with the full support of the Obama administration, Saudi Arabia and its allies have turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, as assessed by the United Nations. Relentless bombing of military and civilian targets alike has led to the deaths of more than 100,000 Yemenis from famine and disease. Millions more need international aid to survive.
One hopeful sign now is the Biden administration’s announcement on February 5 that the US designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization has been rescinded. This was a necessary corrective, not a bold move. The Houthis are ethnic natives in northwest Yemen. Their current territory holds about 70% of Yemen’s 30 million people. They are the victims of Saudi terror bombing.
The Houthis are also the victims of US Iranophobia, the paranoid policy framing that sees Iranian devils behind every difficulty in the Middle East, regardless of any lack of evidence. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is an Iranophobe, as well as a Christo-fascist. In a midnight news dump on January 10, Pompeo announced the terrorist designation to go into effect on January 19. The announcement provided little basis in policy or fact and received bipartisan criticism because its most likely impact would have been to exacerbate human suffering in Yemen.
While the Biden administration’s decision to rescind the terrorist designation eliminates a factor that would have made the Yemen situation worse, there is little in Biden’s speech that promises to make the situation better any time soon.
Supporting United Nations efforts is probably helpful as far as it goes, but it’s a far cry from US engagement on the peace side to match US engagement on the war side. And to suggest that the UN might “impose a ceasefire” implies a military deployment that is pretty much imaginary. The conflict within Yemen is multi-sided, with few if any clearly-defined frontlines.
The Houthis control most of the northwest, but not all, and that may be the most coherent governmental region in the country. In the south, the official Yemen government, unelected but imposed by international fiat and controlled by Saudi Arabia, shares territory with its own rebel faction controlled by the UAE (United Arab Emirates). The eastern two-thirds of the country, mostly desert, contains islands of control under Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other, smaller factions.
The US was misguided, at best, to sanction the Saudi aggression. The US was criminal to support the Saudi aggression for the past six years. Now Biden has said the US is ending “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen.” There are NO defensive operations in that war, the war is effectively all in Yemen. And when Biden says the US is ending all American support, does that mean no more military guidance from the US mission in Riyadh? No more logistical support? No more intelligence sharing? No more training Saudi pilots? No more target selection? No more mid-air refueling? No more maintenance for Saudi bombers? No more spare parts? Does it mean an end to the US naval blockade, itself an act of war?
The US has been doing all these things, and probably more, with Obama’s and Trump’s blessings since 2015. Will the US stop doing all of them now, or in the near future? Biden didn’t say (the State Department later hedged). Biden promised to end “relevant arms sales,” whatever “relevant” is supposed to mean, since it means nothing on its face. And in the next line of his speech, Biden revealed the calamitous duplicity of the US position all along:
At the same time, Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks, UAV strikes, and other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries. We’re going to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.
This is cover-your-butt spinning to excuse future failures planned to appease the Saudi aggressors. Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks and UAV strikes from the Houthis because the Houthis, in the face of relentless attack, have been fighting back.
Biden’s undefined “other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries” is murky, non-specific, unverifiable. This makes Biden sound like he’s channeling Pompeo in pure Iranophobe-speak. This fearmongering portends nothing good for Yemen.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty is under no discernible threat, except perhaps from within the monarchical police state. So the US is committed to defending an anti-democratic dictatorship that murders its critics in the most brutal fashion? How is that a good thing?
Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity is under no credible threat. Quite literally, Saudi Arabia has NO territorial integrity, since most of its border with eastern Yemen has never been drawn. The Saudis and the Houthis have a territorial dispute in the northwest dating to the 1930s. The Saudis have built more than one wall over the years in an effort to block Yemeni migrants seeking work in Saudi Arabia, which has some ten million migrant workers mostly treated abominably.
Saudi Arabia’s people face a chronic, lethal threat from their own government. There are occasional, minor threats from dissidents. Threats from abroad are likewise all but non-existent. Those missiles and UAV worrying Biden have apparently killed no one; there are no Saudi civilian casualties from the Yemen war, just the 100,000-plus Yemenis.
Biden’s reassurances to Saudi Arabia weren’t just specious, they represent an unchanging rigidity in American thinking that continues as a threat to peace. On Democracy Now, Michigan State University assistant professor Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni scholar and activist, put Biden’s comments in perspective:
So, in his speech, Biden said that he is ending offensive operations in Yemen, but committed — he went on to commit to defending Saudi borders. Now, this is really concerning to me, because I still remember the statement that the White House put out when Obama initially entered the war in March of 2015, and that was the exact same framing, that they were defending Saudi territory from the Houthis. This is what led us here — six years of war, over 100,000 Yemenis killed, 250,000 people starved to death, if not more, the entire country destroyed. And the framing was always to protect Saudi borders.
In reality, in 2015, the Houthis were nowhere near the Saudi border, they were deep in southern Yemen, on the verge of overrunning Aden and driving out the Yemeni puppet government controlled by Saudi Arabia. That was when the Saudis launched their undeclared war; that was when the US supported the unrestricted aerial bombardment of a country with no air defense.
And beneath all the other arguments was the widespread fear of Iran, Iranophobia, based on little to no evidence. Iran is a despised Shia Muslim state in a Sunni Muslim world, and the mutual distrust is deep-seated and irrational, except that the Iranians remember that the western allies of Saudi Arabia imposed one of the world’s bloodier dictatorships on Iran. The Iranians weren’t ever very grateful, so how could the US trust them after that: obviously, if Iran had an interest in supporting the Houthis in resisting a puppet government controlled by the Saudi dictatorship, the US had a reason to intervene against the defenders of freedom. Or as Reuters reported in 2015:
The United States is speeding up arms supplies and bolstering intelligence sharing with a Saudi-led alliance bombing a militia aligned with Iran in neighboring Yemen, a senior U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday….
“Saudi Arabia is sending a strong message to the Houthis and their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen by force,” he told reporters in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
“As part of that effort, we have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence sharing, and we have established a joint coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation center….”
That US diplomat in 2015 was US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now President Biden’s new Secretary of State. He was an architect of a criminal war rooted in a largely irrational fear of Iran, along with cynical fealty to Saudi Arabia. Since 1979, US relations with Iran have been poisoned by Iranians taking American diplomats hostage, then manipulating those hostages to push Americans to elect President Reagan. There’s plenty to regret on both sides. But on February 5, Secretary Blinken started a new round of talks with American allies aimed at shaping a new relationship with Iran. The trick will be to treat Iran as a rational adversary, and even more so to persuade Iran that the US can be rational, too. The Yemen initiatives are steps in a positive direction, but only baby steps.
The post How Rational Can the US Be in Dealing with Yemen and Iran? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The United States will seek to rejoin the United Nations Human Rights Council — as an observer nation, initially — according to a statement made on Monday by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“When it works well, the Human Rights Council shines a spotlight on countries with the worst human rights records and can serve as an important forum for those fighting injustice and tyranny,” Blinken said in announcing the decision.
The move comes almost two years after the Trump administration removed the U.S. from the council as both a voting and an observing member. The choice to do so, ostensibly to protest against the council’s actions that Trump officials had disagreed with, “did nothing to encourage meaningful change, but instead created a vacuum of U.S. leadership, which countries with authoritarian agendas have used to their advantage,” Blinken said.
There are 47 member countries on the UN Human Rights Council. No country can serve as a voting member of the council for more than two consecutive three-year terms.
Officials stated that the U.S. will attempt to win a spot on the council as a voting member sometime later this year, possibly replacing Austria, Denmark or Italy when those nations’ terms expire this fall.
The council has faced a number of criticisms in recent years, most notably for having among its members representatives from countries with notable records of human rights abuses themselves, including China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Eritrea. But while the Trump administration cited the membership of those nations as a partial reason for leaving the council, it is believed that the decision may have been largely prompted by the Trump White House’s desire to bolster diplomatic ties with Israel, which is widely viewed in the international community as a chronic violator of human rights. Biden’s decision to reenter the council will likely earn him the criticism of Republicans.
Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, who served in that post when the U.S. left the council, justified the decision to leave at the time by saying the country’s commitment to the issue “does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights.”
Ironically, the administration’s departure from the council came about at the same time that the Trump White House was engaged in human rights abuses of its own — that of forcibly separating migrant children from families and placing them in cages as they came across the U.S.’s southern border. Thousands of families were ripped apart from one another as a result of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy on immigration, and to this day more than 600 children remain separated from their loved ones.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“American leadership still matters. The reality is the world simply does not organize itself,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed at his confirmation hearing. “When we are not engaged, when we are not leading, then one of two things is likely to happen. Either some other country tries to take our place but not in a way that is likely to advance our interests and values, or maybe, just as bad, no one does and then you have chaos.”
Much like President Joe Biden, Blinken is a neoliberal Democrat who believes in the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” He thinks if the United States does not impose its will and shape the world then there will be no law and order. He cannot fathom how countries could survive on their own. At least, that is how he argues for greater American intervention in global regions.
Blinken was confirmed as secretary of state in a vote on January 26. Not a single Democrat in the Senate voted against Blinken.
He is a longtime ally of Biden, and during Biden’s first term as vice president, he was his national security adviser.
During President Barack Obama’s second term, Blinken was deputy secretary of state. He was also a part of President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council from 1994 to 2001.
Blinken’s predecessor Mike Pompeo, a right-wing Christian reconstructionist, was involved in President Donald Trump administration’s failed regime change operation against Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela. Yet, despite its failure, Blinken told Republican Senator Marco Rubio he thought the Biden administration should keep recognizing Juan Guaido as the one and only true “leader.”
“We need an effective policy that can restore democracy to Venezuela, free and fair elections,” Blinken declared. He even embraced sanctions, despite the fact that they have hampered the country’s ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.
“Maybe we need to look at how we more effectively target the sanctions that we have so that regime enablers finally feel the pain of those sanctions,” Blinken added.
However, a report [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) dated January 22, 2021, indicates the sanctions by both the Obama and Trump administrations were targeted pretty well and imposed to inflict “pain” against 113 Venezuelans and 13 entities.
…President Maduro, his wife, Cecilia Flores, and son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra; Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez; Diosdado Cabello (Socialist party president); eight supreme court judges; the leaders of Venezuela’s army, national guard, and national police; governors; the director of the central bank; and the foreign minister…
Trump imposed sanctions to prohibit Venezuela from participating in U.S. financial markets and block the government’s ability to issue digital currency. Treasury Department officials prohibited corporations from purchasing Venezuelan debt. Venezuela’s state oil company, PdVSA, was aggressively targeted for seeking to evade U.S. sanctions and Venezuela’s central bank was sanctioned too.
Obama flouted the War Powers Act and launched a war in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime without the approval of Congress. It created a power vacuum filled by extremist militia groups and transformed the country into a failed state. Migrants are captured and sold in what the United Nations has referred to as “open slave markets.”
Despite the catastrophe sparked by war, Blinken defended his support for a regime change war. “I think it’s been written about. I — I was the president-elect’s national security adviser at the time. And he did not agree with that course of action.”
Biden was opposed to war in Libya. “My question was, okay, tell me what happens? [Gaddafi’s] gone. What happens? Doesn’t the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn’t it become a place where it becomes a petri dish for the growth of extremism? Tell me. Tell me what we’re gonna do.”
Rather than concede President Biden was right and he was wrong, Blinken signaled to Senate Republicans that he would be their hawk when Biden was too dovish.
Blinken bafflingly blamed Gaddafi, who was summarily executed, for what happened in Libya after his death.
“We didn’t fully appreciate the fact that one of the things Gaddafi had done over the years was to make sure that there was no possible rival to his power. And as a result, there was no effective bureaucracy, no effective administration in Libya with which to work when he was gone,” Blinken argued.
Sarah Lazare recalled for In These Times the horrors unleashed on the people of Yemen, as a result of the Obama administration’s support for Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis.
“The coalition bombed a center for the blind, a funeral, a wedding, a factory and countless homes and residential areas, and blockaded Yemen’s ports, cutting off vital food and medical shipments — all while the Obama-Biden administration was in power,” Lazare wrote.
“Indeed, the Obama White House was so complicit in war crimes in Yemen in that its own State Department internally warned key U.S. military personnel could be subject to war crimes prosecution, according to a Reuters investigation published in October 2016. By July 2015, a United Nations official was already warning that Yemen was on the verge of a famine, a premonition that horrifically came true.”
One of Pompeo’s final actions was to sanction Houthis, which caused a disruption to aid groups delivering humanitarian assistance. Biden froze the sanctions for one month the same day the Senate confirmed Blinken.
Asked about the intense humanitarian crisis in Yemen, Blinken drew a false equivalency between the actions of the Houthis and the Saudis.
“We need to be clear-eyed about the Houthis. They overthrew a government in Yemen. They engaged in a path of aggression through the country. They directed aggression toward Saudi Arabia,” Blinken contended. “They’ve committed atrocities and human rights abuses and that is a fact. What’s also a fact though is that the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen to push back against
the Houthi aggression has contributed to what is, by most accounts, the worst humanitarian situation that we face anywhere in the world.”
The Houthis were part of the Arab Spring uprising in Yemen against the corrupt government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. State Department officials generally backed these rebellions against autocratic rulers.
According to a 2017 post from Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, “American intelligence officials said that Iran was actually trying to discourage the Houthis from seizing Sanaa and openly toppling Hadi. Iran preferred a less radical course, but the Houthi leadership was drunk with success. Moreover, Undersecretary of Defense Michael Vickers said on the record in January that Washington had a productive informal intelligence relationship with the Houthis against al-Qaida. He suggested that the cooperation could continue.”
The Obama administration, which included Blinken, did not want to jeopardize a 70-year-plus alliance with Saudi Arabia and backed the monarchy’s intervention.
Blinken expressed his support for arming Ukrainian groups a total of three times. He even reminded Republican Senator Ron Johnson he had the opportunity in 2018 to write an op-ed for the New York Times promoting what senators euphemistically describe as “lethal defensive assistance.”
He told Republican Senator Rob Portman, “I very much support the continued provision to Ukraine of lethal defensive assistance and, and indeed, of the training program as well.”
“To the extent that across a couple of administrations, we’ve been able to effectively train and as well as assist in different ways the Ukrainians, that has made a material difference in their ability to withstand the aggression they’ve been on the receiving end of from Russia,” Blinken asserted.
It is difficult to gauge whether the policy has been effective or helped Ukrainians withstand battles with pro-Russian separatist groups. There is not a whole lot of reporting.
But Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who was the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, stated in 2015, “If the U.S. policy changed to provide, say, Javelins, for example, that would probably lead to increased lethality on the battlefield for the Ukrainians. It would not change the situation strategically in a positive way, because the Russians would double down. They would dramatically increase more violence, more death, more destruction.”
“The conflict in Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial east, called Donbass, erupted in April 2014, weeks after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula,” according to the Associated Press. “More than 14,000 people have been killed in fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists.”
Professor Stephen Cohen called attention to the role of neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine. The overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych was a “violent coup” led by fascist conspirators opposed to Russia. They conducted exterminations of ethnic Russians. The Azov Battalion, part of Kiev’s armed forces, is pro-Nazi and was banned from receiving U.S. military aid, but it almost certainly obtained weapons shipped by the Trump administration from the black market.
“We are left then not with Putin’s responsibility for the resurgence of fascism in a major European country but with America’s shame, and possible indelible stain, on its historical reputation for tolerating it, even if only through silence,” Cohen concluded.
It was the United States under Trump that ditched the Iran nuclear deal, not Iran. Still, it is the Biden’s administration position that Iran should first “comply” with U.S. demands before the U.S. rejoins the deal.
“If Iran returns to compliance with the JCPOA [nuclear deal], we would do the same thing and then use that as a platform working with our allies and partners to build longer and stronger agreements — also capture some of the other issues that need to be dealt with, with regard to missiles, with regard to Iran’s activities and destabilizing activities in the region,” Blinken said.
“There is a lot that Iran will need to do to come back into compliance. We would then have to evaluate whether it actually [did] so. So, I don’t think that’s anything that’s happening tomorrow or the next day.”
Meanwhile, as CBS News described in November, Iran has endured a “harrowing, sanctions-fueled coronavirus catastrophe.”
Doctors experience shortages of every supply necessary for fighting the pandemic. “U.S.-led sanctions have choked off Iran’s access to foreign-made chemicals and equipment.”
Iran has begged Biden to lift sanctions that prevent Iran from accessing COVID-19 vaccines.
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Melodramatically, Senator Marco Rubio feverishly asked Blinken has any doubt that the Chinese Communist Party’s goal is to be the “world’s predominant political, geopolitical, military, and economic power and for the United States to decline in relation.”
“I do not,” Blinken replied.
“You have no doubt?” Rubio chimed.
“I have no doubt,” Blinken restated.
From Obama to Trump, U.S. empire has prepared its forces for what it calls “great power competition” between China and Russia. It fears China will take the place of the U.S., leading to one of Blinken’s nightmare futures.
Much of the public is wary over military interventions in the Middle East. The threat of terrorism is no longer enough to justify expenditures toward an ever-gargantuan military-industrial complex. Countering China, however, is an easier sell.
“Forcing men, women, and children into concentration camps, trying to, in effect, reeducate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide,” Blinken remarked.
Human rights abuses under Biden will increasingly be weaponized to defend policies and operations that ramp up tensions with China. Whether descriptions of China’s acts are accurate or not, the point will be to silence anyone who questions whether the violations are enough to warrant increased conflict. (Of course, how dare anyone raise the matter of U.S. deportation camps and their horrors or America’s mass incarceration of 1–2 million people to point out any sort of hypocrisy.)
After the House of Representatives voted to arm so-called rebel groups in Syria in 2014, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked Blinken about concerns that arms “could end up in wrong hands.” Blinken brushed aside concerns and maintained the U.S. would vet and give arms to “the right people.”
In March 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported “CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed [militias had] repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo” in Syria.
Blinken may not be rapture ready like his predecessor, Mike Pompeo. He may be more willing to wave the LGBTQIA+ rainbow flag when arming proxy forces or backing regime change operations. However, they are both devout believers in American exceptionalism.
He views Biden as a president who will put the “globe back on its axis” after Trump. He will spend his time at the State Department working to “restore democracy” and “renew” America’s “leadership” in the world. Which means Blinken will continue the many callous, cold, and calculating traditions of U.S. imperialism, promote hubris over humility, and commit himself to cloaking ignoble acts in the rhetoric of human rights.
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This post was originally published on Shadowproof.