Military actions by various actors across the Middle East are compounding fears that Israel’s assault on Gaza is escalating into a full-blown regional war. In recent days, the United States has carried out strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen who have resumed their attacks on container ships in the Red Sea; Iran has struck targets in northern Iraq, Syria and Pakistan; while Hezbollah and Israel…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The International Court of Justice. Photo credit: ICJ
On January 11th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is holding its first hearing in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. The first provisional measure South Africa has asked of the court is to order an immediate end to this carnage, which has already killed more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children. Israel is trying to bomb Gaza into oblivion and scatter the terrorized survivors across the Earth, meeting the Convention’s definition of genocide to the letter.
Since countries engaged in genocide do not publicly declare their real goal, the greatest legal hurdle for any genocide prosecution is to prove the intention of genocide. But in the extraordinary case of Israel, whose cult of biblically ordained entitlement is backed to the hilt by unconditional U.S. complicity, its leaders have been uniquely brazen about their goal of destroying Gaza as a haven of Palestinian life, culture and resistance.
South Africa’s 84-page application to the ICJ includes ten pages (starting on page 59) of statements by Israeli civilian and military officials that document their genocidal intentions in Gaza. They include statements by Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, Defense Minister Gallant, five other cabinet ministers, senior military officers and members of parliament. Reading these statements, it is hard to see how a fair and impartial court could fail to recognize the genocidal intent behind the death and devastation Israeli forces and American weapons are wreaking in Gaza.
The Israeli magazine +972 talked to seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials involved in previous assaults on Gaza. They explained the systematic nature of Israel’s targeting practices and how the range of civilian infrastructure that Israel is targeting has been vastly expanded in the current onslaught. In particular, it has expanded the bombing of civilian infrastructure, or what it euphemistically defines as “power targets,” which have comprised half of its targets from the outset of this war.
Israel’s “power targets” in Gaza include public buildings like hospitals, schools, banks, government offices, and high-rise apartment blocks. The public pretext for destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is that civilians will blame Hamas for its destruction, and that this will undermine its civilian base of support. This kind of brutal logic has been proved wrong in U.S.-backed conflicts all over the world. In Gaza, it is no more than a grotesque fantasy. The Palestinians understand perfectly well who is bombing them – and who is supplying the bombs.
Intelligence officials told +972 that Israel maintains extensive occupancy figures for every building in Gaza, and has precise estimates of how many civilians will be killed in each building it bombs. While Israeli and U.S. officials publicly disparage Palestinian casualty figures, intelligence sources told +972 that the Palestinian death counts are remarkably consistent with Israel’s own estimates of how many civilians it is killing. To make matters worse, Israel has started using artificial intelligence to generate targets with minimal human scrutiny, and is doing so faster than its forces can bomb them.
Israeli officials claim that each of the high-rise apartment buildings it bombs contains some kind of Hamas presence, but an intelligence official explained, “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so.” As Yuval Abraham of +972 summarized, “The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.”
Two days after South Africa submitted its Genocide Convention application to the ICJ, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich declared on New Year’s Eve that Israel should substantially empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians and bring in Israeli settlers. “If we act in a strategically correct way and encourage emigration,” Smotrich said, “if there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza, and not two million, the whole discourse on “the day after” will be completely different.”
When reporters confronted U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller about Smotrich’s statement, and similar ones by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Miller replied that Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have reassured the United States that those statements don’t reflect Israeli government policy.
But Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s statements followed a meeting of Likud Party leaders on Christmas Day where Netanyahu himself said that his plan was to continue the massacre until the people of Gaza have no choice but to leave or to die. “Regarding voluntary emigration, I have no problem with that,” he told former Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon. “Our problem is not allowing the exit, but a lack of countries that are ready to take Palestinians in. And we are working on it. This is the direction we are going in.”
We should have learned from America’s lost wars that mass murder and ethnic cleansing rarely lead to political victory or success. More often they only feed deep resentment and desires for justice or revenge that make peace more elusive and conflict endemic.
Although most of the martyrs in Gaza are women and children, Israel and the United States politically justify the massacre as a campaign to destroy Hamas by killing its senior leaders. Andrew Cockburn described in his book Kill Chain: the Rise of the High-Tech Assassins how, in 200 cases studied by U.S. military intelligence, the U.S. campaign to assassinate Iraqi resistance leaders in 2007 led in every single case to increased attacks on U.S. occupation forces. Every resistance leader they killed was replaced within 48 hours, invariably by new, more aggressive leaders determined to prove themselves by killing even more U.S. troops.
But that is just another unlearned lesson, as Israel and the United States kill Islamic Resistance leaders in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, risking a regional war and leaving themselves more isolated than ever.
If the ICJ issues a provisional order for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanity must seize the moment to insist that Israel and the United States must finally end this genocide and accept that the rule of international law applies to all nations, including themselves.
The post A Chance to Hold Israel and the US to Account for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The role of the US State Department regarding Israel’s continued obliteration of Gaza is becoming increasingly clear. As the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces continue, the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is full of meaningless statements about restraint and control, the protection of civilians, the imperatives of humanitarianism in war. As the war continues, so do those statements.
As the new year began, an official from the White House expressed satisfaction at what appeared “to be the start of the gradual shift to lower-intensity operations in the north that we have been encouraging”. But the revised Israeli approach did not “reflect any changes in the south”. The monstrous death toll, in short, would continue to rise.
As Washington feigns a reproachful attitude to the IDF’s grossly lethal tactics, claiming success in restraining them, another, failing front is also being pursued in the Arab world and beyond. As Israel’s great defender, the US is attempting to hold back fury and consternation as the dirty deeds by their favourite ally in the Middle East are being executed.
Blinken’s latest round of travelling has the flavour of swinging by tetchy neighbours to see how they are faring in the sea of blood and acrimony. The itinerary includes Istanbul, Crete, Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Al-’Ula, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, Manama and Cairo. The State Department’s media release on January 4 outlines the obsolete agenda any sensible diplomat would do best to discard. “Throughout his trip, the Secretary will underscore the importance of protecting civilian lives in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza; securing the release of all remaining hostages; our shared commitment to facilitating the increased, sustained delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and the resumption of essential services; and ensuring that Palestinians are not forcibly displaced in Gaza.”
So far, Palestinians are being massacred by the IDF in Gaza, forcibly deprived of life-saving humanitarian assistance and essential services in a sustained act of strangulation while being forcibly displaced. They are being oppressed, harassed and murdered by vigilante Israeli settlers in the West Bank, even as the army looks the other way.
It follows that Blinken is telling tall stories and hoping that legs carry them far. They are also being told as proceedings before the International Court of Justice instituted by South Africa commence to determine whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza satisfies the definition of genocide in international law.
The strategy becomes clearer in the second part of the disingenuous traveller’s agenda. Blinken “will also discuss urgent mechanisms to stem violence, calm rhetoric, and reduce regional tensions, including deterring Houthi attacks on commercial shopping in the Red Sea and avoiding escalation in Lebanon.”
The Houthi attacks and the increasingly violent situation in Lebanon serve as golden distractions for Washington, since they give the Biden administration room to simultaneously claim to be preventing a widening of the conflict while permitting Israel’s butchery to continue.
Corking the conflict, however, is not proving such a success. The war is widening, even if reporting on the subject remains sketchy in the negligently lazy news outlets of the Anglosphere. In addition to the bold moves of the Houthis and escalating violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon come ongoing, harrying efforts from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. An Al-Mayadeen report on January 7 took note of an announcement from the group, also known as the Iraqi al-Najuba Movement, that it had fired an al-Arqab long-range cruise missile at Haifa “in support of our people in Gaza and in response to the massacres committed by the usurping entity against Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”
A spokesperson for the Iraqi Resistance, Hussein al-Moussawi, was bullish in claiming that the group had the capacity to strike targets beyond Haifa. Conditions to develop the group’s weapons had also been “favourable”.
In a separate statement, the Islamic Resistance also revealed that its fighters had targeted an Israeli base on the occupied Golan Heights, usin drones. To this can be added drone attacks on the US army base of Qasrok, located in the countryside of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq. The base continues to host US forces.
Perhaps the greatest canard of all in this briefest of trips by Blinken is the continued, now absurd claim, that Washington is committed “to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps towards the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”
In his remarks to President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Blinken showed the hardened ignorance that will ensure the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue in some form. In his mind, a “reformed” Palestinian Authority will take over the reins of a ruined Gaza (“effective responsibility”) whatever the residents of Gaza think.
Palestinians will never, given current conditions, be permitted sovereignty and anything remotely resembling a thriving, viable state. Israel, whose very existence is based on predation, dispossession and war, will never permit a Palestinian entity to be given equal standing at the diplomatic or security table. The US, in the tatty drag of an independent broker, will go along with the pantomime, promoting, as Blinken is, a sham, counterfeit form of autonomy, one forever subject to conditions, demarcations and restraints. And one thing is almost certain about any future rump Palestinian entity: it will be deprived of any right to defend itself.
The post Tall Tales and Murderous Restraint: Blinken on Gaza and Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
They are unlikely to be revelatory, will shatter no myths, nor disprove any assumptions. Cabinet documents exist to merely show that a political clique – the heart of the Westminster model of government, so to speak – often contain the musings of invertebrates, spineless on most issues such as foreign policy, while operating at the behest of select interests. Hostility to originality is essential since it is threatening to the tribe; dissent is discouraged to uphold the order of collective cabinet responsibility.
The recent non-story arising from the cabinet documents made available as to why Australia participated in a murderous, destructive and most probably illegal war against Iraq in 2003 proves that point. The documents available showed, for instance, that a country, without mandatory parliamentary consultation, can go to war under the stewardship of a cabal influenced by the strategic interests of a foreign government. The Howard government, famously buried in the fatty posterior of the US imperium, was always going to commit Australian military personnel to whatever military venture Washington demanded of it. (In some cases, even without asking.)
It was modish to suggest during the “Global War on Terror” that governments with fictional weapons of mass destruction might pass them on to surrogate non-state actors. It was fashionable to misread intelligence material alleging such links, and, when that intelligence did not stack up, concoct it, as Tony Blair’s government happily did, sexed-up dossiers and all, in justifying Britain’s participation in the mauling of Iraq.
The larger story in the recent documents affair over Iraq was what documents were withheld from the provision to the Australian National Archives in 2020. In his January 3 press conference, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese outlined the process. Normally, cabinet documents would be released two decades after their creation. Such documents are provided to the Archives three years in advance by the government of the day. But on this occasion, 78 were omitted from the transfer, enabling Albanese to point the finger firmly at his predecessor, Scott Morrison. (Those documents have since been transferred to the Archives.)
In Albanese’s view, “Australians have the right to know the basis upon which Australia went to war in Iraq. Australians lost their lives during the conflict and we know that some of the stated reasons for going to war was not correct in terms of the weapons of mass destruction that was alleged Iraq had at the time.” Australians, he went on to say, had “a right to know what the decision-making process was”.
The mistake in question had to be corrected, and the Archives had to release the documentation provided to them. A constricting caveat, however, was appended to the declaration: the release of the documents had to “account for any national security issues […] upon the advice of the national security agencies.”
The caveat is a good starting point to suggest that this documents saga, and the restrictions upon the disclosure of the missing 78 Cabinet records, are set to continue. For one thing, Albanese has added to the farce of secrecy by commencing an independent review that is barely worth that title. The review is to be chaired by the very sort of person you would expect to bury rather than find things: Dennis Richardson, former director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation and former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
Richardson’s appointment continues a practice of partisan control over a process that should be beyond the national-security fraternity. There are fewer strings of accountability, as would apply, say, to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. There are no terms of reference outlined. Short of simply being a political manoeuvre that might cast a poor light on the previous government’s practices, it is unclear what Richardson’s purpose really is apart from justifying the retention of any of the said documents from public view.
Either way, he will be on a tidy sum for the task, something which he is becoming rather used to. As The Klaxon reports, Richardson has been well remunerated by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) for previous work. A $50,000-a-month contract was awarded to him last year for “strategic advice and review” between August 2 and October 31. The department refuses to state what it was for, preferring the insufferably vague justification of some “need for independent research or assessment”. Be on guard whenever the term “independent” is coupled with “inquiry” or “assessment” in an Australian government context.
A media release from the PM&C further notes that no department official or Minister has a direct role in the release or otherwise of the documents in question; the Archives will have the final say on whether those documents will be released or otherwise, whatever Albanese says. Researchers, transparency activists and those keen on open government, are almost guaranteed disappointment, given the habitual secrecy and dysfunction that characterises the operation of that body.
If there is a true lesson in this untidy business for the Albanese government, it must surely lie in the need to debate, discuss and dissent from matters that concern the entanglement of Australia, not merely in foreign wars but in alliances that cause them. That, sadly, is a lesson that is nowhere being observed. Howard’s crawling disposition has found its successor in Albanese’s obsequiousness, in so far as foreign conflicts are concerned. Wherever the US war machine is deployed, Australia will hop to its aid with gleeful obedience.
And as for anything to do with revealing the Australian decision-making process about the decision to invade, despoil and ruin yet another Middle Eastern state in 2003, one is better off consulting records from the White House and the US State Department.
The post Circle of Secrecy: The Iraq War’s Missing Cabinet Documents first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When war criminals can daub canvasses in blithe safety, rake in millions of dollars in after dinner speeches and bore governments to death with their shoddy words of wisdom, the world is not so much as it should be, but merely as it is. Former US President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and tag along bore, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, remain at large, despite their respective countries wagging fingers of disapproval at authoritarian regimes for defying the rules-based international order. Never a more fitting trio in terms of abusing international law could you find.
In 2003, this culpable troika sneered, ignored and soiled such international institutions as the United Nations, the rule of law, the legacy of the Nuremberg trials, and a number of conventions, by invading Iraq. The country, weakened and crippled by years of sanctions, leaving its hospital system crushed with bulky lists of dead children (all worthwhile, according to the late former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright), was apparently a mortal threat to Western civilisation.
The Baathist regime, led by Saddam Hussein, was purportedly armed to the teeth with a doomsday inventory of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that he was bound to use at any given moment against freedom loving types in Washington, London and Canberra. (It is true he had previously had such weapons, much of it supplied by Western arms corporations with the blessing of intelligence agencies such as the CIA.) He had, apparently, refused to disarm, obdurate in the face of United Nations weapons inspectors. And he had flirted with those evil representatives of cataclysmic eschatology, al-Qaida, despite being hostile to such millenarian groups. The report card, spottier than ever in the shadow of the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States, suggested that he had to go. The results: lusty sectarian violence, a catastrophically devastating, often imbecilic occupation by US-led forces, the seeds of emboldened fundamentalism, the offshoot movements such as Islamic State, and multigenerational trauma.
With another new year beckoning, the Australian National Archives have released approximately 240 cabinet papers from 2003 on the decision-making process behind a number of policy decisions. A few snippets are offered regarding road to war. Cabinet’s National Security Committee had kept an eye on developments in Iraq, though the released materials do little to reveal what, precisely, took place in conversations between Howard and Bush.
In September 2002, one document notes how “cabinet noted an oral report by the prime minister on his discussion with the president of the United States on the American position in relation to efforts by Iraq to secure and maintain weapons of mass destruction.” A fortnight later, the then-foreign minister Alexander Downer, is noted as furnishing cabinet with an “oral report” regarding “developments” regarding the proposed UN Security Council resolution on the Saddam regime’s “possession of, and attempts to secure or maintain, weapons of mass destruction, and on the prospects for passage of the resolution”. That such oral revelations were not accompanied by thick, detailed submissions, is telling about the obedient, inevitable train of thinking afflicting the Howard government. A war, started by Washington, would come, and Canberra would be along for the ride.
By March 2003, Howard was demanding action. He informed members of his cabinet that Bush had issued Saddam with an ultimatum of thuggish import. “Saddam Hussein and his sons,” the US president stated, “must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”
Howard was drunk with intelligence assessments from the United States, including such claims that Iraq had put out feelers for yellowcake in Niger. Couple this with such stretched confections as non-state terrorist actors, hankering for WMD spoils from sponsor states, and the prime minister was swooning. In 2013, his cringeworthy apologia given to the Lowy Institute reflected on the fictitious Niger angle as “unmistakable” in its “strength”. Had it been accurate – a sly way of escaping the prosecutor’s legal brief – and Saddam “left in place, only to provide WMDs to a terrorist group, for use against the US, the Administration would have failed in its most basic responsibility to protect the nation.” When crooks of state are found out, they tend to cite public duty as appropriate justification.
As far as legality for any military intervention outside the formal channels of authorisation of a UN Security Council, Howard was armed with a memorandum signed by a first assistant secretary from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and his equivalent from the Attorney-General’s Department. Fantastically and irresponsibly, the cod ordinary advice suggested that Australian involvement in an invasion would be entirely legal, given the Saddam regime’s recalcitrance in not allegedly complying with previous Security Council resolutions. It seems that the public servants in question, instead of offering a panoramic view about the pitfalls of a dangerous adventure in the Middle East, were merely keen to satisfy the bloodletting urges of their political paymasters.
The cabinet minute from March 18, 2003 showed agreement from the Attorney-General with the spurious reasoning of the first assistant secretaries. It also noted that the Australian Governor-General, Peter Hollingworth, holder of that old office of the British empire as the monarch’s representative, had been consulted. Approval from him, however, was not mandatory.
Cabinet, won over with no evident demurral, and previously buttered up by oral reports, approved the measure to commit Australia to another failed military mission of murderous, bungling incompetence. The United States would receive no resistance in getting its pound of Australian flesh for an illegal enterprise, and the Australian public, many of whom had participated in some of the largest anti-war demonstrations the country had ever seen, would be ignored.
The post Criminal Assumptions: The Howard Cabinet and Invading Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
OBITUARY: By Peter Boyle and Pip Hinman of Green Left
Sydney-born investigative journalist, author and filmmaker John Pilger died on December 31, 2023.
He should be remembered and honoured not just for his impressive body of work, but for being a brave — and at times near-lone — voice for truth against power.
In early 2002, the “war on terror”, launched by then United States President George W Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attack, was in full swing.
After two decades, more than 4 million would be killed in Iraq, Libya, Philippines, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere under this bloody banner, and 10 times more displaced.
The propaganda campaign to justify this ferocious, US-led, global punitive expedition cowed many voices, not least in the settler colonial state of Australia.
But there was one prominent Australian voice that was not silenced — and it was John Pilger’s.
‘Breaking the silence’
On March 10 that year, Sydney Town Hall was packed out with people to hear John speak in a Green Left public meeting titled “Breaking the silence: war, propaganda and the new empire”.
Outside the Town Hall, about 100 more people, who could not squeeze in, stayed to show their solidarity.
Pilger described the war on terror as “a war on world-wide popular resistance to an economic system that determines who will live well and who will be expendable”.
He called for “opposition to a so-called war on terrorism, that is really a war of terrorism”.
The meeting played an important role in helping build resistance in this country to the many US-led imperial wars that followed the US’ bloody retribution exacted on millions of Afghans who had never even heard of the 9/11 attacks, let alone bore any responsibility for them.
That 2002 Sydney Town Hall meeting cemented a strong bond between GL and John.
GL is proud to have been the Australian newspaper and media platform that has published the most articles by John Pilger over the years.
Shared values
For much of the last two decades, the so-called mainstream media were always reluctant to run his pieces because he refused to obediently follow the unspoken war-on-terror line.
He refused to go along with the argument that every military expedition that the US launched (and which Australia and other loyal allies promptly followed) to protect privilege and empire were in defence of “shared democratic values”.
The collaboration between GL and John was based on real shared values, which he summed up succinctly in his introduction to his 1992 book Distant Voices:
“I have tried to rescue from media oblivion uncomfortable facts which may serve as antidotes to the official truth; and in doing so, I hope to have given support to those ‘distant voices’ who understand how vital, yet fragile, is the link between the right of people to know and to be heard, and the exercise of liberty and political democracy …”
GL editors have had many exchanges with John over the years. At times, there were political differences. But each such exchange only built up a mutual respect, based on a shared commitment to truth and justice.
The last two decades of John’s moral leadership against Empire were inadvertently confirmed a few weeks before his passing when US President Joe Biden warned Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu not to repeat the US’ mistakes after 9/11.
“There’s no reason we did so many of the things we did,” Biden told Netanyahu.
Focus on Palestine struggle
John had long focused on Palestine’s struggle for self-determination from the Israeli colonial settler state. He condemned Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign of Gaza and, on X, praised those marching for “peaceful decency”.
He urged people to (re)watch his 2002 documentary film Palestine is Still The Issue, in which he returned to film in Gaza and the West Bank, after having first done so in 1977.
John was outspoken about Australia’s treatment of its First Peoples; he didn’t agree with Labor’s Voice to Parliament plan, saying it offered “no real democracy, no sovereignty, no treaty between equals”.
He criticised Labor’s embrace of AUKUS, saying it was about a new war with China, a campaign he took up in his documentary The Coming War on China. While recognising China’s abuse of human and democratic rights, he said the US views China’s embrace of capitalist growth as the key threat.
John campaigned hard for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange’s release; he visited him several times in Belmarsh Prison and condemned a gutless Labor Prime Minister for refusing to meet with Stella Assange when she was in Australia.
He spoke out for other whistleblowers, including David McBride who exposed Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.
Did not mince words
John did not mince words which is why, especially during the war on terror, most mainstream media refused to publish him — unless a counterposed article was run side-by-side. He never agreed to this pretence of “balance”.
John wrote about his own, early, conscientisation.
“I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal,” he said on the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century — Vietnam.
“I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.”
John Pilger will be remembered by all those who know that facts and history matter, and that only through struggle will people’s movements ever have a chance of winning justice.
Republished with permission from Green Left Magazine.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Protesters wave Palestinian, Lebanese, and Hezbollah flags and hold a picture of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah during a Palestine solidarity rally in Lebanon. (Credit: GETTY IMAGES)
While Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been frantically shuttling around the Middle East trying to stop the Israeli conflict in Gaza from exploding into a regional war, the United States has also sent two aircraft carrier strike groups, a Marine Expeditionary Unit and 1,200 extra troops to the Middle East as a “deterrent.” In plain language, the United States is threatening to attack any forces that come to the defense of the Palestinians from other countries in the region, reassuring Israel that it can keep killing with impunity in Gaza.
But if Israel persists in this genocidal war, U.S. threats may be impotent to prevent others from intervening. From Lebanon to Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, the possibilities of the conflict spreading are enormous. Even Algeria says it is ready to fight for a free Palestine, based on a unanimous vote in its parliament on November 1st.
Middle Eastern governments and their people already see the United States as a party to Israel’s massacre in Gaza. So any direct U.S. military action will be seen as an escalation on the side of Israel and is more likely to provoke further escalation than to deter it.
The United States already faces this predicament in Iraq. Despite years of Iraqi demands for the removal of U.S. forces, at least 2,500 U.S. troops remain at Al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar province, Al-Harir Airbase, north of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, and another small base at the airport in Erbil. There are also “several hundred” NATO troops, including Americans, advising Iraqi forces in NATO Mission Iraq (NMI), based near Baghdad.
For many years, U.S. forces in Iraq have been mired in a low-grade war against the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that Iraq formed to fight ISIS, mainly from Shia militias. Despite their links to Iran, the armed groups Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and other PMFs have often ignored Iranian calls to de-escalate attacks on U.S. forces. These Iraqi groups do not respect Iran Quds Force leader General Esmail Qaani as highly as they did General Soleimani, so Soleimani’s assassination by the United States in 2020 has further reduced Iran’s ability to restrain the militias in Iraq.
After a year-long truce between U.S. and Iraqi forces, the Israeli war on Gaza has triggered a new escalation of this conflict in both Iraq and Syria. Some militias rebranded themselves as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and began attacking U.S. bases on October 17. After 32 attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, 34 more in Syria and 3 U.S. airstrikes in Syria, U.S. forces conducted airstrikes against two Kata’ib Hezbollah bases in Iraq, one in Anbar province and one in Jurf Al-Nasr, south of Baghdad, on November 21, killing at least nine militiamen.
The U.S. airstrikes prompted a furious response from the Iraqi government spokesman Bassam al-Awadi. “We vehemently condemn the attack on Jurf Al-Nasr, executed without the knowledge of government agencies,” al-Awadi said. “This action is a blatant violation of sovereignty and an attempt to destabilize the security situation… The recent incident represents a clear violation of the coalition’s mission to combat Daesh (ISIS) on Iraqi soil. We call on all parties to avoid unilateral actions and to respect Iraq’s sovereignty…”
As the Iraqi government feared, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq responded to the U.S. airstrikes with two attacks on Al-Harir airbase on November 22 and several more on November 23rd. They attacked Al-Asad airbase with several drones, launched another drone attack on the U.S. base at Erbil airport, and their allies in Syria attacked two U.S. bases across the border in northeastern Syria.
Short of a ceasefire in Gaza or a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Syria, there is no decisive action the U.S. can take that would put a stop to these attacks. So the level of violence in Iraq and Syria is likely to keep rising as long as the war on Gaza continues.
Another formidable and experienced military force opposing Israel and the United States is the Houthi army in Yemen. On November 14, Abdul-Malek al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi government in Yemen, asked neighboring countries to open a corridor through their territory for his army to go and fight Israel in Gaza.
The Houthi Deputy Information Secretary Nasreddin Amer told Newsweek that if they had a way to enter Palestine, they would not hesitate to join the fight against Israel, ”We have fighters numbering hundreds of thousands who are brave, tough, trained and experienced in fighting,” Amer said. “They have a very strong belief, and their dream in life is to fight the Zionists and the Americans.”
Transporting hundreds of thousands of Yemeni soldiers to fight in Gaza would be nearly impossible unless Saudi Arabia opened the way. That seems highly unlikely, but Iran or another ally could help to transport a smaller number by air or sea to join the fight.
The Houthis have been waging an asymmetric war against Saudi-led invaders for many years, and they have developed weapons and tactics that they could bring to bear against Israel. Soon after al-Houthi’s statement, Yemeni forces in the Red Sea boarded a ship owned, via shell companies, by Israeli billionaire Abraham Ungar. The ship, which was on its way from Istanbul to India, was detained in a Yemeni port.
The Houthis have also launched a series of drones and missiles towards Israel. While many members of Congress try to portray the Houthis as simply puppets of Iran, the Houthis are actually an independent, unpredictable force that other actors in the region cannot control.
Even NATO ally Türkiye is finding it difficult to remain a bystander, given the widespread public support for Palestine. President Erdogan of Türkiye was among the first international leaders to speak out strongly against the Israeli war on Gaza, explicitly calling it a massacre and saying that it amounted to genocide.
Turkish civil society groups are spearheading a campaign to send humanitarian aid to Gaza on cargo ships, braving a possible confrontation like the one that occurred in 2010 when the Israelis attacked the Freedom Flotilla, killing 10 people aboard the Mavi Marmara.
On the Lebanese border, Israel and Hezbollah have conducted daily exchanges of fire since October 7, killing 97 combatants and 15 civilians in Lebanon and 9 soldiers and 3 civilians in Israel. Some 46,000 Lebanese civilians and 65,000 Israelis have been displaced from the border area. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned on November 11, “What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.”
How will Hezbollah react if Israel resumes its brutal massacre in Gaza after the brief pause is over or if Israel expands the massacre to the West Bank, where it has already killed at least 237 more Palestinians since October 7?
In a speech on November 3, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah held back from declaring a new war on Israel, but warned that “all options are on the table” if Israel does not end its war on Gaza.
As Israel prepared to pause its bombing on November 23, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian held meetings in Qatar, first with Nasrallah and Lebanese officials, and then with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
In a public statement, Amirabdollahian said, “the continuation of the ceasefire can prevent further expansion of the scope of the war. In the meeting with the leaders of the resistance, I found out that if Israel’s war crimes and genocide continue, a tougher and more complicated scenario of the resistance will be implemented.”
Amirabdollahian already warned on October 16 that, “The leaders of the resistance will not allow the Zionist regime to do whatever it wants in Gaza and then go to other fronts of the resistance.”
In other words, if Iran and its allies believe that Israel really intends to continue its war on Gaza until it has removed Hamas from power, and then to turn its war machine loose on Lebanon or its other neighbors, they would prefer to fight a wider war now, forcing Israel to fight the Palestinians, Hezbollah and their allies at the same time, rather than waiting for Israel to attack them one by one.
Tragically, the White House is not listening. The next day, President Biden continued to back Israel’s vow to resume the destruction of Gaza after its “humanitarian pause,” saying that attempting to eliminate Hamas is “a legitimate objective.”
America’s unconditional support for Israel and endless supply of weapons have succeeded only in turning Israel into an out-of-control, genocidal, destabilizing force at the heart of a fragile region already shattered and traumatized by decades of U.S. war-making. The result is a country that refuses to recognize its own borders or those of its neighbors, and rejects any and all limits on its territorial ambitions and war crimes.
If Israel’s actions lead to a wider war, the U.S. will find itself with few allies ready to jump into the fray. Even if a regional conflict is avoided, the U.S. support for Israel has already created tremendous damage to the U.S. reputation in the region and beyond, and direct U.S. involvement in the war would leave it more isolated and impotent than its previous misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The United States can still avoid this fate by insisting on an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. If Israel will not agree to that, the U.S. must back up this position with an immediate suspension of arms deliveries, military aid, Israeli access to U.S. weapons stockpiles in Israel and diplomatic support for Israel’s war on Palestine.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Guardian has long promoted itself as a valiant publisher of news and analysis that holds the powerful to account. It is a thing of wonder that the Guardian appends the following comment beneath news pieces:
Our quality, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more.
For over twenty years, Media Lens has shown how false is this claim.
A new, significant example occurred just last week. On 15 November, the paper removed Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” which it had hosted on its website for almost 21 years. What was suddenly so problematic about the letter that it had to be abruptly removed by the Guardian after being on its website for so long (an archived version can be seen here)?
The deleted text was an English translation of bin Laden’s letter, first published on a Saudi website linked to al-Qaeda, in November 2002, over one year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The Guardian website published a full translation on its website on 24 November 2002. The letter, addressed to the American people, contains a detailed list of grievances against the US shared by many in the Muslim world, explaining what motivated the 9/11 attacks.
The letter has been ‘rediscovered’ during Israel’s current genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza, with people around the world discussing relevant issues online. The Guardian link to the letter went viral, particularly among young people on TikTok, with 14 million views of videos tagged with #lettertoamerica. Many of these videos were posted by young Americans, shocked to find that people around the world hate their country because of strong grievances rooted in real issues.
To properly understand why this response is so remarkable, and why it was quickly followed by an Orwellian act of Guardian censorship, requires some vital context.
‘They Hate Us For Our Freedoms’
In a recent edition of System Update, a widely-watched online politics programme, the US journalist Glenn Greenwald summed up the belief system of most Americans, of all ages:
The people who live in the United States believe and are told that we are a nice, good, benevolent, democratic, free country. We don’t want to bother anyone in the world. We’re not here to conquer anyone. To the extent that we involve ourselves in the world, it’s to help; like we’re doing now in Ukraine, we’re told. We just want to spread democracy, want to defend people…So, why would anyone possibly want to perpetrate an attack on the United States of that brutality and savagery? Americans rightly wanted to know.
Greenwald continued:
And they were fed a complete bullshit answer: by the neocons, by the media, by the government: “They hate us for our freedoms”.
The letter was written by bin Laden, who was loudly blamed for the attacks by the US and other governments, and who was extrajudicially executed by US special forces in Pakistan in May 2011. Greenwald pointed out that there are interviews with bin Laden where he had spelled out the grievances explaining the actual reasons why many in the Muslim world hate the United States.
Greenwald added:
And yet, after 9/11, the US government instructed the television networks – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox – do not show any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden, because they didn’t want the American population hearing from him what their actual grievances were. They didn’t want Americans to think that maybe we had done things in that part of the world that caused it to happen, that causes “blowback”, to use the CIA’s term.
As with any statement from an influential or powerful figure, bin Laden’s letter needs to be read critically. There is much to revile in the letter, not least its antisemitism and homophobia. But consider some of the grievances he detailed against the US government, summarised below:
The now blatant US support for Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza – and the genocidal nature of Israel’s attacks on Palestinians – seemingly underpins the explosion on social media of attention directed towards bin Laden’s letter. Young Americans are waking up to the fact that the US has long supported Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians.
Another significant factor is the awful realisation among young American people, especially, that US government policy has made them targets as retribution for the crimes committed by Washington.
“Removed Document”: Guardian Censorship
So why did the Guardian, which proclaims its credentials in supposedly enabling readers to understand the world, remove bin Laden’s letter from its website? The decision was ‘explained’ in a piece by Blake Montgomery, the tech editor for Guardian US in New York City. In fact, the headline, and most of the article, focused on TikTok:
TikTok “aggressively” taking down videos promoting Bin Laden “letter to America”.
The Guardian quoted TikTok:
Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got on to our platform.
But what did the article report about the Guardian itself?
In response to the letter’s renewed spread, Guardian News and Media removed it on 15 November 2023, replacing it with the statement: “The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.”
Significantly, the Guardian article closed with a statement from the White House, as though this should be literally the last word on the matter:
There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.
As Greenwald observed, US ‘Big Tech’ companies – Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) – are already subjected to censorship in accordance with the dictates of the US security state, as the ‘Twitter files’, a cache of leaked documents, showed. TikTok, a Chinese company, was the only major platform outside the reach of the US. But, noted Greenwald, they were told that, as a condition of being able to continue to operate in the US, they would have to agree to the censorship demands of the US government. Hence, TikTok’s determination to ban TikTok clips discussing #lettertoamerica.
In other words, the censorship actions taken by both TikTok and the Guardian align with the requirements of the US government. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the long history of the Guardian acting as a liberal gatekeeper for establishment power. Moreover, the paper’s ever-closer relationship with UK state security services, themselves subservient to US state power, is abundantly clear.
Piling irony upon irony, one article that the Guardian has not removed from its website, is the fake front-page ‘news’ story in November 2018 claiming that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, supposedly held secret talks with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Such reprehensible journalism unjustly besmirched Assange’s reputation and may well have been part of a state-sponsored propaganda campaign in advance of his forcible removal from the embassy by British police in April 2019, to be thrown in Belmarsh Prison where he remains to this day, awaiting likely extradition to the US.
What about the Guardian’s decision to redirect readers to their 2002 news article that ‘contextualised’ the letter? The article was titled, ‘Osama issues new call to arms’, and was written by Jason Burke, then the Guardian’s chief reporter and now the paper’s international security correspondent. The opening sentence made explicit the state-friendly pitch adopted throughout:
A chilling new message from Osama bin Laden is being circulated among British Islamic extremists, calling for attacks on civilians and describing the “Islamic nation” as “eager for martyrdom”.
Burke continued:
Britain, with its close support for America in the war on terror and Iraq, is a prime target and analysts believe any military action against Saddam Hussein would provoke a spate of revenge attacks by Islamic militants. Sources described the mood in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard as “jumpy”.
Recall that this article was published in November 2002, as the West was mounting a propaganda blitz to ‘justify’ its imminent invasion of Iraq which began in March 2003.
Burke added:
Most of his letter comprises a lengthy list of grievances against the West.
But which grievances? Surely the Guardian would spell out several examples from this ‘lengthy list’? Amazingly Burke did not cite any of them, other than bin Laden’s ‘sustained attack on the “immorality” of Western society.’
In other words, the Guardian article that supposedly ‘contextualised’ bin Laden’s letter, which the paper has now removed, does nothing of the sort, obscuring US crimes in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Japan and elsewhere.
Because the letter had gone viral, but then been removed, the most viewed link on the Guardian at one point last week (on 15 November) was actually, ‘Removed – document’; the place-marker with its risible ‘explanation’ that the Guardian had provided.
As Greenwald noted:
Is that Orwellian enough, or Kafkaesque enough, for you? The article in which most people had an interest in reading was the [letter hosted by the] Guardian [which], precisely because too many people were interested in it, [the editors] decided to remove, so that people couldn’t read it any longer. It’s a document by a major historical figure. The person we’re told was responsible for the 9/11 attack explaining to Americans why people in that part of the world were angry enough with America to do that.
And the Guardian decided, even though it had been up on their website for 21 years, that now that people were discussing it in connection with the war in Gaza from Israel, and US support for it, you can no longer read it.
One of our recent media alerts focused on the phenomenon of Orwellian ‘memory-hole journalism’. That the Guardian had been caught in the act, arguably attracting even more attention to what it had tried to conceal (known as the ‘Streisand effect’), is noteworthy.
What is so encouraging about the fact that this went viral among young people is that it suggests they are beginning to look beyond the benevolent platitudes of US government public relations and are seeking to understand the reasons why so many people around the globe hate, not US ‘freedoms’, but US foreign policy.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
With four years passing since the Tishreen Uprising in Iraq, the echoes of the protests for justice, accountability, and a better future still resound within the nation. However, these demands have remained largely unmet, overshadowed by a grim reality of enforced disappearances and a lack of accountability for the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.
The anti-government protests, which began in October 2019, were met with excessive force by Iraqi security forces, leading to numerous deaths, injuries, and the disappearance of activists, lawyers, and ordinary citizens. Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have highlighted the grim aftermath, shedding light on the tragic stories of those forcibly disappeared.
Successive Iraqi governments have promised justice, but these pledges have largely remained unfulfilled. Investigations into the atrocities have been meager and far from meeting international standards. The families of the disappeared, courageously seeking answers, have been met with threats and intimidation, preventing them from pursuing justice. Tragically, in some cases, family members advocating for their missing loved ones have themselves become victims of violence.
Despite assurances and promised investigations, the lack of transparency has further compounded the issue. Committees formed to investigate these violations have failed to deliver the much-needed truth or justice. While reparations have been provided to some families, it falls short of addressing the core issue of accountability for the crimes committed.
The plight of the disappeared persists. Names and faces of those missing continue to haunt their families and communities. Many have been abducted without a trace, their loved ones left in anguish, seeking answers from authorities who have yet to provide any substantial information.
The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances has raised concerns and urged the Iraqi government to take urgent steps. Incorporating enforced disappearance as a distinct crime in domestic law and implementing recommendations for addressing disappearances are imperative. Civil society organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), among others, have urged the Iraqi government to take immediate action and address the devastating issue of enforced disappearances.
Iraq stands at a critical juncture, where justice for the disappeared remains a pressing concern. The voices of those who sought change through peaceful protests continue to resonate. Yet, their absence underscores the urgency of the situation. The Iraqi government must heed the calls for justice, uphold human rights, and ensure accountability for the disappeared protesters, bringing closure to their families and the nation.
The post Seeking Justice for Iraq’s Disappeared Protesters: A Continuing Struggle appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
Airframers in the Asia Pacific region are transitioning away from building under license to developing their own platforms. The Asia Pacific region is the home to several airframers who cut their teeth in their early years with license manufacture of military platforms. Over the past three decades, there has been dramatic progress in the growth […]
The post Vaulting Ambition appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
After a five month absence from Gaslit Nation due to a family situation, Sarah has decided to leave the show. You can read her regular writing over at her new Substack. We all wish her well and look forward to her next book.
In this continuation of Gaslit Nation’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, Andrea shares her own hard learned lessons on how to hold space for a friend grieving over the crisis. This episode also includes a look at the Oslo Accords, an interim agreement that historically opened communication between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel’s government, and the years of violence that quickly followed, spiraling towards the growing mythology of Benjamin Netanyahu who built support through strongman rhetoric promising to keep Israelis safe. Insead, he weakened Israel. Netanyahu’s Trumpian playbook blasted opponents and the media as “FAKE NEWS!”, “THE DEEP STATE!”, “TRAITORS!”, and turned Israelis against each other. While being under investigation for corruption, Netanyahu brazenly tried to destroy the independence of the judiciary, leading to the largest protests in the country’s history. Now the majority of Israelis polled blame him for the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack, but the majority also believe he should resign after the war. That would incentivize Netanyahu to keep the war going to cling to power. Netanyahu must be forced to step down now, for the sake of any chance for peace.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; and Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism joins Andrea to discuss the stakes in Ukraine and the threats to democracy here at home and around the world. This interview was recorded the Friday before the historic October 15 elections in Poland, bringing a democratic coalition to power to defeat a right wing Trumpian regime that packed the courts, turned state media into their own propaganda arm, banned abortion, and inflamed scapegoating against LGBTQ+ people and refugees. This episode was supposed to run two weeks ago, but was delayed due to the war. For Applebaum’s analysis on the Israel-Hamas war, read her brilliant piece in The Atlantic on her summer reporting trip to Israel on how Israelis rightfully saw Netanyahu as an existential threat.
This week’s bonus episode will be inspired by questions submitted at the Democracy Defender level and higher on Patreon. To submit your questions, leave them in the comments or send them in a message. Join the conversation and receive ad free episodes, bonus shows, exclusive invites and other perks by subscribing at Patreon.com/Gaslit. Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
Show Notes:
Inside the Oslo accords: a new podcast series marks 30 years since Israel-Palestine secret peace negotiations https://theconversation.com/inside-the-oslo-accords-a-new-podcast-series-marks-30-years-since-israel-palestine-secret-peace-negotiations-212985
The language being used to describe Palestinians is genocidal https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/the-language-being-used-to-describe-palestinians-is-genocidal
I Negotiated Israel’s Hardest Hostage Deal. Here’s What’s Next in Gaza. “The United States still has a role to play. It should continue to pressure Qatar, which should give an ultimatum that if hostages are not released within, say, 24 hours, all of Hamas’s leaders will be expelled from Qatar, where many are based. I don’t believe that Qatar will agree to that — and certainly not without an Israeli cease-fire — but the American government and others have leverage over Qatar and it should be used.
There is still a small chance and a limited window of opportunity before the ground assault begins to attain the release of some of the hostages through this kind of agreement. After the invasion begins, it will depend on Israeli special forces to try to save them. Some will again see their homes; others may not.
At the other end of this war, I hope that the trauma and suffering we are all feeling on both sides of the conflict will spur us to figure out how to share this land that belongs to both Israelis and Palestinians. Maybe our collective suffering and pain can be channeled to focusing on how to live together rather than killing each other.
That will be a long process and cannot include the leaders on both sides who have brought us to where we are. We need a new generation of leaders with new vision, new hopes, new dreams and the ability to lead. I hope that many of the hostages, together with their families, will soon be able to join the voices calling for change.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/opinion/israel-hamas-hostage.html
Hamas Leader Lies when pressed in TV interview: https://twitter.com/arash_tehran/status/1715354932595847322
Netanyahu’s Attack on Democracy Left Israel Unprepared: The prime minister brought about a situation in which all the options are bad. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/israel-democracy-judicial-reform-netanyahu-hamas-attacks/675713/
Biden’s Israel-Palestine Policy Could Cost Him the Election: The president’s blank-check support of Israel’s war on Gaza is alienating many of the Black and brown voters he needs to win reelection. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-israel-palestine-policy-election/
The End of Netanyahu: He sold Israelis a story about their safety. It turned out not to be true. “Israelis have good reason for their disillusionment. Seen in hindsight, the litany of Netanyahu’s failures is long. By his own admission, he purposely propped up Hamas as a counterbalance to the more moderate Palestinian Authority in order to keep the Palestinian public divided and prevent a negotiated two-state solution. In partnership with Washington, Netanyahu facilitated the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar into Gaza in an attempt to buy quiet from Hamas. Intelligence officials now believe that some of this money was used to fund the group’s terrorism. Netanyahu also increased permits for Gazans to work in Israel; some of the permit holders may have provided intelligence used to plan the attacks. In 2011, the prime minister released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners—including convicted mass murderers—in return for one Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas. This decision encouraged further kidnapping attempts, culminating in the successful abduction of some 200 Israelis this month. One of the prisoners released in 2011 was Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza today.” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-hamas-attack-failure/675722/?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo
“According to his opponents, his semi-authoritarian tendencies have relentlessly weakened the checks and balances of Israeli democracy. He has debilitated democracy’s gatekeepers, constantly accusing the “deep state” – the judicial system, the law enforcement agencies, the bureaucracy – of actively subverting him and framing him for crimes he never committed using the “fake news” media that he claims is out to get him. And his demagogic, divisive and often incendiary political language has posed a clear and present danger to Israeli democracy. If American readers find this eerily familiar, they’re right.” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-hamas-attack-failure/675722/?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo
‘Biggest in Israeli History’: Organizers Claim Half a Million Protesters Against Netanyahu’s Constitutional Coup As a record 50,000 Israelis rallied in Haifa, and hundreds of thousands more across Israel, opposition leader Yair Lapid slams the Netanyahu government’s sole focus on ‘crushing Israeli democracy’ https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-11/ty-article/.premium/biggest-in-israeli-history-organizers-claim-half-a-million-protesters-in-tenth-week/00000186-d261-dfef-a3ef-d26d9bbc0000
Inside Biden’s Gaza strategy https://www.axios.com/2023/10/21/israel-hamas-war-inside-bidens-gaza-strategy
A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance: For 14 years, Netanyahu’s policy was to keep Hamas in power; the pogrom of October 7, 2023, helps the Israeli prime minister preserve his own rule https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-live/american-mother-and-daughter-first-hostages-released-by-hamas-arrive-in-israel/0000018b-4b06-d1fd-a59f-ef9ff9ed0000
Experts say Hamas and Israel are breaking international law, but what does that mean? Since the latest explosion of violence began on October 7, both Israel and Hamas have been accused of breaking international law. As the terms “genocide”, “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” are used to describe the deadly acts carried out by both sides, FRANCE 24 takes a look at what these terms mean. https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20231021-experts-say-hamas-and-israel-are-breaking-international-law-but-what-does-that-mean
Human Rights Watch Condemns Israel’s Collective Punishment on Gaza, Urges Biden to Help Restore Aid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25zrL_I_4Cg
Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-as-israeli-attacks-wipe-out-entire-families-in-gaza/
Civilians, civilian infrastructure, and health care facilities must be protected at all times https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/indiscriminate-violence-and-collective-punishment-gaza-must-cease#:~:text=MSF%20calls%20on%20the%20government,factions%20must%20establish%20safe%20spaces.
Netanyahu Waging Campaign to Blame Israeli Military for Failure to Predict Hamas Attack, Defense Sources Say The Israeli prime minister appointed a new spokesman to liaise with military correspondents, an unusual move, with one source saying they’d heard he was defaming officers https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-22/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-on-campaign-to-blame-idf-for-failure-to-predict-attack-defense-sources-say/0000018b-5688-d5d2-afef-d6fde37a0000
US intelligence report alleging Russia election interference shared with 100 countries https://www.axios.com/2023/10/21/israel-hamas-war-inside-bidens-gaza-strategy
Opening clip: https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1716539683990114683
Oslo Accords clip: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-the-oslo-accords-part-1-why-norway-was-in/id1550643487?i=1000627628956
Clip: Hear what Jenna Ellis said in tearful court speech https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/10/24/jenna-ellis-cries-court-guilty-plea-nc-vpx.cnn
This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”
He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.
Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.
A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point. He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.” Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.
Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:
Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification. It was a war of aggression. Millions died as a result. And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes. The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see. Very, very easy to see.
On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:
The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future. The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.
Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.
I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth. It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework. Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all. I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional. Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues. Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?
Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons. It causes me to shake my head in amazement. When will people learn? How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex. There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.
If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns. So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order. Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework. All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.
My Known Knowns:
Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns. He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.
One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things. It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.
When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course. Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.
“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” – Norman O. Brown
Note: If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The United States announced plans to send depleted uranium to Ukraine earlier this month. Uranium is very dense, which is useful on the battlefield: Bullets that have elements of depleted uranium can pierce armor, and tanks made of depleted uranium stand up well against enemy fire. Almost all the reporting about the move includes the clarification that adverse health risks of depleted uranium — a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.
Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
— Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 34
The interests of power, hinging on the domination of an ignorant population, are robustly maintained:
In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
— Ibid., p. 36
As the Party slogan puts it:
Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
— Ibid., p. 31
In today’s fictional ‘democracies’, the workings of propaganda are more subtle. Notably, there is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric of leaders’ professed concern for human rights, peace and democracy, and the realpolitik of empire, exploitation and control.
As Declassified UK observed earlier this year, the UK has planned or executed over 40 attempts to remove foreign governments in 27 countries since the end of the Second World War. These have involved the intelligence agencies, covert and overt military interventions and assassinations. The British-led coup in Iran 70 years ago is perhaps the best-known example; but it was no anomaly.
If we broaden the scope to British military interventions around the world since 1945, there are as many as 83 examples. These range from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest, including British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953, Egypt in the 1950s, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 (more on this below).
The criminal history of the US in terms of overthrowing foreign governments, or attempting to do so, was thoroughly documented by William Blum, author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.
These multiple invasions, coups and wars are routinely sold to the public as ‘humanitarian interventions’ by Western leaders and their propaganda allies of the ‘mainstream’ media.
A Feted War Criminal
Tony Blair, the arch British war criminal, is largely treated by the UK political and media classes as a wise elder statesman on domestic and world affairs. It sums up the way this country is run by a corrupt and blood-soaked establishment. Proving the point, the Financial Times recently tweeted:
Sir Tony Blair is back. Once vilified as a “war criminal” by some in Labour, his influence within the party is growing again under Sir Keir Starmer. The FT speaks to the former UK premier: https://on.ft.com/3PDkIpE
You’ve got to love the FT’s insistence on using ‘Sir’, as though that bestows some measure of respectability on a man who waged devastating wars of first resort in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Costs of War project, based at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, estimates that the total death toll in post-9/11 wars – including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – could be at least 4.5-4.7 million. Blair is one of the Western leaders who shares complicity for this appalling death toll. That fact has been essentially thrown down the memory hole by propaganda outlets who welcome him with open arms.
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark once explained how, following the 9/11 attacks, the US planned to ‘take out’ seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. It is remarkable that this testimony, and compelling footage, has never been deemed credible evidence by ‘mainstream’ media.
The notion that Blair was ‘once vilified’ as a war criminal – and let’s drop those quotation marks around ‘war criminal’ – as though that is no longer the case is ludicrous. In any case, what does the carefully selected word ‘vilify’ actually mean? According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, it can mean two things:
The FT would presumably like to implant in readers’ minds the idea that Blair has been unjustly accused of being a war criminal; that the suggestion is a slander. But Blair, along with Bush and the Cheney gang, was one of the chief accomplices behind the mass terrorist attack on Iraq in 2003. It was the ‘supreme international crime’, judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials held after the Second World War.
The accompanying FT photograph of a supposedly statesman-like ‘Sir’ Tony Blair was overlaid with a telling quote:
[Britain’s] a country that is in a mess. We are not in good shape.
Unmentioned is that Blair had a large part to play in creating today’s mess in Britain. Other than his great crimes in foreign affairs, he is an ardent supporter of the destructive economic system blandly titled ‘neoliberalism’. He continued along the path laid down by Tory leader Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Indeed, when Thatcher was once asked what she regarded as her greatest achievement, she replied: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’.
As for Blair, he has described Thatcher in glowing terms as ‘a towering political figure’ whose legacy will be felt worldwide. He added:
I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them.
The current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer – another ‘Sir’ and stalwart of the establishment – is unashamedly casting himself as a Blairite figure. They have even appeared in public together to ‘bask in each other’s reflected glory’, as one political sketch writer noted.
Jonathan Cook observed of Blair:
It says everything that Sir Keir Starmer, the UK’s former director of public prosecutions, is actively seeking to rehabilitate him.
That’s the same Starmer who helped smear his leftwing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
The ‘Unprovoked’ Invasion of Ukraine
The mass-media memory hole is proving invaluable in protecting the public from uncomfortable truths about Ukraine. Western leaders’ expression of concern for Ukraine is cover for their desire to see Russian leader Vladimir Putin removed from power and Russia ‘weakened’, as US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin admitted earlier this year. Austin was previously a board member of Raytheon Technologies, a military contractor, stepping down with a cool sum of $2.7 million to join the Biden administration: yet another example of the ‘revolving door’ between government and the ‘defence’ sector.
Australian political analyst Caitlin Johnstone noted recently that:
Arguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word “unprovoked” in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Pointing out that the West ‘provoked’ Russia is not the same as saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified. In fact, we were clear in our first media alert following the invasion:
Russia’s attack is a textbook example of “the supreme crime”, the waging of a war of aggression.
As Noam Chomsky pointed out, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was totally unprovoked, but:
nobody ever called it “the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.” In fact, I don’t know if the term was ever used; if it was, it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked.’
Bryce Greene, a media analyst with US-based Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), observed that US policy makers regarded a war in Ukraine as a desirable objective:
One 2019 study from the RAND Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.
The rationale was outlined in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by John Deni of the Atlantic Council, a US think tank with close links to the White House and the arms industry, headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine”. Greene summarised the logic:
Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.
Greene added:
The consensus among policymakers in Washington is to push for endless conflict, no matter how many Ukrainians die in the process. As long as Russia loses men and material, the effect on Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukrainian victory was never the goal.
As Johnstone emphasised in her analysis:
It’s just a well–documented fact that the US and its allies provoked this war in a whole host of ways, from NATO expansion to backing regime change in Kyiv to playing along with aggressions against Donbass separatists to pouring weapons into Ukraine. There’s also an abundance of evidence that the US and its allies sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in the early weeks of the war in order to keep this conflict going as long as possible to hurt Russian interests.
She continued:
We know that western actions provoked the war in Ukraine because many western foreign policy experts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine.
But you will search in vain for substantive reporting of such salient facts and relevant history – see also this piece by FAIR – in ‘mainstream’ news media.
A recent interview with the influential US economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs, former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, highlighted just how serious these media omissions are in trying to understand what is going on in Ukraine. In a superb 30-minute exposition, Sachs presented vital truths, not least that:
I think the defining feature of American foreign policy is arrogance. And they can’t listen. They cannot hear red lines of any other country. They don’t believe they exist. The only red lines are American red lines.
He was referring here to Russia’s red-line plea to the West not to continue expanding NATO right up to its borders; something, as mentioned above, Western foreign policy experts have been warning about for more than three decades. Would Washington ever allow a Russian sphere of influence to extend to US borders, with Mexico and Canada under the ‘evil spell’ of the Kremlin? Of course not.
Sachs added:
It’s pretty clear in early 2014 that regime change [in Ukraine] – and a typical kind of US covert regime change operation – was underway. And I say typical because scholarly studies have shown that, just during the Cold War period alone, there were 64 US covert regime change operations. It’s astounding.
What is also astounding, but entirely predictable, is that any such discussion is impermissible in ‘respectable’ circles.
Sachs described how the US reassured Ukraine after the Minsk II agreement in 2015, which was intended to bring peace to the Donbass region of Ukraine:
Don’t worry about a thing. We’ve got your back. You’re going to join NATO.
The role of Biden, then US Vice-President and now President, was to insist that:
Ukraine will be part of NATO. We will increase armaments [to Ukraine].
On 17 December 2021, Putin drafted a security agreement between Russia and the United States. Sachs read it and concluded that it was ‘absolutely negotiable’, adding:
Not everything is going to be accepted, but the core of this is NATO should stop the enlargement so we don’t have a war.
Sachs, who has long had high-level contacts within successive US administrations, then described an exchange he had over the telephone with the White House. ‘This war is avoidable’, he said. ‘Avoid this war, you don’t want a war on your watch.’
But the White House was emphatic it would give no commitment to stop enlargement. Instead:
No, no! NATO has an open-door policy [i.e. any country can supposedly join NATO.]
Sachs responded:
That’s a path to war and you know it. You’ve got to negotiate.
Click. The White House hung up.
Sachs told his interviewer:
These people do not understand anything about diplomacy. Anything about reality. Their own diplomats have been telling them for 30 years this is a path to war.
Sachs also related how Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky was so taken aback when the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022, that he started saying publicly, within just a few days, that Ukraine could be neutral; in other words, not join NATO. This was the essence of what Russia was seeking. But the Americans shut down that discussion, as Sachs went on to explain.
By March 2022, Ukrainian and Russian officials were holding negotiations in Turkey. Meanwhile, Naftali Bennett, who was then Israel’s Prime Minister, was making progress in mediating between Zelensky and Putin, as he described during a long interview on his YouTube channel. But, ultimately, the US blocked the peace efforts. Sachs paraphrased Bennett’s explanation as to why:
They [the US] wanted to look tough to China. They were worried that this could look weak to China.
Incredible! The US’s primary concern is to look strong to China, its chief rival in world affairs. This recalls the motivation behind the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan at the end of the Second World War as a show of might to the Soviet Union.
Infamously, Boris Johnson, then the British PM, travelled to Ukraine in April 2022, presumably under US directive, telling Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia.
If we had truly democratic, impartial news media, all these facts would be widespread across national news outlets. BBC News correspondents would continually remind viewers and listeners how the West provoked Russia, then blocked peace efforts. Instead, the memory hole is doing its job – inconvenient facts are disappeared -and we are bombarded with wall-to-wall propaganda about Russia’s ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine.
Libya: A Propaganda Masterclass
The memory-hole phenomenon is a huge factor in media coverage of Libya which, as we wrote last week, has suffered terribly in recent flooding and the collapse of two dams. The city of Derna was washed into the sea after 40cm of rain fell in twenty-four hours, leaving 20,000 people dead.
But vital recent history has been almost wholly buried by state-corporate media. In 2011, NATO’s attack on Libya essentially destroyed the state and killed an estimated 40,000 people. The nation, once one of Africa’s most advanced countries for health care and education, became a failed state, with the collapse of essential services, the re-emergence of slave markets and raging civil war.
The massive bombing, heavily involving the UK and France, had been enthusiastically championed (see our 2011 media alerts here and here) by Western politicians and state-corporate media, including BBC News, as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to get rid of an ‘autocratic dictator’, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
The tipping point was the alleged threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi. A senior government official serving under then Prime Minister, David Cameron, stated:
There was a very strong feeling at the top of this government that Benghazi could very easily become the Srebrenica of our watch. The generation that has lived through Bosnia is not going to be the “pull up the drawbridge” generation.
The reference was to the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces. The threat of something similar happening in Benghazi was a relentless theme across the airwaves and newspaper front pages. The Guardian, in line with the rest of the supposed ‘spectrum’ of British newspapers, promoted Cameron as a world-straddling statesman. The Arab Spring had ‘transformed the prime minister from a reluctant to a passionate interventionist.’ The paper dutifully helped his cause with sycophantic pieces such as the bizarrely titled, ‘David Cameron’s Libyan war: why the PM felt Gaddafi had to be stopped.’
In August 2011, serial Guardian propagandist Andrew Rawnsley responded to NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government:
Libyans now have a chance to take the path of freedom, peace and prosperity, a chance they would have been denied were we to have walked on by when Muammar Gaddafi was planning his rivers of blood. Britain and her allies broadly got it right in Libya.
The BBC’s John Humphrys opined that victory had delivered ‘a sort of moral glow.’ (BBC Radio 4 Today, 21 October 2011)
There are myriad other examples from the Guardian and the rest of the ‘MSM’. The pathology of this propaganda blitz was starkly exposed by a 2016 report into the Libya war by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. The report summarised:
The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.
As for the alleged threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi, the repeated rationale for the intervention, the report commented:
the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence…Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.’ (Our emphasis)
More on this, and the propaganda blitz that enabled NATO’s attack on Libya, can be found in our 2016 media alert, “The Great Libya War Fraud“.
Behind the rhetoric about removing a dictator was, of course, the underlying factor of oil; as it so often is in the West’s imperial wars. In 2011, Real News interviewed Kevin G. Hall, the national economics correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, who had studied WikiLeaked material on Libya. Hall said:
As a matter of fact, we went through 251,000 [leaked] documents… Of those, a full 10 percent of them, a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil.’ (‘WikiLeaks reveals US wanted to keep Russia out of Libyan oil,’ The Real News, 11 May 2011)
Hall concluded:
It is all about oil.
In 2022, Declassified UK reported that:
British oil giants BP and Shell are returning to the oil-rich north African country just over a decade after the UK plunged it into chaos in its 2011 military intervention, which the British government never admitted was a war for oil.
There were additional ‘benefits’ to the West. As WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange explained in an interview with John Pilger, Hillary Clinton intended to exploit the removal of Gaddafi as part of her corporate-funded bid to become US president. Clinton was then US Secretary of State under President Barack Obama:
Libya’s war was, more than anyone else’s, Hillary Clinton’s war…who was the person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails [leaked emails published by WikiLeaks]’.
Assange added:
She perceived the removal of Gaddafi, and the overthrow of the Libyan state, something that she would use to run in the election for President.
You may recall Clinton’s gleeful response to the brutal murder of Gaddafi:
We came, we saw, he died.
Also, as Assange pointed out, the destruction of the Libyan state generated a catastrophe of terrorism and a refugee crisis, with many drowning in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe:
Jihadists moved in. ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis. Because, not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing Syria, destabilisation of other African countries as the result of arms flows, the Libyan state itself was no longer able to control movement of people through it…. [Libya] had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So, all problems, economic problems, civil war in Africa – people previously fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe.
Very little of the above vital history and context to the recent catastrophic flooding in Libya is included in current ‘mainstream’ news reporting. At best, there is token mention. At worst, there is deeply deceitful and cynical rewriting of history.
A report on the Sky News website went about as far as is permissible in detailing the reality:
Libyans are worn down by years and years of poor governance many of which date back to 2011 and the NATO-backed ousting of the country’s autocratic dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, during the period which became known as the Arab Spring.
Gaddafi was killed and the country dived into instability with rival armed militias vying for power and territory.
An article for the BBC News Africa section gave an even briefer hint of the awful truth:
Libya has been beset by chaos since forces backed by the West’s NATO military alliance overthrew long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011.
This was the only mention in the article of Western responsibility for the disaster. The shameful propaganda censorship was highlighted when the article was posted by the BBC Africa Twitter/X account. So many readers pointed out the glaring omissions that a Twitter/X warning of sorts appeared under the BBC’s tweet:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know.
Then:
Due to NATO intervention in Libya, several problems such as the lack of a unified government, the re-emergence of slave markets and collapse of welfare services have made the country unable to cope with natural disasters.
If such ‘context’ – actually, vital missing information – were to regularly appear under BBC tweets because of reader intervention, it would be a considerable public service; and a major embarrassment for the self-declared ‘world’s leading public service broadcaster’.
A major reason for the appalling death toll in the Libyan city of Derna was that two dams had collapsed, sending 30 million cubic metres of water into the city in ‘tsunami-like waves’. These dams were built in the 1970s to protect the local population. A Turkish firm had been contracted in 2007 to maintain the dams. This work stopped after NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign. The Turkish firm left the country, their machinery was stolen and all work on the dams ended. This was mentioned briefly in a recent Guardian article, but NATO’s culpability was downplayed and it certainly did not generate the huge headlines across the ‘MSM’ that it warranted.
Further crucial context was also blatantly flushed down the media’s memory hole: NATO had deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure in 2011. Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported in 2015:
The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself.
Ros Atkins, who has acquired a huge profile as an expert ‘explainer’, with the moniker ‘BBC News Analysis Editor’, narrated a video for the BBC News website ‘on the floods in Libya – and the years of crisis there too.’ Once again, NATO’s appalling role in the 2011 destruction of the country was glossed over. The BBC’s ‘explanation’ explained virtually nothing.
Meanwhile, the Guardian ran a wretched editorial which is surely one of the worst Orwellian rewritings of history it has ever published:
Vast fossil fuel reserves and regional security objectives have encouraged foreign powers to meddle in Libya.
As noted above, that was emphatically not the story in 2011 when the Guardian propagandised tirelessly for ‘intervention’. The editorial continued:
Libyans have good reason to feel that they have been failed by the international community as well as their own leaders.
In fact, they were also failed by Guardian editors, senior staff, columnists and reporters who did so much to sell ‘Cameron’s war’ on Libya. Nowhere in the editorial is NATO even mentioned.
And beneath this appalling, power-serving screed was a risible claim of reasons for supporting the Guardian:
Our fearless, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more, in Europe and beyond.
This assertion is an audacious reversal of truth from one of the worst perpetrators of memory-hole journalism in the Western world.
Monday, September 11, 2023 marked the 22nd Anniversary of the NYC 9/11, a day of global mourning, the beginning, or activation, of a crime of biblical proportions like never before in history remembered. Activation stands for onslaught of a colossal War on Humanity. What the small supremacist elite calls War on Terror is nothing less than an endless war on mankind. A war waged by a death cult. The preparation for the war started decades or probably hundred-plus years before.
Two planes hitting the twin towers of the NYC World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 – probably remote-controlled – because most pilots admit this kind of close-curved maneuver necessary to hit the towers was impossible to carry out by a pilot.
The world was told the perpetrators were a group of some 12 Saudi terrorists. An outright lie. One of the first ones – to be followed by countless others – all in the name of instilling fear to control mankind, to eventually upgrade the war to a killing machine – leading onto the infamous UN Agenda 2030, alias the Great Reset, and the all-digitizing, QR-code -crowned Fourth Industrial Revolution, what Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and CEO proudly claims as his brainchild.
Who else could come up with a new world order based on linearism, digitalized transhumanism, 180-degrees opposite of what life, the universe is – an infinite multitude of dynamism – life in multiple dimensions, evolving naturally as a cog in the universe’s endless wheel?
Right there on NYC’s 9/11, more than 3000 people were killed. Thousands more followed in the immediate aftermath.
The third building that collapsed a day later – seemingly out of the blue – was apparently ripe with documented evidence of the crime. Almost silence by the media.
And to this day, nobody knows what happened to the people on the plane that apparently crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania. No debris and no people were ever found. Here too, no media coverage, no investigation – just destined to be forgotten.
What happened to the dozens of policemen and firefighters who were near the WTC towers and in their basements, reporting on hearing explosions underground and in the lower strata of the extremely solid constructions just before they collapsed in the well-known style of purposeful city demolition techniques? Most of them were never seen again. “Victims” of the accident?
Overall, since the NYC-9/11 millions of people were killed in the aftermath of the trigger to the so-called war on terror, which, in fact, was meant to be — and is — a war on humanity.
The onslaught of wars began. The US invasion of Afghanistan, barely a month after the suspected auto-coup of the 9/11 Twin Towers implosion. The pretext was Osama Bin Laden, an Al Qaeda CIA recruit, who, the George W. Bush Administration lied, having orchestrated the 9/11 attack from Afghanistan, had to be eliminated by invading the mountainous and resources-rich Afghanistan landlocked in the center of Asia.
Al Qaeda was a CIA creation of the late 1980’s, already then as an instrument to justify the coming war on terror.
True reasons for invading Afghanistan were several: The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Gas Pipeline, also known as Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, or TAPI Pipeline, was to bring natural gas from the world’s second largest gas fields in Galkynysh, Turkmenistan, discharging 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year to the Gulf of India. Washington wanted control over this largest gas transit, potentially disrupting US petrol giants market dominance.
The ever-closer relations between Afghanistan and China were a thorn in the eyes for US political supremacy, and finally the extreme mineral riches especially rare earths, vital for production of electronics and chips used for military equipment as well as for multiple civilian uses.
Afghanistan was the first “leg” on the endless “War on Terror”.
The Afghanistan invasion was followed by the May 2003 Iraq invasion, one of the hydrocarbon richest countries in the Middle East, with a leader, Saddam Hussein, who was at the point of defying OPEC rules of trading hydrocarbons in US-dollars only. Saddam wanted to trade Iraq’s hydrocarbons in Euros. Iraq was also labeled an al Qaeda terrorist country.
A “Shock and Awe” attack should eliminate the country’s leader and bring Iraq to her knees before the almighty US of A. By now we know that it did not exactly happen that way. It was probably also planned as an endless war.
Iraq – another “War on Terror” – emanating from the 9/11 auto-attack.
Syria. From 2011 forward Washington’s secret service created a “civil war” applying the principle of divide to conquer. In September 2014 the conflict culminated in the US intervening, siding with the [US-created] Syrian rebels, fighting the Islamic State, the so-called “Operation Inherent Resolve” in what was labeled international war against the Islamic State.
In truth, Washington wanted to get rid of the highly popular and democratically elected Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Again, the interest was control over the large Syrian oil and mineral resources.
Also, under the flag of “War on Terror”.
Coincidentally – though, there are no coincidences – the Ukraine war also started in [February] 2014, by the US instigated coup against the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Remember Victoria Nuland’s recorded phone conversation with the US Ambassador in Kiev – “f**k Europe”? And the recent admission by NATO boss, Jens Stoltenberg, that the Ukraine War started already in 2014?
Other US-initiated wars and conflicts followed. In Sudan in 2006 / 2007 after the broken Darfur Peace Agreement; in Pakistan in 2011 under the pretext and on the heels of several targeted killings in Karachi, leaving hundreds of people dead. US presence never left the country, as Pakistan was attempting establishing closer relations with China.
To the “war on terror” may also be counted the October 2011 US / French / NATO lynching of Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country as of this day in a state of constant civil strife and mafia-like killings and enslavement of refugees. Gaddafi was about to introduce the Gold Dinar as a unified currency for Africa to liberate Africa from French and US/K currency exploitation.
The NYC 9/11 was — and is — a war instrument that until this day has not been fully recognized as what it was supposed to be – a precursor to possibly the planned final phase for civilization as we know it, the UN Agenda 2030, alias The Great Reset, leading to the full digitization of humanity into transhumanism and simply a One World Order (OWO), run by full control via digitization of everything, complemented with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
It is the plan. A scary plan, a plan with the purpose of instilling fear. Thus, it is hoped, making the population defenseless against a tyrannical take-over.
This plan will not materialize.
Lest we forget, it is important to point out that there was another 9/11 “event” 50 years back that took place in Chile. It also killed instantly hundreds of people, and over the following 16 years, until General Pinochet’s demise in March 1990, tens of thousands of people disappeared and were killed.
The purpose of the US-instigated and Henry Kissinger executed military coup in Chile was to get rid of the “uncomfortable” democratically elected, socialist-leaning, President Salvador Allende so that the United States could implement and test a “Chicago Boys” designed neoliberal economic system to run an entire country. Later to be repeated throughout Latin America, a remedy to make sure Latin America would keep their US “Backyard” status, for a long time to come.
The “Chicago Boys” were a group of Chilean and international economists, most of whom were educated in the 1970s and 1980s by arch-conservative Milton Friedman at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago.
Also, not to forget, the major coup planner and instigator, was the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, under Richard Nixon’s presidency. Kissinger later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his alleged peace efforts in the Vietnam war which he also “directed”, and following his ordered bombing of Cambodia and Laos to bloody rubble with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Remember the infamous “Killing Fields” in Cambodia? Well, that was also Henry Kissinger, arguably the most notorious war criminal still alive.
Earlier this year, Henry Kissinger turned 100. This could be natural old age, or it could be old age enhanced by adrenochrome.
Is it sheer coincidence that the Santiago Chile and the NYC Nine-Eleven massacres are exactly 50 years apart? A half a century.
There are no coincidences. Just connecting the dots.
As a reminder 911 is the emergency-call number in the United States. That is hardly a coincidence.
Kissinger is a close buddy, ally and advisor of Klaus Schwab, CEO of the controversial World Economic Forum (WEF). As of this day, Kissinger’s advice is sought by leaders around the world.
In July 2023, Kissinger was received by China’s President Xi Jinping, who apparently greeted Kissinger with a comment, “old friends” like him will never be forgotten. The irony is subtle. The US-initiated meeting was apparently meant to mend frayed ties between Washington and Beijing.
A tremendous attribute for President Xi. He is always open for initiatives potentially leading to improved relations, harmony, and peace.
Back to NYC-9/11
What we, especially the western world’s humanity, currently are living is a colossal crime never seen and recorded before in known history.
After 9/11 for many, and for a long time for most, flying has become a nightmare and a huge business for a few. The long security lines, the manual checking – often more reminiscent of groping – of passengers, who often for some medical reasons, have a hard time passing through the control machines without the red-light flashing.
The first US Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and associates, became insanely rich by launching the manufacturing of the airport security machines that were imposed worldwide, and which are being constantly upgraded.
Backtracking
9/11 sparked “wars on terror” – alias on humanity — that may have had several phases of activation.
The Club of Rome, first unofficially meeting in 1956 in Rome, was formally created in 1968 as an initiative of David Rockefeller with Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King and Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, founder and President of Africa’s Agang party, and others.
The Club of Rome issued in 1972 the infamous report “Limits to Growth” (LTG), arguing against continued economic and population growth, setting the first marks for a massive eugenist agenda, a population reduction down to about 500 million people from today’s 8 billion-plus, a reduction of about 95%.
Dennis Meadows, one of the main authors of the Club of Rome’s “The Limits of Growth”, is a member of the World Economic Forum. He propagates as of this day massive population reduction. See this.
This eugenist plan is as of this day the blueprint for what we are living. It is the core for UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset and All-digitization.
From it was born covid, the worldwide coercive vaxx mandate, possibly more lab-made “viruses” to come, as well as the climate change hoax, justifying geoengineering of weather, causing droughts, floods, never-seen-before hurricanes and tornadoes, Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) caused forest and other fires, like the destruction of Lahaina on Maui, and others – all bringing about poverty, famine, misery, and death.
Closing the circle with NYC’s 9/11 setting the stage 22 years ago.
There is no waiting. We must resist with heart and soul and peaceful spirits. We shall never forget 9/11 and what it triggered, and we shall overcome.
Since 9/11, US wars have become widespread, everyday affairs that most Americans know next to nothing about. The largest wars like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have a limited place in public consciousness, but the dozens of secret operations taking place across the planet are alien to most of us. How does the war machine work today, and how do government, the media, and new technologies help to obscure war from the public? Norman Solomon tackles these questions on The Marc Steiner Show in a discussion around his new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.
I want to share a quote with you that really popped in my head after finishing reading War Made Invisible, by Norman Solomon, How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. And as I introduce Norman to us all once again, think about this: America has been at war for 93% of our time of existence on this planet, 231 years out of 247 years, as a nation, since 1776. That means that only 20 years since the birth of this nation have we been at peace. Why is that? Who are we? Why do these wars keep taking place, and now wars are even more dangerous than they ever were because we don’t see them, feel them, or hear them, which is what Norman Solomon writes about in huge detail and graphically for us to understand where we sit.
The book again, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. Norman, welcome back. Good to have you with us.
Norman Solomon:
Thanks, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
So you’ve written about war many times before but there’s something that really struck me as I read this book and finished it again which is how insidious the war machine has become, even since my time during the Vietnam War or my father’s time in World War II. There’s an insidiousness into the way it is hidden from us and how much more powerful and horrendous it’s become.
Norman Solomon:
Insidious is a good word. It has worked its way into, you might say, the wallpaper of the media echo chambers. It’s ironic that media technology now has a capacity to convey to us, at least within the limits of any technology, the ways in which wars harm human beings and cause such desolation and such suffering. So with better technology than ever, we get less and less. And that’s driven by who dominates and controls the technology and the fact that as these wars have gone on in this century, they’ve become more and more abstracted. There are fewer and fewer so-called boots on the ground. We’re above it all, literally and figuratively, bombing from the air, sending drones from many thousands of miles away. So the end result is that these abstractions become more and more acute, even as the military-industrial media complex makes killing more and more so-called normal.
Marc Steiner:
I was going to wait till later to say this but I wanted to throw it out here early because I thought you very profoundly addressed it in your books, especially towards the end of the book, which is how we see it in some places and we don’t see it in other places. We might see it in Europe, we might see it in Ukraine, but we don’t see it, whether it was our wars in Afghanistan or Iraq or what we’ve done all throughout and continue to do all throughout the continent of Africa, and how race and racism is tied into all this and winds its way through in the wars that grip all the people who are involved.
Norman Solomon:
I think of it as a series of Venn diagrams: The overlays where there are these factors that determine largely whether, as people in the US through US media, we see, hear, and read about wars in terms of empathetic graphic detail or not. One is race. As you mentioned and has really occurred to me in the course of writing this book, racism has had so much of an effect on US foreign policy and military intervention and yet we hear virtually nothing about that in mass media, certainly not from politics in Washington. Whereas when you think about it, the last few years, because of the wonderful movements that have consolidated behind Black Lives Matter and so forth, structural racism, systemic racism, is being talked about, not enough, but a lot more. And yet, that discourse exists only about domestic policy.
And something that stunned me as I was working on this book was to realize that in the more than 20 years of the so-called War on Terror, the victims of US firepower around the world have been virtually all people of color. It’s hidden in plain sight. And when I realized that and wrote a whole chapter in the book about it, when the book came out, I sent a little op-ed to a number of daily newspapers and they all rejected it and what struck me is I’ve never read a piece to that effect. It’s not like I was saying stuff that had been repeated before. So, this is almost a taboo subject.
And then when you overlay that with the nationalism, the jingoism, and the ideology out of Washington, when the designated enemies of the US kill people in war, such as Russians slaughtering people in Ukraine, that is empathetically reported. But when the US has slaughtered people in Afghanistan or Iraq, another big power invading another country illegally, very little empathy.
Marc Steiner:
I’m going to have to read this one thing, one of the quotes. You have many powerful quotes in this, we’ll get to a few of them in the course of our conversation. But you have this one from Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken and I want to read it to give the perspective on what you’re saying. The quote is, “Race is not a perspective on international relations; it’s a central organizing feature of world politics… And today race shapes threat perception and responses to violent extremism, inside and outside the ‘war on terror.’ Yet one cannot comprehend world politics while ignoring the race and racism. Race continues to shape our international and domestic threat perceptions.”
And that really is key. What’s happening in Ukraine is horrendous. What’s happening across many places but we don’t have the same empathetic structure as when it happens anywhere in the continent of Africa or in Asia or in Latin America. And much of the media backing what America does or ignoring those conflicts, unless they happen in Europe, exasperates the racism that grips this world.
Norman Solomon:
When you overlay the factors of personal, institutional racism for us foreign policy and warfare with the agendas of the geopolitical power of corporate-driven US foreign policy and access to raw materials, geopolitical positioning and all that, you get a great example of that, a very sad and horrible one.
When you think about if you drive around your neighborhood, certainly around mine, and this is the case in so much of the US, you will see Ukrainian flags displayed in solidarity with the people being bombed and strafed and murdered by the invading force, the Russian force. And I’m all for that.
Marc Steiner:
Absolutely, right.
Norman Solomon:
And I’m all for the empathetic US media coverage of the people in Ukraine. The spin, the political lack of historical context and so forth, that’s another matter. But in terms of the suffering on the ground in Ukraine, and that has caused this outpouring of emotion and support, including the display of Ukrainian flags, okay, that’s part of what being human should be, empathizing, what journalism should be.
I can’t find in my neighborhood, and I’m not aware of anywhere in the US, a display of Yemeni flags. People in Yemen have been slaughtered with US government support since 2015, under three presidencies. You had under Obama, then Trump, then Biden. There’s a bit of a ceasefire now but for seven or eight years the killing of people with US government active support, shipping of billions of dollars worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia leading the killing in Yemen, the UN saying almost 400,000 people have died in that war, the largest cholera epidemic in human history. How can it be that the US, as a country, as a people, as media are so empathetic towards people invaded and killed in Ukraine but not in Yemen? And that is a clear instance of how corrupted, how morally corrosive this environment is for us, personally and politically, and in terms of media coverage.
Marc Steiner:
I’m curious. As I read your book, and especially after I finished it, thinking about all the things you posited… Let me give one of the stats here and talk about what you think is happening and why it has happened this way because war has always been part of humankind. I can’t think of a period of human history where it has not existed but we are reaching a point now where it could literally destroy the place we live, this entire planet.
And you write how we spent $50 billion a year over the last 20 years, that’s $2.1 trillion going to five firms: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. The sheer size of the amount of money that we spend on war and preparing for war and it’s war that’s not like the war that people saw that were troops on the ground; This is a war that’s unseen. And now you couple that with the world of artificial intelligence and how that is beginning to even expand the notion of war without boots on the ground. So tell me what you think that dynamic together means for us now and where do you think that takes us?
Norman Solomon:
I think it means for us and it takes us further into a realm, a status quo, a so-called normality, where the more ubiquitous the power of the military industrial complex is, the less it’s talked about and the less it’s objected to. I think of how then-senator Harry Truman during World War II gained a lot of acclaim for chairing hearings on Capitol Hill as a senator, investigating what was very derisively, critically called war profiteering. And I really can’t remember any uproar in recent years in the US throughout the entire so-called war on terror, about war profiteering. As you mentioned, a few corporations making a killing, literally and figuratively, by increasingly selling aerospace products of one or another, but all tools of the trade of the killing industry. And yet, we get virtually no critical coverage.
Even on Capitol Hill among progressives, there is talk about, yes, the military budget is too high. But we are not hearing about that very essence, the core of the military-industrial complex, which is much more pervasive and much more powerful even since then-outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower coined the term in 1961.
Marc Steiner:
The military-industrial complex, right?
Norman Solomon:
Yes, the military-industrial complex.
Marc Steiner:
There’s so much in this book. It’s jam-full of interesting analysis that you put into all of this. For me, there’s a real question here about the world we are entering and what you think the response can be and how it can be developed. Because one of the things, the Vietnam War… And I started reading some more about the Vietnam War and media after reading your book. And while much of the media went along with the war and glorified the war, it also exposed the war at the same time which meant to expose the American public and the rising numbers of people who were opposed to the Vietnam War.
But I wonder, given where we are now, how do you think you begin to build a movement that’s truly against the wars that we propagate around the world and the wars that our children are going to face? Where do you think this takes us? And how do you think we address it and oppose it and stop it?
Norman Solomon:
It seems to me that a foundation for any powerful movement is realism, not fatalism. On the contrary, willingness and eagerness to challenge the status quo and make the world a whole lot better, turn around these horrible, terrible trends, but a realism that says we must do all we can to make the world better for the next generations, and in the case of the nuclear age now, make the world possible.
And so I think of a couple of quotes. One is from Antonio Gramsci, the great anti-fascist imprisoned under Mussolini, who talked about the need for what he called “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” So on the one hand, the realism, no sugarcoating like we get so often from mass media, unfortunately from the Biden Administration, about the status quo. Sugarcoating is not going to do it. We need a pessimism of the intellect, as Gramsci called it, and optimism of the will, which we could refer to as a determination, insistence. This is humanity that has to galvanize our own creative life-affirming power.
And another quote that comes to mind is one that I actually close this book on from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” That as a foundation, and then we have to organize like crazy. And that has many components. I’m sometimes asked, what is the thing that all of us should do? And my answer is, there’s nothing that all of us should do. We need to build and create and grow movements the way we’d have a healthy forest. We don’t say, “Well, we just need a lot of good trees,” or, “We need a lot of good ground cover or soil.” We need all the above and so much more.
And so in a nutshell, I think a healthy movement of course has to sustain and support much more effectively independent alternative progressive media, certainly the Real News among the outlets that are vital. We’ve got to support what exists, not take anything for granted, and find ways to greatly expand the power of media and communications, local, regional, international, and make communication not vertical but horizontal so we can really organize.
And then the last point I would make, which is broad, but I think absolutely crucial. We have to organize, we have to put more resources, time, energy, thought and cooperation into how we can counter the power of the military industrial complex bringing us the specter of nuclear annihilation and this climate emergency that is so terrible and ominous for future generations, and we have to run counter to our training because our training through mass media and political culture is to be passive. The corporate media really just encourages us to buy things and maybe vote once in a while. We need to turn that around and really make change from the grassroots.
Marc Steiner:
I’m going to put this in perspective a bit. You have this great quote in here from the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Iraq Family Health Survey that I covered, and it talks about that the casualties in the war, almost 4,500 Americans killed, 32,000 wounded. It’s the post-war, the cost of almost $1 trillion worth of care for veterans. But then this quote, “The foregoing cost could conceivably be justified if the Iraq intervention had improved the United States’ strategic position in the Middle East, but this clearly is not the case. The Iraq war has strengthened anti-US elements and made the position in the United States and its allies more precarious.”
Now, clearly that’s a kind of pro-American Defense Department statement on one level, but on the other hand, it really exposes, in not enough depth, what these wars have done in terms of helping create the terrorism, the dysfunction, the failed states, and the authoritarianism across the planet. And that’s the connection people don’t make I think.
Norman Solomon:
That was a quote yes, from the Center for American Progress aligned by the Clinton clan 10 years into the Iraq war, and they were simply totting up the balance sheet. They were saying basically, as I write in the book, the war was a flop. They thought it would be great for US power in the Middle East and so forth. It hasn’t panned out that way. So they do the calculus of was the war worth it in strictly monetary terms, in terms of geopolitical power? And even on its own terms, these wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the century from the US, they haven’t been successful. At the same time, Raytheon, Boeing, other huge military contractors, they never lose a war.
And so just as with the horrible war going on in Ukraine right now with refusal to engage in genuine diplomacy from Washington or from Moscow, the arms dealers, they’re just doing great. I mean, this is a war that is a dream for the military industrial complex of the US of 2023 and beyond. They just see billions of dollars of profits.
And looking at it just from a macrocosm, this is a system that is insane. Daniel Ellsberg, in his last and just such a vital book, The Doomsday Machine, quotes Nietzsche, the philosopher, who says that, “Madness in individuals is rare, but madness in nations and governments is routine.” And I think we’re coming to the extreme of that where diplomacy has become a dirty word in the United States and the double standards, what Orwell would call the doublethink that we’ve been talking about, is so ingrained that we have a kind of an atmosphere now politically and in media in terms of US militarism that I would compare to what happened in the months after 9/11 and happened during the McCarthy era.
Yes, this is a different point in history, but the squelching of real challenge and open debate about US militarism is really extreme and it’s part of our challenge, as we were talking about a couple of minutes ago, to build movements just to say, we’re going to create new dialogue, we’re going to ask key questions because we know that the questions being framed right now are suicidal and omnicidal globally. These are questions that are mainstream, like, how do we defeat the Russians? How do we counter the Chinese threat in the South China Sea, for instance, without asking why does the South China Sea have its middle name? It’s called the South China Sea because it’s pretty close to China.
And here we have the United States that has proclaimed, and we started out, you were talking Marc, I think quite rightly, about how almost the entire history of the United States has engaged, been involved in some kind of warfare. The Monroe Doctrine, from the very beginning, we get to run this hemisphere. Now that’s not enough. We need to also say that the surrounding area of China, Chinese military vessels are a threat. I mean, this is this sort of hubris and arrogance that is normalized coming from the power centers in Washington. Unless we break that mold and shatter that acceptance of such suicidal, global, omnicidal approaches, we will be stuck in what Martin Luther King Jr. called the Madness of Militarism.
Marc Steiner:
And that last quote, I’ve been thinking about that a lot given that we are at the 60th anniversary of The March on Washington. I’ve been contemplating his words a lot recently and what those struggles were like then.
But one of the things I think I really want to raise with you and talk to you about when it comes to this is you really lay out the devastation that these wars have created in the countries where we’ve launched these wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, what’s happening in Yemen and more, the deaths, the complete disruption of society that’s taken place.
And we are also in a time, as I said earlier, and I really want to probe this with you because I know you think about this a great deal and it comes out in the book, which is the last war that really affected masses of people in this country that we fought as a nation was Vietnam. And since then, there’s been a great disconnect between the American populace, between our consciousness, and the wars we fight. And it’s an odd twist because it also is entangled in all of our struggles and the draft. What we’ve done in some respects is create a professional army that is disconnected from the rest and one that is deeply connected to war, to remote war, and the devastation its causing.
That’s what I kept thinking about as I was reading your book, is that we’ve come into a really much more dangerous place when it comes to global hegemony and war and the disconnect we all feel from it.
Norman Solomon:
The disconnect has become much more severe even while the risks have become more extreme. Nuclear superpowers based in Moscow and Washington, increasingly in conflict. It’s the Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the closest it’s ever been, I think 90 seconds now, to apocalyptic midnight. And yet there’s sort of a sleepwalking towards catastrophe that independent progressive media outlets such as this one and social movements have got to directly challenge.
The reality is that as much as we are told the United States is an exceptional nation, the indispensable nation, actually just indispensable to itself as I say in the book, the reality is we live on a globe that is spherical. What goes around comes around. We’ve learned that with the climate emergency, we’ve learned that with COVID. It’s a sort of a derangement, this kind of US bravado, this jingo narcissism that exempts us, we think or we’re told we should think or assume, from the realities that we’re on this one human planet, this one planet together with human beings.
And so what goes around does come around, and that underscores that just because there are a few boots on the ground now in other countries and missile strikes, drone attacks and so forth are more and more central to US warfare doesn’t mean we are at war, and people at the other end of the missiles and bombs, they know that we are at war. They are being besieged, they are being sacrificed by people who vote appropriations on Capitol Hill and will never know their names or see their faces.
And then another part of what goes around comes around is the savage attacks on US budgets, the escalating military spending while, whether you’re in Baltimore, San Francisco, or anywhere else in this country, you’re not far from places where people are grievously suffering from lack of adequate healthcare, education, housing, infant care, elderly care. That is a reality. That’s part of what the militarized society brings to people and takes away from human lives.
I think about how, as you mentioned, Marc, in the last few days, justifiably, there’s been a lot of media coverage of the 60th Anniversary of The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the beautiful “I Have a Dream” speech. Four years later, Martin Luther King gave his speech at Riverside Church beyond Vietnam where he called the United States the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. I’m afraid that, overall in this century, has still been true. One of the things that he said, which is virtually never mentioned in mass media, is that out-of-control military spending, then as now, in ’67, he said that, “That spending is,” and I’m quoting here, “a destructive demonic suction tube taking away just the vital resources to sustain life in our own country.” And so that demonic suction tube is with us right now, and it’s part of the invisibility of war and living in a warfare state.
Marc Steiner:
As you said that, and in all kinds of thread that runs through your book is the human cost of war that you have seen in your own travels to different parts of the globe, the cost it is to this country and our own future with dystopian poverty coursing its way through every major urban and rural area of our country, and I think that that’s something that really most Americans are not aware of in terms of what we spend and what we are doing with federal money and what could be done to keep everyone afloat in America. I mean, I think that’s the imbalance that’s part of, to me, is part of the subtext of your book.
Norman Solomon:
One of the realities is that the proportion of discretionary spending from the federal government on the military keeps going up. It’s now about 55% of discretionary spending that Congress votes and the President signs. That’s going to the military, the Pentagon, nuclear weapons and so forth.
As you mentioned that, Marc, one thing comes to mind that is a tough political nut to crack, so to speak. And yet I think it’s a challenge, but we got to look at it. And that is when you consider US foreign policy, with the exception of climate change and so forth, it’s very difficult to find substantive differences between the so-called leadership of the Democratic and Republican Party, say, on Capitol Hill. They’re both on the war train. They both want to drive the war train. They might disagree on how much military aid should go to Ukraine without diplomacy, but very few voices calling for diplomacy. They may disagree on exactly how much resources should be diverted from the Ukraine War to confronting China. Republicans tend to want to shift more of the hostility towards China, but there is a virtual consensus from both parties on Capitol Hill about US militarism.
And then you get to domestic policy and the Republican Party is neofascist, and it is ridiculous for anyone to claim that there’s not a significant difference between the Republican and Democratic parties on domestic policy. We have a neoliberal Democratic Party in domestic policy, and we have a neofascist Republican Party on domestic policy.
And so for progressives, I think we’re going to be facing, we’re already facing this dilemma, this terrible knot to try to untie or cut through in some way, whether it’s a Gordian Knot or not, I don’t know, but basically we have these two parties that are so similar in foreign policy and so diametrically, or at least so profoundly different under the circumstances, on domestic policy. It’s not to praise Democrats, of course. Bernie Sanders is right. There’s so much wrong with the Democratic Party, but to inflate the two for domestic policy is ridiculous, out of touch with reality. And yet, we have to somehow square this circle because we’re coming into an election year.
Marc Steiner:
I was thinking, I’m going to close with this, it made me think of this as I finished your book. I actually, I’m going to get some copies, several copies of your book, and send them to my grandsons and why? All three of them are in the military. And I remember going in saying to myself, when they were going in, saying to myself, “They’re all going into,” what I called at the moment, “the intellectual ends of the service.” They’re not going to be “in combat.” But then I realized, stepping back in my own analysis, that they’re all going to be in combat because that’s where combat’s going.
Norman Solomon:
That’s a great point. I mean, I have friends who have been in the military and they were behind computer consoles in the United States, and the people they were targeting were pixels on the screen.
Marc Steiner:
Not human beings on the ground. I mean, I think the way you put it in part of the book is near the end of the book when you talked about how we know intimately the lives of so many people who were killed in the 9/11 attacks on this country, who they were, what they did, what their hobbies were, their families, what they left behind. But we don’t know anything about the human beings or the intimacy of the lives of the human beings that we have been part of killing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or any other part of the globe.
Norman Solomon:
One of the most powerful parts of the book to me, maybe the most powerful, involves the interview I did with Daniel Ellsberg, the great activist, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower a couple of years ago. And I sat with Dan Ellsberg on the porch next to his house, and he talked about exactly that point that you’re making, Marc. He said that he was really struck after 9/11 how the New York Times devoted tremendous journalistic resources to finding pictures and researching about the lives of everybody who was killed on 9/11, these little pictures, and would have a few words about, as Dan said, insight into what made them human. They liked to skydive or they were golfers or they were pianists, just to convey that they were really human beings whose lives were extinguished by this horrible act of mass murder that we call 9/11.
And then Dan went on to say, “This could have been done after the Shock and Awe Attack on Baghdad after US troops arrived in the capitol of Iraq.” He said, “It would’ve been possible to find the names and find pictures of people who had been killed by the US attack on their city.” And then he paused and he said, “Of course, nothing like that ever happened. Nothing like that would happen from the New York Times.”
Marc Steiner:
And that’s true. That was a great quote. He was a great human being. One of my great pleasures in my life is meeting him numerous times and doing interviews with him. He had so much to teach us about where we’ve come from and where we’re going. And I know you two were very close.
Norman Solomon:
Dan used to say, and he would convey this in many ways, he appreciated being told that he inspired people, and then he would pause and he would say words to the effect, “Most important, what are you inspired to do?”
Marc Steiner:
Exactly, exactly. I was thinking about what you were just saying as well. I knew a number of people who were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and I have a number of friends who are Iraqi-Americans and Afghan-Americans now whose families were killed in Shock and Awe and killed in the wars in Afghanistan, two of the most unnecessary wars that ever existed in this country’s history, modern history anyway. The other wars made little sense either, but I think that you kind of made me think maybe it’d be interesting to have a conversation between all those people.
Norman Solomon:
Absolutely.
Marc Steiner:
About war.
Norman Solomon:
Yeah, yeah. The poet William Stafford, who I quote in the book, he wrote a poem called Every War Has Two Losers, and one side usually, or often, suffers much more than the other, but war is so corrosive. There’ve been times in my life, and I think for a whole lot of people, even if we’ve worked on war issues, well, I’ve wanted to think, “Well, I don’t think I really want to focus on that anymore. There’s so much else to work on.” And of course there is. There’s so many multidimensional problems and challenges, human realities that we need to encounter and try to improve the world about. Somehow though war is at such a core of what is ailing our country and the world, what is causing so much suffering, so much social dysfunction, and far worse than dysfunction, so much cruelty that is institutionalized. War is at the core.
Marc Steiner:
War is at the core. And Norman, I want to say one thing before we conclude, is that A, your books, all of them, this book is exceptionally well-written, and in your way of writing, you have the heart of a prose poet that makes it very easy to read because it could be a godawful tome and it’s not.
Norman Solomon:
Thanks, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
And I do want to encourage everybody to really check this book out. War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine by the wonderful Norman Solomon, who is kind of warning us about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we could be going. It’s a book that needs to be read, and I would encourage everybody to take this to their book groups in your neighborhoods and your friends, read it together, wrestle with it, and let us know what you think about what you wrestled with here. You can write to me at mss@therealnews.com. I’d love to get back to you on this. It’s really an important book, War Made Invisible by Norman Solomon.
And Norman, it is always a joy to talk to you. Pleasure to talk to you. I appreciate the work you do. You can’t talk about war as a joy, but it’s always a treat to talk with you and appreciate the work you’ve done in taking the time with us here today.
Norman Solomon:
Thank you so much, Marc, and thanks for the Marc Steiner Show.
Marc Steiner:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation today with Norman Solomon about his book, War Made Possible: How the US Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, and I really encourage everyone out there to read it, share it, talk about it with your friends. It’s really a very important book, one that’ll make you think, and you can really wrestle with the ideas that pop up.
And I want to thank you all for joining us today, and I especially want to thank David Hebden, Kayla Rivara behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you’ve thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll write you right back. And while you’re here, please go to www.therealnews.com/support, become a monthly donor and become part of the future with us.
I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
On 30 August 2023, Amnesty International reported on that Representatives of the families of people forcibly disappeared in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen gathered in Beirut to demand that their governments uphold their rights to truth, justice and reparation, during an event organized by AI to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.
Across the Middle East, both state authorities and non-state actors, such as armed opposition groups, abduct and disappear people as a way to crush dissent, cement their power, and spread terror within societies, largely with impunity.
While most governments in the region have not yet investigated disappearances nor provided accurate numbers of those missing or disappeared, civil society organizations and UN bodies have published estimated numbers of people abducted and disappeared in each country. These numbers in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, when multiplied by a conservative estimate of the total years these individuals have been missing, suggest that families have spent more than a million years waiting for answers – an agonizing length of time.
“In the face of their governments’ apathy and complicity for the crime of enforced disappearances, the families of the disappeared across the Middle East have led the charge, year after year, in demanding their right to know what happened to their loved ones and to get justice and reparation – often at great personal risk,” said Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“Today we honour their perseverance and add our voice to theirs in calling for authorities to take real action to investigate these crimes, hold those suspected of criminal responsibility accountable and ensure these crimes are not committed again.”
Iraq
In Iraq, the UN estimates that between 250,000 to 1,000,000 individuals have been disappeared since 1968 – making it one of the countries with the highest number of disappearances in the world. Disappearances are still being carried out today at hands of militias affiliated with the government. Consecutive Iraqi governments have repeatedly failed to take meaningful steps to investigate disappearances or hold those suspected of criminal responsibility to account. Widad Shammari from Iraqi organization Al Haq Foundation for Human Rights, whose son has been missing since 2006, said: “I was a single protester until I met many others who shared my struggle, and we formed a strong coalition who fights for the truth for all the disappeared in the Arab region, not just Iraq.”
Lebanon
In Lebanon, the official estimate of those abducted or missing as a result of the 1975-1990 civil war is 17,415. Every year, on 13 April – the anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War – the families of the missing and disappeared gather to mark the beginning of the conflict, repeating the mantra, “Let it be remembered, not repeated.”
The Lebanese authorities granted amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes that occurred during the civil war, but after years of campaigning, in 2018, the families of the disappeared successfully pressured the government to acknowledge the disappearances that took place. The government also passed a law that established the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared with a mandate to investigate individual cases, locate and exhume mass graves and enable a tracing process.
However, Wadad Halawani, whose husband was kidnapped in 1982 and who leads the Committee of the Kidnapped and Missing in Lebanon said: “Today, we raise our voice and shout out loud. The National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared is 3 years old already. Only two years remain in its mandate. The Commission established a clear strategy for its work, but it cannot carry on without the needed financial and logistical support. The government must provide it with all the needed resources immediately.”
Syria
Since 2011, the Syrian authorities have forcibly disappeared tens of thousands of its actual or perceived opponents, including political activists, protestors, human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and humanitarian aid workers, as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population that amounts to crimes against humanity. Thousands have also gone missing after being detained by armed opposition groups and the so-called Islamic State. Given the Syrian government’s role in orchestrating the campaign of enforced disappearances, there has been total impunity for these crimes in Syria. The families have therefore resorted to international justice mechanisms.
In a momentous victory for the families, on 29 June 2023, the UN General Assembly voted to establish an international institution dedicated to shedding light on the fate and whereabouts of those missing and disappeared since the start of the armed conflict in Syria.
Fadwa Mahmoud from Families for Freedom, whose husband and son were disappeared in Syria in 2012 said: “We had big dreams in 2011. But we paid a very heavy price. My husband and son have been disappeared since September 2012… We faced our fears and raised our voice until it reached the United Nations …this [institution] is the product of our labour as the families of the detained…and this is its strength. We are demanding that we have an instrumental role in the institution.”
My husband and son have been disappeared since September 2012… We faced our fears and raised our voice until it reached the United Nations …this [institution] is the product of our labour as the families of the detained…and this is its strength.Fadwa Mahmoud from Families for Freedom, whose husband and son were disappeared in Syria in 2012
Yemen
In Yemen, human rights organizations have documented 1,547 cases of disappeared and missing people since 2015. All parties to the conflict, including the Huthi de facto authorities and the internationally recognized government forces, are still committing these crimes with impunity at a time when the world’s attention has turned away. Since the Human Rights Council voted in 2021 to end the mandate of the Group of Eminent Experts, following heavy lobbying from Saudi Arabia, efforts to hold all those suspected of criminal responsibility accountable in fair trials and realize victims’ rights to reparations have stalled.
The Abductees’ Mothers Association in Yemen said: “We were harassed and threatened and beaten-up during demonstrations, but we will not give up and we are determined at ensuring some progress every step of the way. We are not mothers of our own disappeared family members only; we consider ourselves mothers of every single disappeared person in the region and we will continue our fight for the truth for all of them.
See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/09/14/portraits-of-disappeared-defenders-paraded-in-bangkok/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Baher Azmy about the Abu Ghraib lawsuit for the August 18, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
New York Times (8/8/23)
Janine Jackson: Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a report on the Arlington National Cemetery burial of Ian Fishback, a former Special Forces officer who, as the Times said, “dared to challenge the Army on its soldiers’ sustained abuse of Iraqi and Afghan men in their custody.”
Fishback’s testimony “unequivocally characterizing the soldiers’ behavior as torture,” the paper explained, “shattered the Pentagon’s insistence that the torture in [Abu Ghraib] was an isolated case,” but it did lead to personal harm and hardship for Fishback.
Of course, the actions that Fishback was moved to denounce had horrific and enduring impacts on many other people, starting with the victims of the torture.
The Times has unfortunately been not particularly interested in the stubborn insistence of those people in having their case heard. One piece in March noted that opponents of the Iraq War say that “the shame of the American abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib…have not been forgotten by history,” but it’s disheartening that that sentence appeared within a piece centered on how George W. Bush “doesn’t second-guess himself on Iraq.”
The ongoing case against military contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc., hired to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib, is a chance for reporters to prevent our forgetting.
The Center for Constitutional Rights has been leading that case, which a federal judge has just said can move forward, since June 2008. We’re joined now by phone by Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Baher Azmy.
Baher Azmy: Thank you for having me.
JJ: If you would ground us, first of all, with some context: This case is against a military contractor, not against the US government per se, and it’s about just a handful of plaintiffs. It’s not the be-all, end-all on the horrors of Abu Ghraib, much less the invasion and the war, but it is the last case standing, and it carries meaning, within itself and beyond itself, would you say?
BA: Yeah, that’s right. This is actually the third of three cases we brought on behalf of Iraqi victims of torture by the US government and private military contractors in Iraq and Abu Ghraib.
One case was thrown out by the DC Federal Court of Appeals, led by Kavanaugh, with a dissent from then-Judge Garland; a second case on behalf of 71 individuals brought against a translation company, L-3 Services, that settled favorably; and this, the third, is brought on behalf of three remaining plaintiffs, three victims of torture at the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib, where all of the depictions of torture we have seen were revealed.
And it’s very challenging to sue the US military for torture, but US generals did an investigation of the torture at Abu Ghraib and identified that private military contractors, including CACI, had a preeminent role.
CACI sent a number of untrained individuals to serve as interrogators, under a very profitable $35 million contract. And as the reports and the evidence revealed, in the command vacuum that occurred at Abu Ghraib, it was CACI interrogators who were telling military police, including people you might recognize if you’re old enough—Lynndie England, Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner—to “soften up” detainees via torture for later interrogation by CACI.
So this seeks accountability against the private military contractor for actions that US service members spent considerable time in a military brig for, and it seeks to close that accountability gap, and hold this profit-making enterprise accountable for its clear role in contributing to the torture and abuse of our plaintiffs.
JJ: I don’t know if it matters to say at this point that prisoners in Abu Ghraib were not criminals—these were not people who were charged and convicted—but maybe that’s worth mentioning here.
BA: Correct. And there are clear, clear duties under the laws of war with respect [to] what is called cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment. And, notably, the judge in this case has found sufficient evidence that CACI was a direct conspirator, aided and abetted the actual torture of our clients, so enough evidence that a jury could find them liable, and that’s what we’re hoping will be the next step in front of a United States jury.
CounterSpin (5/27/16)
JJ: CACI says, as I understand it, that since the United States would have immunity in this case, well, then, we were working for them, so we also have immunity. What do you have to say? I remember an interview with deeply missed CCR president Michael Ratner, explaining in 2004, that this idea that torture isn’t torture came in with US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and things went south at that point.
But that’s CACI’s line, that since we’re acting as the government, we therefore have immunity against these charges?
BA: Yeah, it’s interesting. The subtext of this is a really disturbing pattern among all private military contractors, which I think is seeking precisely this: Even though they act for profit, have no sovereign responsibilities, are in no way politically accountable, democratically accountable, they want to assume the same benefits as the government, as if CACI was a sovereign entity rather than a profit-making entity. That seems like a terrifying notion for me.
And the subtext is, I think, ultimately, from a range of private military contractors, to get the law and the police to fulfill a kind of Erik Prince–ian vision, where private military contractors can go into war spaces and enjoy the same immunity as the United States government.
And so far, the courts have plainly resisted that: You’re not allowed to assume the immunity of the United States government if you yourself have broken the law, even as a contractor.
And the courts have rejected CACI’s argument, building on what John Yoo and Dick Cheney have said—that these are not legal questions, they’re political questions, that they’re out of the jurisdiction of the courts, what we choose to do with prisoners during wartime. And the court flatly rejected that, and said they can be accountable for torture, even if they were participating with the military.
JJ: All right, then. Well, for many people, Abu Ghraib is a series of horrific photographs, and maybe the government’s efforts to suppress them, the media’s release of them, and then a kind of collective gasp—”shocking the conscience,” we heard.
But then we got the sense, vaguely speaking, that since we’ve had our conscience shocked, we’ve addressed it, and so let’s all move on from that difficult time.
But if no real deep-going, up-to-the-top accountability happens, aren’t we just setting ourselves up for the next, “Oh my gosh, that’s terrible” that’s carried out in our name?
Baher Azmy: “The problem with not holding high-level officials to account is these abuses get replicated and indeed escalated.” (image: Democracy Now!, 8/8/23)
BA: I really quite agree, as someone who’s been heavily involved and early involved in the responses to the human rights crisis created by the Bush administration and the lawlessness there. I draw a connection between the kind of soft authoritarianism of the Bush administration, and the sanctioned lawlessness and demand for impunity and subverting US institutions and constraints on executive power, to the kind of hard authoritarianism that the Trump administration embraced.
I mean, should we really be surprised by the Muslim ban that Trump escalated, given what the Bush administration tried and largely got away with? Should we be surprised with lawyers, like John Yoo in the torture context and John Eastman in the insurrection context, trying to sanction or legitimize, under law, subverting American institutions?
I think precisely the problem with not holding high-level officials to account is these abuses get replicated and indeed escalated.
JJ: Well, we’re going to end on that important note. We’ve been speaking with Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can track their work, including on this case, which is not closed but is going forward, at CCRJustice.org. Baher Azmy, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin
BA: Thank you very much.
The post ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
A law amendment in Iraq has proposed capital punishment for homosexual relationships. Campaigners have called it a “dangerous” escalation in the country where people already face frequent attacks and discrimination. However, life for queer Iraqis hasn’t always been this way. As with so many stains on worldwide human rights, the worsening homophobia and transphobia in Iraq can be traced back to the British empire.
The amendment to a 1988 anti-prostitution law passed a first reading in parliament last week. It would enable courts to issue “the death penalty or life imprisonment” sentences for “homosexual relations”. This is according to a document seen by Agence France-Press (AFP). The amendment would also set a minimum seven-year prison term for “promoting homosexuality”.
Currently, no existing laws explicitly punish homosexual relations. However, the state has prosecuted LGBTQ+ people for sodomy, or under vague morality and anti-prostitution clauses in Iraq’s penal code. This also comes at a time when the state and the media are also cracking-down on open discussion about LGBTQ+ issues.
The national media and communications commission is considering banning Iraq-based publications from using the term “homosexuality”. Instead, it would advise media outlets to use the derogatory term “sexual deviance”. It also wants to ban the term “gender”.
The law change appears to have broad support in the Islamist-majority assembly. Saud al-Saadi is member of Shiite Muslim party Huquq, the political wing of the powerful Iran-aligned Hezbollah Brigades and part of the ruling coalition. He said the amendment was “still under discussion and subject to exchanges of viewpoints”. Saadi said a second reading had yet to be scheduled, and argued that parliament aims to “fill a legal vacuum”.
Lawmaker Sharif Suleiman of the Kurdistan Democratic Party said the proposed legislation reflects:
our moral and human values and our fights against abnormal social phenomena… We need deterrent laws.
A 2022 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and non-governmental organisation IraQueer found that people often target LGBTQ+ Iraqis with “kidnappings, rapes, torture and murders”. The state fails to punish the perpetrators. LGBTQ+ rights researcher at HRW Rasha Younes called the new proposed legislation as a “dangerous step”. She told AFP:
That means that Iraqi individuals’ life and constant fear of being hunted down and killed by armed groups with impunity is now going to translate into the law itself.
The Iraqi government (is) using the rights of LGBT people to distract the public from its lack of delivery.
The surge in anti-LGBTQ sentiment has stoked further fear among members of the community. Iraqi gay man Abdallah told AFP:
The situation has become too complicated because we are not protected by the authorities. If someone finds out that I’m gay and has a problem with me, they can send my name or photo to armed groups. My life will end.
It is likely Iraqi politicians will pass the law – and it can be directly linked back to Britain’s colonial influence.
Historically, Iraq and other countries in the Middle East were not as homophobic as they are today. Rather, the Ottoman empire – part of which would later become present-day Iraq – was relatively permissive of homosexuality, particularly if it was kept out of the public eye.
Then, as History wrote:
Britain seized Iraq from Ottoman Turkey during World War I and was granted a mandate by the League of Nations to govern the nation in 1920. A Hashemite monarchy was organized under British protection in 1921, and on October 3, 1932, the kingdom of Iraq was granted independence.
But the damage was already done. The Economist explained that:
In 1885 the British government introduced new penal codes that punished all homosexual behaviour. Of the more than 70 countries that criminalise homosexual acts today, over half are former British colonies. France introduced similar laws around the same time. After independence, only Jordan and Bahrain did away with such penalties.
Britain forced its anti-LGBTQ+ laws onto Iraq (as it did most of its colonies). Negative societal attitudes and state criminalisation have remained ever since.
Now, it’s LGBTQ+ Iraqis feeling the full effects of the legacy of British colonialism.
Featured image via BBC World Service – YouTube
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
Victim of US torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003
This week on CounterSpin: For corporate news media, every mention of the Iraq War is a chance to fuzz up or rewrite history a little more. This year, the New York Times honored the war’s anniversary with a friendly piece about how George W. Bush “doesn’t second guess himself on Iraq,” despite pesky people mentioning things like the torture of innocent prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema has just refused to dismiss a long standing case brought against Abu Ghraib torturers for hire, the company known as CACI. Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the case is a real-world, stubborn indication that what happened happened and those responsible have yet to be called to account. We can call the case, abstractly, “anti-torture” or “anti-war machine,” as though it were a litmus test on those things; but we can’t forget that it’s pro–Suhail al-Shimari, pro–Salah al-Ejaili, pro– all the other human beings horrifically abused in that prison in our name. We get an update on the still-ongoing case—despite some 18 attempts to dismiss it—from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Gizmodo (8/9/23)
Also on the show: The internet? Am i right? Thomas Germain is senior reporter at Gizmodo; he fills us in on some new developments in the online world most of us, like it or not, live in and rely on. Developments to do with ads, ads and still more ads, and also with the disappearing and potential disappearing of decades of archived information and reporting.
The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit, Thomas Germain on Online History Destruction appeared first on FAIR.
This June, the Swiss journalist Maurine Mercier found several United States citizens fighting in Ukraine under the guise of humanitarian work. “All of them are veterans, former soldiers who fought in all the recent American wars: the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan,” she reports. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, carrying the embodied ghosts of past conflicts and deep psychic wounds to…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
By Blessen Tom, RNZ News journalist
Fifteen artists have been selected as the inaugural beneficiaries of NZ On Air’s New Music Pan-Asian funding.
The initiative, the first of its kind, aims to support the Asian music community in New Zealand.
The fund was established due to a lack of equitable representation of Asian musicians in the country’s music sector, says Teresa Patterson, head of music at NZ On Air.
“Our Music Diversity Report clearly showed the under-representation of Pan-Asian New Zealand musicians in the Aotearoa music sector,” she said.
“This is reflected in the number of funding applications we received for this focus round.”
The funding provides musicians with up to $10,000 for recording, mixing and mastering a single, some of which can be set aside for the promotion and creation of visual content to accompany the song’s release.
“We received 107 applications for 15 grants, which is outstanding,” Patterson said.
‘Wonderful range’
“The range of genre, gender and ethnicity among the applicants was wonderful. We received applications from artists who identify as Chinese, Indian, Filipino, South Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Thai and Iraqi.
“The genres varied from alternative/indie and pop to hip-hop/RnB, dance/electro and folk/country.”
Six of the 15 songs that secured funding are bilingual, featuring Asian languages such as Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Malay and Punjabi.
Patterson believed this variety would “really help to reflect the many voices of Aotearoa New Zealand” and add to the vibrant cultural music mix experienced by local audiences.
Swap Gomez, a drummer, visual director and academic lecturer, was one of the panel members responsible for selecting the musicians for the funding. He emphasised the challenges faced by Asian musicians in New Zealand.
“What was awesome to see was so many Pan-Asian artists applying; artists we had never heard of coming out of the woodwork now that a space has been created to celebrate their work,” Gomez said.
“This is the time we can celebrate those Pan-Asian artists who have previously felt overlooked by the wider industry.
“Now there is an environment and sector where they can feel appreciated for their success in music. As a multicultural industry, developing initiatives such as this one is more crucial than ever.”
NZ On Air has announced that funding opportunities for Asian musicians will continue in the next financial year.
“The response we have had to this inaugural NZ On Air New Music Pan-Asian focus funding round has been phenomenal,” Patterson said.
“It tells us that there is a real need, so NZ On Air is excited to confirm that it will return in the new financial year.”
The full NZ On Air’s Pan-Asian New Music recipient list:
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Former Reuters journalist Dean Yates’ career has taken him around the world and up-close-and-personal with some of the century’s worst tragedies and atrocities. From the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, to the frontlines of war in Lebanon and Iraq—Yates’ experiences have taken a deeply personal toll. The killing of two Iraqi journalist colleagues by a US Apache gunship finally pushed him over the edge. After years of dealing with PTSD, substance abuse, and psychiatric hospitalization, Yates has written a new memoir about his journey, Line in the Sand. Dean Yates joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his new book, his career, and his healing journey.
Studio: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
(Singing).
Chris Hedges:
Dean Yates was a reporter for Reuters who led teams that covered the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia. He served as Deputy Bureau Chief for Israel and Palestine in 2006 during the Lebanon war, and was the Reuters Bureau chief in Iraq, overseeing a staff of 100 people from 2007 to 2008. It was during his time in Iraq that a US Apache gunship gunned down two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. On July 12th, 2007. WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange published footage of the attack in 2010 known as the Collateral Murder Video. Yates struggled in the aftermath with severe PTSD, was consumed by guilt over the killing of his two Iraqi colleagues. His trauma turned out to be a time bomb, leading to substance abuse, rage, numbness, and pushing him up to the edge of suicide. He was hospitalized three times in a psychiatric ward.
He, like many former war correspondence, felt abandoned by his news organization. He was unable to recapture the camaraderie and sense of purpose, even meaning that comes with war reporting. The toxicity of his trauma, which took a heavy toll on his wife and children, became the new war he had to fight. Yates has written a brutally honest memoir about his battle, Line in the Sand, a Journalist Memoir of War, Trauma and Healing. He joins me to discuss the trauma of war reporting, its crippling consequences and the struggle to heal and find peace. So as you know, I’m a huge admirer of this book for its unflinching honesty.
I want to ask having … and I think just to go back, we should recap because a lot of people don’t remember the Bali bombings. I think there’s a moment in the book where you’re counting over 200 bodies, counting them, right?
Dean Yates:
That was in the Boxing Day tsunami-
Chris Hedges:
That was in the Boxing Day. I did the same, and a way it becomes a kind of … it gives you something to do. It creates a distance between you and the carnage, but I remember also, doing exactly what you did. Give us just a brief kind of summary of the kind of traumatic events that you had to cover as a reporter.
Dean Yates:
Yeah. I think the Bali bombings, Chris was … it was one of those seminal events, right? So, 9/11 had happened. The world had been shocked and horrified by 9/11, those attacks. So the war on terror had begun and the war in Afghanistan had begun. Then a year later, I’m sitting in Jakarta and I get this phone call from our stringer in Bali who said, there’s been these explosions in Kuta Beach. Of course everyone knows Bali. It’s this tourist paradise, one of the holiday islands of the world. I said, what can you see? And he said, “Headless bodies and cars on fire.” And I knew something terrible had happened, but I just didn’t know how bad it would be. Of course, the final death toll was 202 people dead, including 88 Australians. This was the worst attack for my country, Australia, outside wartime.
It was very quickly identified that the attackers were an offshoot, a Southeast Asian terrorist group called Jemaah Islamiyah, which was affiliated with Al-Qaeda. I went down there the following morning, I was on the first flight and the whole area had been obliterated. Thousand kilograms of explosives in a minivan just exploded outside this nightclub, which was full of young holiday makers. This is what I think … this is why this attack reverberated around the world because it was ordinary people, young people having fun, going to the beach and on holiday. It was a brutal evil attack, and that that was the beginning of what we saw then, during those years of these wave of terrorist attacks around the world, Spain, London, France, elsewhere. It was the beginning after 9/11 of that decade long, if you like, wave of terrorism,
Chris Hedges:
And talk about what you saw when you got there.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, I get to the bomb site and it was this big crater in the ground and Indonesia being Indonesia, there was no security there. There was no tape around the site. I actually walked over the bomb site looking just to see what I could see. There was still some bit of smoke coming out of the debris. My foot bumped a bit of debris and I actually dislodged and there was a shown of hand there, and I nearly stepped on it, and the whole thing was just … I actually could feel evil there, and I was a real methodical news agency journalist. I just did one story, moved onto the next, but I could actually feel evil there. It’s the first time and the only time I’ve ever felt that. Then I went to the hospital because this is where all the survivors were, their families.
All the bodies had been taken to the main hospital in Bali. When I got to that hospital, I was about to go in and then a burned victim was brought past me, young man, face looking up, badly burnt face. And I froze, there was something about that moment where I just thought, I can’t go into that hospital. I was really confused about my role. This was the biggest story I’d ever covered, and we’re talking 20, 21 years ago now. I’d never been trained for this sort of thing. I’d never been … no one had taught me, how do you go into a hospital ward, full of grieving people who’ve just lost loved ones in a horrific attack? And what do you even say to these people? Well, people think I’m a … Well, they think I’m a voyeur? I just didn’t have the emotional skills to deal with that.
And so I actually, didn’t even go into the hospital. I couldn’t do my job. And I felt such shame about that for nearly 15 years. I didn’t even tell my wife for 15 years because I wasn’t able to do my job, and it was only years later that I was actually through lots of therapy. Bali really affected me. I felt very … it really traumatized me. It was only years later that through a lot of therapy, I was able to work out with my psychologist that I just didn’t have … I didn’t have the emotional skills to go into that hospital ward. I didn’t know how I could deal with the distress inside, and I was very tired. I’d been up all night and exhausted, and the shame I felt was that I didn’t do my job. I didn’t give those people a chance to tell their story. You and I both know working in conflict zones, working in disaster zones, a lot of people want to tell their story.
They want the world to know. I didn’t give them a chance to do that. That was the shame I felt but then 20 years later, all this therapy, I was able to show myself compassion for that younger reporter who just didn’t know how to respond to that situation, and that helped me deal with all those emotions.
Chris Hedges:
And then quickly the tsunami and then Iraq. I should point out you were 700 days in Iraq, and we were talking about before we went on the air that although I probably have been in more combat than you have, I went in and out of combat. So there were periods where I was relatively safe or certainly didn’t feel the fear or the terror. When I was in Sarajevo, which was being shelled all of the time, it was constant fear, which we would pull out after three weeks because you don’t sleep. I’m really curious about those 700 days, but just talk briefly about the tsunami and then Iraq and then we’ll go into the effects.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, the tsunami was just … for some of us who covered the tsunami, we actually consider that the big story of our generation, actually. I mean, this was a natural disaster, unprecedented in modern times. In Aceh … Indonesia’s Aceh, 166,000 people killed in 20 minutes. The destruction, the death. I saw thousands of dead bodies. I walked into a mosque, the day I got there. I walked into a mosque, the main mosque in Banda Aceh, the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque. There were just bodies lined up in this mosque, bloated. I just thought, I’ve got to count these bodies. It was sort of like … there was a journalistic part of it, right? I write my story, I want to count how many bodies are there, but it was sort of like someone had to do it.
It was paying them respect by doing so, and I counted 156 bodies in this mosque, but it was just horrific, but what I found covering the Boxing Day tsunami was unlike Bali where I froze at that hospital, I just had this energy and this passion to cover that story, to report the hell out of that story. It was one of those events where it happened on Boxing Day, and those news images and the pictures that came out galvanized the global community in contributing something like 14, 15 billion dollars in aid for the tsunami victims all around the Indian Ocean. It was an incredible effort and it was partly due to that sort of media coverage, and the thing about the coverage for me personally, was that while the death toll was horrific and while the … and I spent a month up there and I went back six months later and 12 months later. Boxing Day tsunami didn’t traumatize me as much.
And I think it was because I was able to work … I was really proud of the work I did, and I was really proud of the work that Reuters, my employer put into that story, through the kitchen sink at it. We threw so many people at that story. So I felt that week that I did the story justice and our organization did the story justice, I think that means a lot to journalists, that if you feel you are bearing witness, if you feel you are doing your job properly, I think that actually is a protective measure when it comes to trauma. I mean, it’s different, a manmade atrocity versus a natural disaster. They are different, but they’re still trauma. For me, I just felt that I’d been able to do my job really well and that protected me later when the trauma came.
Chris Hedges:
And let’s talk just briefly about Iraq.
Dean Yates:
And the thing with Iraq was just the fear. Again, it was something that I didn’t realize until literally 18, 19 years later, that fear of getting kidnapped had been trapped in my body, and this was something that every single journalist was frightened about, obviously in Baghdad, was getting kidnapped because if you got kidnapped, you were likely going to get killed. There was … the way Al-Qaeda was operating and some of those other militant groups, they weren’t taking prisoners. You’re dead, and that fear manifested itself in my nightmares. In my nightmares, the most common nightmare I would have was of being chased through the streets by insurgents in Baghdad. I could see the streets of Baghdad, I could see the shopkeepers.
And some colleagues were able to grow their beards and look Arab, I could never do that. I always looked like a Westerner and in these nightmares, I’d be running through the streets, gunman chasing me, and I wouldn’t know how to get back to the office. My feet actually moved in the bed. It was like I was … and my feet were scratching the wooden frame of our bed and my wife, Mary, we’d wake up the next morning and she’d say, “You were running in your sleep again last night.” I was literally running to try and get away from these people. Sometimes I’d scream out because they’d caught me. It was just … the nightmares were terrible, so that fear, I thought was … when I look back at that now, and I look back and it’s sort of interesting, and it’s an interesting element to the trauma, was that it’s sometimes things that don’t actually happen to you can be traumatic.
We often think something must happen to someone, they get shot at or they get blown up or they get attacked, but for me, it was something that didn’t happen, but that could have happened, and that what was I found very … ultimately was a big factor in my PTSD.
Chris Hedges:
Well, I had that story, well, I still to this day have dreams of being shelled and although I spent far more time covering the war in El Salvador, five years where I was in a lot of combat and I wasn’t ever hit by a shell, but it’s exactly the same thing where it’s the fear and living with that fear 24 hours a day, obviously ingrained itself so deeply within my psyche. Let’s just talk briefly about the collateral murder video, what happened, and then I want to get into your own struggle.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, so obviously with Iraq and Baghdad, for me, the biggest traumatic event was the deaths of my staff. Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, the Reuters photographer and driver who were killed on July 12th, 2007 by a US Apache gunship call sign, Crazy Horse 18. I was in the newsroom that day, and out of the blue, there amongst a group of men, shot dead by this gunship, and that for me was … it was the start of, I guess a slow burn chain reaction, traumatic event that eventually brought me to the brink of suicide nearly 10 years later because of all sorts of reasons. I failed to protect my staff. When Julian Assange released the collateral murder tape, I didn’t speak up. I was literally frozen in shock when that tape came out and I couldn’t speak. The fact that I didn’t speak up meant that Reuters allowed the US military to get away with its deceitful narrative around what happened.
In other words, Reuters allowed the US military to lie about the events of that attack and didn’t challenge it. Then, there was just all … and so that narrative was allowed to continue. So, that to me was a lack of courage on my part, a lack of moral courage. All of that came together 10 years later. And that guilt and that shame from that brought me to the brink of suicide until my wife, Mary intervened and said, “You need to get help. You need to go to a psych ward.”
Chris Hedges:
I want to ask, just from my own experience, I did war for 20 years. My last war I covered was Kosovo. I felt myself … I don’t know that I had a breakdown, but I felt myself breaking down in that war. I did my job, but it was much harder than any other conflict that I covered, and I wondered if you had a kind of final period when you were covering, I assume in Iraq, where you felt the same kind of thing.
Dean Yates:
For me, that breakdown was actually a couple of days after Namir and Saeed were killed. I was told that the Iraqi staff felt that I wasn’t being tough enough on the US military in our reporting, the Iraqi staff basically wanted me to report in our stories that Namir and Saeed had been killed in cold blood. I just couldn’t report that because we didn’t know exactly what had happened and you know what it was like in these war zones. Information is so sketchy. I hadn’t seen anything from the tape by that stage. I could only report what we knew, but it was like the Iraqi staff were calling me gutless. And that ripped my heart apart, and I just thought, I can’t do this and I wept, and my young deputy from Lebanon who told me this, I just said to her, “I can’t do this. I need to resign. I wanted to resign my post. I wanted to leave Baghdad.”
She knew that if I did that, it would break me, and she urged me to stay on. And I have to probably thank her for saving my career at that time because I think if I had resigned I would’ve never gotten another post again, because Reuters was pretty tough, like all news organizations and if I’d have bailed, that would’ve been probably the end for me. I managed to keep going after that event, and I don’t know, but it all caught up with me, Chris, in the end,
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk about how it caught up with you.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, so funnily enough, it caught up with me in this beautiful island where I live now of Tasmania, this peaceful, pristine little part of the world where we eventually-
Chris Hedges:
I just want to interrupt. There are a lot of ghosts in Tasmania. There was a genocide before you got there.
Dean Yates:
You also got the Tasmanian … yeah, that’s right. There are a lot of ghosts. It’s been a brutal place over many years. So my wife, Mary comes from Tasmania, and so we decided to move here after … I’ve been on the road for 20 years for Reuters, and I was pretty tired and decided let’s go back to Tasmania. And Reuters said that I could work as a subeditor wherever I went, as long as I had a broadband connection. So we relocated here in 2013, and it wasn’t long before the symptoms started to emerge of PTSD, the noise sensitivity, the agitation, the anxiety, the depression, isolating myself, that sort of stuff.
Chris Hedges:
I just want to interrupt. I just want to ask why you thought … it happened after you left. I didn’t have nightmares in war zones. I would have them the moment I left. And the other point that you bring up in the book that I liked, you talk about trauma. You may be quoting somebody, but you’re talking about trauma, like all these items packed in a cupboard. And then every once in a while they’ll fall out. You can’t control it. I mean, I feel that I keep them packed, I try and keep them all packed in there. I thought that was an incredible analogy. So why did the trauma hit you after you left, and how did those things fall out of the cupboard?
Dean Yates:
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. So for me, and I think it’s the same for a lot of people, when you’re working in intense places, there’s no room in your head for a lot of that trauma to come out right. You’ve just got so much on your mind. You’ve got so much to do. You’re focused. You’ve got your job to do. When I left Asia and the Middle East and came back to Tasmania, my brain had space to start ruminating, and when you’re in this beautiful environment, you start to think about the past, it’s just inevitable. It’s going to happen. So, that allowed room for the memories to start coming back in. Before, there’s just no time for those memories to come back. It’s easy to keep memories down when you’ve got so much else to do and so much here and now to focus on with your work.
That’s why some people who have been traumatized can keep going until they’re old. And then when they stop work, bang, the trauma really hits them. So for me, being here in Tasmania, I was still working, but I wasn’t working as hard. I wasn’t working those same hours. That’s when all this stuff started to accumulate. And I would literally be sitting in my home office trying to work on stories, edit stories and I was editing things like … this is the thing, right? Editing stories, MH 17, terrorist attacks, other sorts of events that were triggering as well, reminders of what I’d covered in the past. And I would get so stressed out, I would bang my fists on the table, I would yell, I would scream, and it would be like I was sitting back in my office in Baghdad. I would be so stressed that I’d be physically transported back.
So eventually, after many years of pleading, my wife Mary got me to get help because I was horrible at home. I’m terrible to live with. And I was very quickly diagnosed with PTSD, and I was given time off work, but as I went … and this was the thing, this was the critical thing, as soon as I took sick leave, the nightmare started, within days of me taking sick leave and stopping work, that’s when the nightmare started, and I think that was because I wasn’t working then. My head wasn’t filled with news planning calls wasn’t filled with what stories am I editing who I got to discuss that story with no emails to answer. My head’s got nothing in it, in come the nightmares, the flashbacks became very intense at that time as well. So rather than get better on sick leave, I went downhill.
Chris Hedges:
I want to just ask a quick question. When you cover war, you’re getting all sorts of adrenaline rushes almost constantly. I’m just curious whether you think that that was … those soldiers call it a combat high? It’s very real. I’m just wondering if those adrenaline rushes ward it off in your idea, in your thoughts, trauma and then, I just want you … because we only have about seven minutes left, I want you to talk about the road to recovery, what it is you had to do.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, no, I think those adrenaline rushes do ward off the trauma. Absolutely. I think the problem is if you keep looking for those adrenaline rushes, you’re going to have to confront at some stage in your life, you can’t keep putting it off-
Chris Hedges:
Well, the problem is you leave and you keep looking for it. I mean, the title of your book is A Journalist, Memoir of War Trauma, Infidelity and Healing. I mean, they can read that chapter.
Dean Yates:
You can’t keep putting this stuff off, right? You will have to confront the trauma at some stage. You can keep trying to delay it, but it will catch up with you, I guarantee it. It’s just a matter of when, and the longer you leave it, the harder it is and the longer it’s going to take too to get to that recovery. That whole thing about the linen cupboard and the items stacked in the cupboard, the first day I went to the psych ward, this was just … and I loved this imagery. The first time I went to this psych ward in Melbourne, a lot of coppers, a lot of veteran specialist PTSD facility. I was given this notebook, this notebook, and it had this piece of paper, and I’ve still got it on my notice board up here, treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, the linen covered metaphor.
On one side, you’ve got this messy cupboard with clothes falling out on the other is a very neat cupboard. The idea is that messy cupboard is all your traumatic memories, right? And you open that cupboard and they all start tumbling out. The idea of therapy is to process those memories, deal with them, work through them, and then you fold them up and uniquely stack them away in the tidy side of the cupboard so that if you want to access them, you just open the cupboard and you can pull them out if you want to, and you can put them in. They don’t just tumble out if you happen to bump the cupboard accidentally or brush past it. That is one of the biggest problems with PTSD is that people have no control over their memories. Those memories can just come flooding back at any time.
The memories are unprocessed. Whereas once you’ve done the therapy and you’ve gone through it, you’re able to … those memories are properly filed. They’re stored away in that linen cupboard.
Chris Hedges:
Do you ever reach a point where all of the memories jumbled in the one cupboard are folded and processed? I mean, isn’t it to a certain extent, always with you that trauma or not?
Dean Yates:
Chris, I’ll be honest, because I’ve spent seven years writing this book. I’ve spent seven years in really immersive therapy and really working hard on my recovery. I honestly believe that most of my memories now are folded up and put inside that cupboard. I still get … there’s no question that I still get jolted sometimes, but I know where every memory is. I know where they all are, and I know that the anniversary of Namir and Saeed’s deaths are coming up next month. I’ll feel emotional about that, but that’s fine. It’s okay. I’m at peace with myself. I’ve made peace with myself over that, and I’ll know to expect the emotion-
Chris Hedges:
I just want to add, that was a very important part in your recovery was a ritual.
Dean Yates:
Yes.
Chris Hedges:
A religious ritual of your own design, but that doesn’t matter. I went to seminary. I mean, I’m a believer in ritual and that it was carrying out that ritual that … and as I remember, I think you spoke to them in that ritual, but just talk about that briefly.
Dean Yates:
Yeah, and it was basically … and actually, I got this idea by reading books by American veterans, by American … essentially American spiritual healers, people who have worked with American veterans and brought them to peace with what they saw and did in Vietnam. And the idea was … people helped me come up with this idea for a ritual … a memorial service in a chapel on the 10th anniversary of Namir and Saeed’s-
Chris Hedges:
It was a mosque, wasn’t it? It was a mosque.
Dean Yates:
No, I also went to a mosque. I also went to a mosque nearby and got advice from an imam. So I brought the two religions, Christianity and Islam together, but it was having that memorial service where I wrote them a letter. I wrote them a 5,000 word letter, which took nearly a week and in it, I sort of poured my heart into this letter and that memorial service that I held, I was able to … that process, it wasn’t like, “Let’s have a memorial service and I’ll forgive myself.” It was the process of getting to that service, the planning, the thinking about it, and I had a spiritual care worker who did the work with me, and then, the culmination of that memorial service, she poured cold water over my hands.
She anointed the sign … did the sign of the cross on my forehead. I felt absolved. I literally felt clenched. I’m not religious, but it was the ritual of that process that helped me make peace with myself. It was very important.
Chris Hedges:
Just to close, where would you say you are now?
Dean Yates:
So I actually don’t like to use the word recovery because I think recovery is more of a physical manifestation. I just feel like I’ve written a new narrative for myself. I’ve healed, that’s a better way of referring to it. I really feel healed. I feel like this is a new chapter in my life, but the trauma that I experienced and what happened is just part of my … it’s part the new identity that I’ve forged for myself, and it’s integrated into who I am and who I want to be. I got to say I’m a pretty happy person these days, Chris.
Chris Hedges:
Great. That was Dean Yates on his memoir, Line in the Sand. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
President Biden accidentally referred to Putin’s war in “Iraq” when answering questions from the press, a year after former president George W Bush made the same gaffe. Both men played crucial roles in the push to invade Iraq.
Asked on Wednesday whether the short-lived Prigozhin rebellion was a sign that Putin was weakening, Biden replied, “It’s hard to tell really. But he’s clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
During the 2020 presidential race, Current Affairs’ Nathan J Robinson wrote the following about Biden’s pivotal role in manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion:
In 2003, Biden was “a senator bullish about the push to war [in Iraq] who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public,” who “voted for — and helped advance — the Bush agenda.” He was the war’s “most crucial” senate supporter. Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying that “these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.” The resulting war was one of the most deadly catastrophes in the history of U.S. foreign policy — the Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands or possibly even the millions, and 4,500 American troops died.
That Biden’s decomposing brain would find the word “Iraq” when reaching for the word which means “nation that has been illegally invaded by an evil government” is positively Freudian.
In May of last year during a speech in Dallas, George W Bush made a similar Freudian confession, saying, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”
After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.
I defy you to find me anything that is more quintessentially representative of the state of the US empire than these two clips. Two decaying empire managers fumbling around in their skulls for the name of nation that’s been invaded by murderous thugs, and coming up with the name of the nation they themselves invaded. It’s truly a thing of beauty.
It’s absolutely ridiculous that they’re trying to charge Putin with war crimes while these two mass murderers are walking free. As American law professor Dale Carpenter has said, “If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.” This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.
It’s not a “whataboutism” to say it’s absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging men like Bush and Biden — it’s a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone, then it’s not the law, it’s just corruption. It’s a tool of the powerful.
____________
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
(Readers sensitive to discussion of inappropriate adult behavior toward children may want to skip this one.)
There’s a really gross video going around of the Dalai Lama kissing a young boy on the lips and telling him to suck his tongue while an adult audience looks on approvingly. A tweet from Tibet.net last month shows a video clip of the Tibetan spiritual leader with the child and says the encounter took place during his “meeting with students and members of M3M Foundation,” though Tibet.net’s clip cuts out the sexually inappropriate part of the encounter.
Here is a hyperlink to a video of the interaction. For those who understandably do not wish to see such a thing but are comfortable with a text description, here’s a new write-up from News.com.au:
The Dalai Lama has raised eyebrows after kissing a young Indian boy on the lips and asking him to “suck” his tongue at a recent event.
Footage of the bizarre interaction, which occurred last month during an event for India’s M3M Foundation, has gone viral on social media.
The leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso, was hosting students and members of the foundation at his temple in Dharamshala, India, where he lives in exile.
In the video, the boy approaches the microphone and asks, “Can I hug you?”
The 87-year-old says “OK, come” and invites him on stage.
The Dalai Lama motions to his cheek and says “first here” and the boy gives him a hug and kiss.
He holds the boy’s arm and turns to him, saying “then I think fine here also” as he points to his lips.
The spiritual leader then grabs the boy’s chin and kisses him on the mouth as the audience laughs.
“And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama tells the boy, sticking out his tongue.
They press their foreheads together and the boy briefly pokes out his tongue before backing away, as the Dalai Lama gives him a playful slap on the chest and laughs.
Eye openning piece
"Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth (2003)"
by Michael Parenti https://t.co/JalkGOp3ZK
— Joe Emersberger (@rosendo_joe) April 9, 2023
What is it with power-adjacent clergymen and child molestation, anyway? As Michael Parenti noted in 2003, sexual abuse was commonplace in the tyrannical environment of feudal Tibet, over which the 14th Dalai Lama would still preside had it not been forcibly annexed by the PRC in the 1950s. While the slogan of “Free Tibet” has long been used as a propaganda bludgeon by the west against China particularly and against communism generally, the truth of the matter is that Tibet was quantifiably a far more tyrannical and oppressive place to live back when it was supposedly “free”.
I went to see the Dalai Lama a long time ago when he came to speak at Melbourne, and I remember what stood out the most for me was how completely lacking in depth or profundity it was. As someone with an intense interest in spirituality and enlightenment I always found it perplexing that someone so highly regarded in the circles I moved in had nothing to say on such matters besides superficial, Sesame Street-level remarks about being nice and trying to make the world a better place. Probably no one alive today is more commonly associated with Buddhism and spiritual awakening in western consciousness than the Dalai Lama, yet everything I’ve ever read or heard from him has struck me as unskillful, unhelpful and vapid when compared to the words of other spiritual teachers.
That confusing discrepancy cleared up after I got into political analysis and learned that the Dalai Lama is probably not someone who should be looked to for spiritual guidance, and is actually far too messed up inside to have accomplished much inner development as a person.
Take an interview he did back in September 2003, a solid six months after the invasion of Iraq. The Dalai Lama told AP that he believed the US invasion of Afghanistan was “perhaps some kind of liberation” that could “protect the rest of civilization,” as was the USA’s brutal intervention in Korea, and that the US invasion of Iraq was “complicated” and would take more time before its morality could be determined. In 2005, years after the invasion, after normal mainstream members of the public had realized the war was a disaster, the Dalai Lama still said “The Iraq war — it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”
This is plainly someone with a broken moral compass. These are basic, bare-minimum assessments that any normal person with any degree of psychological and emotional health can quickly sort out for themselves, and he still winds up basically on the same side of these issues as some of the worst people on earth.
I used to think it odd that the Dalai Lama has nothing to offer but vapid kindergarten pop spirituality, then I learned he was a well-paid CIA agent for many years.https://t.co/wBfqsLm3rt pic.twitter.com/2DmGsgll5B
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 5, 2020
But I guess that’s about the best anyone could expect from a literal CIA asset. His administration received $1.7 million a year from the Central Intelligence Agency through the 1960s, and it’s reported that he himself personally received $180,000 a year from the CIA for decades.
From The New York Review of Books:
Many friends of Tibet and admirers of the Dalai Lama, who has always advocated nonviolence, believe he knew nothing about the CIA program. But Gyalo Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers, was closely involved in the operations, and [CIA veteran John Kenneth] Knaus, who took part in the operation, writes that “Gyalo Thondup kept his brother the Dalai Lama informed of the general terms of the CIA support.” According to Knaus, starting in the late 1950s, the Agency paid the Dalai Lama $15,000 a month. Those payments came to an end in 1974.
The CIA is easily the most depraved institution in the world today, so it would be reasonable to expect the moral development of someone so intimately involved with it to be a bit stunted. Ten or fifteen years ago it would’ve surprised me to learn that I would one day type these words, but it turns out the Dalai Lama is a real asshole.
It’s rare to find a spiritual teacher who has expanded their consciousness inwardly enough to have useful things to say about enlightenment, and of those who do it’s extremely rare to find one who has also expanded their consciousness outwardly enough to discuss world events from a place of wisdom and understanding as well. The Dalai Lama is as far from this as you could possibly get: he has lived his life in cooperation with the most unwise institutions on earth, and he is less inwardly developed than most people you might pass on the street.
People should stop looking up to this freak.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
Recently, the US Senate voted on a bipartisan basis to rescind the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq. President Biden, who voted for that AUMF in 2003, has said he will sign it if it gets to his desk.
At this writing, it is unclear if the U.S. House will post the rescission for a vote and, if so, whether it will pass in that chamber. I fervently hope that it will, so one of the most notorious episodes in U.S. history can be peacefully laid to rest.
If that does happen, it would be a strong parallel to the rescission of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution by the U.S. Senate in 2009. That AUMF in 1964 was also based on deception and authorized the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, which became the greatest American debacle of that era.
But far more important, rescinding the Iraq AUMF would repudiate deception and manipulation by any Presidential Administration as happened with the George W. Bush Administration in getting Congress to support it. It would also discourage open-ended Congressional AUMFs with no expiration date, which so far has allowed the one in Iraq to continue for two decades. In short, it would re-establish the Constitutional principle that only Congress can declare war, and repudiate the decades-long trend toward an imperial US presidency.
In the lead-up to the U.S. attack on Iraq 20 years ago, as the executive director of the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action, I helped lead intensive organizing to try to prevent it.
We organized numerous demonstrations opposing the Bush administration’s campaign to start a war with Iraq, including joining a demonstration of over 1 million in New York City shortly before the March 19, 2003 invasion. With demonstrations worldwide attended by tens of millions, it was the largest anti-war mobilization in history to try to prevent a war.
We also did intensive lobbying in opposition to the Bush Administration’s AUMF to authorize the war. I remember being in a delegation that met with the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg shortly before the vote, at which he shared that he couldn’t justify sending his own son to that war so had decided to vote against it.
Starting in August 2002, there was an intense mobilization by the Bush Administration with neoconservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to promote the war based on the deception that it was needed to prevent Iraq from using Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
That culminated with a presentation by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council in February 2003 asserting the same supposed danger. The Council didn’t vote to support it. We put forward compelling evidence that the Bush Administration was deceiving the American people into supporting the war, but it began anyway.
Years later, I had an in-person conversation with the Chief UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, Dr. Hans Blix. He told me he had met in person with President Bush before he launched the war, and certified to him that Iraq had no nuclear weapons. He said he told him that if he were given just a few more months, he could certify that it also didn’t have Chemical or Biological Weapons. But Blix said Bush simply retorted that he had made the decision, and the US invasion happened shortly after.
Peace-loving citizens in the U.S. and across the world organized intensively to end the war. I’m proud that the Coalition for Peace Action played a leading role in that effort in our region. But it wasn’t ended until 2011 when the US finally withdrew its last remaining troops as part of an agreement in 2008, before Bush finished his second term. Over 5,000 U.S. Servicemembers were killed, and tens of thousands wounded—including countless returning US Servicemembers who suffer from PTSD to this day. And up to one million Iraqis died.
The U.S. House needs to complete rescission of this deceptive and extremely damaging AUMF. In January 2020, the Trump Administration invoked it to conduct a drone assassination of a top Iranian military leader who was in Bagdad, creating a grave danger of major war with Iran. Iran did a retaliatory strike against a U.S. base in Iraq. But thankfully, no U.S. troops were killed—though a considerable number were injured.
Wars of choice in Vietnam and Iraq have not led to peaceful American-style democracies, as those can never be imposed from the outside. We need to rescind the AUMF for the Iraq War, as we did with the Tonkin Gulf AUMF that green-lighted the Vietnam War. Readers wanting to support that goal can visit peacecoalition.org.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
As with all matters regarding United States policy, Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a non-committal position — “quiet diplomacy”. Binoy Kampmark reports.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Roots Action’s Norman Solomon about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion for the March 24, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: So here we are, 20 years after the US war on Iraq, and, to speak broadly, the popular understanding is that Iraq wasn’t behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction aimed at the US, weapons whose immediate threat, yes, was the vehemently argued premise for a grave assault on a sovereign country.
Atlantic (3/13/23)
But somehow, in all of this talkity-talk, the idea of acknowledgement of wrong—forget compensation, forget apology—is nowhere in evidence.
The story has been made over such that the Iraq invasion was wrong, but still OK. Iraqis were harmed, but still helped. And all the advisors and experts that got it very wrong are still, somehow, right.
The 2003 war on Iraq is, most importantly, a story about imperialist violence. But it’s also about the web of lies and disinformation used to advance it, and the role that nominally independent journalists played—and play.
Norman Solomon has been thinking and working on these issues for decades. He’s been part of FAIR since the start. He’s co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His most recent book is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, out soon from the New Press.
He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Norman Solomon.
Norman Solomon: Thanks, Janine.
JJ: There are so many places we could start. But I did want to stick a fork in one thing. Talking about media today, at the 20-year mark, the theme is missed signals, miscalculation, misunderstanding.
It’s hard to talk about what happened, and media’s role, without recognizing that the George W. Bush administration and its advisors wanted and intended to invade Iraq before the September 11, 2001, attacks. But that’s not a contention. That’s just a thing we know, based on evidence, right?
Guardian (2/24/06)
NS: Yes, Rumsfeld made a very clear statement in a memo, just in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that they were going after Iraq. It was their “eyes on the prize,” in a grotesque sort of way.
And when we look back 20 years, I think there’s a consistent thread that the media and the government excuses are basically intertwined. Which sort of makes sense, since the disinformation messaging after 9/11, before, during and after the invasion of Iraq—all that was also intertwined between government and mass media.
And we think of and sometimes notice the revolving door of personnel, where someone is a press secretary for the president, then goes to a cable news network, or vice versa. George Stephanopoulos, and many others who followed him, just had this career path that was basically recycling between those in government who often deceive, and those in media who have a follow-up career. And they’re just in a different part of the deception chain, as it turns out.
And so I think it’s fitting, unfortunately, that 20 years after so many of the government officials and media mavens and so-called journalists—quite often not deserving the name—that they were basically singing out of the same hymn book. And now they’re being exculpatory for each other and themselves at the 20th anniversary.
One example that I think is just so profoundly grotesque is that in the months before the invasion of Iraq, you had people who were recycling falsehoods out of government sources, or government-designated, -anointed sources, into news media, like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, onto the front pages of the New York Times.
Then you would have Dick Cheney, for instance, who would go on the Sunday talkshows, knowing that his own office had funneled the disinformation into the New York Times, then he would say, “Well, don’t just believe us. This is being reported by the New York Times.”
Intercept (3/15/23)
JJ: Right. And a number of folks have written recently—Jon Schwarz at the Intercept, Derek Seidman at Truthout, also Marjorie Cohn, Adam Johnson at Real News—about how these visible architects of the Iraq War, in government, but also in think tanks, and then also in media, they’ve all failed upward subsequently, haven’t they? Even knowing what we know, there’s been no comeuppance, no fallout, for those folks.
NS: That is something I think we could call a repetition compulsion disorder that completely gets a reward system to back it up. Whereas those who step out of line, who don’t conflate being pro-war with being objective, they are not going to find upward mobility in media anywhere near so smooth. And often they just hit a brick wall, forget glass ceiling, they hit a brick wall above their heads.
We have some examples that cry out for remembering and reminding people, that Phil Donahue, who had the temerity to actually have a variety of voices about the wisdom of invading Iraq in the months before in his primetime MSNBC program, we know because of a leaked memo that he was fired a few weeks before the invasion, precisely because people at the top of management—MSNBC, NBC News—they were worried that, as they put it in this, for a while, secret memo, that the flag-wavers at Fox and CNN would make MSNBC look bad because Donahue was allowing some anti-war voices onto the air.
And I know from having been reporting and visiting Iraq before the invasion a few times, and writing about this at the time, including for FAIR, that there was a tremendous amount of pressure going on from news media, and to the extent there was an opening for debate, say in the summer and early fall of 2002, the aperture continued to narrow, and so the more that a consensus was being promoted and forced, you might say, that a war and invasion was necessary, the less space there was.
Salon (3/19/23)
I know personally, because I was able to go to Iraq with some delegations, a former senator and current member of Congress, and then with Sean Penn, and then with a UN official. I found in the late part of 2002 what was first a bit of an opening, where I would be invited on to CNN or MSNBC or even Fox. By the end of the autumn, that opening had pretty much closed, and certainly by the end of the year.
And the explanation I was given was that in October of 2002, when the House and Senate voted that an invasion of Iraq would be authorized, that became official policy, and some of the bookers and so forth at the cable news networks would say, “Well, you know, now this is the US government stance that an invasion is in the cards; it’s officially authorized by the legislative branch. So there’s less controversy here.”
JJ: And so now we need to close up any window of debate in the public conversation, because officials have decided what’s going to happen. And I don’t think that’s maybe everybody’s understanding of the way journalism works, or should work.
NS: Yeah, it’s a sort of an ersatz, pseudo-journalism that sets the standard for professionalism. And we, I guess, ought to face it that when people move into the journalism profession, they’re out of college or whatever, what defines professional standards? It’s the ambience, the content, the style, the attitude that’s inherent in what people who have already made it in the profession are doing every day.
Norman Solomon: “High-quality media outlets in the United States of America basically served as conveyor belts for pro-war propaganda.”
And so it’s an imitative quality that defines what journalism, or at least what passes for journalism, is. And part of that is not really apologizing, even later on. And I think this gets to what you were alluding to at the outset of our discussion, Janine, that when there’s an anniversary, or a look back, there’s really very little impetus for candor, least of all self-assessment or self-criticism, really, from these media institutions.
And so even in some of the most conspicuous, egregious cases like the New York Times distortions and serving up just bogus stories, the Washington Post as well, when they did sort of mea culpas, many, many weeks later, they were sort of equivocal. And they avoided really shedding harsh light on how it could be that these two purportedly most important, high-quality media outlets in the United States of America basically served as conveyor belts for pro-war propaganda coming from the top of the US government.
JJ: To me, the fact that when you look at the architects and the folks who are most prominent in mouthpiecing for this invasion, the fact that they are all still in high-paid and prominent positions, it underscores the fact that corporate media’s “debate,” it has a patina of rationality and of debate, but it’s really kind of just a club, right?
There’s just certain folks that they listen to and whose ideas they promote. And it doesn’t matter if those folks are wrong or right, or if they’re reliable or not, or if they’re lying or ignorant, they’re just on the list. And then there are other people who are just not on the list, whether or not their predictions turn out to be right, or whether or not they’re reliable.
And with Iraq, that was historians and regional specialists and human rights researchers. They’re just never going to be let into the conversation, no matter how correct they were.
NS: There really are tacit media boundaries that I think are well-understood, however consciously or not, and when a misassessment was later shown to be egregiously wrong, with a war or peace at stake, there’s later on a sense of a clean slate, let’s wipe the record clean, because, eh, we all make mistakes, and so forth.
And that goes to individuals and also to media organizations. And we might want to think the ones that are really top quality, they will cop to their mistakes, distortions, errors, even, or especially, when the errors were extremely important.
And yet, that’s not the case. One example, which at least has to do with history—and we’re told that journalism is the first draft of history; OK, later on, there should be a better draft. Of course, one would hope that the first one was accurate, given that that is the most important, while these events are unfolding.
So one example that comes to mind is the New York Times reported, early on in this whole 20-year span, that the invasion came after Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN weapons inspectors from the country in 1998. So this was the New York Times telling all of its readers that, hey, those UN weapons inspectors were pulled out of the country several years before the invasion, they were kicked out, Saddam Hussein did not allow them to inspect anymore.
And FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, made the clear and accurate point, and mobilized some messaging to the New York Times, that that’s an interesting story which happens to be false, and that Saddam Hussein did not kick out the UN weapons inspectors in 1998.
They were withdrawn by the United Nations because the government of, under that point, President Bill Clinton had made clear it was about to bomb Iraq in what became known as Operation Desert Fox.
And so it was because the US government announced, essentially, it was about to bomb the country that the UN thought it was prudent to save the lives, perhaps, of the UN inspectors, to withdraw them.
And so that was something that FAIR activists were able to get the New York Times to publish a subsequent correction.
New York Times (3/18/23)
Fast forward many years, to the time of the 20th anniversary that we’ve just gone through, and the New York Times again publishes the falsehood that Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors from the country in 1998, which reminds me of something that George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.” And I think that’s a good cautionary note to anybody who thinks, well, this is just history, why talk about it now?
Because all of this is prefigurative; it is actually reinforcing mindsets. These distortions are messaging to people, subtly and not so subtly, that at the end of the day, I think as you put it at the beginning of our discussion, Janine: The US government can be wrong, but it’s still OK.
We can go into war and, OK, we made mistakes, etc., etc., which is easy for us to say, while other people experience it with more suffering by far than those in the US. But still the pretense, subtly or not, is it’s OK, because we mean well.
There was a short story written 100 years ago called “Editha,” and there’s a character in it, and this is in about 1905, when it’s published, which is in the aftermath, really, of the US slaughter of people in the Philippines. And there’s a character who says: what a wonderful thing it is to live in a country that might be wrong, but when it’s wrong, is right anyway.
JJ: And that’s the water that elite news media carry, and to folks who could think smarter, to a population that could handle reality, and react accordingly.
And I guess that’s what makes me so angry, is that people pick up the paper thinking that they’re being addressed as an intelligent person who’s trying to make decisions about what they support and what they don’t support. And it’s just not what they’re getting. It’s not what they’re getting.
And there were a few things that stand out to me, Norman, because I know that some of CounterSpin listeners weren’t born in 2003. And so they’ve only heard the remix, as it were. But there are things that stand out for those of us who were there.
And one of them is a massive demonstration in New York, with thousands of other people who were opposing an imminent invasion of Iraq, who were pulled out of their apartments, people who don’t usually go out in the street, who don’t usually demonstrate. But we were very aware that this was a war that was going to be called in our name, specifically, like, look at what happened to New York on September 11. And it was supposed to be in our name.
New York Times (10/30/02)
And as I’ve said many times before, the most prominent message here in New York City was “our grief is not a cry for war,” and the desire to not turn the horror and loss of September 11 into more horror and loss for other people.
And what I remember was coming home from this massive demonstration, and reading the New York Times saying, well, not a lot of people showed up, it wasn’t as many people as organizers thought, and so wrong, so wrong, that the Times had to go back and re-report the story later.
And so I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the erasing and the denigrating of anti-war voices was key in 2003, and it’s key in 2023.
NS: Absolutely. It’s the erasure of those who are either suffering under the US bombs, erasure from media coverage of substance and let alone empathy, and also erasure, as you say, of anti-war voices in our own communities in the United States, and the tremendous quantity, really, and depth of anti-war feeling and understanding. It is infuriating. It should be infuriating.
And often, when I read even the best, what we’re told are the best, mass media outlets in the United States, it seems that there’s an effort in effect to infantilize the readers, to almost like what was in school called the Weekly Reader, where things were really, if not dumbed-down, it’s just simplified, and the lens on the world, the window on the world, is so tinted red, white and blue. We’re being assumed to be either naive, gullible or simply blindly (what passes for) patriotic.
And the staying power of people who are in the upper reaches of editorial decision-making is really quite stunning. It’s hard to think of anyone who was in a major position 20 years ago, propagating and fomenting and spreading the lies to grease the path, the skids, for the war on Iraq, it’s hard to think of many who suffered at all from their careers. They simply did fine, the ones who did all that, just went right along, often rising into the profession’s upper reaches.
New Yorker (1/26/03)
I think, for instance, of David Remnick, who was already the editor of the New Yorker magazine during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, and he wrote a de facto editorial calling for the invasion of Iraq. It was quite vehement. And that was a couple of months before the invasion.
But even worse, under his editorial leadership, David Remnick ran a magazine, the New Yorker, that published one article after another that was absolute distortion, claiming without any evidence—and it certainly turned out to be false—that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government had ties to Al Qaeda, had ties to what happened during 9/11. These were very powerful messages.
And many people, naively, gullibly assumed, well, it’s in the New York Times, or it’s in the New Yorker, or it’s in the Washington Post, that these kinds of stories were true, or had credibility.
In fact, they were disinformation of the most dangerous and ultimately destructive kind.
JJ: And finally, and following from that, it’s work, isn’t it, to resist the confusion and the cognitive dissonance that elite media enforce, for a person who’s just trying to inform themselves about the world.
The messages you get—sovereignty matters, except when we say it doesn’t. Invasion is horrific, except when we do it. Look how they oppress their own people; that’s reason enough to force regime change. Oh, but don’t talk about that in the US, you freaking commie.
Forget your political stance—it just breaks your brain to try to pretend to follow elite media’s, what they call rationality. And I guess, above all, it makes you feel confused and alone.
And what I want to ask you is, what do you see as the antidotes to that? Where do you see the place for folks to go who recognize how brain-breaking and how wrong this is?
NS: As you say, the effort is so important, because if we’re simply passive and let it wash over us, that’s not going to work.
I think recognizing that the essence of propaganda is repetition, and that if we are immersed in this constant waterfall, this flood of corporate-driven media coverage and what passes for analysis and so forth, that we’re in the deluge, and that we need to swim, so to speak, in a very different direction.
And that includes, of course—I don’t mean this as a cliche—thinking for ourselves, and also availing ourselves and supporting media outlets that are very much willing to swim upstream to challenge the conventional media wisdom that is so driven by, among other things, the military industrial complex and corporate power.
And so that should mean including supporting FAIR, subscribing to the newsletter Extra!, going to FAIR.org, supporting CounterSpin; going to outlets like Truthout and Common Dreams and the Intercept and elsewhere, Democracy Now!
These are very important outlets, because if we don’t sustain them, we will simply be overwhelmed by the disinformation machine.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon of RootsAction.org and the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible, will be out soon from the New Press. Thank you so much, Norman Solomon, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NS: Thanks a lot, Janine.
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