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Category: CounterPunch+

  • Civil War, Alex Garland’s Gripping War Between the Cinematic States

    A still from director Alex Garland’s film “Civil War.” (Courtesy A24)

    My derriere still hurts from sitting on the edge of my seat at an IMAX theater while gawking at London-born director Alex Garland’s Civil War, which draws its inspiration from the USA’s contemporary red-state-versus-blue-state zeitgeist. Civil War marks the second time in US history – since Major-General Robert Ross’ British soldiers invaded the White House on August 24, 1814 – that the Executive Mansion has been attacked by Brits. But although this chilling movie’s director is indeed an Englishman, the armed invaders in the provocative Civil War are actually Americans engaged in this insurrectionary, incendiary fable that has the ring of truth.

    In Civil War Garland brings the war home with his stark, startling dramatization of the type of fierce combat Americans are used to watching from afar on screens – and from their perches in imperialist cockpits and tank turrets – but are being fought right here in the homeland. As armed rebels march on Washington, D.C. – not on some hapless Third World country du jour – we witness shocking scenes of the Lincoln Memorial and White House, as well as the heartland, under attack in Civil War. (However, a closeup of machine gun nests in the Statue of Liberty’s torch, which is depicted in posters, does not seem to actually appear per se onscreen.)

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  • Overhyping a US-China “AI Arms Race”

    Imagine yourself in Taiwan—living a nightmare of epic proportions. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army, two million strong, invades Taipei in the dead of winter. Within hours, it assumes control over the island’s other major cities, steadily moving south. Technologies enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) help China’s military synchronize its air, sea, and land forces. The […]

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  • Intolerable Cruelty

    Since Nancy Pelosi put her name on a letter calling on Biden to halt “offensive” weapons sales to Israel, she’s been frantically rounding up votes for a bill that would give Israel $14 billion in weapons, with no restrictions at all on their use.

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  • My Holy War with the Catholic Church

    Image by Jonathan Dick.

    “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”

    -Mikhail Bakunin

    It begins with an unstoppable flood of unbearable images. A child stripped naked beaten in a preschool bathroom. A visiting priest with a sinful smile. Two nude men in a rectory bedroom. An unrecognizable reflection in that same bathroom mirror… Quickly, this nightmarish montage forms a narrative like a terrible bedtime story you’ve heard a thousand times before for the first time. A story about a little girl trapped inside a scary body whose dysphoria was exploited by sexual predators at a Catholic school so they could have a good time with someone, some thing, too frightened to ever tell.

    This narrative was too much for that little girl to bear, so she blacked it out, she blacked out everything she saw in that mirror, including her gender identity, for decades. Until years of nightmares became an unstoppable flood of unbearable images, and those images formed a narrative of repressed memories that now feed an insatiable thirst for revenge.

    This has become my life over the last several months. This waking nightmare has become the new normal. The trauma surrounds me, like living in an active warzone. Everything triggers flashbacks and the flashbacks have become so menacingly jarring that they have begun to trigger seizures. I feel like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, vomiting up secrets and bodily fluids that belong to men sent to save my soul. My life has become a horror movie that no one can bear to watch.

    I have been abandoned by all but my most devoted friends. I have formed multiple personalities that represent the children that the Catholic Church conspired to destroy. One of them is also a five-year-old girl who was passed around by priests until she became physically ill. I spend my nights consoling that child while she screams. Some nights she consoles me. My own therapist now refuses to see me, telling me over the phone like some cheap fling that I require a level of care that she cannot provide.

    This has become my life and the only thing that has kept me from taking it is war. That word pounds in my head like a drumbeat. War. War. Over and over again. War. War. War. The moment that I stop shaking and sobbing. War. War. War. That five-year-old girl and her fourteen-year-old protector join the chant like a chorus. War. War. War. This is what keeps me going, the fact that there are still children coming and going from the churches and schools that those vile men combed like a brothel, the fact that those buildings are still standing after thirty years of them tearing me down and burning the pieces.

    I want to kill. I want to shoot, stab, hack, and bludgeon. But that isn’t enough. Any one act of violence, no matter how justified, would be little more than a senseless indulgence considering the depth of the conspiracy that inspires my rage. Burn one church and there are still thousands more standing. Kill one priest and there are still millions left walking, groping, hunting, lying, escaping.

    Revenge is not enough because I am not alone. I am one of legions of broken children who have been mercilessly degraded and discarded by the Catholic Church. The only thing more horrifying than stories like mine are how many of them there are. In the United States alone, more than 11,000 complaints of abuse have been lodged against more than 6,000 Catholic clergy members by the children who survived their sexual degradation. Diocese across the country have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in out of court settlements just to keep them silent and my home state of Pennsylvania has hosted some of the vilest transgressions of this colossal conspiracy.

    The entire Keystone State was turned into a veritable harem. For decades, over 300 predator priests were given free reign over nearly every diocese in the state while the Church leadership compiled detailed records of their crimes and moved these monsters around like game pieces on a map of hell. Cases were reported to bishops and bishops reported them to the Vatican, but the only actions taken by Rome were in defense of the accused and the silence that kept them active. And Pennsylvania is far from the only hunting ground either.

    216,000 children in France between 1950 and 2020. 3,677 minors in Germany between 1946 and 2014. Nearly 15,000 underage victims in Ireland between 1970 and 1990. And this doesn’t even include the generations of children subjected to the horrors and humiliations of institutionalized corporal punishment, or the emotional abuse of homophobia and transphobia, or the slut shaming of children for even having a sexuality outside of a holy man’s fist… or the Magdelene Laundries, or the mother and baby homes, or the dungeon-like orphanages and the illegal adoptions… The Catholic Church is not a religious organization, it is an international misery industrial complex that runs on shattered childhoods, and the responsibility for this monstrosity runs straight to the top of the Vatican.

    At least three consecutive popes have been complicit. In 2001, Pope John Paul II, a man now considered a saint by the Catholic Church, issued a global papal rescript compelling all of the Church’s bishops to forward cases of abuse to Rome so that the Vatican could decide the appropriate course of action rather than the public. That same year, a high-ranking Vatican prefect who would go on to become Pope Bennedict in 2005 issued a document mandating that all cases of clerical sex abuse be reported directly to his office where they were to be kept under lock and key. Those files soon numbered in the thousands and were further secured under the Vatican’s Crimen Sollicitationis, which required total silence from victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike under the threat of excommunication.

    Pope Francis was supposed to be different, swept into power in 2013 after Bennedict made the unprecedented decision to resign under a cloud of scandals going back to his days as the Archbishop of Munich in the 1980s, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was carefully marketed to the fleeing faithful as a caring reformer. He has reformed nothing. While touring the globe making heartfelt apologies to the victims of his church, the man they now call Francis has also carefully avoided making any formal admission of responsibility on the part of the Vatican so as to avoid ever having to pay a dime in reparations.

    Francis can also be judged by the company he keeps. The man he appointed as his anti-corruption czar and continues to praise in death, Cardinal George Pell, was a convicted pedophile only released from prison because Australia’s High Court chose not to believe his victims on acquittal.

    Pope Francis is not a reformer; he is a cleaner sent by an evil institution to mop up the scene of the crime and reign in a dwindling flock who is fleeing the church in droves. Pope Francis is proof that what the Vatican requires is not reform but revolution. This is a recognized nation state responsible for centuries of grisly crimes against humanity. An ancient imperial relic that has conspired with dictators, Nazis, mafioso, and death squads, and continues to horde billions of dollars in its bank, including gold picked from the teeth of the gassed Jews at Auschwitz. This monstrosity must be razed to the ground and fed to the woodchippers. But even this fate is not enough.

    The only way to possibly call any revolution an act of justice is if this jihad ensures that the crimes that inspired it will never happen again. This is bigger than any one church. This is about a society that grooms its children to be prey by denying them any rights as individuals. There will always be adults that rape children as long as institutions of power afford them that right and childhood itself as we understand it has become one of those institutions.

    We must liberate our children by empowering them with the same rights we afford adults and teach them that their bodies belong to them and no one else, not the state, not the church, not even their parents. We must emancipate childhood and raise proud individuals instead of silent dutiful citizens.

    If this is impossible then I will die fighting endlessly for the impossible. I will fight forever because it is the only thing that keeps me from destroying myself beneath the weight of the horror that has become my existence. I must become Che Guevara because it is the only fate keeping me from becoming Charles Whitman. I will not die a statistic. I will rage furiously unto my dying breath until the whole world can hear that five-year-old girl scream. Maybe then she can sleep and so can I.

    The post My Holy War with the Catholic Church appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • College Athletes Still are Not Allowed to be Paid by Universities

    Ever since July 1, 2021, student-athletes have been able to pursue endorsement deals. But when it comes to getting paid by the universities for which they play, the students have been shut down. Here, Cyntrice Thomas, a professor of sport management at the University of Florida, answers questions about the hurdles that stand in the way of college athletes being compensated for their athleticism.

    What stands in the way of paying college sports players?

    NCAA rules are the main obstacle.

    Not long after it was formed in 1906, the NCAA prohibited schools from compensating student-athletes for their athletic ability. In 1948, the NCAA adopted the Sanity Code, which also prohibited athletic scholarships for students who couldn’t demonstrate financial need or economic hardship.

    The organization began to allow athletic scholarships in 1956 without regard to financial need. But that was limited to tuition, room and board, and books.

    Over time the NCAA has made more allowances, such as funding for medical insurance and by creating the Student Assistance Fund. The fund is meant to “cover unforeseen expenses” related to attending college.

    Are the rules being challenged?

    In 2009, Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player, sued the NCAA over its rules that limited the amount in scholarships that schools could offer as well as the compensation for student-athletes with regard to the use of their image in video games. O’Bannon was successful in showing that the NCAA’s rules were unlawful, and the court allowed for schools to offer scholarships up to the cost of attendance.

    Most recently, in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Alston that colleges must be allowed to compensate students for education-related expenses up to $5,980 annually. The Supreme Court found that the NCAA rules against this were a violation of antitrust law. The purpose of antitrust law is to protect and promote competition in the marketplace to keep prices competitive for consumers.

    NCAA rules negatively affected competition because schools could offer only up to the cost of attendance in scholarships – not additional incentives that may attract student-athletes.

    Currently, several lawsuits – including Johnson v. NCAA, Carter v. NCAA and House v. NCAA – have plaintiffs using different legal arguments to challenge NCAA rules that limit their access to compensation. In Carter v. NCAA, the plaintiffs claim the limitations on compensation are unlawful and that they are entitled to a share of the million-dollar television contracts of the conferences and NCAA.

    Why are ‘name, image and likeness’ deals not enough?

    States have passed laws that require student-athletes to be compensated by third parties for the use of their name, image and likeness. These laws directly contradict past NCAA rules that made this type of compensation an explicit NCAA violation because they threaten the notion of amateurism.

    However, these laws do not apply to schools and universities. The laws apply only to third parties such as corporations like Gatorade or sport manufacturers like Nike, and that’s where these laws arguably fall short. Schools can continue to make millions of dollars from intercollegiate athletics without having to share that with student-athletes.

    Should college athletes make money from name, image and likeness deals?

    Schools and universities, however, can continue to use student-athletes’ names and images to promote their sports and do not have to compensate them. This is because NCAA rules prohibit schools from compensating student-athletes for their publicity or fame related to athletic ability.

    Barbara Osborne, a sports scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that through scholarships, student-athletes do receive compensation. However, when recognizing that Division I schools, especially those in a Power Five conference, generate billions of dollars in revenue, other scholars, such as Mark Nagel and Richard Southall, argue that a scholarship is insufficient and that “profit-athletes,” as he refers to them, deserve the fair market value of their labor.

    Instead of paying their athletes, schools pour the revenue they make back into the athletic departments and use it to fund salaries, operating costs, facilities and other expenses. This can include funding other sports that do not generate revenue.

    Who has the power to change things?

    The NCAA, for one. However, the NCAA sees change as the end of amateurism. In fact, at its most recent convention in January, the organization restated its hopes of regaining some of its power to regulate intercollegiate athletics. Specifically, it plans to do this by seeking legal protection from the continuous threat of lawsuits. The organization is also lobbying Congress to declare that student-athletes are not employees.

    Another possibility is for schools and universities, specifically those in the Power Five conferences, to simply leave the NCAA. They could then create their own governing body with rules that allow for schools to pay student-athletes, which would allow them to get the best recruits and make more money.

    A third possibility is the federal government. Because of the number of legal challenges to the NCAA rules brought by current and former student-athletes, the NCAA has tried to lobby Congress. The organization spent over $750,000 lobbying Congress to create limitations on athlete pay. They also sought to get Congress to pass laws that limit name, image and likeness deals and give the organization an exemption from antitrust laws.

    There is reluctance from members of Congress, however, to support an exemption for the NCAA. Some congressional members have actually advocated for more protections for student-athletes. For example, several senators have been working on a bipartisan bill that would include protections for student-athletes with regard to medical care and agent certification.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    The post College Athletes Still are Not Allowed to be Paid by Universities appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cyntrice Thomas.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Orwell on the Necessity of Decolonization — for the Colonizer

    Image by Markus Spiske.

    Published in 1936, “Shooting an Elephant” remains one of George Orwell’s most celebrated essays. In it, the English writer recounts an incident from his time as a police officer in modern day Myanmar, then known as Burma, part of the British Empire. Responding to calls of a rampaging elephant, Orwell finds the animal docile, but nevertheless feels compelled to kill it, rather than appear weak before the crowd who has gathered to watch. In allowing his conscience to be overwhelmed, he experiences how colonialism dehumanizes not just the colonized, but the colonizers as well.

    “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys,” writes Orwell. “He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy …. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

    Although Orwell is writing specifically of the British Empire, he quite clearly intends for his essay to be read more broadly, as applicable to contemporary fascism in Europe as British colonialism in Asia. And so too does his insight extend to today in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine.

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  • Buying Democracy with Dirty Money

    Japan’s right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō) is in trouble. Following the assassination of PM Shinzo Abe in 2022, voter abstention and a corruption scandal have eroded the Party’s credibility. The LDP was founded with help from the CIA in 1955 as a weapon against the left. It ruled uninterrupted until 1993 and continues to dominate Japanese politics.

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  • Zone of Extermination

    The Israelis calling the drone strike that killed 7 Western aid workers a “mistake” is like a correction in the New York Times. They both serve the purpose of wanting you to believe everything else was perfectly fine–in the Times’s case, that all of the other stories printed in the paper are true; in Israel’s case, that the airstrikes that have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, including 14,500 kids, were totally legit.

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  • The Banality of Sir Keir Starmer

    What is remarkable about Sir Keir Starmer, however, is that he has not a single, discernible positive quality.    If he got lost in Tesco, and his mum put out his description on the tannoy, there would be no possible chance of him being tracked down.  He is not a good speaker, his nasal voice drones on and on, a lulling invitation to the most pronounced meaninglessness.   When asked about his vision for the future, he says things like this:‘Changing the things that need changing … that is the change I will bring about!’
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  • Israel’s War Psychosis

    The October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israelis followed by the extremely disproportionate IDF assault on Gaza has been accompanied by a slew of racist invective by Israeli leaders. Dan Gillerman, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN referred to Palestinians as “horrible inhuman animals.” Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, used the same hate expression. Netanyahu called Gaza a “city of evil,” summoning the Old Testament tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which the Israeli government now gets to play God.
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  • Who’ll Stop the Rain?

    + The UN has been used to start many wars, but has it ever stopped one? The Security Council’s ceasefire resolution, temporary as it is, was completely ignored by Israel. Will any of the Council’s members (China? Russia?) use their considerable power to enforce it?
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  • U.S. Complicity in Israel’s “Plausible” Genocide

    “Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing,” Representative Ocasio-Cortez said on the floor of the House of Representatives on March 22. “We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer.” “Facilitating mass killing” and “responsibility” could include United States legal complicity. While eyes are on a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, a court case in California (Defense for Children International, Palestine, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, et al.) is worth noting; the case directly challenges the United States’ support for Israel. Although the case will not force Israel to withdraw from Gaza, it does raise serious issues about the United States’ complicity in Israel’s continuous violation of human rights and humanitarian law as well as its egregious non-compliance with the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

    The ICJ ruled on January 26 that Israel was committing “plausible genocide.” In addition, in a March 25 Report to the Human Rights Council by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese wrote in the Summary: “By analyzing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

    In the California case, United States leaders are accused of illegal complicity in not preventing genocide as well as contributing to Israel’s genocidal actions.

    Over thirty eminent legal scholars and practitioners, including Richard Falk, Philip Alston, and Andrew Clapham, presented a brief (Amicus curiae) supporting the case before The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District. Without going into all the legalese, the major points in the brief were: 1) The prohibition of genocide, complicity in genocide, and the duty to prevent genocide are fundamental norms of customary international law from which there are no exceptions. 2) Being aware of the risk of genocide obliges states to prevent genocide from occurring. If a state knows genocide is taking place, and the state continues to support the state committing genocide, the supporting state has not fulfilled its legal obligation to prevent genocide and may be held to be complicit in the genocide. 3) Historically, in previous cases before the ICJ, the United States has agreed to these fundamental principles. 4) Domestic courts may enforce fundamental customary international law such as California in this case.

    The second major point merits detailed explanation since it refers to two types of violations to the Genocide Convention. The first violation is that the prevention of genocide is a legal obligation. If a state has knowledge that genocide is being committed and does nothing, if it has knowingly not prevented genocide, the state is complicit. Furthermore, as the scholars note; “The duty does not require a finding that genocide is occurring; rather, awareness of a serious risk of genocide places an obligation on all States to take whatever action possible and necessary to prevent its occurrence or continuation.” The ICJ’s decision on “plausible genocide” makes this point relevant for the United States as does the Report of the Special Rapporteur. There is obviously a serious risk of genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza. There can be no doubt of the United States’ “awareness of a serious risk.” Therefore, as the brief argues, the United States, like all states that have ratified the Convention, is legally bound “to take whatever action possible and necessary to prevent its [genocide] occurrence or continuation.”

    The second type of violation in the brief is even more damning for the United States. It describes a positive act of commission rather than the negative act of not preventing. If a state continues to support the state committing genocide, the brief points out, the supporting state may be held complicit in genocide’s commission. The United States continues to supply weapons to Israel after October 7. “The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing,” John Hudson wrote on March 6, 2024, in The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times confirmed this account of the Congressional briefing in similar reports.

    The United States is therefore twice guilty of violating Article IIIe of the Genocide Convention which specifically prohibits complicity.

    How does the United States continue to supply weapons to Israel in violation of the Genocide Convention? The U.S. Arms Export Control Act does permit exceptions for arms sales to close allies. The United States uses this loophole to continue sending weapons to Israel. But using this loophole to continue sending weapons does not exonerate complicity in genocide. In the least, it is hypocritical. Using the Arms Export Control Act “doesn’t just seem like an attempt to avoid technical compliance with US arms export law, it’s an extremely troubling way to avoid transparency and accountability on a high-profile issue,” Ari Tolany, director of the security assistance monitor at the Centre for International Policy think tank, was quoted in The Guardian.

    Hypocritical and secretive. According to a recent New York Times article: “Last December, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken twice invoked a rarely used emergency authority to send tank ammunition and artillery shells to Israel without Congressional review. These were the only two times the administration has given public notice of government-to-government military sales to Israel since October.”

    What about other countries? Have they changed their policies towards Israel following the ICJ ruling? The Canadian government, which provides about $4 billion dollars a year in military aid to Israel, recently announced that it would halt arms sales to Israel after the Canadian Parliament passed a non-binding motion to stop the weapons sales. Canada was not alone. “Canada joins the Netherlands, Japan, Spain, and Belgium in suspending arms sales,” Aljazeera reported.

    In addition to countries’ stopping arms sales, The Guardian revealed that more than 200 members of parliaments (MPs) from 12 countries wrote a letter trying to persuade their governments to impose a ban on arms sales to Israel. The MPs, a network of socialist and activists, argued that they will not be complicit in “Israel’s grave violation of international law” in its Gaza assault. In their letter, the politicians argued that after the ICJ ruling, “an arms embargo has moved beyond a moral necessity to become a legal requirement.”

    The MPs were also not alone. U.N. experts stated that “any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law…” The experts, mostly independent rapporteurs for the United Nations Human Rights Council, wrote: “The need for an arms embargo on Israel is heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the continuing serious harm to civilians since then.” As the Genocide Convention requires all states who have acceded to employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide in another state as far as possible, “This necessitates halting arms exports in the present circumstances,” the experts argued.

    In relation to the California case, the experts were quite clear; “State officials involved in arms exports may be individually criminally liable for aiding and abetting any war crimes, crimes against humanity or acts of genocide,” they wrote. “All States under the principle of universal jurisdiction, and the International Criminal Court, may be able to investigate and prosecute such crimes.”

    In full awareness of the serious risk of “plausible genocide” by Israel taking place in Gaza, the United States has not stopped Israel’s actions and continues to send weapons to Israel. The United States has been and continues to be complicit. “International law does the enforce itself,” the experts concluded. “All States must not be complicit in international crimes through arms transfers. They must do their part to urgently end the unrelenting humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

    The legal argument is clear. The moral argument is clearer. Will political action follow? Eight senators wrote to Mr. Biden on March 11 calling on him to require Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to stop restricting humanitarian aid access to Gaza or forfeit U.S. military aid to Israel.” Requiring Israel to allow access to humanitarian aid would be a start. Stopping sending military equipment would be even better. But even a U.N. Security Council ceasefire – where the U.S. meekly abstained – will not absolve the United States of complicity in Israel’s “plausible genocide.”

    The post U.S. Complicity in Israel’s “Plausible” Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Never-Ending Federal Surveillance Crime Spree

    Photo: James Bovard.

    Last December, one of the most intrusive provisions in the federal statute book was set to expire. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the National Security Agency to vacuum up trillions of emails and other data. A bevy of bipartisan members of Congress called for radically curtailing those nullifications of Americans’ privacy.

    But the effort to put a leash on the federal surveillance failed dismally. Congress voted for a four-month extension of FISA, which will likely be followed in April by a much longer extension. There was a bipartisan congressional conspiracy to entitle the Deep State to continue trampling the Constitution.

    In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to outlaw political spying (such as the FBI had committed) on American citizens. FISA created a secret court to oversee federal surveillance of suspected foreign agents within the United States, permitting a much more lenient standard for wiretaps than the Constitution permitted for American citizens.

    The FISA court “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” the New York Times reported in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked court decisions. The court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling National Security Administration (NSA) data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as “almost Orwellian.” In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”

    FISA Section 702

    The latest controversy involved FISA Section 702, first enacted by Congress in 2008. That section authorizes the National Security Agency to surveil targets in foreign nations regardless of how many Americans’ privacy is “incidentally” destroyed. The NSA collects vast amounts of information as part of that surveillance and then permits the FBI to sift through its troves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned more than a decade ago that Section 702 “created a broad national-security exception to the Constitution that allows all Americans to be spied upon by their government while denying them any viable means of challenging that spying.”

    Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how Section 702 worked: “What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry … they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order … sometime, unbeknownst to you.” Actually, the law in practice is much worse.

    A license for lying

    From the beginning, federal agencies brazenly lied about the number of Americans whose privacy was ravaged. In 2014, former NSA employee Edward Snowden provided the Washington Post with a cache of 160,000 secret email threads that the NSA had intercepted. The Post found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were American citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.

    FISA perils are compounded because, in practice, the FBI has a blank check for perjury in the name of Total Information Awareness. In 2002, the FISA court revealed that FBI agents had false or misleading claims in 75 cases, and a top FBI counterterrorism official was prohibited from ever appearing before the court again. Three years later, FISA chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented; that never happened because it could have “slowed such investigations drastically,” the Washington Post reported. So FBI agents continued to have a license to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.

    An abuse of power

    In 2018, a FISA ruling condemned the FBI for ignoring limits on “unreasonable searches.” As the New York Times noted,

    F.B.I. agents had carried out several large-scale searches for Americans who generically fit into broad categories … so long as agents had a reason to believe that someone within that category might have relevant information. But [under FISA] there has to be an individualized reason to search for any particular American’s information.

    The FBI treated the FISA repository like the British agents treated general warrants in the 1760s, helping spark the American Revolution.

    But Congress reauthorized Section 702 in 2018 regardless of the perpetual abuses of that power. Subsequent reports revealed that the congressional vote of blind confidence was misplaced. But Congress did oblige the feds to publicly disclose how often the FBI unjustifiably violated Americans’ privacy by snooping in the NSA catch-all archives.

    The FBI exploited FISA to target 19,000 donors to the campaign of a candidate who challenged an incumbent member of Congress. An FBI analyst justified the warrantless searches by claiming “the campaign was a target of foreign influence,” but even the Justice Department concluded that almost all of those searches violated FISA rules. Apparently, merely reciting the phrase “foreign influence” suffices to nullify Americans’ rights nowadays. (In March, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL) revealed that he had been wrongly targeted by the FBI in numerous FISA 702 searches.)

    Warrantless searches

    In April 2021, the FISA court reported that the FBI conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for “domestic terrorism,” “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets — including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity. In 2019, an FBI agent conducted an unjustified database search “using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation,” the New York Times reported.

    As I tweeted after that report came out, “The FISA court has gone from pretending FBI violations don’t occur to pretending violations don’t matter. Only task left is to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy.” FISA court Chief Judge James Boasberg lamented “apparent widespread violations” of the legal restrictions for FBI searches but shrugged them off and permitted the scouring of Americans’ personal data to continue.

    Alas, there was no bureaucratic repentance. The feds revealed in 2022 that “fewer than 3,394,053” Americans’ privacy had been zapped by FBI warrantless searches using Section 702. Why didn’t the feds use an alternative headline for the press release: “More than 320,974,609 Americans not illegally searched by the FBI?” That report was issued by the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But there was scant transparency aside from a raw number that raised far more questions than it answered.

    Almost two million of those searches involved an investigation of Russian hacking. Yet there aren’t that many hackers in the United States. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center presumed that anyone whose tweets agreed with a position of the Russian government should be banned by Twitter for being a Russian agent. Did the FBI use a similar “catch-all” standard to justify pilfering two million Americans’ email and other online data?

    Exemption from the Constitution 

    In May 2023, a heavily redacted FISA court decision revealed that the FBI continued exempting itself from the Constitution. For each American that the FISA court authorized the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveilled almost a thousand additional Americans. The FBI admitted to conducting 278,000 illicit searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021 (the period covered by the FISA court ruling released in May 2023).

    The FBI conducted illegal secret searches of the emails and other data of 133 people arrested during the protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

    The FBI conducted 656 warrantless searches to see if they could find any derogatory information on people they planned to use as informants. The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.” Even the Justice Department complained those searches were improper.

    The FBI seems to have presumed that any American suspected of supporting the January 6, 2021, Capitol ruckus forfeited his constitutional rights. An FBI analyst exploited FISA to unjustifiably conduct searches on 23,132 Americans citizens “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras. The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.”

    For 20 years, FISA judges have whined about FBI agents lying to the court. As long as the FBI periodically promises to repent, the FISA court entitles them to continue decimating the Fourth Amendment. Chief FISA Judge Contreras lamented: “Compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.” The FBI responded to the damning report with piffle: “We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security, and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time.”

    The FBI crime wave

    FBI officials stress that any violations of Americans’ privacy is “incidental.” Since the FBI didn’t intend to violate Americans’ rights, it was a no-fault error — or millions of no-fault errors. There is no chance that police will adopt the same standard for absolving drunk drivers who did not intend to kill anyone they crashed into. Even when a media star such as Tucker Carlson may have been pulled into the 702 mire, the system manages to whitewash itself.

    The FBI’s perpetual crime wave created a hornet’s nest on Capitol Hill. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) asked: “How much longer must we watch the FBI brazenly spy on Americans before we strip it of its unchecked authority?” Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) declared, “We need a pound of flesh. We need to know someone has been fired.”

    House Republicans, led by House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), pushed a bipartisan reform of 702 named he Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, which would have required the FBI to get a warrant from a federal judge for most of its queries to the NSA database. Jordan’s proposal would have also sharply reduced the number of FBI officials with access to the NSA trove. Jordan’s bill included the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which “stops law enforcement from buying data that should require a court order,” a scandal tagged in a New York Post op-ed headlined “Feds are buying your life with your tax dollars.”

    Congressional impotence

    FISA epitomizes the mirage of constitutional checks and balances in our times. When Congress returns to FISA with the short-term authorization, the House will consider a FISA “reform” bill the Intelligence Committee unanimously approved. The House Intelligence Committee acts like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Deep State. Unfortunately, these are the members of Congress with special access to federal dirt — and they have largely chosen to ignore the crimes committed by the spies they champion and bankroll.

    Former Justice Department lawyer Marc Zwillinger is one of a handful of FISA court amici allowed to comment on cases or policies in the secret court. He issued a public warning that the House Intelligence bill expands the definition of “electronic communication service providers” covered by FISA compliance obligations to include “business landlords, shared workspaces, or even hotels where guests connect to the Internet.”

    In other words, the FISA expansion could affect your next visit to Comfort Inn — and you thought Wi-Fi service was already bad! Former Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Goitein warns, “Hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other places that offer wifi to their customers could be forced to serve as surrogate spies. They could be required to configure their systems to ensure that they can provide the government access to entire streams of communications.” The bill could also cover any repairman who works on such equipment. That bill should be titled, Biden Big Brother Better Act.

    The FISA reauthorization was included in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024, a 3000-page “must pass” bill that Congress considered in December. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who led the opposition to the bill in the Senate, urged fellow senators not to “trust any bill so large that it has to be delivered by handcart.” But to no avail.

    The tyranny of the FISA court

    The FISA court has perpetually dismally failed to defend Americans’ constitutional rights. Washington must finally admit that there is no secret “doing God’s work” clause in the Constitution that entitles FBI agents to trample Americans’ privacy and liberty.

    Will Congress show more gumption when the short-term FISA reauthorization expires in April? When FISA was up for renewal in 2012, I tweeted, “Only a fool would expect members of Congress to give a damn about his rights and liberties.” Unless Congress puts me to shame, FISA should be renamed the “‘Trust Me, Chumps!’ Surveillance Act.”

    This article was originally published in the March 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.

    The post The Never-Ending Federal Surveillance Crime Spree appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James Bovard.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How Israeli Propagandists Reach Journalists

    Image by Annie Spratt.

    Every day, journalists like myself receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails from publicists pitching their respective clients as sources to consider for this or that story in the current newscycle. It’s not every day, however, that you’re pitched an apologist for genocide.

    That is, in essence, the email I received last month from Joshua Steinreich, a publicist with the Steinreich Communications Group, who was pitching Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, as a source on the yet-impending Israeli invasion of Rafah, the potential next phase of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Despite the Israeli military having killed 31,726 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing, the Israeli military “seeks to minimize civilian casualties,” while Hamas “gains from the loss of life,” in Melamed’s estimation.

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  • Larry Hogan’s Dead Chief-of-Staff

    The coroner couldn’t say whether it was Roy McGrath or the FBI who fired the fatal shot, but after two to the head McGrath was dead at 53. Publicly, Larry Hogan said all the right things in the wake of the death of his former chief of staff; thoughts and prayers for the family, etc. But privately Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland now running for Senate, must have breathed a sigh of relief. He no longer had to worry about his longtime friend running his mouth, or releasing secret recordings.
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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Famine-Makers

    If you want an idea of just how miserably the media has failed in its coverage of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, in a recent Pew survey only about half of American adults could correctly identify whether more Israelis (1,550) or Palestinians (33,000+) had been killed in the war.
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  • Pentagon Spending and National (In)Security

    Photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase – Public Domain

    In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security.

    Why? Because real national security can neither be measured nor safeguarded solely by military power (especially the might of a military that hasn’t won a major war since 1945). Economic vitality matters so much more, as does the availability and affordability of health care, education, housing, and other crucial aspects of life unrelated to weaponry and war. Add to that the importance of a Congress responsive to the needs of the working poor, the hungry and the homeless among us. And don’t forget that the moral fabric of our nation should be based not on a military eternally ready to make war but on a determination to uphold international law and defend human rights. It’s high time for America to put aside its conveniently generic “rules-based order” anchored in imperial imperatives and face its real problems. A frank look in the mirror is what’s most needed here.

    It should be simple really: national security is best advanced not by endlessly preparing for war, but by fostering peace. Yet, despite their all-too-loud disagreements, Washington’s politicians share a remarkably bipartisan consensus when it comes to genuflecting before and wildly overfunding the military-industrial complex. In truth, ever-rising military spending and yet more wars are a measure of how profoundly unhealthy our country actually is.

    “The Scholarly Junior Senator from South Dakota”

    Such insights are anything but new and, once upon a time, could even be heard in the halls of Congress. They were, in fact, being aired there within a month of my birth as, on August 2, 1963, Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota — later a hero of mine — rose to address his fellow senators about “New Perspectives on American Security.”

    Nine years later, he (and his vision of the military) would, of course, lose badly to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. No matter that he had been the one who served in combat with distinction in World War II, piloting a B-24 bomber on 35 missions over enemy territory, even as Nixon, then a Navy officer, amassed a tidy sum playing poker. Somehow, McGovern, a decorated hero, became associated with “weakness” because he opposed this country’s disastrous Vietnam War, while Nixon manufactured a self-image as the staunchest Cold Warrior around, never missing a chance to pose as tough on communism (until, as president, he memorably visited Communist China, opening relations with that country).

    But back to 1963, when McGovern gave that speech (which you can read in the online Senate Congressional Record, volume 109, pages 13,986-94). At that time, the government was already dedicating more than half of all federal discretionary spending to the Pentagon, roughly the same percentage as today. Yet was it spending all that money wisely? McGovern’s answer was a resounding no. Congress, he argued, could instantly cut 10% of the Pentagon budget without compromising national security one bit. Indeed, security would be enhanced by investing in this country instead of buying yet more overpriced weaponry. The senator and former bomber pilot was especially critical of the massive amounts then being spent on the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the absurd planetary “overkill” it represented vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, America’s main competitor in the nuclear arms race. As he put it then:

    “What possible advantage [can be had] in appropriating additional billions of dollars to build more [nuclear] missiles and bombs when we already have excess capacity to destroy the potential enemy? How many times is it necessary to kill a man or kill a nation?”

    How many, indeed? Think about that question as today’s Congress continues to ramp up spending, now estimated at nearly $2 trillion over the next 30 years, on — and yes, this really is the phrase — “modernizing” the country’s nuclear triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), as well as its ultra-expensive nuclear-missile-firing submarines and stealth bombers. And keep in mind that the U.S. already has an arsenal quite capable of wiping out life on several Earth-sized planets.

    What, according to McGovern, was this country sacrificing in its boundless pursuit of mass death? In arguments that should resonate strongly today, he noted that America’s manufacturing base was losing vigor and vitality compared to those of countries like Germany and Japan, while the economy was weakening, thanks to trade imbalances and the exploding costs of that nuclear arms race. Mind you, back then, this country was still on the gold standard and unburdened by an almost inconceivable national debt, 60 years later, of more than $34 trillion, significant parts of it thanks to this country’s failed “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere across all too much of the planet.

    McGovern did recognize that, given how the economy was (and still is) organized, meaningful cuts to military spending could hurt in the short term. So, he suggested that Congress create an Economic Conversion Commission to ensure a smoother transition from guns to butter. His goal was simple: to make the economy “less dependent upon arms spending.” Excess military spending, he noted, was “wasting” this country’s human resources, while “restricting” its political leadership in the world.

    In short, that distinguished veteran of World War II, then serving as “the scholarly junior Senator from South Dakota” (in the words of Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia), was anything but proud of America’s “arsenal of democracy.” He wasn’t, in fact, a fan of arsenals at all. Rather, he wanted to foster a democracy worthy of the American people, while freeing us as much as possible from the presence of just such an arsenal.

    To that end, he explained what he meant by defending democracy:

    “When a major percentage of the public resources of our society is devoted to the accumulation of devastating weapons of war, the spirit of democracy suffers. When our laboratories and our universities and our scientists and our youth are caught up in war preparations, the spirit of [freedom] is hampered.

    “America must, of course, maintain a fully adequate military defense. But we have a rich heritage and a glorious future that are too precious to risk in an arms race that goes beyond any reasonable criteria of need.

    “We need to remind ourselves that we have sources of strength, of prestige, and international leadership based on other than nuclear bombs.”

    Imagine if his call had been heeded. This country might today be a far less militaristicplace.

    Something was, in fact, afoot in the early 1960s in America. In 1962, despite the wishes of the Pentagon, President John F. Kennedy used diplomacy to get us out of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Soviet Union and then, in June 1963, made a classic commencement address about peace at American University. Similarly, in support of his call for substantial reductions in military spending, McGovern cited the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 during which he introduced the now-classic phrase “military-industrial complex,” warning that “we must never let the weight of this combination [of the military with industry, abetted by Congress] endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

    Echoing Ike’s warning in what truly seems like another age, McGovern earned the approbation of his Senate peers. His vision of a better, more just, more humane America seemed, however briefly, to resonate. He wanted to spend money not on more nuclear bombs and missiles but on “more classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and capable teachers.” On better hospitals and expanded nursing-home care. On a cleaner environment, with rivers and streams saved from pollution related to excessive military production. And he hoped as well that, as military bases were closed, they would be converted to vocational schools or healthcare centers.

    McGovern’s vision, in other words, was aspirational and inspirational. He saw a future America increasingly at peace with the world, eschewing arms races for investments in our own country and each other. It was a vision of the future that went down fast in the Vietnam War era to come, yet one that’s even more needed today.

    Praise from Senate Peers

    Here’s another way in which times have changed: McGovern’s vision won high praise from his Senate peers in the Democratic Party. Jennings Randolph of West Virginia agreed that “unsurpassed military power in combination with areas of grave economic weakness is not a manifestation of sound security policy.” Like McGovern, he called for a reinvestment in America, especially in underdeveloped rural areas like those in his home state. Joseph Clark, Jr., of Pennsylvania, also a World War II veteran, “thoroughly” agreed that the Pentagon budget “needs most careful scrutiny on the floor of the Senate, and that in former years it has not received that scrutiny.” Stephen Young of Ohio, who served in both World War I and World War II, looked ahead toward an age of peace, expressing hope that “perhaps the necessity for these stupendous appropriations [for weaponry] will not be as real in the future.”

    Possibly the strongest response came from Frank Church of Idaho, who reminded his fellow senators of their duty to the Constitution. That sacred document, he noted, “vests in Congress the power to determine the size of our military budget, and I feel we have tended too much to rubberstamp the recommendations that come to us from the Pentagon, without making the kind of critical analysis that the Senator from South Dakota has attempted… We cannot any longer shirk this responsibility.” Church saluted McGovern as someone who “dared to look a sacred cow [the Pentagon budget] in the teeth.”

    A final word came from Wayne Morse of Oregon. Very much a gadfly, Morse shifted the topic to U.S. foreign aid, noting that too much of that aid was military-related, constituting a “shocking waste” to the taxpayer even as it proved detrimental to the development of democracy abroad, most notably in Latin America. “We should be spending the money for bread, rather than for military aid,” he concluded.

    Imagine that! Bread instead of bullets and bombs for the world. Of course, even then, it didn’t happen, but in the 60 years since then, the rhetoric of the Senate has certainly changed. A McGovern-style speech today would undoubtedly be booed down on both sides of the aisle. Consider, for example, consistent presidential and Congressional clamoring now for more military aid to Israel during a genocide in Gaza. So far, U.S. government actions are more consistent with letting starving children in Gaza eat lead instead of bread.

    Peace Must Be Our Profession

    What was true then remains true today. Real national defense should not be synonymous with massive spending on wars and weaponry. Quite the reverse: whenever possible, wars should be avoided; whenever possible, weapons should be beaten into plowshares, and those plowshares used to improve the health and well-being of people everywhere.

    Oh, and that Biblical reference of mine (swords into plowshares) is intentional. It’s meant to highlight the ancient roots of the wisdom of avoiding war, of converting weapons into useful tools to sustain and provide for the rest of us.

    Yet America’s leaders on both sides of the aisle have long lost the vision of George McGovern, of John F. Kennedy, of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Today’s president and today’s Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, boast of spending vast sums on weapons, not only to strengthen America’s imperial power but to defeat Russia and deter China, while bragging all the while of the “good” jobs they’re allegedly creatinghere in America in the process. (This country’s major weapons makers would agreewith them, of course!)

    McGovern had a telling rejoinder to such thinking. “Building weapons,” he noted in 1963, “is a seriously limited device for building the economy,” while an “excessive reliance on arms,” as well as overly “rigid diplomacy,” serve only to torpedo promising opportunities for peace.

    Back then, it seemed to politicians like McGovern, as well as President Kennedy, that clearing a path toward peace was not only possible but imperative, especially considering the previous year’s near-cataclysmic Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet just a few months after McGovern’s inspiring address in the Senate, Kennedy had been assassinated and his calls for peace put on ice as a new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, succumbed to pressure by escalating U.S. military involvement in what mushroomed into the catastrophic Vietnam War.

    In today’s climate of perpetual war, the dream of peace continues to wither. Still, despite worsening odds, it’s important that it must not be allowed to die. The high ground must be wrested away from our self-styled “warriors,” who aim to keep the factories of death churning, no matter the cost to humanity and the planet.

    My fellow Americans, we need to wake up from the nightmare of forever war. This country’s wars aren’t simply being fought “over there” in faraway and, at least to us, seemingly forgettable places like Syria and Somalia. In some grim fashion, our wars are already very much being fought right here in this deeply over-armed country of ours.

    George McGovern, a bomber pilot from World War II, knew the harsh face of war and fought in the Senate for a more peaceful future, one no longer haunted by debilitating arms races and the prospect of a doomsday version of overkill. Joining him in that fight was John F. Kennedy, who, in 1963, suggested that “this generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war, and hate, and oppression.”

    If only.

    Today’s generation of “leaders” seems not yet to have had their fill of war, hate, and oppression. That tragic fact — not China, not Russia, not any foreign power — is now the greatest threat to this country’s “national security.” And it’s a threat only aggravated by ever more colossal Pentagon budgets still being rubberstamped by a spinelessly complicit Congress.

    The post Pentagon Spending and National (In)Security appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by William J. Astore.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Open letter to the EU Leadership Demanding an Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza

    15th March 2024.

    Dear President von der Leyen,
    Dear President Michel,
    Dear High Representative Borrell,

    The Geneva International Peace Research Institute respectfully comes back to you on this question of a ceasefire in Gaza, on which we have yet to receive a satisfactory response.

    Since our previous email of 23rd February, GIPRI has launched an academic and media campaign of awareness-raising and public debate.  Our director Dr. Gabriel Galice and the board are appalled at the inaction by European leaders in the face of the on-going genocide and the multiple violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law by the government of Israel.  It is most urgent to enforce a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, followed by a lifting of the illegal blockade against the hapless population of Gaza, the full implementation of the order of the International Court of Justice of 26 January 2024, and the prompt and effective delivery of humanitarian assistance to the starving population.

    You received the proposal from Dr. Galice on the 27th of February last, calling for a multi-national force to break the illegal Israeli blockade on Gaza. We attach the document here again for your reference.

    The document was shared in good faith, as a rallying call to the international community to support the besieged population of Gaza, through the formation of unilateral state partnerships with international humanitarian organizations to break the illegal blockade. What it was not meant for was to be co-opted by the EU and the US government.

    The GIPRI proposal was published in the Belgian paper Le Soir on 29th February, and we have it on good authority that the next morning it was sitting on the desks of prime ministers in certain European capitals.

    It was also published in the Tribune de Geneve on 5th March.

    By some marvelous set of coincidences, the US government announced a week after the Le Soir article, after five months of relentless Israeli bombing, that it would build a pier in Gaza and send aid to Gaza via a maritime corridor out of Cyprus. It would do all of this while at the same time maintaining its provision of weapons and political cover for Israel to continue its murderous campaign against the civilians of Gaza unabated. The cognitive dissonance of such a situation is monstrous, as we see pictures of a tugboat pulling a barge with a couple of hundred tons of aid on it, bound for Gaza, while the images of the bloody aftermath of Israeli air strikes continue to be livestreamed. It is unethical and cynical to be complicit in a genocide and then to pretend to be a Good Samaritan with all the media hype associated with it.  Last weekend, the EU announced that it would be implementing a similar initiative, although the European governments continue giving aid and comfort to the government of Israel in the midst of its ethnic cleansing campaign, engaging in apology of genocide and crimes against humanity.

    There appears to be such an enormous moral vacuum and absence of ideas at the levels of Brussels and Washington, not to mention shocking apathy, that it is quite clear that the GIPRI proposal has been co-opted by bureaucrats in both locations to make it seem as though they are doing something to help the people of Gaza, when in reality they do not care.

    Not only is the mechanism that the EU has adopted useless, in the absence of a port in Gaza or any means of inland delivery of aid planned for in advance, but the EU is also continuing to provide its tacit support for the Israeli blockade, the bombing and starvation of the population, as well as the continuation of the slow and torturous Israeli aid inspection process.

    By opening a maritime corridor via Cyprus, the EU is effectively surrendering any remaining moral authority it may have had to the Israelis, by presenting the scenario as though no other possible alternative exists, when in fact many alternatives do exist.

    Through adopting this approach, the EU continues to support the Israeli blockade by steadfastly refusing to call for a ceasefire, and by not calling for Israel to open the land borders to allow the hundreds of aid trucks already positioned to enter Gaza. This is the only effective means through which aid can be distributed to the population by the United Nations agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other international partners and organizations. These agencies have been calling for months for rapid and unhindered access to deliver aid, calls that continue to fall on deaf ears.

    This assault on Gaza was never about 7th October, or about Hamas, or about Israel’s notional right to defend itself. It is clear now that it is nothing less than a pre-planned genocide, a land-grab for the creation of a greater Israel, a more secure Apartheid ethno-state. The EU has supported it and you are all guilty of enabling this genocide to take place in plain sight. Words have lost their meaning at this point to express the horror of what we have witnessed for the past five months. Again, just last night, we witnessed another ‘Flour Massacre’, with over 60 people murdered by Israeli tanks and machine guns while waiting for food aid.

    This is a shocking disgrace and once again there has been no condemnation from the EU of these cold-blooded massacres we have witnessed in the past two weeks.

    As a group of European and American citizens, we have had enough, and we are holding you accountable for your actions in supporting Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its murder of the population. We are appalled that the EU has acted in this undemocratic way for the past five months, throwing its support behind Israel, while the citizens of the EU have been overwhelmingly demanding, for months now, an end to the senseless slaughter and destruction.

    We demand that the EU calls for an immediate and unconditional end to the Israeli bombing of Gaza right now, and we demand that the EU also calls for an opening of the borders, allowing rapid and unhindered delivery of food, shelter and medical supplies to the population.

    Anything less than this is unacceptable and in breach of international law, which you all claim to uphold, but which it is evident that you are in breach of.

    Short of this, we will be amplifying calls at the public level for your immediate resignations, as you no longer represent the population of the EU, with your continued support for a racist, murderous, apartheid regime.

    Professor Alfred de Zayas, former senior lawyer with OHCHR, former UN Independent Expert on International Order, and member of the GIPRI board is prepared to substantiate the violations by Israel of the Hague Convention of 1907, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1977 Additional Protocols, of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and of articles 6, 7, and 8 of the Statute of Rome.

    If there ever was a case for the application of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (GA Resolution 60/1 paras 138-39), this is it.

     

    The post Open letter to the EU Leadership Demanding an Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Geneva International Peace Research Institute.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Open letter to the EU Leadership Demanding an Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza

    15th March 2024.

    Dear President von der Leyen,
    Dear President Michel,
    Dear High Representative Borrell,

    The Geneva International Peace Research Institute respectfully comes back to you on this question of a ceasefire in Gaza, on which we have yet to receive a satisfactory response.

    Since our previous email of 23rd February, GIPRI has launched an academic and media campaign of awareness-raising and public debate.  Our director Dr. Gabriel Galice and the board are appalled at the inaction by European leaders in the face of the on-going genocide and the multiple violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law by the government of Israel.  It is most urgent to enforce a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, followed by a lifting of the illegal blockade against the hapless population of Gaza, the full implementation of the order of the International Court of Justice of 26 January 2024, and the prompt and effective delivery of humanitarian assistance to the starving population.

    You received the proposal from Dr. Galice on the 27th of February last, calling for a multi-national force to break the illegal Israeli blockade on Gaza. We attach the document here again for your reference.

    The document was shared in good faith, as a rallying call to the international community to support the besieged population of Gaza, through the formation of unilateral state partnerships with international humanitarian organizations to break the illegal blockade. What it was not meant for was to be co-opted by the EU and the US government.

    The GIPRI proposal was published in the Belgian paper Le Soir on 29th February, and we have it on good authority that the next morning it was sitting on the desks of prime ministers in certain European capitals.

    It was also published in the Tribune de Geneve on 5th March.

    By some marvelous set of coincidences, the US government announced a week after the Le Soir article, after five months of relentless Israeli bombing, that it would build a pier in Gaza and send aid to Gaza via a maritime corridor out of Cyprus. It would do all of this while at the same time maintaining its provision of weapons and political cover for Israel to continue its murderous campaign against the civilians of Gaza unabated. The cognitive dissonance of such a situation is monstrous, as we see pictures of a tugboat pulling a barge with a couple of hundred tons of aid on it, bound for Gaza, while the images of the bloody aftermath of Israeli air strikes continue to be livestreamed. It is unethical and cynical to be complicit in a genocide and then to pretend to be a Good Samaritan with all the media hype associated with it.  Last weekend, the EU announced that it would be implementing a similar initiative, although the European governments continue giving aid and comfort to the government of Israel in the midst of its ethnic cleansing campaign, engaging in apology of genocide and crimes against humanity.

    There appears to be such an enormous moral vacuum and absence of ideas at the levels of Brussels and Washington, not to mention shocking apathy, that it is quite clear that the GIPRI proposal has been co-opted by bureaucrats in both locations to make it seem as though they are doing something to help the people of Gaza, when in reality they do not care.

    Not only is the mechanism that the EU has adopted useless, in the absence of a port in Gaza or any means of inland delivery of aid planned for in advance, but the EU is also continuing to provide its tacit support for the Israeli blockade, the bombing and starvation of the population, as well as the continuation of the slow and torturous Israeli aid inspection process.

    By opening a maritime corridor via Cyprus, the EU is effectively surrendering any remaining moral authority it may have had to the Israelis, by presenting the scenario as though no other possible alternative exists, when in fact many alternatives do exist.

    Through adopting this approach, the EU continues to support the Israeli blockade by steadfastly refusing to call for a ceasefire, and by not calling for Israel to open the land borders to allow the hundreds of aid trucks already positioned to enter Gaza. This is the only effective means through which aid can be distributed to the population by the United Nations agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other international partners and organizations. These agencies have been calling for months for rapid and unhindered access to deliver aid, calls that continue to fall on deaf ears.

    This assault on Gaza was never about 7th October, or about Hamas, or about Israel’s notional right to defend itself. It is clear now that it is nothing less than a pre-planned genocide, a land-grab for the creation of a greater Israel, a more secure Apartheid ethno-state. The EU has supported it and you are all guilty of enabling this genocide to take place in plain sight. Words have lost their meaning at this point to express the horror of what we have witnessed for the past five months. Again, just last night, we witnessed another ‘Flour Massacre’, with over 60 people murdered by Israeli tanks and machine guns while waiting for food aid.

    This is a shocking disgrace and once again there has been no condemnation from the EU of these cold-blooded massacres we have witnessed in the past two weeks.

    As a group of European and American citizens, we have had enough, and we are holding you accountable for your actions in supporting Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its murder of the population. We are appalled that the EU has acted in this undemocratic way for the past five months, throwing its support behind Israel, while the citizens of the EU have been overwhelmingly demanding, for months now, an end to the senseless slaughter and destruction.

    We demand that the EU calls for an immediate and unconditional end to the Israeli bombing of Gaza right now, and we demand that the EU also calls for an opening of the borders, allowing rapid and unhindered delivery of food, shelter and medical supplies to the population.

    Anything less than this is unacceptable and in breach of international law, which you all claim to uphold, but which it is evident that you are in breach of.

    Short of this, we will be amplifying calls at the public level for your immediate resignations, as you no longer represent the population of the EU, with your continued support for a racist, murderous, apartheid regime.

    Professor Alfred de Zayas, former senior lawyer with OHCHR, former UN Independent Expert on International Order, and member of the GIPRI board is prepared to substantiate the violations by Israel of the Hague Convention of 1907, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1977 Additional Protocols, of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and of articles 6, 7, and 8 of the Statute of Rome.

    If there ever was a case for the application of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (GA Resolution 60/1 paras 138-39), this is it.

     

    The post Open letter to the EU Leadership Demanding an Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Geneva International Peace Research Institute.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Cop Cities, Borders, and Bombs

    Image by Ray Acheson.

    Last month, organizers and activists from around the United States gathered in Tucson, Arizona for a nationwide summit to Stop Cop City—or, more accurately, Cop Cities. As new research has revealed, there are at least 69 militarized police training facilities in the works across the country. Each was put in motion in or after 2020, clearly a direct response to the Black Lives Matter uprisings that dominated city streets for months to condemn racialised police violence and demand the defunding of police.

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Why Should We Give All Our Money to Landlords?

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    Who decided we should give all our money to landlords? Did you vote for that? I didn’t. You didn’t, either. And if you have thoughts of leaving renting behind to buy, the costs of mortgages are, not surprisingly, rising dramatically as well.

    As far as I know, no landlord has been recorded as holding a literal gun to the head of tenants to sign a lease. But then there is no need for them to do so, as “market forces” do the work for them. At bottom, the problem is that housing is a capitalist market commodity. As long as housing remains a commodity, housing costs will continue to become ever more unaffordable. To put this in other words: As long as housing is not a human right, but instead something that has to be competed for and owned by a small number of people, the holders of the good (housing) will take advantage and jack up prices as high as possible.

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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • It Can Happen to You

    The greatest tribute the Academy Awards made to Zone of Interest was to reenact its basic premise for nearly four hours, wrapping itself in a cocoon of distraction and self-infatuation, amid the horrors taking place outside, a swirl of superficiality only briefly interrupted by the unsettling sound of Jonathan Glazer’s trembling voice bringing an urgent message from the dead and dying to those who have retreated into a simulation of innocence.
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  • Inside the UAW’s Southern Strategy

    Persuading Southern autoworkers to join a union remains one of the U.S. labor movement’s most enduring challenges, despite persistent efforts by the United Auto Workers union to organize this workforce.

    To be sure, the UAW does have members employed by Ford and General Motors at facilities in Kentucky, Texas, Missouri and Mississippi.

    However, the UAW has tried and largely failed to organize workers at foreign-owned companies, including Volkswagen and Nissan in Southern states, where about 30% of all U.S. automotive jobs are located.

    But after the UAW pulled off its most successful strike in a generation against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, through which it won higher pay and better benefits for its members in 2023, the union is trying again to win over Southern autoworkers.

    The UAW has pledged to spend US$40 million through 2026 to expand its ranks to include more auto and electric battery workers, including many employed in the South, where the industry is quickly gaining ground.

    Based on my five decades of experience as a union organizer and labor historian, I anticipate that, recent momentum aside, the UAW will face stiff resistance from Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and the other big foreign automakers that operate in the South. The pushback is also coming from Southern politicians, many of whom have expressed concern that UAW success would undermine the region’s carefully crafted approach to economic development.

    Lauding the ‘perfect three-legged stool’

    After the region’s formerly robust textile industry imploded in the 1980s and 1990s because of an influx of cheap imports, Southern business and political leaders revived the region’s manufacturing base by successfully recruiting foreign automakers.

    The strategy of those leaders reflects what the Business Council of Alabama has described as the “perfect three-legged stool for economic development.” It consists of “an eager and trainable workforce with a work ethic unparalleled anywhere in the nation,” accompanied by a “low-cost and business-friendly economic climate, and the lack of labor union activity and participation.”

    The prospect of a low-wage and reliable workforce has lured the likes of Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, Honda, Volkswagen and Hyundai to the South in recent decades.

    Although many of those companies negotiate constructively with unions on their home turf, the lack of union membership and the protections that go with it have proved a draw for them in the United States.

    As journalist Harold Meyerson has noted, these foreign automakers embraced the opportunity to “slum” in America and “do things they would never think of doing at home.”

    The absence of union representation is a major reason why.

    Less than 5% of workers in six Southern states are union members, and only Alabama and Mississippi approach union membership levels above 7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    That’s below the national average, which slid to 10% in 2023.

    Blaming unions for bad job prospects

    One way automotive employers in the South have blocked unions is by portraying them as outdated institutions whose bloated contracts and rigid work rules destroy jobs by making domestic auto companies uncompetitive.

    Automotive leaders in the South argue the region has developed an alternative labor relations model that provides management with flexibility, offers wages and benefits superior to what local workers have earned previously and frees employees from any subordination to union directives.

    Southern automakers also draw on another powerful resource in resisting the UAW: public intervention by top elected officials.

    In 2014, when the UAW attempted to organize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. Bob Corker, Tennessee’s junior U.S. senator and a former mayor of Chattanooga, weighed in as voting commenced.

    Corker claimed he had received a pledge from Volkswagen’s management to expand production in Chattanooga if workers voted against the union.

    Three years later, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant similarly urged Nissan workers to reject the UAW.

    “If you want to take away your job, if you want to end manufacturing as we know it in Mississippi, just start expanding unions,” Bryant said in 2017.

    A majority of the autoworkers heeded their conservative leaders’ advice in both cases and voted against joining the UAW.

    Making dire warnings

    With the UAW ramping up its organizing efforts again, Southern governors are sounding alarms once more.

    “The Alabama model for economic success is under attack,” warned Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey.

    She then asked workers: “Do you want continued opportunity and success the Alabama way? Or do you want out-of-state special interests telling Alabama how to do business?”

    Unions “have crippled and distorted the progress and prosperity of industries and cities in other states,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster declared in his Jan. 24, 2024, State of the State address. He then issued an ominous call: “We will fight” the UAW’s labor organizers “all the way to the gates of hell. And we will win.”

    The UAW counters that union membership means workers will get predictable raises, better benefits and improved workplace policies.

    Changing context

    Although these arguments from anti-union politicians haven’t changed much over the years, the context certainly has.

    The UAW’s big wins on pay and benefits resulting from its 2023 strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have increased its clout and credibility.

    Many automakers with a U.S. workforce not covered by the UAW – including Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai and other foreign transplants – responded by raising pay at their Southern plants. The union justifiably describes those raises as a “UAW bump.”

    The UAW will presumably cite these pay hikes in its outreach to workers at Tesla and other nonunion companies involved in electric vehicle and battery production in which the industry is investing heavily.

    “Nonunion autoworkers are being left behind,” the UAW’s recruiting website warns. “Are you ready to stand up and win your fair share?”

    The pitch continues: “It’s time for nonunion autoworkers to join the UAW and win economic justice at Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mazda, Rivian, Lucid, Volvo and beyond.”

    Some Southern autoworkers, meanwhile, have been expressing concerns over scheduling, safety, two-tier wage systems and workloads that they believe a union could help resolve.

    It’s also clear they’ve been emboldened by the gains they have seen UAW members make.

    Southern autoworkers applaud the union-organizing drive underway at a VW factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

    Revving up

    The UAW’s campaign is just starting to rev up.

    In accordance with its “30-50-70” strategy, the union is announcing the share of workers who have signed union cards in stages. Once it hits 30% at a factory, the UAW will announce publicly that an organizing campaign is underway. At the 50% mark, it will hold a public rally for workers that includes their neighbors and families, as well as UAW President Shawn Fain.

    Once it gains support from 70% of a plant’s workers, the UAW says it will seek voluntary recognition by management.

    A recent National Labor Relations Board ruling provides unions with additional leverage in this process. If management refuses to recognize the union’s request, the employer would then be required to seek an NLRB representation election.

    To win, unions need a majority of those voting. Under the new rule, if management is found to have interfered with workers’ rights during the election process, it could then be required to bargain with the union.

    So far, the UAW has announced that it has obtained the support of more than half the workers at factories belonging to two of the 13 nonunion automakers it’s targeting: a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a
    Mercedes-Benz factory near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It has also obtained 30% support at a Hyundai plant in Alabama and a Toyota engine factory in Missouri.

    I believe that the stakes are high for all workers, not just those in the auto industry.

    As D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here, a union that represents workers in a wide range of occupations, recently observed: “If you change the South, you change America.”The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    The post Inside the UAW’s Southern Strategy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bob Bussel.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Hasbarist

    Bret Stephens speaking at the 92nd Street Y, Youtube screenshot.

    On October 15, 2023, a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel and in the early days of an indiscriminate Israeli response, New York Times editorialist Bret Stephens wrote a column titled “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War.”

    After allowing that “[r]easonable people can criticize Israel for not allowing enough time for civilians to get out of harm’s way,” Stephens, having rhetorically covered himself, endorses the impending ground invasion and arrives at the conclusion inscribed in the column’s title. “The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas,” he writes. “It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians.”

    After five months of war, at least 30,000 Palestinians dead (12,000 children, certainly an undercount), innumerable documented atrocities, a partial indictment for genocide, and the prospect of a spiraling Middle East conflagration, you might think his tune would have shifted, even a little. After all, even Tom Friedman has managed to squeeze out some criticism of Israel.

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  • What Biden and the Democrats Can Appear to Do About Gaza

    When it comes to the genocide that the United States is helping Israel inflict on Gaza, Joe Biden is never more repugnant than when he pretends to care. I actually prefer his one-sided regional empathy: tedious reminiscences of chats with Golda Meir and odious references to Israel’s psychopathic Prime Minister as “Bibi”. { A  term […]
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    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Starvation Games

    With more than a half-million Gazans already facing starvation and more and more children dying of hunger, Biden’s solution, a floating port, will take 30-60 days to build and even then Israeli forces will still be in charge of inspecting the trucks of supplies, the main reason trucks are backed up for miles at the entry points into Gaza. Even the trickle of humanitarian supplies and food Biden has pledged to provide to Palestinians in Gaza won’t do much, if any, good, if there’s no one there to distribute it and Israel just moved to deny visas to the aid workers who have the experience and means to get the aid where it needs to go, a clear strategy to double down on its warfare by starvation.
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  • Homo What?

    As some members of our species are at it, hell for leather, killing other members of it wholesale and openly, aided and abetted by “democratic” national and international institutions in the “crime of all crimes”—genocide—humanity’s current situation is one in which the end of our species, and all the rest, is looming in the even […]
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  • Fani Willis’ Other Scandal

    Four days before the January 6 insurrection, then-president Donald Trump infamously told a state official to “find” the votes needed to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden in the key state of Georgia. News of Trump’s put-me-in-jail-please phone call broke just as Fani Willis took the reins as the newly elected district attorney for […]
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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Tucker.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Burning All Illusions

    The desperate attempts to smear Aaron Bushnell as “insane” are absurd. They are the kind of absurdity that Camus dissects in The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.”  If Camus ultimately comes down on the side of living, it’s a close call that takes many pages to reason out in a world where one civilized culture gave us Auschwitz and another Hiroshima. Our own cultural guardians want us to believe Bushnell was mad and not the war that drove him to take his own life.
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  • Assange’s High Court Appeal

    Assange’s attorneys had informed the court that he simply could not attend in person, though it would hardly have mattered.  His absence from the courtroom was decorous in its own way; he could avoid being displayed like a caged specimen reviled for his publishing feats.  The proceedings would be conducted in the manner of appropriate panto, with dress and procedure to boot.
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