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Category: Iraq

  • Wicked Leaks, Part 2: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On BP And Cancer In Iraq

    In Part 1, we described how state-corporate media non-reporting of evidence relating to the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines on September 26 was an example of how the truth on key issues is increasingly being quarantined from public awareness by ‘mainstream’ media.

    At first sight, our second example might appear to contradict this claim.

    To its credit, in several news reports, and in an hour-long film, ‘Under Poisoned Skies’, the BBC provided news from Iraq that will have shocked many readers and viewers (in truth, it is a shock to read any UK media news on life in Iraq):

    ‘Communities living close to oil fields, where gas is openly burned, are at elevated risk of leukaemia, a BBC News Arabic investigation has revealed.’

    By BBC standards, the report was absolutely damning:

    ‘The UN told the BBC it considers these areas, in Iraq, to be “modern sacrifice zones” – where profit has been prioritised over human rights.

    ‘Gas flaring is the “wasteful” burning of gas released in oil drilling, which produces cancer-linked pollutants.’

    Some of the worst ‘modern sacrifice zones’ are found on the outskirts of Basra, in the south-east of Iraq, ‘some of the country’s biggest oil exploration areas’. Flared gases from these sites are dangerous because they emit a mix of carbon dioxide, methane and black soot which is carcinogenic.

    If this sounds bad, it gets worse when we consider just who has been subordinating Iraqi human welfare to profit in this way:

    ‘BP and Eni are major oil companies we identified as working on these sites.’

    Eni is an Italian multinational energy company. BP, of course, is one of the world’s oil and gas ‘supermajors’, and is British.

    In other words, these BBC reports highlighted the rarely discussed fact that a British oil giant is deeply involved in a country that was illegally invaded in 2003, at the cost of one million Iraqi lives, on a pack of bogus claims relating to ‘national security’ and ‘human rights’. The 2003 war was, of course, waged by a coalition led by the United States and Britain. Italy was part of the coalition.

    Not only did this US-UK war crime secure substantial quantities of Iraq’s oil for US and UK corporations, but BP has now been accused of creating environmental mayhem in Iraq. The BBC reported:

    ‘A leaked Iraq Health Ministry report, seen by BBC Arabic, blames air pollution for a 20% rise in cancer in Basra between 2015 and 2018.

    ‘As part of this investigation, the BBC undertook the first pollution monitoring testing amongst the exposed communities. The results indicated high levels of exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.

    ‘Using satellite data we found that the largest of Basra’s oil fields, Rumaila, flares more gas than any other site in the world. The Iraqi government owns this field, and BP is the lead contractor.

    ‘On the field is a town called North Rumaila – which locals call “the cemetery”. Teenagers coined the phrase after they observed high levels of leukaemia amongst their friends, which they suspect is from the flaring.

    ‘Prof Shukri Al Hassan, a local environmental scientist, told us that cancer here is so rife it is “like the flu”.’

    This was a truly shocking comment; no wonder the BBC initially used it as the headline for its report:

    ‘BP in oil field where “cancer is like the flu”’

    The News Sniffer website, which tracks edits made to media articles, found that this headline only lasted a few hours before being toned down to:

    ‘BP in oil field where “cancer is rife”’

    Remarkably, the less dramatic headline and citation was actually fake. The relevant part of the text reads:

    ‘Prof Shukri Al Hassan, a local environmental scientist, told us that cancer here is so rife it is “like the flu”.’

    Professor Al Hassan was not quoted as using the word ‘rife’, nor was anyone else quoted in the article. The edited headline was simply made up.

    The BBC quoted Dr Manuela Orjuela-Grimm, professor of childhood cancer at Columbia University:

    ‘The children have strikingly high levels [of cancer-causing chemicals]… this is concerning for [their] health and suggests they should be monitored closely.’

    The BBC report also gave us an idea of the nature of the ‘democracy’ installed in Iraq by the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation. The leaked Iraqi health ministry report shows the government is aware of the region’s health issues:

    ‘But Iraq’s own prime minister issued a confidential order – which was also seen by BBC Arabic – banning its employees from speaking about health damage caused by pollution.’

    David Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, told the BBC that people living near oil fields are ‘the victims of state-business collusion, and lack the political power in most cases to achieve change’.

    Ali Hussein, a 19-year-old childhood leukaemia survivor, from North Rumaila, said:

    ‘Here in Rumaila nobody speaks out, they say they’re scared to speak in case they get removed.’

    Indeed, the BBC reported:

    ‘Until now health researchers have been prevented from entering the oil fields to carry out air quality tests.’

    As the BBC noted, their reports also revealed ‘millions of tonnes of undeclared emissions from gas flaring at oil fields where BP, Eni, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell work’. Major oil companies are not declaring this significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.

    These were important exposés by the BBC, but what is simultaneously so shocking, and yet so normal for the media strategy of quarantine over inoculation, is that our search of the ProQuest media database for terms like ‘Iraq’ and ‘cancer’ found no articles mentioning or following-up the BBC reports in any UK national newspaper. This important story involving harm caused by powerful British interests was deemed unworthy even of mention.

    In a free media environment, the report would have triggered serious reflection on whether the Iraq war really was, in fact, about oil, as honest commentators have long claimed, albeit at the margins of ‘respectable’ discourse. What does it say about Western ‘civilisation’ and its ‘rules-based order’ that UK and US oil companies like BP and Exxon have been able to profit from the vast crimes of their governments in Iraq? And what does it say that they’re able to do so without any state-corporate journalists noticing any controversy, or feeling any need to comment at all?

    In a recent alert, we described how the Al Jazeera documentary series, The Labour Files, has been effectively quarantined by ‘mainstream’ media. The ban on discussion is so extreme that a caller to journalist Matt Frei’s talk show on LBC was simply cut off when he mentioned the series. More than 1,200 people supported our polite request for an explanation from Frei on Twitter, but he simply ignored them and us.

    In previous alerts, we have described how whistle-blowers from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) challenging claims of chemical weapons attacks allegedly committed by Assad’s forces in Syria have been quarantined by ‘mainstream’ media. The silence has been overwhelming. News on the grim fate of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, imprisoned in Belmarsh maximum security prison, has been similarly quarantined. Other examples abound.

    Agony is piled on agony for anyone who knows and cares about the torment inflicted by the West on Iraq over the last 30 years, when we recognise the strong echoes in the latest devastation of earlier horrors inflicted in the process of conquering Iraq.

    In 2010, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a leading medical journal, published a study, ‘Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009’. Noam Chomsky described the study’s findings as ‘vastly more significant’ than the Wikileaks Afghan ‘War Diary’ leaks.

    The survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah showed a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. It found a 10-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia. By contrast, Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia. According to the study, the types of cancer are ‘similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout’.

    The extent of genetic damage suffered by residents in Fallujah suggested the use of uranium in some form. Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey, said:

    ‘My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside.’

    The truth on Nord Stream and on cancer in Iraq has been effectively quarantined – journalists are deeply reluctant to point the finger of blame at the state-corporate Establishment of which they are a part and by which they are richly rewarded.

    We are not supposed to notice that the same British media endlessly packing their pages with realpolitik-friendly ‘concern’ for the plight of Ukrainian people suffering invasion and bombardment by Russia have no interest whatever in massive environmental damage and mass human suffering caused by US and British corporations profiting from the crimes of their governments. Latest media reports predict that ‘2022 profits at Britain’s BP could break the $20bn mark’ in the next week. ExxonMobil is ‘expected to report year-to-date earnings approaching $70bn’.

    By contrast, all ‘mainstream’ media gave high-profile coverage over several days to allegations that a policeman in oil-rich Iran had been caught on camera committing ‘sexual abuse’. The BBC analysed video footage of the incident: ‘officer approaches her from behind and puts his left hand on her bottom’.

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook asked: why does the West not ‘give a damn about these women’s lives, or those of their brothers, when it comes to enforcing decades of western sanctions?’

    The answer: for the same reason the West doesn’t give a damn about its victims in Libya, Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere else. Western state-corporate ‘concern’ for human rights is a function of power, not of compassion.

    The post Wicked Leaks, Part 2: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On BP And Cancer In Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chomsky: 20 Years After Iraq War Vote, US Continues to Flout International Law

    This week marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. congressional vote to authorize the deadly war on Iraq, which according to some estimates, killed between 800,000 and 1.3 million people. In the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, Noam Chomsky shares his thoughts on the causes and ramifications of this appalling crime against humanity.

    Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).

    C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, 20 years ago, the U.S. Congress authorized the invasion of Iraq despite massive opposition to such an undertaking. Several leading Democratic senators ended up supporting the war authorization, including Joe Biden. For both historical and future purposes, what were the causes and ramifications of the Iraq war?

    Noam Chomsky: There are many kinds of support, ranging from outright to tacit. The latter includes those who regard it as a mistake but no more than that — a “strategic blunder,” as in Obama’s retrospective judgment. There were Nazi generals who opposed Hitler’s major decisions as strategic blunders. We don’t regard them as opponents of Nazi aggression. The same with regard to Russian generals who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan as a mistake, as many did.

    If we can ever rise to the level of applying to ourselves the standards we rightly apply to others, then we will recognize that there has been little principled opposition to the Iraq War in high places, including the government and the political class. Much as in the case of the Vietnam War and other major crimes.

    There was, of course, strong popular opposition. Characteristic was my own experience at MIT. Students demanded that we suspend classes so that they could participate in the huge public protests before the war was officially launched — something new in the history of imperialism — later meeting in a downtown church to discuss the impending crime and what it portended.

    Much the same was true worldwide, so much so that Donald Rumsfeld came out with his famous distinction between Old and New Europe. Old Europe are the traditional democracies, old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who we Americans can disregard because they are mired in boring concepts like international law, sovereign rights, and other outdated nonsense.

    New Europe in contrast are the good guys: a few former Russian satellites who tow Washington’s line, and one western democracy, Spain, where Prime Minister Aznar went along with Washington, disregarding close to 100 percent of public opinion. He was rewarded by being invited to join Bush and Blair as they announced the invasion.

    The distinction reflects our traditional deep concern for democracy.

    It will be interesting to see if Bush and Blair are interviewed on this auspicious occasion. Bush was interviewed on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan, another act of criminal aggression that was overwhelmingly opposed by international opinion contrary to many claims, matters we have discussed before. He was interviewed by the Washington Post — in the Style section, where he was portrayed as a lovable goofy grandpa playing with his grandchildren and showing off his portraits of famous people he had met.

    There was an official reason for the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, the “single question,” as it was called from on high: Will Iraq terminate its nuclear weapons programs?

    International inspectors had questioned whether there were such programs and asked for more time to investigate, but were dismissed. The U.S. and its U.K. lackey were aiming for blood. A few months later the “single question” was answered, the wrong way. We may recall the amusing skit that Bush performed, looking under the table, “No not there,” maybe in the closet, etc. All to hilarious laughter, though not in the streets of Baghdad.

    The wrong answer required a change of course. It was suddenly discovered that the reason for the invasion was not the “single question,” but rather our fervent wish to bring the blessings of democracy to Iraq. One leading Middle East scholar broke ranks and described what took place, Augustus Richard Norton, who wrote that “As fantasies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were unmasked, the Bush administration increasingly stressed the democratic transformation of Iraq, and scholars jumped on the democratization bandwagon.” As did the loyal media and commentariat, as usual.

    They did have some support in Iraq. A Gallup poll found that some Iraqis also leaped on the bandwagon: One percent felt that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq, 5 percent thought the goal was “to assist the Iraqi people.” Most of the rest assumed that the goal was to take control of Iraq’s resources and to reorganize the Middle East in U.S. and Israeli interests — the “conspiracy theory” derided by rational Westerners, who understand that Washington and London would have been just as dedicated to the “liberation of Iraq” if its resources happened to be lettuce and pickles and the center of fossil fuel production was in the South Pacific.

    By November 2007, when the U.S. sought a Status of Forces Agreement, the Bush administration came clean and stated the obvious: It demanded privileged access for Western energy companies to Iraqi fossil fuel resources and the right to establish U.S. military bases in Iraq. The demands were endorsed by Bush in a “signing statement” the following January. The Iraqi parliament refused.

    The ramifications of the invasion were multiple. Iraq has been devastated. What had been in many ways the most advanced country in the Arab world is a miserable wreck. The invasion incited ethnic (Shia-Sunni) conflict that had not existed before, now tearing not only the country but the whole region apart. ISIS emerged from the wreckage, almost taking over the country when the army trained and armed by the U.S. fled at the sight of jihadis in pickup trucks waving rifles. They were stopped just short of Baghdad by Iranian-backed militias. And on, and on.

    But none of this is a problem for the lovable goofy grandpa or the educated classes in the U.S. who now admire him as a serious statesman, called upon to orate about world affairs.

    The reaction is much like that of Zbigniew Brzezinski, when asked about his boast to have drawn the Russians into Afghanistan and his support for the U.S. effort to prolong the war and to block UN efforts to negotiate Russian withdrawal. It was a wonderful success, Brzezinski explained to the naïve questioners. It achieved the goal of severely harming the U.S.S.R. he (dubiously) claimed, while conceding that it left a few “agitated Muslims,” not to speak of a million cadavers and a ruined country.

    Or like Jimmy Carter, who assured us that we owe “no debt” to the Vietnamese because “the destruction was mutual.”

    It is all too easy to continue. From a position of supreme power, with a loyal intellectual community, little is beyond reach.

    The 2003 Iraq invasion was as criminal an act as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the reaction on the part of the Western community was very different than it has been in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. No sanctions were imposed against the U.S., no freezing of the assets of U.S. oligarchs, no demands that the U.S. be suspended from the UN Security Council. Your comments on this matter?

    Comment is hardly needed. The worst crime since World War II was the long U.S. war against Indochina. No censure of the U.S. could be contemplated. It was well understood at the UN that if the horrendous crimes were so much as discussed, the U.S. would simply dismantle the offending institution. The West righteously condemns Putin’s annexations and calls for punishment of this reincarnation of Hitler, but scarcely dares to utter a chirp of protest when the U.S. authorizes Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and Greater Jerusalem, and Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara. The list is long. The reasons are clear.

    When the operative rules of world order are violated, reaction is swift. A clear illustration was when the World Court condemned the Holy State [the U.S.] for international terrorism (in legalese, “unlawful use of force”) in 1986, ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations to the victim (Nicaragua). Washington reacted by escalating the crimes. The press dismissed the judgment as worthless because the court is a “hostile forum” (according to the New York Times), as proven by its judgment against the U.S. The whole matter has been effectively wiped out of history, including the fact that the U.S. is now the only state to have rejected a World Court decision — of course with total impunity.

    It’s an old story that “Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.” The maxim holds with particular force in the international domain, where the Godfather rules supreme.

    By now the contempt for international law — except as a weapon against enemies — is barely concealed. It is reframed as the demand for a “rules-based international order” (where the Godfather sets the rules) to supersede the archaic UN-based international order, which bars U.S. foreign policy.

    What would have happened if Congress had refused to go along with the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq?

    One Republican voted against the war resolution (Chafee). Democrats were split (29-21). If Congress had refused to go along, the Bush administration would have had to find other means to achieve the goals that Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and other hawks had laid out fairly clearly.

    Many such means are available: sabotage, subversion, provoking (or manufacturing) some incident that could be used as a pretext for “retaliation.” Or simply extending the brutal sanctions regime that was devastating the population. We may recall that both of the distinguished international diplomats who administered Clinton’s program (via the UN) resigned in protest, condemning it as “genocidal.” The second, Hans von Sponeck, wrote an extremely illuminating book spelling out the impact in detail, A Different Kind of War. There was no need for an official ban of what is arguably the most important book on the build-up to the criminal invasion, and on the U.S. sanctions weapon generally. Silent conformity sufficed. That might have crushed the population sufficiently as to call for “humanitarian intervention.”

    It is well to remember that there are no limits to cynicism if conformity and obedience prevail.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Women-led protests in Iran gather momentum – but will they be enough to bring about change?

    ANALYSIS: By Tony Walker, La Trobe University

    As protests in Iran drag on into their fourth week over the violent death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, there are two central questions.

    The first is whether these protests involving women and girls across Iran are different from upheavals in the past, or will simply end the same way with the regime stifling a popular uprising.

    The second question is what can, and should, the outside world do about extraordinarily brave demonstrations against an ageing and ruthless regime that has shown itself to be unwilling, and possibly unable, to allow greater freedoms?

    The symbolic issue for Iran’s protest movement is a requirement, imposed by morality police, that women and girls wear the hijab, or headscarf. In reality, these protests are the result of a much wider revolt against discrimination and prejudice.

    Put simply, women are fed up with a regime that has sought to impose rigid rules on what is, and is not, permissible for women in a theocratic society whose guidelines are little changed since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

    Women are serving multi-year jail sentences for simply refusing to wear the hijab.

    Two other issues are also at play. One is the economic deprivation suffered by Iranians under the weight of persistent sanctions, rampant inflation and the continuing catastrophic decline in the value of the Iranian riyal.

    The other issue is the fact Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old whose death sparked the protests, was a Kurd.

    The Kurds, who constitute about 10 percent of Iran’s 84 million population, feel themselves to be a persecuted minority. Tensions between the central government in Tehran and Kurds in their homeland on the boundaries of Iraq, Syria and Turkey are endemic.


    A BBC report  on the Mahsa Amini protests.

    Another important question is where all this leaves negotiations on the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA had been aimed at freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

    Former President Donald Trump recklessly abandoned the 2015 agreement in 2018.

    The Biden administration, along with its United Nations Security Council partners plus Germany, had been making progress in those negotiations, but those efforts are now stalled, if not frozen.

    The spectacle of Iranian security forces violently putting down demonstrations in cities, towns and villages across Iran will make it virtually impossible in the short term for the US and its negotiating partners to negotiate a revised JCPOA with Tehran.

    Russia’s use of Iranian-supplied “kamikaze” drones against Ukrainian targets will have further soured the atmosphere.

    How will the US and its allies respond?
    So will the US and its allies continue to tighten Iranian sanctions? And to what extent will the West seek to encourage and support protesters on the ground in Iran?

    One initiative that is already underway is helping the protest movement to circumvent regime attempts to shut down electronic communications.

    Elon Musk has announced he is activating his Starlink satellites to provide a vehicle for social media communications in Iran. Musk did the same thing in Ukraine to get around Russian attempts to shut down Ukrainian communications by taking out a European satellite system.

    However, amid the spectacle of women and girls being shot and tear-gassed on Iranian streets, the moral dilemma for the outside world is this: how far the West is prepared to go in its backing for the protesters.

    There have also been pro-government Iranian rallies in response
    Since the Iranian protests began there have also been pro-government rallies in response. Image: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/AAP

    It is one thing to express sympathy; it is another to take concrete steps to support the widespread agitation. This was also the conundrum during the Arab Spring of 2010 that brought down regimes in US-friendly countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

    It should not be forgotten, in light of contemporary events, that Iran and Russia propped up Syria’s Assad regime during the Arab Spring, saving it from a near certain end.

    In this latest period, the Middle East may not be on fire, as it was a decade or so ago, but it remains highly unstable. Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, is effectively without a government after months of violent agitation.

    The war in Yemen is threatening to spark up again, adding to uncertainties in the Gulf.

    In a geopolitical sense, Washington has to reckon with inroads Moscow has been making in relations with Gulf States, including, notably Saudi Arabia.

    The recent OPEC Plus decision to limit oil production constituted a slap to the US ahead of the mid-term elections in which fuel prices will be a potent issue.

    In other words, Washington’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is eroding, partly as a consequence of a disastrous attempt to remake the region by going to war in Iraq in 2003.

    The US’s ability to influence the Middle East now much weaker
    The US’s ability to influence the Middle East is much weaker than before it went to war in Iraq in 2003. Image: Susan Walsh/AP/AAP

    A volatile region
    Among the consequences of that misjudgement is the empowerment of Iran in conjunction with a Shia majority in Iraq. This should have been foreseen.

    So quite apart from the waves of protest in Iran, the region is a tinderbox with multiple unresolved conflicts.

    In Afghanistan, on the fringes of the Middle East, women protesters have taken the lead in recent days from their Iranian sisters and have been protesting against conservative dress codes and limitations on access to education under the Taliban.

    This returns us to the moral issue of the extent to which the outside world should support the protests. In this, the experience of the “green” rebellion of 2009 on Iran’s streets is relevant.

    Then, the Obama administration, after initially giving encouragement to the demonstrations, pulled back on the grounds it did not wish to jeopardise negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran or undermine the protests by attaching US support.

    Officials involved in the administration, who are now back in the Biden White House, believe that approach was a mistake. However, that begs the question as to what practically the US and its allies can do to stop Iran’s assault on its own women and girls.

    What if, as a consequence of Western encouragement to the demonstrators, many hundreds more die or are incarcerated?

    What is the end result, beyond indulging in the usual rhetorical exercises such as expressing “concern” and threatening to ramp up sanctions that hurt individual Iranians more than the regime itself?

    The bottom line is that irrespective of what might be the desired outcome, Iran’s regime is unlikely to crumble.

    It might be shaken, it might entertain concerns that its own revolution that replaced the Shah is in danger of being replicated, but it would be naïve to believe that a rotting 43-year-old edifice would be anything but utterly ruthless in putting an end to the demonstrations.

    This includes unrest in the oil industry, in which workers are expressing solidarity with the demonstrators. The oil worker protest will be concerning the regime, given the centrality of oil production to Iran’s economy.

    However, a powerful women’s movement has been unleashed in Iran. Over time, this movement may well force a theocratic regime to loosen restrictions on women and their participation in the political life of the country. That is the hope, but as history has shown, a ruthless regime will stop at little to re-assert its control.The Conversation

    Dr Tony Walker is a vice-chancellor’s fellow, La Trobe University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • China’s CASC wins follow-on CH-4 UAV export order

    China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced in early September that it had secured an export contract for its CH-4 (Cai Hong-4, or CH-4) medium altitude long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (MALE UAV) worth over US$100 million from an undisclosed customer. It is understood that the order is from an existing customer for an […]

    The post China’s CASC wins follow-on CH-4 UAV export order appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Welcome to War Criminals!

    It was the event of the season.  A “Distinguished Speakers Series”– and what speakers!  A former secretary of state, a world-renowned hi-tech pioneer, a movie director quite famous for her films about the exploits of our glorious armed forces–and, last but not least, a former president of the United States!

    The Beverly Hills series, despite the high-priced tickets, was sold out way in advance.  After all, the wealthy citizens were eager to encounter, in-person, these exceptionally wealthy and successful luminaries–those who had unquestionably made it “to the top.”  Maybe the ex-president wasn’t quite as wealthy as some of them, but he had certainly attained the ultimate prize–the pinnacle of power.  The hushed audience suddenly broke into enthusiastic, interminable applause as the ex-president entered the stage and situated himself behind a lectern on the dais.

    With a welcoming smile, a young man, exquisitely dressed in an expensive suit, rose in the front row and warmly addressed the speaker and the audience.  “We of the Welcoming Committee”– an invention of his quick-witted mind–”can only express our gratitude that you kindly accepted our invitation to appear before us to share your insights on global affairs.”  The two organizers of the event, elderly women who were quite socially prominent in town, were sitting on opposite sides of the auditorium.  But they glanced over at each other in puzzlement.  Welcoming Committee?  Who decided on that?

    “Before you begin, the Committee has asked me to humbly request that you include a couple of  topics in your remarks.”  The man, clearly articulate and gracious in his manner, continued to smile enthusiastically at both the speaker and audience.  Clearly, he was as eager as everyone else to hear the esteemed speaker’s thoughts.  “These are just a few points we hope you will touch upon.  Why” — he paused for a couple of seconds–”did you lie about a non-existent threat of Iraqi WMDs?” He paused, just for a moment, sensing unrest in the audience, but looking up with earnest respect at the speaker. “Outrageous,” loudly grumbled a bejeweled dowager, but mumbling that “he  certainly is a polite, well-spoken young man.”

    The crowd, shocked but nonetheless silent; after all, it would be rude to chastise the Welcoming Committee and its spokesman.  Speaking a bit more quickly, but in his friendly, almost nonchalant tone, the man continued: “Why did you order combat and bombing that killed about one million–yes, one million–innocent Iraqi people?  And why, do you think, have over 30,000 Iraq war veterans committed suicide?”

    At this, the initially taken-aback ex-president recovered his balance.  “What kind of impertinence is this,” he snarled.  “If this is a ‘welcome,’ then I don’t know…”  Several now-aroused audience members also shouted: “This is offensive, disrespectful!” “Who do you think you are!?”  “This Committee must just be a bunch of Marxists!”

    “But this is a most sincere welcome,” the polite young man calmly responded in mock-surprise.  “We are welcoming with open arms a distinguished friend, one who has carried out just the kind of murderous, amoral, profiteering schemes which have made us all rich…very rich.”  Grumbling and muttering continued to spread throughout the audience.  The two elderly organizers, first baffled but by now shocked, hurried to the back of the hall:  “Who’s behind this Committee?!  Better call Security.”

    Meanwhile, the insouciant young man, who blithely ignored the pawing and nasty cracks of those around him, continued quietly, in a tone of wonder: “Did you know, Mr. President, that an esteemed social scientist has exhaustively documented 269 war crimes that you committed?1   And, fellow attendees, do you remember the great LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi?  He wrote a book-length indictment, called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.”

    “Is there not a single one of you, citizens as you are of a free country, who will back me up on these truths?  You see, at this moment it is not our speaker who is on trial.  It is you.  Do you honor Truth?  Do you honor Justice?  Do you exercise your right as citizens to question the crimes of your elected officials?”  Profound silence, punctuated by hostile mutterings, as most looked away or at the floor.  “Where is Security?” one of the organizer-ladies angrily whispered to her counterpart.

    Looking up at the ex-president, still standing behind the lectern, scowling furiously but speechless, the young man turned slowly to the audience, which collectively glared and shouted at him.  “This,” he said softly, with sadness, “is your unequivocal answer.  And it makes me more afraid, for humanity, than even the terrible crimes of this war criminal.”

    The doors flung wide open, and three burly security guards, armed and rushing forward, seized the young man by the neck and dragged him quickly out of sight–and out of mind.

    Note: This story is loosely based on Iraq veteran and antiwar activist Michael Prysner’s courageous confrontation with Bush, at just such a Beverly Hills lecture, on September 19, 2021.

    1. George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes, Michael Hass, Praeger, 2008.
    The post Welcome to War Criminals! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The War on Terror’s Detention and Torture Practices Have Not Gone Away

    The so-called “war on terror,” initiated by the U.S. and its global allies in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001, did not so much change the rules of warfare as throw them out of the window.

    In the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war was virtually abandoned when the U.S. and its allies detained hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, mainly civilians. The use of torture and indefinite arbitrary detention became defining features of the war on terror.

    Intelligence yielded from the use of torture was not particularly effective, and experimentation on human subjects was an element of the process. Guantánamo Bay, which currently holds 36 prisoners, is viewed by many human rights defenders as a final remnant of the policy of mass arbitrary detention.

    The little light shed on these practices has largely been the result of hard and persistent work by international and civil society organizations, as well as lawyers who continue to sue states and other parties involved on behalf of victims and their families, some of whom are still detained.

    A report presented earlier this year by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, following up on a 2010 U.N. report on secret detention, found that the “failure to address secret detention” has allowed similar practices to flourish in North-East Syria and Xinjiang Province in China.

    North-East Syria

    How to deal with arbitrarily detained alleged ISIS (also known as Daesh) militia supporters and fighters in Syria and Iraq is an issue that goes back to the Obama era, but gained traction in 2018-2019, when ISIS lost its last major stronghold and significant territory, leading existing detention camps, like Al-Hawl, to swell in size. Al-Hawl was set up as an Iraqi refugee camp by the U.N. in 1991 with capacity for around 15,000 people. In 2018, it held around 10,000 Iraqi refugees. The majority of the 73,000-plus residents of this camp since 2019 are women and children, around 11,000 of whom are nationals of countries other than Syria or Iraq, living in poor shelter, hygiene and medical conditions.

    All are detained by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and the Syrian Defense Force (SDF), which are not state entities. Their efforts to investigate and prosecute possible ISIS fighters are still at the early stages, lack formal and widespread recognition and do not look at potential war crimes. With some prisoners detained for over six years, without charge, trial or formal identification, the situation is pretty much as it was in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    According to Ní Aoláin, “No legal process of any kind has been established to justify the detention of these individuals. No public information exists on who precisely is being held in these camps, contrary to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions stipulating that detention records be kept that identify both the nationality of detainees and the legal basis of detention.”

    She further states that, “These camps epitomize the normalization and expansion of secret detention practices in the two decades since the establishment of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The egregious nature of secret, incommunicado, harsh, degrading and unacceptable detention is now practised with impunity and the acquiescence of multiple States.”

    In addition, around 10,000 men and 750 boys (of whom 2,000 and 150 are respectively not from Syria or Iraq) are held in some 14 detention centers in North-East Syria, accused of association with ISIS: “No judicial process has determined the legality or appropriateness of their detention. There are also reports of incommunicado detention.”

    Efforts have been made, with varying success, to repatriate and release Iraqi refugees and Syrians internally displaced by the regional conflict: Around 2400 Iraqis have been repatriated over the past year or so.

    European and other Western states were initially reluctant to repatriate their nationals — with former President Trump threatening to force them to — and some, such as the U.K., introducing measures to strip them of citizenship to prevent that. More recent efforts by European states have taken on a gendered approach, aimed at repatriating women and children in the camps. This approach, however, ignores the practice of the SDF to separate boys as young as 9 from their families and detain them, as a security risk, with men in prisons. Concern was only expressed during a prison break in early 2022 when it was feared these children would fall into ISIS’s hands, as though they were somehow safe with their original captors.

    Missing the Point

    The gendered approach to repatriation of detainees plays into long-standing orientalist and imperialist views, framing Western powers as saviors of these women and children, whereas the men and boys left behind remain “ISIS fighters” without investigation and substantiation of this status.

    In spite of the recent U.S. conviction of two former British ISIS fighters for their role in the kidnapping and deaths of Western hostages, the value of such a detention policy must be questioned. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, arbitrary detention and cruel punishment of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes in conditions worse than those they are associated with, is unjustifiable.

    Ní Aoláin’s report also found that no war on terror detainees have “received a complete and adequate legal remedy,” and the lack of due process has resulted in the continuing stigmatization and persecution of prisoners upon release from Guantánamo.

    Two decades on, the absence of justice at Guantánamo remains a recurring theme. Prosecutors are now seeking a plea deal settlement with defense lawyers in the 9/11 case that would avoid trial — and thus torture revelations — and the death penalty, as the case continues to drag over a decade on.

    The farce of “justice” is also amply demonstrated by the failure to release Majid Khan, who, following a plea bargain and several years of torture in secret CIA prisons, completed his sentence on March 1; the military jurors at his sentencing hearing decried the torture he faced and petitioned for clemency for him. However, he remains at Guantánamo as it is too unsafe for him to return to Pakistan and the U.S. has found no safe country for relocation. After being sued to take action, the U.S. Department of Justice has responded by opposing his habeas plea and claiming that he is still not subject to the Geneva Conventions.

    What Justice?

    The outcome of two decades of secret and arbitrary detention has been to deny justice to the victims of war crimes and terrorist acts, and create new victims — detainees and their families — who are also denied justice.

    After two decades, the failure to close Guantánamo and end such secret and arbitrary detention and the secrecy that continues to surround them (such as the refusal to disclose the full 2014 Senate CIA torture report) are not errors or oversight but deliberate policy. It affords impunity for states and state-backed actors while tarring detainees with the “terrorist” label for the rest of their lives without due process, effectively leaving them in permanent legal limbo in many areas of everyday life.

    A year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, justice still evades the Afghan people. With the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking to restart its investigation, but excluding the U.S. and its Afghan allies from its scope, effectively granting them impunity while focusing on the Taliban, “the ICC has so far come to represent selective and delayed justice to many victims of war in Afghanistan,” according to Shaharzad Akbar, former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. In addition, “a year after the withdrawal of international forces and many ‘lessons learned’ exercises, key troop contributing countries such as the United States, the U.K., and others in NATO are yet to reflect on the legacy of impunity they left behind.”

    Not Going Anywhere

    Addressing her report to the U.N. in April, Ní Aoláin stated, “It is precisely the lack of access, transparency, accountability and remedy that has enabled and sustained a permissive environment for contemporary large-scale detention and harm to individuals.”

    Ní Aoláin expresses concerns in her report over the “lack of a globally agreed definition of terrorism and (violent) extremism, and […] the widespread failure to define acts of terrorism in concrete and precise ways in national legislation.” The vague definition has meant that any form of dissent and resistance against the state can effectively be labelled terrorist activity.

    The focus on Guantánamo and mass detention of alleged terrorism suspects has drawn the attention away from the carceral practices of states. Torture, lengthy solitary confinement, rape, and other prisoner abuses in federal jails has not prompted the same criticism or action. The focus on ISIS prisoners also draws away attention from the mass detention and abuse of those incarcerated in Syrian prisons.

    At the same time, mass arbitrary and secret detention of alleged terrorists has helped to justify the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, with the involvement of private contractors. Over the past two decades, the use of torture has grown worldwide. Perhaps most worrying has been the boom in the mass arbitrary detention and abuse of men, women and children worldwide without due process and few legal rights known as immigration detention, with the reframing of migration and asylum as a security issue over the past two decades.

    That such reports and monitoring of the situation continue at the highest level and by civil society organizations means that the prisoners have not been obscured and forgotten or their situation normalized as much as the states involved would like them to be. The need for justice for all victims is on the path to any kind of peace, and thus it remains essential to keep pressing and supporting Ní Aoláin’s call for “access, transparency, accountability and remedy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Allegations that elite UK troops slaughtered innocents fit an international pattern

    Elite soldiers, cover-ups, night-time house raids, and evidence of execution-style killings. The story of Britain’s recent wars will be told for many years to come. And, the latest allegations of war crimes suggest that it will not be a tale of military glory.

    Military personnel from the US, Australia, and the UK are held in high regard, often hero-worshipped by the public and politicians alike. However, their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has led to accusations of criminal activity – including the murder of civilians – as well as seemingly endless allegations of further wrong-doing which have proven difficult to pin down.

    The SAS

    The newest allegations concern operations in Afghanistan over a decade ago. The BBC published their findings on Tuesday 12 July. Through whistleblowers, experts, and witnesses, they found that multiple war crimes had been carried out by an SAS unit in 2011.

    This includes the allegation that innocent civilians were executed during house raids in Helmand Province. Furthermore, senior military officers may have covered up evidence and worked against military police investigators. General Mark Carleton-Smith, a former head of special forces, and later head of the army, was also criticised in the report.

    In one operational tour, it was alleged, up to 54 civilians may have been murdered. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) rejects the claims, calling them “subjective” and “unjustified”.

    Disbanded?

    The responses to the latest in a long line of allegations have been polarised. Some have said the regiment should be disbanded if the claims are true. Others have framed the allegations as improbable. In Parliament, Boris Johnson extended the tradition of never commenting on special forces matters when asked if there would be an investigation. Also in the Commons, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for special forces to be made democratically accountable:

    Some criticised the use of footage from an execution-style killing by Australian SAS soldiers in the BBC film. Like the British military, the Australian military have repeatedly been accused of war crimes in Afghanistan – the problem extends throughout Anglophone Western armies.

    War crimes

    In 2020, the Australian SAS was subject to war crimes allegations. These included the video, mentioned above, of a soldier executing a prisoner at point-blank range.

    Investigators reported that a culture of violent impunity has developed in the elite unit. One described the soldiers conduct as:

    deliberate, repeated and targeted war crimes.

    Other allegations included a practice called ‘blooding’, in which new SAS soldiers were made to murder prisoners in order to acquire their first kill.

    A report noted that the unit’s ‘distorted’ culture:

    …was embraced and amplified by some experienced, charismatic and influential non-commissioned officers and their proteges, who sought to fuse military excellence with ego, elitism and entitlement.

    Seal Team 6

    For their part, elite US forces have been subject to similar allegations, including unlawful killings and the mutilation of bodies. In the latter case, this included the use of specially made hatchets modelled after indigenous American tomahawks.

    Like the Australians, reports suggest that a toxic unit culture developed in the SEALS, a US Navy special forces unit. They reportedly treated killing like a sport, fetishising particular kinds of headshot:

    “There is and was no military reason whatsoever to split someone’s skull open with a single round,” said a former SEAL Team 6 leader. “It’s sport.”

    One of the highest-profile cases was of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of various crimes but eventually acquitted. Among those to rally to his cause was Donald Trump. In other cases, Trump pardoned elite soldiers accused of wartime atrocities.

    Overseas Operation Bill

    Responses from the state have varied across the US, UK, and Australia. In Australia, an investigation was launched. In the US, war crimes became a partisan issue, with Trump intervening in favour of soldiers. In the UK, the process culminated in the Overseas Operations Bill. This has since become law.

    The bill, which was heavily criticised by veterans, military charities, lawyers, and human rights groups, has made it harder to investigate and prosecute war criminals. It includes what is in effect a five-year run-out date for allegations to be brought. Keir Starmer’s Labour was whipped to abstain from the bill, and the few who voted against it were disciplined.

    Immunity from justice

    The “war on terror” has seen armed forces personnel, and particularly elite military units, elevated to the status of heroes. Beneath that façade, there have been numerous accusations of brutality and murder. Special forces units from across the Western world often appear to have evolved toxic leadership cultures and enjoy little accountability.

    In cases where they have been accused – or even found guilty of crimes – they have usually been framed as victims. The truth is, the victims have always been the often-nameless, forgotten, occupied people in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And without a serious reckoning with these allegations, similar atrocities will happen again and again.

    Featured image via Elite Forces UK, cropped to 770 x 403.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Turkey should face international court over Yazidi genocide, report says

    Exclusive: Investigation by group of prominent human rights lawyers also criticises Syria and Iraq

    Turkey should face charges in front of the international court of justice for being complicit in acts of genocide against the Yazidi people, while Syria and Iraq failed in their duty to prevent the killings, an investigation endorsed by British human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy has said.

    The groundbreaking report, compiled by a group of prominent human rights lawyers, is seeking to highlight the binding responsibility states have to prevent genocide on their territories, even if they are carried out by a third party such as Islamic State (IS).

    Continue reading…

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

  • Beyond the Blob

    An interview with Senator Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor Matt Duss.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Anthony Albanese raises case of jailed Australian engineer Robert Pether with Iraqi PM

    Exclusive: Pether, who has been imprisoned for 14 months in Baghdad, has become ‘gravely ill’ according to his family

    The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has raised the case of jailed engineer Robert Pether with the Iraqi leader, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, as the Australian’s family warns he has become “gravely ill” and is rapidly deteriorating in his Baghdadi jail cell.

    Pether has now been imprisoned for more than 14 months following a commercial dispute between his engineering firm and Iraq’s central bank, which had hired Pether’s company to help build its new Baghdad headquarters. Pether’s family say he is innocent and the trial was unfair and compromised.

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    Continue reading…

  • Palestinians “Are Not Animals in a Zoo”: On Kanafani and the Need to Redefine the Role of the “Victim Intellectual”

    Years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, US media introduced many new characters, promoting them as ‘experts’ who helped ratchet up US propaganda, ultimately allowing the US government to secure enough popular support for the war.

    Though enthusiasm for war began dwindling in later years, the invasion of Iraq had begun with a relatively strong popular mandate that allowed US President George W Bush to claim the role of liberator of Iraq, the fighter of ‘terrorism’ and the champion of US global interests. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted on March 24, 2003 – a few days after the invasion – seventy-two percent of Americans were in favor of the war.

    Only now are we beginning to fully appreciate the massive edifice of lies, deceit and forgery involved in shaping the war narrative, and the sinister role played by mainstream media in demonizing Iraq and dehumanizing its people. Future historians will continue with the task of unpacking the war conspiracy for years to come.

    Consequently, it is also important to acknowledge the role played by Iraq’s own ‘native informants’, as late professor Edward Said would describe them. The “native informant (is a) willing servant of imperialism”, according to the influential Palestinian intellectual.

    Thanks to the various American invasions and military interventions, these ‘informants’ have grown in number and usefulness to the extent that, in various western intellectual and media circles, they define what is erroneously viewed as ‘facts’ concerning most Arab and Muslim countries. From Afghanistan, to Iran, to Syria, Palestine, Libya and, of course, Iraq, among others, these ‘experts’ are constantly parroting messages that are tailored to fit US-western agendas.

    These ‘experts’ are often depicted as political dissidents. They are recruited – whether officially via government-funded think tanks or otherwise – by western governments to provide a convenient depiction of the ‘realities’ in the Middle East – and elsewhere – as a rational, political or moral justification for war and various other forms of intervention.

    Though this phenomenon is being widely understood – especially as its dangerous consequences became too apparent in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan – another phenomenon rarely receives the necessary attention. In the second scenario, the ‘intellectual’ is not necessarily an ‘informant’, but a victim, whose message is entirely shaped by his sense of self-pity and victim-hood. In the process of communicating that collective victim-hood, this intellectual does his people a disfavor by presenting them as hapless and having no human agency whatsoever.

    Palestine is a case in point.

    The Palestine ‘victim intellectual’ is not an intellectual in any classic definition. Said refers to the intellectual as “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion”.  Gramsci argued that intellectuals are “(those) who sustain, modify and alter modes of thinking and behavior of the masses”. He referred to them as “purveyors of consciousness”. The ‘victim intellectual’ is none of these.

    In the case of Palestine, this phenomenon was not accidental. Due to the limited spaces available to Palestinian thinkers to speak openly and truly about Israeli crimes and about Palestinian resistance to military occupation and apartheid, some have strategically chosen to use whatever available margins to communicate any kind of messaging that could be nominally accepted by western media and audiences.

    In other words, in order for Palestinian intellectuals to be able to operate within the margins of mainstream western society, or even within the space allocated by certain pro-Palestinian groups, they can only be ‘allowed to narrate’ as ‘purveyors’ of victim-hood. Nothing more.

    Those familiar with the Palestinian intellectual discourse, in general, especially following the first major Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-9, must have noticed how accepted Palestinian narratives regarding the war rarely deviate from the decontextualized and depoliticized Palestinian victim discourse. While understanding the depravity of Israel and the horrondousness of its war crimes is critical, Palestinian voices which are given a stage to address these crimes are frequently denied the chance to present their narratives in the form of strong political or geopolitical analyses, let alone denounce Israel’s Zionist ideology or proudly defend Palestinian resistance.

    Much has been written about the hypocrisy of the West in handling the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war, especially when compared to the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestine or the genocidal Israeli wars in Gaza. But little has been said about the nature of the Ukrainian messaging if compared to those of Palestinians: the former demanding and entitled, while the latter mostly passive and bashful.

    While top Ukrainian officials often tweet such statements that western officials can “go f**k yourselves”, Palestinian officials are constantly begging and pleading. The irony is that Ukrainian officials are attacking the very nations that have supplied them with billions of dollars of ‘lethal weapons’, while Palestinian officials are careful not to offend the same nations that support Israel with the very weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians.

    One may argue that Palestinians are tailoring their language to accommodate whichever political and media spaces that are available to them. This, however, hardly explains why many Palestinians, even within ‘friendly’ political and academic environments, can only see their people as victims and nothing else.

    This is hardly a new phenomenon. It goes back to the early years of the Israeli war on the Palestinian people. Palestinian leftist intellectual Ghassan Kanafani, like others, was aware of this dichotomy.

    Kanafani contributed to the intellectual awareness among various revolutionary societies in the Global South during a critical era for national liberation struggles everywhere. He was the posthumous recipient of the Afro-Asia Writers’ Conference’s Lotus Prize for Literature in 1975, three years after he was assassinated by Israel in Beirut, in July 1972.

    Like others in his generation, Kanafani was adamant in presenting Palestinian victimization as part and parcel of a complex political reality of Israeli military occupation, western colonialism and US-led imperialism. A famous story is often told about how he met his wife, Anni, in South Lebanon. When Anni, a Danish journalist, arrived in Lebanon in 1961, she asked Kanafani if she could visit the Palestinian refugee camps. “My people are not animals in a zoo,” Kanafani replied, adding, “You must have a good background about them before you go and visit.” The same logic can be applied to Gaza, to Sheikh Jarrah and Jenin.

    The Palestinian struggle cannot be reduced to a conversation about poverty or the horrors of war, but must be expanded to include wider political contexts that led to the current tragedies in the first place. The role of the Palestinian intellectual cannot stop at conveying the victimization of the people of Palestine, leaving the much more consequential – and intellectually demanding – role of unpacking historical, political and geopolitical facts to others, some of whom often speak on behalf of Palestinians.

    It is quite uplifting and rewarding to finally see more Palestinian voices included in the discussion about Palestine. In some cases, Palestinians are even taking center stage in these conversations. However, for the Palestinian narrative to be truly relevant, Palestinians must assume the role of the Gramscian intellectual, as “purveyors of consciousness” and abandon the role of the ‘victim intellectual’ altogether. Indeed, the Palestinian people are not ‘animals in a zoo’ but a nation with political agency, capable of articulating, resisting and, ultimately, winning their freedom, as part of a much greater fight for justice and liberation throughout the world.

    The post Palestinians “Are Not Animals in a Zoo”: On Kanafani and the Need to Redefine the Role of the “Victim Intellectual” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Dark day for press freedom as Priti Patel approves Julian Assange extradition

    Home secretary Priti Patel has approved the US extradition request for journalist and Wikileaks editor Julian Assange. The Australian national, whose work on massive Iraq and Afghanistan war leaks earned him the ire of Western leaders, has been held in Belmarsh prison since 2019. Before that, he had been living in the the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012.

    Press organisations and allies of Assange called the decision a dark day for press freedom around the world.

    His own organisation, Wikileaks, condemned the decision immediately:

     

    And UK investigative outfit Declassified UK re-shared their graph on the connections between what they consider anti-Assange figures involved in his years-long extradition process:

    In a statement, the US media freedom organisation Freedom of the Press said:

    By continuing to extradite Assange, the Biden DOJ is ignoring the dire warnings of virtually every major civil liberties and human rights organization in the country that the case will do irreparable damage to basic press freedom rights of U.S. reporters.

    Hellhole

    Legendary reporter John Pilger, a stalwart ally of Assange, said Patel had condemned the Wikileaks founder to “an American hellhole”:

    Some MPs voiced their opposition to the decision, pointing out that Assange had exposed western crimes carried out during wars in the Middle East:

    Meanwhile US journalist Kevin Gozstola, who closely covered the Assange extradition proceedings, warned that press freedom was diminishing all over the world with the decision:

    Mainstream concerns

    And even mainstream journalists like John Simpson added their voices, warning that the implications of the decision would have far-reaching consequences for journalists everywhere:

    A former UN expert on global democracy and equity said the extradition evidenced “the breakdown of the rule of law in the UK”:

    Moreover, journalist Matt Kennard tweeted a screenshot of the famous Collateral Murder video. The leaked film showing a US helicopter murdering civilians, including civilians in Iraq, was one of Wikileaks’s most powerful exposes:

    Assange’s wife Stella Morris said:

    He is a journalist and a publisher, and he is being punished for doing his job

    Wikileaks confirmed they would appeal against the extradition. Powerful forces are aligned against Assange, and many journalists must worry for their own safety. Especially when they see other reporters treated in this way by two ostensibly democratic states like the UK and US.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Snapperjack, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY-SA 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Invasion News Fits on Front Page More When an Enemy Does the Invading

     

    New York Times front page feauturing stories on Ukraine invasion

    The New York Times front page for April 5, 2022, featured four stories on the Ukraine War, including three at the top of the page.

    The New York Times’ slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has appeared on the paper’s front page since 1897. But a comparison of Times coverage of the 2022 Ukraine War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq shows that the same kinds of news don’t always fit on the front page.

    FAIR examined front pages of the New York Times between April 1 and April 30, 2022, and compared them to those from May 1 to May 31, 2003. The dates represent the second full calendar months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US invasion of Iraq, respectively—major armed conflicts involving major world powers illegally invading  smaller countries.

    In April 2022, there were a total of 179 stories on the Times‘ front page, and  79 (44%) concerned the Ukraine invasion. All but three were located at  the top of the page (i.e., with no articles above them), where editors put the stories they consider to be the most important of the day. Fully 75% of all top-of-the-page stories were about the Ukraine war. Not a single day went by without a Ukraine story being published on the top of the page, and on 14 different days only stories about Ukraine were published on the top of the front page.

    In May 2003, when there were 226 stories on the front page, only 41 of them (18%) reported on the Iraq invasion. Thirty-two of those were at the top of the page, with nine below; 25% of all top-of-the-page stories were dedicated to the Iraq War.

    This means that a major conflict launched by the country where the paper is published was given less than half as many front-page articles—and a third of the top of the front page, where highest-priority stories are placed—compared to a war in which that country was not directly involved. Six days out of the month, the paper did not feature a single Iraq story at the top of the page, and the top-of-the-page stories were never exclusively about Iraq.

    The apparently greater newsworthiness of military aggression when committed by an official enemy isn’t just on display on the Times front page.  A study of the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news shows (Tyndall Report, 4/7/22) found that the first full month of the Ukraine War got more coverage (3/22, 562 minutes) than the peak month of coverage of the Iraq War (4/03, 455 minutes).

    Civilian deaths newsworthy or not

    New York Times Front Page

    In May 2003, the Iraq War was just one of many stories to the New York Times (5/10/03)—and was sometimes pushed off the front page altogether.

    Of the 79 front-page New York Times stories on the war in Ukraine in May 2022, 14 of them were primarily about civilian deaths as a result of the Russian invasion, all of which appeared at the top of the page. As FAIR has argued in the past (e.g., 3/18/22), coverage of the civilian toll of war is well-warranted, as civilians usually face the worst impact of modern warfare. By the beginning of May, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (5/2/22) estimated that there were at least 3,153 civilian deaths in Ukraine.

    In contrast, during the month of Iraq coverage, there was only one story (5/1/03) about civilian deaths at the hands of the US military on the front page, a report describing an event in which US soldiers killed two protesters (described as part of “a crowd of angry Iraqis [who] chanted and threw stones”). The lack of coverage, however, did not reflect a lack of civilian casualties during this period: Iraq Body Count estimated that at least 7,984 civilian deaths had occurred by the end of May 2003.

    Other stories about Iraqi noncombatants being killed in the war sometimes made the paper (e.g, 5/11/03), but not on the front page.  The Times has a history of downplaying civilian casualties at the hands of the US military (FAIR.org, 9/18/15). The contrast between intense interest in civilians killed by Russia and minimal attention to civilians killed by the United States matches a previous FAIR study (3/18/22). It found 27 mentions on the nightly network news shows in the first week of the Ukraine invasion identifying Russia as responsible for harming civilians, as compared to nine mentions in the first week of the Iraq invasion that reported on the US harming civilians—fewer than the 12 mentions that depicted the US helping Iraqi civilians.

    It should be noted that in 2007, the New York Times (7/18/06) announced it was decreasing its physical page size as a result of budget cuts. While Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time, estimated that the change would only result in a 5% reduction of news, because pages were added, the front page suffered greater losses as a result of the smaller format; comparing May of 2003 to April of 2022, there were 20% fewer stories overall. But the Ukraine War still managed to get more reports on the front page than the Iraq War in absolute numbers, as well as making up a greater percentage of front-page stories.

     

     

    The post Invasion News Fits on Front Page More When an Enemy Does the Invading appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Iraq passes law making ties with Israel criminal offence

    Its passage cemented the Arab countries invariable, and age old, policy of refusing to recognize the occupying regime.

    The legislation applies to all Iraqis, governmental and independent institutions, as well as foreign nationals working in Iraq.

    In a statement, the Parliament said the legislation is a true reflection of the will of the people.

    The post Iraq passes law making ties with Israel criminal offence appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • George W. Bush, Freudian Confessions and Foiled Assassinations

    Death, remarked Gore Vidal about Truman Capote’s passing, was a good career move.  The novelist Saki also considered the good qualities of shuffling off the mortal coil.  “Waldo,” he writes in “The Feast of Nemesis”, “is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”  But what of those instances when death is foiled, the Grim Reaper cheated?

    Former US President George W. Bush has had the good fortune of facing such a foiling, though the claims remain fresh.  On May 24, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, an Iraqi national living in Columbus, Ohio, was arrested and charged with aiding and abetting the attempted murder of a former US official and charges of attempting to bring foreign nationals to the US.  The nationals in question are said to be affiliated with the Islamic State group.

    According to court documents, the FBI foiled the alleged plot through using informants.  In November last year, Shihab is said to have told one of them that he “wished to kill former President Bush because they felt that he was responsible for killing many Iraqis and breaking apart the entire country of Iraq.”

    In subsequent discussions with the informants, Shihab is alleged to have said how he “wanted to be involved in the actual attack and assassination of former President Bush and did not care if he died as he would be proud to have been involved in killing former President Bush.”  One may fault the intended outcome, but the historical reasoning behind the motive is hard to rebut.

    A statement from Bush’s chief of staff Freddy Ford had the former president expressing “all the confidence in the world in the United States Secret Service and our law enforcement and intelligence communities.”

    This would have caused a gasp from those in the intelligence community so wilfully maligned in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003.  The issue again surfaced in March 2019, when former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took to Twitter to wash his hands while dumping on those who had supplied the intelligence.  “There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years,” he began.  “After no WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] were found, the left claimed ‘Bush lied.  People died.’  This accusation is a lie.  It’s time to put it to rest.”

    Unconvincingly, Fleischer proceeded to shift and spread blame, claiming both he and Bush “faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded.” He implicated the CIA and other intelligence services, including those of Egypt, France and Israel.  “We all turned out to be wrong.  That is very different from lying.”

    Bush’s role in the Iraq War was again appraised in his May 19 speech on election integrity, when he enlivened his gaffe-strewn legacy with a momentous Freudian slip or, as John Fugelsang described it, “a Freudian confession”.  In referring to Vladimir Putin and Russia’s “absence of checks and balances”, Bush had something of a coming out moment: “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq … I mean, of Ukraine.”  On realising his error, and no doubt hoping to strike a note of levity, he suggested, “Iraq, too” and pointing to age as an excuse (“Anyway, 75!”).

    Guffawing followed and could only come across as ghoulishly telling about the predations of power and cant.  It was reminiscent of the light-hearted response to his cringeworthy performance at the 2004 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  While narrating a slideshow featuring a picture of himself peering under furniture in the Oval Office, Bush could not resist quipping: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.”

    David Corn, writing at the time for The Nation, found little reason to be amused.  “Before an audience of people who supposedly spend their days pursuing the truth, Bush joked about misstatements (if not lies) he had used to persuade (if not hornswoggle) the American people and the media.”

    The same could be said about the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, who refused to partake in the merriment, however nervously expressed, by the audience gathered at the Southern Methodist University.  “Freudian slip about past massacres (of other barbarians) amuses audience,” he tweeted gloomily.  “All is well in the settler colony.”

    All is certainly well for Bush, who, as absent-minded dauber, has undergone a rapid rehabilitation as elder statesman.  Little is mentioned these days of his culpable role in leading an invasion of a sovereign state that saw the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands, displacements, poisonings, and the destabilisation of the Middle East.  “When your guilty consciousness catch [sic] up with you and you end up confessing but no one cares to hold you to account,” observed Representative Ilhan Omar.

    The Trump era aided the process of revision and cleansing, with traumatised Democrats and some notional progressives longing to return to the good times of the Bush imperium marked by illegal wars, warrantless surveillance and state sanctioned torture.

    In 2019, Yale University, via a delegation of students who might have known better, bestowed upon Bush the Yale Undergraduate Lifetime Achievement Award.  The decision to select the former president as the recipient was drawn from a vote by over 1,000 students, suggesting that collective amnesia is rife.  In a statement, Bush acknowledged the role played by the university in shaping him, expressing pride in joining the ranks of Anderson Cooper, Maya Lin and Jodie Foster, concluding with the triumphant, “Boola Boola!”

    With Shihab’s arrest, Bush can draw upon a well of sympathy by claiming that Freedom’s Land had, at the very least, a president worthy of being the target of an alleged assassination plot.  But in prosecuting a man nursing a grievance over the role played by Bush in perpetrating the destruction of his homeland, another brutal invasion will receive some renewed attention, if only briefly.

    The post George W. Bush, Freudian Confessions and Foiled Assassinations first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russia-Ukraine war: George Bush’s admission of his crimes in Iraq was no “gaffe”

    It was apparently a “gaffe” of the kind we had forgotten since George W Bush stepped down from the US presidency in early 2009. During a speech in Dallas last week, he momentarily confused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current war of aggression against Ukraine and his own war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.

    Bush observed that a lack of checks and balances in Russia had allowed “one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean, Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway… I’m 75.”

    It sounded like another “Bushism” – a verbal slip-up – for which the 43rd president was famous. Just like the time he boasted that people “misunderestimated” him, or when he warned that America’s enemies “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we”.

    Maybe that explains why his audience laughed. Or maybe not, given how uncomfortable the laughter sounded.

    Bush certainly wanted his mistake to be seen as yet another slip-up, which is why he hurriedly blamed it on his age. The senility defence doubtless sounds a lot more plausible at a time when the incumbent president, Joe Biden, regularly loses track of what he is saying and even where he is.

    The western media, in so far as it has bothered to report Bush’s speech, has laughed along nervously too. It has milked the incident largely for comic effect: “Look, we can laugh at ourselves – unlike that narcissist Russian monster, Putin.”

    The BBC accorded Bush’s comment status as a down-page brief news item. Those that gave it more attention preferred to term it a “gaffe” or an amusing “Freudian slip”.

    ‘Putin apologists’

    But the focus on the humour of the moment is actually part of the media’s continuing war on our understanding of recent history. It is intended to deflect us, the audience, from thinking about the real significance of Bush’s “gaffe”.

    The only reason the media is now so belatedly connecting – if very indirectly – “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” of Ukraine and what happened in Iraq is because of Bush’s mistake.

    Had it not happened, the establishment media would have continued to ignore any such comparison. And those trying to raise it would continue to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists or as apologists for Putin.

    The implication of what Bush said – even for those mockingly characterising it in Freudian terms – is that he and his co-conspirator, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are war criminals and that they should be on trial at the Hague for invading and occupying Iraq.

    Everything the current US administration is saying against Putin, and every punishment meted out on Russia and ordinary Russians, can be turned around and directed at the United States and Britain.

    Should the US not be under severe economic sanctions from the “civilised world” for what it did to Iraq? Should its sportspeople not be banned from international events? Should its billionaires not be hunted down and stripped of their assets? And should the works of its long-dead writers, artists and composers not be shunned by polite society?

    And yet, the western establishment media are proposing none of the above. They are not calling for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. Meanwhile, they echo western leaders in labelling what Russia is doing in Ukraine as genocide and labelling Putin as an evil madman.

    The western media are as uncomfortable taking Bush’s speech at face value as his audience was. And for good reason.

    That is because the media are equally implicated in US and UK crimes in Iraq. They never seriously questioned the ludicrous “weapons of mass destruction” justification for the invasion. They never debated whether the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Baghdad was genocidal.

    And, of course, they never described either Bush or Blair as madmen and megalomaniacs and never accused them of waging a war of imperialism – or one for oil – in invading Iraq. In fact, both continue to be treated by the media as respected elder statesmen.

    During Trump’s presidency, leading journalists waxed nostalgic for the days of Bush, apparently unconcerned that he had used his own presidency to launch a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime”.

    And Blair continues to be sought out by the British and US media for his opinions on domestic and world affairs. He is even listened to deferentially when he opines on Ukraine.

    Pre-emption excuse

    But this is not simply about a failure to acknowledge the recent historical record. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is deeply tied to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And for that reason, if no other, the western media ought to have been driving home from the outset the parallels between the two – as Bush has now done in error.

    That would have provided the geopolitical context for understanding – without necessarily justifying – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s role in provoking it. Which is precisely why the media have worked so hard to ignore those parallels.

    In invading Iraq, Bush and Blair created a precedent that powerful states could redefine their attack on another state as “pre-emptive” – as defensive rather than aggressive – and thereby justify the military invasion in violation of the laws of war.

    Bush and Blair falsely claimed both that Iraq threatened the West with weapons of mass destruction and that its secular leader, Saddam Hussein, had cultivated ties with the extreme Islamists of al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US. These pretexts ranged from the entirely unsubstantiated to the downright preposterous.

    Putin has argued – more plausibly – that Russia had to take pre-emptive action against covert efforts by a US-led Nato to expand its military sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders. Russia feared that, left unchecked, the US and Nato were preparing to absorb Ukraine by stealth.

    But how does that qualify Russia’s invasion as defensive? The Kremlin’s fears were chiefly twofold.

    First, it could have paved the way for Nato stationing missiles minutes away from Moscow, eroding any principle of mutual deterrence.

    And second, Nato’s incorporation of Ukraine would have drawn the western military alliance directly into Ukraine’s civil war in the eastern Donbass region. That is where Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi elements like the Azov Brigade, have been pitted in a bloody fight against ethnic Russian communities.

    In this view, absent a Russian invasion, Nato could have become an active participant in propping up Ukrainian ultra-nationalists killing ethnic Russians – as the West is now effectively doing through its arming of Ukraine to the tune of more than $40bn.

    Even if one discounts Russia’s concerns, Moscow clearly has a greater strategic interest invested in what its neighbour Ukraine is doing on their shared border than Washington ever had in Iraq, many thousands of miles away.

    Proxy wars

    Even more relevant, given the West’s failure to acknowledge, let alone address, Bush and Blair’s crimes committed in Iraq, is Russia’s suspicion that US foreign policy is unchanged two decades on. On what basis would Moscow believe that Washington is any less aggressive or power-hungry than it was when it launched its invasion of Iraq?

    The western media continue to refer to the US attack on Iraq, and the subsequent bloody years of occupation, as variously a “mistake”, a “misadventure” and a “blunder”. But surely it does not look that way to Moscow, all the more so given that Washington followed its invasion of Iraq with a series of proxy wars against other Middle Eastern and North African states such as Libya, Syria and Yemen.

    To Russia, the attack on Iraq looks more like a stepping stone in a continuum of wars the US has waged over decades for “full-spectrum dominance” and to eradicate competitors for control of the planet’s resources.

    With that as the context, Moscow might have reasonably imagined that the US and its Nato allies were eager for yet another proxy war, this time using Ukraine as the battlefield. Recent comments from Biden administration officials, such as Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, noting that Washington’s tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv is intended to “weaken Russia”, can only accentuate such fears.

    Back in March, Leon Panetta, a former US secretary of defence and the CIA director under Barack Obama, who is in a position to speak more freely than serving officials, observed that Washington was waging “a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not”.

    He predicted where US policy would head next, noting that the aim would be “to provide as much military aid as necessary”. Diplomacy has been a glaringly low priority for Washington.

    Barely concealed from public view is a desire in the US and its allies for another regime change operation – this time in Russia – rather than end the war and the suffering of Ukrainians.

    Butcher versus blunderer

    Last week, the New York Times very belatedly turned down the war rhetoric a notch and called on the Biden administration to advance negotiations. Even so, its assessment of where the blame lay for Ukraine’s destruction was unambiguous: “Mr Putin will go down in history as a butcher.”

    But have Bush or Blair gone down in history as butchers? They most certainly haven’t. And the reason is that the western media have been complicit in rehabilitating their images, presenting them as statesmen who “blundered” – with the implication that good people blunder when they fail to take account of how entrenched the evil of everyone else in the world is.

    A butcher versus a pair of blunderers.

    This false distinction means western leaders and western publics continue to evade responsibility for western crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.

    That was why in late February – in reference to Ukraine – a TV journalist could suggest to Condoleezza Rice, who was one of the architects of the illegal war of aggression on Iraq as Bush’s national security adviser: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” The journalist apparently did not consider for a moment that it was not just Putin who was a war criminal but the very woman she was sitting opposite.

    It was also why Rice could nod solemnly and agree with a straight face that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “against every principle of international law and international order – and that’s why throwing the book at them [Russia] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is a part of it”.

    But a West that has refused to come to terms with its role in committing the “supreme international crime” of invading Iraq, and has been supporting systematic crimes against the sovereignty of other states such as Yemen, Libya and Syria, cannot sit in judgment on Russia. And further, it should not be trying to take the high ground by meddling in the war in Ukraine.

    If we took the implications of Bush’s comment seriously, rather than treating it as a “gaffe” and viewing the Iraq invasion as a “blunder”, we might be in a position to speak with moral authority instead of flaunting – once again – our hypocrisy.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Russia-Ukraine war: George Bush’s admission of his crimes in Iraq was no “gaffe” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bush Accidentally Condemns “Brutal Invasion of Iraq” When Talking About Ukraine

    While speaking to an audience at his presidential library on Wednesday, former President George W. Bush accidentally condemned his 2003 invasion of Iraq while attempting to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Bush’s speech took place at his library in Dallas, Texas, and was part of an event focused on the importance of promoting free and fair elections throughout the world. Bush was trying to say that a lack of transparency and democracy in Russia, resulting in Putin’s continued rule in Moscow, led to the invasion of Ukraine that was launched earlier this year.

    But instead of saying “Russia,” Bush inserted the name of the country he ordered U.S. military forces to invade nearly two decades ago.

    “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,” Bush said.

    The former president acknowledged his mistake seconds later, and tried to play it off with a joke. “Iraq too, anyway,” he said, eliciting some laughter from the crowd.

    Many pointed out that it was callous for Bush to joke about the invasion of Iraq, as the war resulted in thousands of American soldiers dying or being injured in significant ways, and more than a million Iraqi citizens being killed. Millions more have been permanently displaced because of the invasion.

    “I’m not laughing, and I am guessing nor are the families of the thousands of American troops and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in that war,” said MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan on Wednesday night.

    “The laughing and joking at the end of this reveals everything you will ever need to know about George W. Bush,” said Dan Caldwell, vice president of foreign policy for Stand Together, a philanthropic organization focused on “bridging partisan divides.”

    “I gave eye witness testimony at [the Kuala Lumpur] War Crimes Tribunal in 2012 on US torture in #Bagram and #Gitmo alongside survivors #abughraib #Iraq,” tweeted Moazzam Begg, who was formerly imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. “Bush and his acolytes were found guilty in absentia of war crimes and crimes against humanity. No joke.”

    Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the basis that the country was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and was seeking to develop nuclear weapons capabilities — unfounded allegations that were relentlessly pushed by his administration and corporate media to justify going to war. When no such weapons were found after the invasion began, Bush joked about his lie to the public during a speech at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner, showing images of himself looking around the White House for WMDs.

    There are many similarities between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt noted in a column in April. Like Putin, “Bush and his allies within government and the media crafted a complete alternate reality to justify their intentions,” he wrote.

    “Vladimir Putin, the strongman leader who calls the Russian oligarch billionaire class his base, has also constructed an alternative reality to buttress his desire for an expanded empire,” Pitt pointed out, comparing Bush’s false narratives to justify an invasion of Iraq to the unfounded allegations the Russian president has made against Ukraine’s political leaders.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • On Bush’s Freudian Confession

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Oh my God. It happened. I can’t believe it really happened.

    During a speech in Dallas at Southern Methodist University’s George W Bush Presidential Center on Wednesday, the man himself, George W Bush, did the best thing ever. I am pretty sure it is the single best thing that has ever happened. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say that.

    While criticizing Russia for having rigged elections and shutting out political opposition (which would already be hilarious coming from any American in general and Bush in particular), the 43rd president made the following comment:

    “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.”

    And then it got even better. After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension in the empire-loyal crowd 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.

    And Bush’s audience laughed. They thought it was great. A president who launched an illegal invasion that killed upwards of a million people (probably way upwards) openly confessing to doing what every news outlet in the western world has spent the last three months shrieking its lungs out about Putin doing was hilarious to them.

    There are not enough shoes in the universe to respond to this correctly.

    As comedian John Fugelsang put it, “George W. Bush didn’t do a Freudian slip. He did a Freudian Confession.”

    One of the many, many interesting things about this occurrence is the likelihood that Bush’s words tumbled out in the way they did because he’s either heard a lot of criticisms of his invasion or has been thinking a lot about them; a familiar neural pathway would explain why his brain chose the exact worst word he could possibly swap out for “Ukraine” in that moment. This would be a small light in the darkness for we ordinary folk who oppose war and love peace, because it suggests that even the worst empire managers cannot fully insulate themselves from our criticisms.

    The bullshit doesn’t get any more brightly illuminated than this, folks. All that spin and narrative management they’ve been pouring into the US proxy war in Ukraine, and Bush undoes it all with the Bushism to end all Bushisms.

    While the western political/media class constantly rends its garments over “disinformation” about the Ukraine war even as US officials openly admit they’ve been using the media to circulate disinformation about that same war, and even as the Biden administration imprisons and persecutes a journalist for exposing US war crimes, we get a square admission that the US is no better than Russia and that the only thing obscuring this is the fact that we are all swimming in a sea of disinformation and propaganda provided by that same political/media class.

    And this admission comes not from any low-level empire lackey, but from the man himself. The guy. The man whose name alone serves as a one-word debunk of every claim made about how uniquely nefarious Vladimir Putin is on the world stage and how uniquely depraved is his invasion of Ukraine.

    If you really look at what just happened, really truly ingest it, this one incident just by itself is enough to show you that we are swimming in a sea of lies designed to give us an upside-down and ass-backwards perspective of what’s going on in the world. If Bush himself can’t always tell the difference between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Ukraine, then this means our news media and our politicians are lying to us constantly. They lied to us through 2002 and 2003, and they never stopped lying, and they are lying now in the year 2022.

    The entire mainstream worldview is a perceptual distortion filter which obscures the public understanding of world events so severely that Bush has been not just forgiven for his crimes but actively rehabilitated in the public eye, while the enemies of the United States are continuously compared to Adolf Hitler and condemned throughout the US-dominated world.

    In reality the US is the single most tyrannical and destructive government on this planet, and it is only because the public is fed a nonstop deluge of propaganda that this isn’t universally obvious. Even the worst empire managers know deep down that this is true, and, in their less guarded moments, sometimes the truth slips out.

    __________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • George W. Bush’s gaffe shows war crimes are a parlour joke for the ruling class

    Nineteen years on, the Iraq War has become a parlour joke for rich Western audiences, a parlour joke cracked by no less than the architect of Iraq’s destruction, George W. Bush. That the ex-president was speaking at an event at a venue named after himself, the George W. Bush Presidential Centre, only adds to the crassness.

    Bush was there to discuss future elections in the US. But he was criticising the Russian invasion of Ukraine when he said:

    …the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.

    When he laughed it off, audience members laughed with him. Bush blamed his age – he is 75 – for the error.

    War crimes

    Bush’s gaffe drew immediate criticism on social media, including from Mehdi Hasan:

    Media Lens said Bush’s error showed up the mendacity and hypocrisy of Western media as a whole:

    Bush also accused Putin of rigging elections. However, it was quickly pointed out that similar accusations have been made of Bush himself, regarding his 2000 election:

    Another commenter had to explain to her father that Bush, who is famous for his blunders, somehow got into a top US university:

    One journalist made it very clear that he felt there was little difference between what Bush did in Iraq and what Putin has done in Ukraine:

    ‘Twice as brutal’

    Meanwhile, another said that in terms of sheer death toll in the first three months, Bush’s Iraq war was far more bloody than the Ukraine invasion:

    And one Twitter user captured the essence of the problem when he said that war criminality is “ok when we do it”:

    Accountability

    Bush’s latest error comes at a key moment in terms of accountability. In recent days, the first trials of Russian troops for war crimes in Ukraine have gotten underway. The first accused soldier pleaded guilty in a Kyiv court on Wednesday.

    Closer to home, an amnesty on crimes by British troops during the Troubles in Ireland has become law.

    Republic of Ireland prime minister Michael Martin told the press on Tuesday 17th May:

    Victims and survivors want no amnesty. They want full accountability. They want people brought before the courts if possible and they want people prosecuted. That’s the least they deserve.

    If there was ever any doubt about a moral double standard over war crimes, it surely must now be dispelled. As it stands, British and American brutality can be legislated away or simply laughed off, whilst at the same time war crime trials in Ukraine are treated with grave seriousness.

    The truth is, all war crime allegations must be given the same gravity, and the law should not respect wealth, fame, or power.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Common/Chris Greenberg, cropped to 770 x 403.

    By Joe Glenton

  • Madeleine Albright’s Funeral Buried Her Legacy Of War-Making And Extraordinary Deceit

    It’s fitting that Joe Biden and Bill and Hillary Clinton should eulogize Madeleine Albright at the mammoth Episcopalian institution calling itself the “National Cathedral”. After all, just last year, Albright eulogized fellow war maker, “trailblazer” and fellow Episcopalian Colin Powell there for his “honesty, dignity, loyalty and an unshakable commitment to his calling and word.”

    Albright, Biden and the Clintons covered for each other’s criminal war making – and ultimately, they all enabled and covered for Republican criminality as well. All showed they were capable of murderous deceits.

    It sparked some measure of attention during the 2020 election, but it’s largely been forgotten that the current sitting president, who with great hypocrisy calls Vladimir Putin a war criminal, Joe Biden, won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record – and he hasn’t for years.

    The post Madeleine Albright’s Funeral Buried Her Legacy Of War-Making And Extraordinary Deceit appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Selling Albright as a ‘Feminist Icon’: Was the Price Worth It?


    When Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright died of cancer last month, a stream of fawning obituaries hailed her as a hero of NATO, a feminist icon and a “champion of human rights and diplomacy” (CNN, 3/24/22).

    Most coverage failed to levy any criticism at all of Albright’s actions in government, despite her presiding over a critical turning point in the American Empire. For the foreign policy establishment, the ’90s under Albright solidified the US self-image as the “indispensable nation,” ready and able to impose its will on the world, a position with repercussions that still echo today. Instead of critically exploring this legacy, corporate media opted for celebration and mythmaking.

    ‘Icon’ and ‘trailblazer’

    Reuters: Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state and feminist icon, dies at 84

    Reuters‘ obituary (3/23/22) for “the first female US secretary of state and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon.”

    Some of the coverage focused on Albright as a “feminist icon” (Reuters, 3/23/22; USA Today, 3/23/22)  breaking the glass ceiling. A commonly used term was “trailblazer” (e.g., NPR, 3/24/22; Washington Post, 3/23/22).

    The New Yorker (3/24/22) declared, “Madeleine Albright Was the First ‘Most Powerful Woman’ in US History.” CNN (3/24/22) went as far as to call Albright an early progenitor of “feminist foreign policy.”

    NPR (3/24/22) claimed that Albright “left a rich legacy for other women in public service to follow.” BuzzFeed (3/23/22) found time to discuss the meaning of the jewelry she wore when meeting foreign leaders.

    There is nothing wrong with remarking on the significance of a woman taking charge in the historically male-dominated halls of US power. However, it is far more important to take a critical look at her policies, including whether they jibe with the tenets of feminism as generally understood—something few in the media chose to do.

    Media fell into this same trap when praising Gina Haspel as the first female head of the CIA, or when they applauded the top military contractors for having female heads (FAIR.org, 6/28/20). Similarly, Albright’s violent legacy is being obscured by seemingly progressive language.

    ‘More children than died in Hiroshima’

    Madeline Albright on 60 Minutes

    Madeleine Albright telling 60 Minutes (5/12/96) that half a million dead children is a price worth paying.

    One of the first things many progressives think of when they think of Albright is her championing of the sanctions against Iraq during the ’90s. In between the two US wars on Iraq, Albright presided over crushing sanctions aimed at turning the Iraqi population against the Ba’athist government. These sanctions cut off crucial supplies to the nation, starving its people. A UN survey found that the sanctions led to hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children.

    When Albright was confronted with this figure in an interview with CBS‘s Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes (5/12/96; Extra!, 11–12/01), Albright’s response was cold:

    “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

    “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

    The UN numbers have since been revised downward, but the unavoidable fact is that Albright accepted the number she was given, took willful responsibility for the deaths and concluded that they were “worth it” for the purpose of turning the Iraqi people against their government.

    Common Dreams: I'm an Iraqi and I Remember Madeleine Albright for Who She Truly Was

    Ahmed Twaij (Al Jazeera English via Common Dreams, 3/27/22): “The most prominent memory of Albright that I have in my mind is from an interview she gave to CBS 60 Minutes in 1996.”

    While so many Americans seem to have forgotten this shameful display, the rest of the world has not. Ahmed Twaij, an Iraqi writing in Al Jazeera (3/27/22), said that his “most prominent memory of Albright” was that notorious interview:

    As an Iraqi, the memory of Albright will forever be tainted by the stringent sanctions she helped place on my country at a time when it was already devastated by years of war.

    Despite its resonance around the world, the quote wasn’t even referenced in many of the retrospectives FAIR reviewed. USA Today (3/23/22) mentioned that Albright received “criticism” for calling the deaths “worth it,” and Newsweek (3/23/22, 3/25/22, 3/23/22) mentioned the quote in some of its coverage. But it went missing from the New York Times (3/23/22, 3/25/22), Washington Post (3/23/22), NBC.com (3/23/22), CNN.com (3/24/22, 3/26/22), New Yorker (3/24/22) and The Hill (3/24/22).

    Guaranteed shootdown

    Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recounts in his book how Albright suggested to him that the US fly a plane over Iraqi airspace low enough to be shot down, thus giving the US an excuse to attack Saddam Hussein. Shelton recalls Albright’s words:

    What we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event—something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough—and slow enough—so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?

    Albright was quickly rebuffed, but she was later able to get her wish of war in Iraq. Her efforts culminated in the Iraq Liberation Act, signed in October 1998, which made seeking regime change in Iraq official US policy.

    As the New York Times (3/23/22) mentioned in its obituary, Albright threatened the Ba’athist leader with bombing that year if he didn’t open the country to weapons inspectors. Even though Kofi Annan brokered an agreement on the inspectors, the US bombed anyway in December 1998.

    The Times didn’t explore these events further—not mentioning that the administration justified the bombing using the debunked pretext of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction—and instead continued ahead with its largely positive obituary.

    Rewriting Yugoslav history

    Time: Albright at War

    When Time magazine (5/9/99) called Kosovo “Albright’s War,” it meant that as a compliment.

    One of Albright’s most notable moments during her tenure as secretary of state was the 78-day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999. Today, the bombing is hailed as a major victory by the forces of democracy, and Albright’s role is cast in a positive light.

    NPR’s three sentences (3/24/22) on the subject show the dominant version of the events:

    As chief diplomat in the late ’90s, Albright confronted the deadly targeting of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Time magazine dubbed it Madeleine’s War. Airstrikes in 1999 eventually led to the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces.

    Americans were told at the time that the war solidified the US as “an indispensable nation asserting its morality as well as its interests to assure stability, stop thugs and prevent human atrocities” (Time, 5/9/99). The Washington Post (3/23/22) seized on this myth, calling Albright “an ardent and effective advocate against mass atrocities.” In this story, she is a hero for mobilizing the timid American giant to use its military might on behalf of humanitarian and democratic ideals.

    But the truth is that the bombing Albright advocated was motivated less by humanitarian concerns and more by the US goal of breaking up Yugoslavia and establishing a NATO-friendly client state via the Kosovo Liberation Army. Indeed, the US’s negotiating tactic with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was to offer the choice of either occupation by NATO or destruction. As a member of Albright’s negotiating team anonymously told reporters (Extra!, 7–8/99): “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.”

    Exacerbating bloodshed

    One fact that quickly debunks the humanitarian pretext is that the US-led bombing greatly exacerbated the bloodshed. According to Foreign Affairs (9–10/99), 2,500 died during the preceding civil war, but “during the 11 weeks of bombardment, an estimated 10,000 people died violently in the province.” And while Albanian civilians bore the brunt of the violence during the NATO attacks, in the year preceding the bombing, British Defense Secretary George Robertson told the Parliament that the NATO-backed KLA “were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been” (Monthly Review, 10/07).

    As Edward Herman and David Peterson wrote in their detailed essay on Yugoslavia in the Monthly Review (10/07), the US and NATO

    were key external factors in the initiation of ethnic cleansing, in keeping it going, and in working toward a violent resolution of the conflicts that would keep the United States and NATO relevant in Europe, and secure NATO’s dominant position in the Balkans.

    The concern for ethnic minorities was merely a pretext offered to the American people, and lapped up wholeheartedly by a compliant mass media.

    Along with liberal hawks like Samantha Power, Albright helped weaponize human rights and legitimize unsanctioned “humanitarian interventions” around the world. This showcase of unilateral and illegal violence has had direct repercussions around the world, paving the way for US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya—to say nothing of the current Russian attack on Ukraine.

    Promoting hawkish policy

    CBS: Madeleine Albright, first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, dies at 84

    CBS (3/23/22): “Albright and [President Bill] Clinton clashed with then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali as she advocated fiercely for U.S. and democratic interests.”

    Much of the coverage framed Albright’s Clinton-era career arc as one in which she repeatedly failed to get the US to play a larger role in advancing its ideals in the post-Cold War world. This fight included taking on international institutions that didn’t understand American exceptionalism.

    Albright clashed with then–UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali “as she advocated fiercely for US and democratic interests,” in the words of CBS (3/23/22). She and Boutros-Ghali butted heads over the US role in peacekeeping operations during crises in Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia.

    In the end, Albright dissented against the entire UN Security Council, using the US veto power to deny Boutros-Ghali a second term as secretary general. His ouster paved the way for the more US-friendly Kofi Annan, as the “Albright Doctrine” took center stage.

    In its cover story on “Albright’s War,” Time (5/9/99) described the Albright doctrine as

    a tough-talking, semimuscular interventionism that believes in using force—including limited force such as calibrated air power, if nothing heartier is possible—to back up a mix of strategic and moral objectives.

    In other words, Albright advocated a policy of unilateral intervention instead of an global order based on international law and mutual obligations. The US could assert itself whenever and wherever it determined the “strategic and moral objectives” were of sufficient importance.

    The diplomat was more blunt about the US chauvinism imbued in the doctrine when she spoke to NBC (2/19/98) in 1998:

    If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.

    ‘Albright was right’

    CNN:The West would be wise to heed Madeleine Albright’s lessons on foreign policy

    A CNN op-ed (3/24/22) positively cited Albright’s comment to Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    The media reflect positively on this mindset that “blended her profound moral values from her childhood experience in Europe with US strategic interests,” according to the New Yorker (3/24/22). Some suggested that this mindset should continue to animate American policy.

    CNN.com (3/24/22) published an opinion by Elmira Bayrasli that claimed, “The West would be wise to heed Madeleine Albright’s lessons on foreign policy.” She embraced Albright’s hawkish label, saying that “advocating the oppressed and actively upholding human rights…sometimes meant using the might of the American military.”

    Hillary Clinton, whose “trailblazing” also obscured the deadly cost of her foreign policy initiatives, published a guest essay in the New York Times (3/25/22) under the headline “Madeleine Albright Warned Us, and She Was Right.” To Clinton, the world still needs Albright’s “clear-eyed view of a dangerous world, and her unstinting faith in…the unique power of the American idea.”

    While some pieces were clear in calling her a hawk (e.g., Washington Post, 3/23/22), CNN (3/24/22) wrote, “It is a mistake to see Albright exclusively as a hawk,” because she sat on the board of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and supported the activities of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Hill (3/24/22) also highlighted her support for these organizations, noting that for Albright, “democracy and human rights…were integral to American foreign policy.”

    The NDI exists under the umbrella of the National Endowment for Democracy, a deceptively named organization that spends tens of millions of dollars annually promoting and installing US-friendly governments around the world. USAID has long been used as a front for intelligence and soft power initiatives. During Albright’s time in office, USAID was heavily involved in facilitating the further destruction of Haitian democracy, among a myriad of similar activities around the world.

    These organizations have been well-documented as extensions of US power and bases for subversive activities, but this history is dismissed in favor of the government’s line that they are genuine conduits for democracy. The methods of empire have evolved, but the Albright coverage continues to obscure this fact. Regime change efforts can be recast as efforts to spread democracy around the world if the press refuses to scrutinize the official line.

    NATO expansion

    MSNBC: Madeleine Albright's NATO expansion helped keep Russia in check

    “Madeleine Albright’s NATO expansion helped keep Russia in check,” argued MSNBC’s Noah Rothman (3/24/22)—even as NATO expansion, as predicted, had sparked a bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    NATO expansion, a major initiative during Albright’s tenure, has come to the forefront of US discussion in recent months. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is in part a result of the decades-long expansion of the NATO military alliance, despite the warnings of US foreign policy veterans that the expansion was a “policy error of historic proportions.” (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.)

    In 1998, legendary diplomat George Kennan (New York Times, 5/2/98) called NATO expansion “a tragic mistake.” He predicted, “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies…and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.”

    Kennan’s words have proven prophetic, but most articles on Albright’s passing wrote fondly of her role in NATO expansion and the accompanying anti-Russian politics. CNN.com (3/23/22), in an article headlined “Albright Predicted Putin’s Strategic Disaster in Ukraine,” declared that the former top diplomat “died just as the murderous historic forces that she had spent her career trying to quell are raging in Europe again.”

    MSNBC.com (3/24/22) declared that “​​Madeleine Albright’s NATO Expansion Helped Keep Russia in Check.” Columnist Noah Rothman explained that “only the compelling deterrent power of counterforce stays the hand of land-hungry despots.”

    The New Yorker (3/24/22) described NATO expansion as one of Albright’s “major achievements,” despite acknowledging that in the wake of the policy, “​​​​US interests are indeed threatened more than at any time in three decades by Russian aggression in Europe.”

    Some pieces were more reflective. The Conversation (3/24/22) went into detail on her role in expanding NATO, acknowledging that “Albright’s curt dismissal of Russia’s security concerns might seem to have been ill-judged…in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    A time for reflection

    In the United States, political figures are merged with the culture of celebrity. Too many judge politicos by their force of personality or lines on their resume, rather than the material changes that occurred on their watch. The substantive history of US policymaking is rarely brought up, and political discussion remains surface-level and incomplete.

    This celebrity culture is on full display whenever a venerated member of the Washington establishment passes away. We’ve seen similar soft media coverage after the deaths of George H.W. Bush (FAIR.org, 12/7/18), Colin Powell (FAIR.org, 10/28/21) and Donald Rumsfeld (FAIR.org, 7/2/21).

    By now, the idea of the United States as the global policeman has been discredited enough to warrant at least some pushback in the corporate press. The passing of one of America’s leading interventionists should be a time for reflection. How did this person’s policies contribute to what is going on now?

    Instead, the media decided to use Albright’s death to reinforce the myths and legitimize the policies that have led to so much destruction around the world.

    The post Selling Albright as a ‘Feminist Icon’: Was the Price Worth It? appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Putin’s Brutal Ukraine Invasion Bears Some Similarities to Bush’s Attack on Iraq

    In March of 2003, George W. Bush transformed the center of Baghdad into a bowl of fire during the “Shock & Awe” phase of his doomed Iraq invasion. I lay on my back in my living room that day, horrified by the massacre unfolding on the television, a vivid war crime I and millions of others had labored for months to thwart. More people protested that war before it started than any other conflict in all of human history, and yet it came to sorrow nonetheless.

    In order to get their war, Bush and his allies within government and the media crafted a complete alternate reality to justify their intentions. Iraq, according to them, was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 48,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which equals 1 million pounds) of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents, 30,000 munitions to deliver these poisons, mobile biological weapons laboratories, uranium from Niger for use in a “robust” nuclear weapons program, and direct connections to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and around the world.

    Not one word of this was true. Yet the message was chilling in its precision, the perfect threat to levy against a population still reeling from the shock of September 11. That the president of the United States deliberately used that terrible day against his own people was another accent in the symphony of lies and betrayals that led inexorably to war. Once begun, the war made its own gravy, in the form of easily manipulated “terror alerts” that kept everyone looking over their shoulders. Because of the war, many people expected a wave of retaliatory terrorism attacks to unfold any day.

    That wave did not come, at least not here at home, but the invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on smoke and fiction did set part of the precedent for what we are all watching unfold in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, the strongman leader who calls the Russian oligarch billionaire class his base, has also constructed an alternative reality to buttress his desire for an expanded empire. Alleging that Ukraine is dominated by Nazis — a conjuring word for the Russian people the way 9/11 is here — the Russian president has laid claim to the moral high ground within a near-seamless media bubble that has neighbor turning against “disloyal” neighbor and students turning in teachers who speak out against the war. Although of course, neo-Nazis are present in Ukraine as they are in other countries, the particular picture that Putin has painted is patently false.

    With the war in Ukraine now several weeks underway, images of atrocity have flooded the networks and been splashed across front pages. U.S. officials and press pundits speak with unchecked outrage at the horrors being visited upon Ukraine’s civilian population. Of course, Putin’s horrific actions deserve all our condemnation. Remembering that day almost 20 years ago, when another aggressive invasion and occupation was underway, I am also left with an ugly and unavoidable question.

    Will the pundits and officials currently condemning Putin’s unspeakable violence also condemn the U.S.’s unspeakable violence? The international community did not roundly sanction or otherwise punish the U.S. after Bush led us into that charnel house based on a tapestry of poorly weaved lies. Right down to the idea bubble that prevents people from reading and seeing the truth, Russia and the U.S. are both deeply guilty when it comes to wars of choice, and thus are both morally repugnant.

    “In the wake of so-called Shock and Awe (i.e. the mass bombing of a city full of civilians), and alongside Abu Ghraib (mass torture of people being held, without trial, by an occupying force), Fallujah was the apex of brutality by the waning US empire,” journalist Dahr Jamail, who reported for Truthout for many years, told me in a recent email. “I know because I was there before, during, and after the sieges of that city.”

    Jamail continued:

    The corporate press is aghast at the atrocities they are witnessing across Ukraine, and rightly so. The intentional targeting of civilians, collective punishment, bombing civilian targets like apartments and train stations and hospitals: all war crimes.

    Finding burned bodies with their hands tied, cluster bombs, and encircling cities and intentionally starving the people within them and cutting them off from medical help — war crimes the corporate press, and presidents of the EU and US and other countries are right to call as such.

    But where was this same outrage about US war crimes in Iraq? Having reported from that country off and on for a decade, I can say unequivocally that the Russians have done nothing worse in Ukraine than the US military did in Iraq.

    The Guardian reports: “The mayor of the Ukrainian town of Bucha, near Kyiv, said that authorities had so far found 403 bodies of people they believed were killed by Russian forces during their occupation of the area, but that the number was growing.”

    Dahr Jamail: “As horrible as the [total number of] dead civilians in Bucha, Ukraine is, that is at most one-tenth of the number killed in Fallujah. The numbers of dead civilians in Ukraine pale in comparison to the more than 1,000,000 Iraqis that died due to the savage US occupation of that country, that continued into the Obama presidency. Where were the cries in the corporate media then for trying Bush and Obama for war crimes? The silence was deafening.”

    BBC reports: “The US and Britain say they are looking into reports that chemical weapons have been used by Russian forces attacking the Ukrainian port of Mariupol. Ukraine’s Azov regiment said three soldiers were injured by ‘a poisonous substance’ in an attack on Monday. However, no evidence has been presented to confirm the use of chemical weapons.”

    Dahr Jamail on the Fallujah siege: “During the November siege of that year, the US military used massive amounts of white phosphorous, an incendiary weapon, the use of which in an area where there could be civilians, is a violation of international law. The US military itself stated there were at least 30,000 civilians in Fallujah during that siege. I personally interviewed soldiers who were told to shoot anything that moved. This is the institution of war crimes as policy.”

    It is the duty of every moral person to raise their voice against the bloodbath being perpetrated by Vladimir Putin against the people of Ukraine. Some 21 years ago, the same held true of George W. Bush and his long atrocity in Iraq. Bush proved in 2003 that you can get away with a hell of a lot if you’re a global economic powerhouse bristling with nuclear weapons.

    There are no heroes among the powerful invaders. As we rightly condemn Putin’s grave atrocities, we must also remember U.S. war crimes and vow to oppose future ones.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • What Does Standing up for Ukraine Signify When Sitting on One’s Derriere for Violence against Others?

    The leaders of a bevy of NATO-aligned countries have appeared in a collage that reads “Stand up for Ukraine.” It comes across blatantly as propaganda cooked by a corporate PR firm as part of the information war being waged against Russia.

    My question to these upstanding, er … these people standing up, is: When have you stood up for, in no particular order:

    Palestine
    Syria
    Libya
    Iraq
    Afghanistan
    Yemen
    Iran
    Democratic Republic of Congo
    Somalia
    Haiti
    Serbia
    Venezuela
    Bolivia
    Honduras
    Nicaragua

    This is, of course, an inexhaustive list. What follows is an analysis of what NATO types standing up for signifies for the first six listed countries above, along with two unlisted countries.

    Palestine

    According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, 10,165 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, and an additional 82 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli civilians. This disregard for the life of the non-Jew is ingrained in many Talmudic Jews, as Holocaust survivor and chemistry professor Israel Shahak detailed in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight Of Three Thousand Years. If anyone needs convincing of this Jewish discrimination and racism towards non-Jews, then peruse the statistics at the B’Tselem website on home demolitions, who can and cannot use roads in the West Bank, the water crisis, and settler crimes against Palestinians.

    On 10 April, Ghadeer Sabatin, a 45-yr-old unarmed Palestinian widow and mother of six, was shot by Israeli soldiers near Bethlehem and left to bleed out and die. Will any of the politicians standing up for Ukraine also stand up for Palestine? Image Source

    Many of these Stand up for Ukraine types have been been glued to their seats during the slow-motion genocide by Zionist Jews against Palestinians.

    Are Palestinians a lesser people than Ukrainians?

    Syria

    These Stand up for Ukraine types in their spiffy business attire have also been seated while backing Islamist terrorists in Syria. Americans later invaded and still occupy the northeastern corner of Syria, stealing the oil and wheat crops.

    The UN Human Rights chief Michelle Bachelet reported that more than 350,000 people have been killed in 10 years of warring in Syria, adding that this figure was an undercount.

    Are Syrians a lesser people than Ukrainians?

    Libya

    In February 2020, Yacoub El Hillo, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Libya, called the impact of the NATO-led war on civilians “incalculable.”

    Are Libyans a lesser people than Ukrainians?

    Iraq

    I have a vivid memory of a crowd of students gathered around a TV screen in the University of Victoria to cheer on the start of Shock and Awe in Iraq. The US-led war on Iraq was based on the pretext that Iraq had weapons-of-mass-destruction although the head UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter had found Iraq to be “fundamentally disarmed.”

    Chemistry professor professor Gideon Polya was critical of how the western monopoly media “resolutely ignore the crucial epidemiological concept of non-violent avoidable deaths (excess deaths, avoidable mortality, excess mortality, deaths that should not have happened) associated with war-imposed deprivation.” Polya cites 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million).

    Abdul Haq al-Ani, PhD in international law, and Tarik al-Ani, a researcher of Arab/Islamic issues, wrote a legal tour de force, Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States, that makes the case for myriad US war crimes that amount to a genocide.

    Nonetheless, US troops are still stationed in Iraq despite being told to leave by the Iraqi government.

    Are Iraqis a lesser people than Ukrainians?

    Afghanistan

    The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. The institute’s key findings are:

    • As of April 2021, more than 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of the war.
    • The United States military in 2017 relaxed its rules of engagement for airstrikes in Afghanistan, which resulted in a massive increase in civilian casualties.
    • The CIA has armed and funded Afghan militia groups who have been implicated in grave human rights abuses and killings of civilians.
    • Afghan land is contaminated with unexploded ordnance, which kills and injures tens of thousands of Afghans, especially children, as they travel and go about their daily chores.
    • The war has exacerbated the effects of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, and environmental degradation on Afghans’ health.

    Are Afghans a lesser people than Ukrainians?

    Yemen

    In November 2021, the UN Development Programme published “Assessing the Impact of War in Yemen: Pathways for Recovery” (available here) in which it was estimated that by the end of 2021, there would be 377,000 deaths in Yemen. Tragically, “In 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five dies every nine minutes because of the conflict.” (p 12)

    The Yemeni economy is being destroyed and has forced 15.6 million people into extreme immiseration along with 8.6 million people being malnourished. Worse is predicted to come: “If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result…” (p 12)

    Countries such as Canada, the US, UK, France, Spain, South Africa, China, India, and Turkey that supply arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE are complicit in the war on the Yemeni people.

    Are Yemenis a lesser people than Ukrainians?

    One could continue on through the above list of countries “invaded” and arrive at the same conclusions. The predominantly white faces of western heads-of-government in their suits and ties or matching jackets and skirts did not stand up for the brown-skinned people killed in the countries adumbrated. Most of these countries were, in fact, directly attacked by NATO countries or by countries that were supported by NATO. What does that imply for the Standing up for Ukraine bunch?

    The Donbass Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk

    And lastly, most telling, is just how many of these people stood up for Donbass when it was being shelled by Ukraine?

    If France and Germany, guarantors for the Minsk Agreements that Ukraine signed, had not only guaranteed but also enforced Ukraine’s compliance, then, very arguably, no Russian recognition of the independence of the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk would have been forthcoming and there would have been no Russian military response. But France and Germany did not stand up for their roles as guarantors of the Minsk Agreements.

    Consequently, for all these politicians to contradict their previous insouciance and suddenly get off their posteriors and pose as virtuous anti-war types standing up for Ukraine is nigh impossible to swallow. Given that the historical evidence belies the integrity of this Stand up for Ukraine bunch, they ought better to have striven for some consistency and remained seated.

    The post What Does Standing up for Ukraine Signify When Sitting on One’s Derriere for Violence against Others? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Step up efforts to free Assange after 3 years in jail, MEAA tells Canberra

    Pacific Media Watch newdesk

    Australia must step up diplomatic efforts to encourage the US government to drop its bid to extradite Julian Assange who has now been imprisoned for three years, says the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

    Today marks the third anniversary of Assange’s arrest when he was dragged from the Ecuador Embassy in London on 11 April 2019 to face extradition proceedings for espionage charges laid by the US.

    The WikiLeaks founder and publisher has been held at Belmarsh Prison near London ever since, where his mental and physical health has deteriorated significantly.

    On this day, the MEAA calls on the Biden administration to drop the charges against Assange, which pose a threat to press freedom worldwide. The scope of the US charges imperils any journalist anywhere who writes about the US government.

    MEAA media federal president Karen Percy urged the Australian government to use its close ties to both the US and the UK to end the court proceedings against him and have the charges dropped to allow Assange to return home to Australia, if that is his wish.

    Assange won his initial extradition hearing in January last year, but subsequent appeals by the US government have dragged out his detention at Belmarsh.

    “Julian Assange’s work with WikiLeaks was important and in the public interest: exposing evidence of war crimes and other shameful actions by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Percy said.

    Assange charges an ‘affront to journalists’
    “The stories published by WikiLeaks and its mainstream media partners more than a decade ago were picked up by news outlets around the world.

    “The charges against Assange are an affront to journalists everywhere and a threat to press freedom.”

    The US government has not produced convincing evidence that the publishing of the leaked material endangered any lives or jeopardised military operations, but their lasting impact has been to embarrass and shame the United States.

    “Yet Assange faces the prospect of jail for the rest of his life if convicted of espionage charges laid by the US Department of Justice,” Percy said.

    “The case against Assange is intended to curtail free speech, criminalise journalism and frighten off any future whistleblowers and publishers with the message that they too will be punished if they step out of line.

    “The US Government must see reason and drop these charges, and the Australian Government should be doing all it can to represent the interests of an Australian citizen.”

    Assange has been a member of the MEAA since 2009 and in 2011 the WikiLeaks organisation was awarded the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • John Minto: Bucha – the Russian army’s Fallujah. Justice needed for both cities.

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    The discovery of many civilian bodies lying dead in the Ukrainian city of Bucha this week has brought out more Western rhetoric of horror, disgust, anger and fury at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has renewed calls for more sanctions against Russia, more weapons to the Ukrainians and calls for Putin to be put on trial as a war criminal.

    That’s a strong response to war and those responsible for starting a military invasion of a sovereign state.

    Let’s shift the focus to Iraq in 2003 for a moment.

    On the marches to protest against the US-UK-Australian-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 one of the chants used was “Never forget Fallujah!”.

    So, for those that were too young to know, or now too old to remember, here are a few well-referenced paragraphs from Wikipedia about what happened when the US invaders attacked that city as part of an invasion of another sovereign state, Iraq.

    The United States bombardment of Fallujah began in April 2003, one month after the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. In April 2003, United States forces fired on a group of demonstrators who were protesting against the US presence. US forces alleged they were fired at first, but Human Rights Watch, who visited the site of the protests, concluded that physical evidence did not corroborate US allegations and confirmed the residents’ accusations that the US forces fired indiscriminately at the crowd with no provocation.

    Seventeen people were killed and 70 were wounded.

    Further killings
    In a later incident, US soldiers fired on protesters again; Fallujah’s mayor, Taha Bedaiwi al-Alwani, said that two people were killed and 14 wounded. Iraqi insurgents were able to claim the city a year later, before they were ousted by a siege and two assaults by US forces.

    These events caused widespread destruction and a humanitarian crisis in the city and surrounding areas. As of 2004, the city was largely ruined, with 60 percent of buildings damaged or destroyed, and the population at 30–50 percent of pre-war levels.

    At least one US battalion had orders to shoot any male of military age on the streets after dark, armed or not. In violation of the Geneva Convention, the city’s main hospital was closed by Marines, negating its use, and a US sniper was placed on top of the hospital’s water tower.

    On November 13, 2004, a US Marine with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, was videotaped killing a wounded combatant in a mosque. The incident, which came under investigation, created controversy throughout the world.

    Bucha killings in Ukraine AJ
    A survivor in Bucha says some of his neighbours left their dark, cold houses that had no electricity, running water or natural gas supply to get bread or charge their mobile phones – but never came back. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR

    The man was shot at close range after he and several other wounded insurgents had previously been left behind overnight in the mosque by the US Marines. The Marine shooting the man had been mildly injured by insurgents in the same mosque the day before.

    On November 16, 2004, a Red Cross official told Inter Press Service that “at least 800 civilians” had been killed in Fallujah and indicated that “they had received several reports from refugees that the military had dropped cluster bombs in Fallujah, and used a phosphorus weapon that caused severe burns.”

    On 17 May 2011, AFP reported that 21 bodies, in black bodybags marked with letters and numbers in Roman script, had been recovered from a mass grave in al-Maadhidi cemetery in the centre of the city.

    Blindfolded, legs tied
    Fallujah police chief Brigadier General Mahmud al-Essawi said that they had been blindfolded, their legs had been tied and they had suffered gunshot wounds. The Mayor, Adnan Husseini said that the manner of their killing, as well as the body bags, indicated that US forces had been responsible.

    Both al-Essawi and Husseini agreed that the dead had been killed in 2004. The US Military declined to comment.

    There were no sanctions against the US, UK and Australia, there were no US soldiers, military leaders or politicians held to account. There were no arms sent to help the Iraqis facing overwhelming odds in their fight against the US and its allies.

    There were no moves to charge George Bush (US President), Tony Blair (UK Prime Minister) or John Howard (Australian Prime Minister) for war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

    Yes Vladimir Putin should be on trial at the International Criminal Court, but before he appears we should have seen George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard face the same charges first.

    We should never forget Bucha — but we must never forget Fallujah either. The people of both cities deserve justice at the ICC. Let’s do all we can to hold them to account.

    Incidentally, US President Joe Biden was pushing hard for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. His hypocrisy now in condemning Putin is the stuff of legends.

    Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • From Korea to Libya: On the Future of Ukraine and NATO’s Neverending Wars

    Much has been said and written about media bias and double standards in the West’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war, when compared with other wars and military conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Global South. Less obvious is how such hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon which governs the West’s relationship to war and conflict zones.

    On March 19, Iraq commemorated the 19th anniversary of the US invasion which killed, according to modest estimates, over a million Iraqis. The consequences of that war were equally devastating as it destabilized the entire Middle East region, leading to various civil and proxy wars. The Arab world is reeling under that horrific experience to this day.

    Also, on March 19, the eleventh anniversary of the NATO war on Libya was commemorated and followed, five days later, by the 23rd anniversary of the NATO war on Yugoslavia. Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.

    None of these wars, starting with the NATO intervention in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, have stabilized any of the warring regions. Iraq is still as vulnerable to terrorism and outside military interventions and, in many ways, remains an occupied country. Libya is divided among various warring camps, and a return to civil war remains a real possibility.

    Yet, enthusiasm for war remains high, as if over seventy years of failed military interventions have not taught us any meaningful lessons. Daily, news headlines tell us that the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain or some other western power have decided to ship a new kind of ‘lethal weapons’ to Ukraine. Billions of dollars have already been allocated by Western countries to contribute to the war in Ukraine.

    In contrast, very little has been done to offer platforms for diplomatic, non-violent solutions. A handful of countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have offered mediation or insisted on a diplomatic solution to the war, arguing, as China’s foreign ministry reiterated on March 18, that “all sides need to jointly support Russia and Ukraine in having dialogue and negotiation that will produce results and lead to peace”.

    Though the violation of the sovereignty of any country is illegal under international law, and is a stark violation of the United Nations Charter, this does not mean that the only solution to violence is counter-violence. This cannot be truer in the case of Russia and Ukraine, as a state of civil war has existed in Eastern Ukraine for eight years, harvesting thousands of lives and depriving whole communities from any sense of peace or security. NATO’s weapons cannot possibly address the root causes of this communal struggle. On the contrary, they can only fuel it further.

    If more weapons were the answer, the conflict would have been resolved years ago. According to the BBC, the US has already allocated $2.7bn to Ukraine over the last eight years, long before the current war. This massive arsenal included “anti-tank and anti-armor weapons … US-made sniper (rifles), ammunition and accessories”.

    The speed with which additional military aid has poured into Ukraine following the Russian military operations on February 24 is unprecedented in modern history. This raises not only political or legal questions, but moral questions as well – the eagerness to fund war and the lack of enthusiasm to help countries rebuild.

    After 21 years of US war and invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in a humanitarian and refugee crisis, Kabul is now largely left on its own. Last September, the UN refugee agency warned that “a major humanitarian crisis is looming in Afghanistan”, yet nothing has been done to address this ‘looming’ crisis, which has greatly worsened since then.

    Afghani refugees are rarely welcomed in Europe. The same is true for refugees coming from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali and other conflicts that directly or indirectly involved NATO. This hypocrisy is accentuated when we consider international initiatives that aim to support war refugees, or rebuild the economies of war-torn nations.

    Compare the lack of enthusiasm in supporting war-torn nations with the West’s unparalleled euphoria in providing weapons to Ukraine. Sadly, it will not be long before the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have left their country in recent weeks become a burden on Europe, thus subjected to the same kind of mainstream criticism and far-right attacks.

    While it is true that the West’s attitude towards Ukraine is different from its attitude towards victims of western interventions, one has to be careful before supposing that the ‘privileged’ Ukrainains will ultimately be better off than the victims of war throughout the Middle East. As the war drags on, Ukraine will continue to suffer, either the direct impact of the war or the collective trauma that will surely follow. The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s  decade long civil war.

    Ukraine needs peace and security, not perpetual war that is designed to serve the strategic interests of certain countries or military alliances. Though military invasions must be wholly rejected, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, turning Ukraine into another convenient zone of perpetual geopolitical struggle between NATO and Russia is not the answer.

    The post From Korea to Libya: On the Future of Ukraine and NATO’s Neverending Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lasting Cruelties

    Reign of Terror situates the War on Terror as part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Aroused by Power: Why Madeleine Albright Was Not Right

    When involved in war, those who feel like benefactors are bound to congratulate the gun toting initiators.  If you so happen to be on the losing end, sentiments are rather different.  Complicity and cause in murder come to mind.

    The late US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will always be tied with the appallingly named humanitarian war in Kosovo in 1999, one that saw NATO attacks on Serbian civilian targets while aiding the forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).  It was a distinct backing of sides in a vicious, tribal conflict, where good might miraculously bubble up, winged by angels.  Those angels never came.

    Through her tenure in public office, Albright showed a distinct arousal for US military power.  In 1992, she rounded on the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell for refusing to deploy US forces to Bosnia.  “What’s the point of having this superb military machine you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    Too many apologists have come out to explain why Albright was so adamant about the use of such force.  Biographical details are cited: born in Czechoslovakia as Marie Jana Korbelová; of Jewish roots rinsed in the blood wine of Roman Catholicism.  She fled with her family to Britain, eventually finding refuge in Notting Hill Gate.  She went to school, spent time in air raid shelters, sang A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall.

    The NATO intervention – and this point was never lost on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reiterated it in his February address – took place without UN Security Council authorisation.  For the law abiders and totemic worshipers of the UN Charter keen to get at Russia’s latest misconduct in Ukraine, this served to illustrate the fickleness of international law’s supporters.  At a given moment, they are bound to turn tail, becoming might-is-right types.  The persecuted, in time, can become persecutors.

    NATO, in fact, became an alliance Albright wished to see expanded and fed, not trimmed and diminished.  The historical role of Germany and Russia in central and eastern Europe became the rationale for expanding a neutralising alliance that would include previous “victim” countries.  A weakened Moscow could be ignored.  “We do not need Russia to agree to enlargement,” she told US Senators in 1997.

    Paul Wilson, considering the Albright legacy, wrote in 2012 about the danger of following analogies in history to the letter.  “Historical analogies are seductive and often treacherous.  [Slobodan] Milošević was not Hitler and the Kosovar Liberation Army was not a champion of liberal democracy.”

    In fact, the KLA was previously designated by the State Department to be a terrorist organisation.  “The Kosovar Albanians,” wrote the regretful former UN Commander in Bosnia Major General Lewis MacKenzie in April 2003, “played us like a Stradivarius violin.”  In his view, NATO and the international community had “subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo.  We have never blamed them for being perpetrators of violence in the early 1990s, and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today, in spite of evidence to the contrary.”

    Such is the treacherous nature of the sort of perverse humanitarianism embraced by Albright and her colleagues.  Such a policy, Alan J. Kuperman remarks with gloomy accuracy, “creates a moral hazard that encourages the excessively risky or fraudulent behaviour of rebellion by members of groups that are vulnerable to genocidal retaliation, but it cannot fully protect against the backlash.”

    One such encouraged individual, Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani, was all gushing over Albright’s legacy.  “She gave us hope when we didn’t have it.  She became our voice and our arm and when we had neither voice nor an arm ourselves.  She felt our people’s pain because she had experienced herself persecution in childhood.”

    The first female Secretary of State will also be linked with the Clinton Administration’s sanctions policy that killed numerous citizens and maimed the country of Iraq, only for it to then be invaded by the venal architects of regime toppling in the succeeding Bush Administration.  This sickening episode sank any heroic notions of law and justice, showing that Albright was content using a wretched calculus on life and death when necessary.

    On May 12, 1996, Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on the CBS program 60 Minutes about the impact of the sanctions that served to profitlessly kill hundreds of thousands.  “We have heard that half a million children have died.  I mean, that’s more children than have died in Hiroshima.  And, you know, is the price worth it?”  Then US Ambassador Albright did not flinch.  “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

    In September 2000, she was still crazed by the sanctions formula against Iraq, telling the United Nations in an absurd address that Baghdad had to be stood up to, being “against the United Nations authority and international law.”  Meek acknowledgment was given to the fact that “the hardships faced by Iraq’s people” needed to be dealt with.  What came first was “the integrity of this institution, our security, and international law.”

    Albright could be sketchy on sanctions.  In instances where Congress imposed automatic sanctions, Albright could express furious disagreement.  When this happened to both India and Pakistan in 1998 in the aftermath of nuclear weapons testing, she could barely conceal her irritation on CNN’s Late Edition.  “I think we must do something about it, because sanctions that have no flexibility, no waiver authority, are just blunt instruments.  And diplomacy requires us to have some finesse.”

    The hagiographic salutations have been many.  One, from Caroline Kelly at CNN, is simply too much.  Albright “championed the expansion of NATO, pushed for the alliance to intervene in the Balkans to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing, sought to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons, and championed human rights democracy across the globe.”

    As Secretary of State, she presided in an administration of the world’s only surviving superpower, uncontained, unrestrained, dangerously optimistic.  There was much hubris – all that strength, and lack of assuredness as to how to use it.  The Cold War narrative and rivals were absent, and the Clinton Administration became a soap opera of scandal and indiscretion.

    In her later years, she worried about the onset of authoritarianism, of power going to people’s heads, the inner tyrant unleashed in the playpen of international relations.  She had much to complain about regarding Donald Trump, Putin and Brexit.  In encouraging the loud return of the US to front and centre of international politics, she ignored its previous abuses, including some perpetrated by her office.  When given such power, is it not axiomatic that corruption will follow?

    The post Aroused by Power: Why Madeleine Albright Was Not Right first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A New Cold War Won’t Help the People of Ukraine or Anyone Else

    Kyiv residents sit in tent set up after building is hit with shrapnel

    The Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked strong reactions across the world, from empathetic solidarity with the Ukrainian people to crass anti-Russian bigotry. Looking to ride the wave of both sentiments is a domestic foreign policy establishment that is eager to restore the U.S.’s global standing and sense of historic purpose — and perhaps their own soiled reputations after two decades of a disastrous “global war on terror.”

    “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us,” declared the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. “We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time. And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”

    For the veteran foreign affairs reporter George Packer, Vladimir Putin’s war should jolt Americans out of the melancholy “realism” of a declining superpower and remind us of “a truth we didn’t want to see: that our core interests lie in the defense of [democratic and liberal] values.”

    Then there is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who revealed more than he intended when he declared that “Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history.”

    Only a Pentagon bureaucrat could so easily dismiss the epochal events of recent years: a pandemic, an economic meltdown, an uprising for Black lives, and the acceleration of rising temperatures that threaten to destroy this era of human civilization. Sure, you can picture Gates saying, that stuff is kind of important, but a land war in Eurasia? Now that’s real history.

    But there’s a common and depressing framework shared by Gates, Packer and even Rhodes, who once memorably described the Beltway foreign relations officialdom as “the Blob” which the rest of the Obama administration was trying to disrupt.

    The U.S. has had ample opportunities in recent years, under Democratic and Republican administrations, to lead the way in defending liberal values and taking the moral high ground on such pivotal issues around the world as vaccine access, migrant rights and renewable energy conversion. Yet these centrist Democrats only seem to envision U.S. global leadership in the 21st century being restored through a revived 20th-century Cold War with Russia — and probably China.

    Foreign policy elites might be especially eager to restore the U.S. to its former position of global strength because they are the ones who did so much to destroy it. Gates, Packer, and almost every other Washington insider initially supported the 2003 Iraq War, another shockingly brazen invasion that rested on legal fictions and false delusions of instant success.

    The failures of that war, along with the Afghanistan war and “counterterror activities” in 83 other countries, have drained the U.S. treasury of an astounding $8 trillion, mortally wounded Washington’s global credibility, and contributed to the rising authoritarianism at home that helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016. Now “the Blob” is saying we can undo America’s decline … through another endless war.

    Far from marking a break with the mistakes of its imperial adventures 20 years ago, this sudden consensus that we are in a new Cold War echoes the post-9/11 talk from the Bush administration about a “generational conflict” that would last decades and extend the fight against “terrorism” into countries across the globe.

    Unlike ordinary people around the world, foreign policy elites are not thinking primarily about the immediate needs of the Ukrainian people. If they were, the U.S. would be doing more to aid peace talks, cancel Ukraine’s onerous debt repayments to global banks and stop the denial of entry to Ukrainian refugees at the U.S. border.

    Instead, the primary form of U.S. assistance has been an “unprecedented” flow of weaponry into the country. That’s because the Blob is looking to make Ukraine a costly and bloody battlefield for its Russian invaders.

    Hillary Clinton was typically clumsy when she cited U.S. aid to Afghan militants fighting Russia in the 1980s as a potential model for what to do now in Ukraine. But while most American officials have the savvy to avoid proposing a repeat of the course of actions that ultimately led to the formation of al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic points out that many U.S. officials share Clinton’s interest in turning Ukraine into a Russian quagmire.

    Fortunately, the Biden administration (for now) has clearly ruled out imposing a no-fly zone that could lead to a catastrophic and possibly nuclear U.S.-Russia war (despite the protestations of an alarmingly hawkish White House press corps). But we should be clear that Washington regards Ukrainians as a propaganda tool for restoring the U.S.’s reputation, rather than 40 million people whose lives will be further devastated if their country becomes the site of a protracted war.

    To be clear, the surge of enthusiasm for confronting Russia is being driven by the Putin government’s belligerent actions, which have already caused thousands of deaths, created 3 million refugees, and unraveled what were already frayed relations among the U.S., Russia, China and Western Europe.

    People around the world should oppose the invasion and build solidarity with Ukraine, not through a new Cold War but by echoing the demands coming from Ukrainian and global activists to welcome refugees, abolish Ukraine’s debt, revive global disarmament talks and negotiate an immediate end to the war.

    For anyone concerned that these measures don’t do enough to punish Vladimir Putin, there is an obvious and globally beneficial strategy for countering an autocratic government whose economy rests on oil exports. If wealthy governments had spent the last decade converting their economies to renewable energy sources, writes Naomi Klein, “Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons.”

    Instead, the Biden administration is looking to counter the loss of Russian fossil fuels by increasing global and domestic oil production. Like Russia, U.S. politics is a declining empire that has been captured by oil companies and other oligarchs; our democracy is so broken that a single West Virginia coal baron has held his entire party’s program hostage for the past year.

    More generally, the U.S. has been on a slow-motion path (OK, maybe a little faster during the Trump years) toward the same trends of autocracy, oligarchy and hyper-nationalism that more greatly afflict Russia. Liberal foreign policy hawks like George Packer and Ben Rhodes see these trends and think they can be reversed through a new generational conflict that revives the country’s national spirit.

    That sounds a bit like an American version of Putin’s logic, which only shows how much both countries were commonly shaped (and misshaped) by 50 years of the original Cold War. As the deadline for decisive climate action gets closer, the world can’t afford to waste another half-century on a new one.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • President Joe Biden seeks to Destroy Russia and Punish the Russian People

    Who, really, is the War Criminal?

    So what does President Joe Biden want the sanctions imposed on Russia to do? Think back to the 1990s and what the US-NATO imposed no-fly zone and sanctions did to the people of Iraq?  The results were almost 1 million Iraqis dead, according to the website GlobalIssues.org.

    Over at truthout.org, Jake Batinga reported that President Joe Biden strongly supported those sanctions as a US Senator and recently has turned a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan:

    Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances.

    Batinga also notes that:

    More Afghans are poised to die from US sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and US military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, US establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.

    The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the US has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.

    In 1990, the US imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports. These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians.

    BRIC’s Made of Straw

    The BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China have been in the news lately and for good reason. There is talk, and talk is cheap, of course, of China and Russia creating an alternative payment system to the US dollar dominated international payments system SWIFT.

    Already Russia has joined China’s Cross Border Interbank Payment System as an alternative to SWIFT, along with joining China’s UnionPay credit card system which serves as an alternative to Visa and Master Card who, along with dozens of other Western country businesses (Europe, USA plus Japan and South Korea), bolted Russia’s marketplace after its military operation got started in Ukraine in late February.

    India apparently is trading with Russia in a rupee, ruble swap but that seems ad hoc, at best. And there is news of Saudi Arabia cutting a deal with China to use the yuan as an exchange currency. Brazil has enough internal problems to deal with: crime, disease, Amazon deforestation.

    Chinese leaders must realize that if Russia falters in Ukraine which means it is unable to liberate the Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, gain international recognition of Crimea—and maintain territorial gains made on the coast of the Black and Azov Seas—and/or President Putin is removed from office and Russia destabilizes, the United States will chop up Russia into separate republics, steal its resources and cancel the billions in deals signed with China for oil, gas, and grains

    The United States will bring the NATO military alliance to China’s doorstep and likely put on show trials in the International Criminal Court arguing that Putin and his general staff are war criminals, which would be utter nonsense given US policies and actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

    China is trying to placate the US because it still fears US economic and military power. Its party officials probably figure that they can keep building up the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Air Force and Strategic nuclear capability and when there is enough firepower, will be able to challenge US dominance in the Pacific. But how?

    The PLA forces have no modern combat experience to speak of and their plan seems to be; well, no plan at all. They are faced with the combined forces of the USA that are building new aircraft carriers, submarines and long distance B-21 bombers, along with upgrading all three legs of its nuclear TRIAD.

    Which brings us back to Russia and the economic support it needs so that Biden’s sanctions don’t end up killing a million Russians. Because that is what Biden intends and his track record on supporting sanctions is disturbingly clear. When China looks at what the USA-NATO have done to the Russian economy, they are looking at their own future.

    Hypocrisy

    Joe Scalice at the World Socialist Website notes the hypocrisy of the USA-NATO and the compliant MSM Western media:

    The wars of aggression of Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump contained the accumulated evil of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the drone bombing of children at play, villages leveled by precision missiles and refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. Baghdad crumbled beneath the shock and awe of unstinting US bombing; Fallujah burned with white phosphorus.

    The American mass media is complicit in these crimes. They never challenged the government’s assertions, but trumpeted its pretexts. They whipped up a war-frenzy in the public. Pundits who now denounce Putin were ferocious in demanding that the United States bomb civilians.

    Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 1999 of the bombing of Serbia under Clinton, “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted… [W]e will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.” [Biden supported bombing Belgrade]

    Biden labels Putin a war criminal in the midst of a new media hysteria. Never referring to the actions of the United States, never pausing for breath, the media pumps out the fuel for an ever-expanding war. Hubris and hypocrisy stamp every statement from Washington with an audacity perhaps unique in world history. Its hands bathed in blood up to the elbows, US empire gestures at its enemies and cries war crimes.

    Tactics

    Indeed, the media has capitulated to the war propaganda narrative of the Biden Administration. The US MSM relies almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources for its error filled reporting. If you are reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, you aren’t getting the full story. Pro-Russia sites like Southfront, Newsfront, War Gonzo and others tell a different story. For example, the Retroville Mall destruction on March 21 was reported in the West as a wanton and random attack on a shopping place. In fact, the below-building parking lot was home to Ukrainian military vehicles clearly shown by a set of photos that appeared on Newsfront. Residential buildings are clearly being used by the Ukrainian forces to hide their weapons or launch anti-tank attacks from apartment building roofs or top floor apartments. That’s a tactic that makes sense. The Russians know that.

    You’ve got to look at all the news sources, even the ones you don’t want to view, in order to be informed about this conflict.

    The post President Joe Biden seeks to Destroy Russia and Punish the Russian People first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.