The deaths of thousands of civilians killed in US drone strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria were covered up by the Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations, reports Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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“It’s never enough” said former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about military spending. “They always want more.” ((Jay Hill, in the House of Commons, quoting then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from an article by Stephanie Rubec in the Ottawa Sun, October 20, 2003.))
Canada shouldn’t spend huge sums on 88 new fighter jets incapable of protecting the population against pressing security threats. The warplanes will simply strengthen Canada’s powerful, offensive air force.
Amidst a pandemic and climate crisis the security argument for spending $19 billion – $77 billion over their life cycle – on fighter jets is extremely weak. New warplanes won’t protect against climate induced disasters or new viruses. Worse still, purchasing heavy carbon emitting fighter jets diverts resources away from dealing with these genuine security threats.
But we require these warplanes to protect Canada, say the militarists. In fact, many countries don’t have fighter jets. More than 30 nations, including Costa Rica, Iceland and Panama, don’t have an active military force at all while Ireland hasn’t had fighter jets for two decades. Nor has New Zealand, but the militarists who demand Canada follow its “Five Eyes” counterparts won’t mention that.
Nor do they discuss how Canada’s free trade partner Mexico has no operational fighter jets. Doesn’t that country face a similar menace from the Russians or Chinese? The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) is far better equipped than its counterpart in Mexico, a country with more than twice Canada’s population.
RCAF has about 90 operational CF-18s. It is one of the better warplanes and will remain a top-tier fighter jet for many years to come. RCAF is about the 16th best equipped air force in the world. But Canada is the 39th most populous state. Should Canadians spend lavishly to maintain an air force far better equipped than this country’s relative population size?
Considering the resources required to mitigate the climate crisis and pandemic why not simply maintain the CF-18s and when the RCAF’s standing approaches Canada’s share of the global population consider purchasing new fighter jets. If the RCAF were designed to defend Canada that would be the sensible approach. But that is not, in fact, its purpose. The RCAF is structured primarily to support the US war machine.
Canada’s air force says CF-18s intercept 6-7 aircraft each year in Canada’s Air Defence Identification Zone, which is 100-200 nautical miles from its coastline. (Canada’s territorial airspace is 12 nautical miles from the coastline.) By comparison, notes Brent Patterson, Canada’s CF-18s have conducted 1600 offensive bombing missions over the past 30 years in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria and Libya.
While the military tightly controls news during fighter jet missions, some information has trickled out about what happens when these planes drop bombs from the sky. Pentagon documents suggest CF-18s were responsible for a January 2015 air strike in Iraq that killed as many as 27 civilians. The RCAF claimed it had “no obligation”, reported the internal US documents, “to conduct an investigation” of the incident. In October 2015 the CBC also reported, “Canadian fighter planes have now been connected to a second airstrike in Iraq that has been reviewed by the Pentagon for possible civilian casualties.” In another incident, a CF-18 reportedly killed 10 and injured 20 Iraqi civilians on November 19, 2015.
In 2011 seven Canadian CF-18 fighter jets dropped at least 700 bombs on Libyan targets. Two months into the bombing United Press International reported that Ottawa “ordered 1,300 replacement laser-guided bombs to use in its NATO mission in Libya” and a month later they ordered another 1,000 bomb kits. A number of coalition members placed strict restrictions on their forces’ ability to strike ground targets. These and other countries’ militaries frequently “red carded” sorties, declaring that they would not contribute. “With a Canadian general in charge” of the NATO bombing campaign, explained the Globe and Mail, “Canada couldn’t have red-carded missions even if it wanted to, which is why Canadian CF-18 pilots often found themselves in the most dangerous skies” doing the dirtiest work.
CBC.ca reported that on March 29, 2011, two CF-18s launched strikes that directly aided the Jihadist rebels in Misrata and on May 19 Canadian jets participated in a mission that destroyed eight Libyan naval vessels. On their return to Canada, CBC.ca reported: “[pilot Maj. Yves] Leblanc’s crew carried out the final mission on the day Gaddafi was captured, and were flying 25,000 feet over when Gaddafi’s convoy was attacked.” Human Rights Watch found the remains of at least 95 people at the site where Muammar Gaddafi was captured. According to the human rights group, a sizable number “apparently died in the fighting and NATO strikes prior to Gaddafi’s capture” with multiple dozens were also executed by close range gunshot wounds. Some accused NATO forces of helping to murder Gaddafi.
In the spring of 1999 eighteen CF-18s dropped 532 bombs in 678 sorties during NATO’s bombing of Serbia. About two thousand died during NATO’s bombing. Hundreds of thousands were internally displaced and hundreds of thousands were made refugees in a war that contravened international law.
Two dozen CF-18s were deployed to Iraq in 1990. Among few other coalition members, Canadian fighter jets engaged in combat. They joined US and British counterparts in destroying most of Iraq’s hundred plus naval vessels in what was dubbed the “Bubiyan Turkey Shoot.” Coalition bombing destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. The country’s electricity production was largely demolished as were sewage treatment plants, telecommunications equipment, oil refineries, etc. Twenty thousand Iraqi troops and thousands of civilians were killed. The UN resolution allowed for attacks against Iraqi establishments in Kuwait while the US-led forces bombed across Iraq in what Mark Curtis described as the open “rehabilitation of colonialism and imperialism.”
Buying 88 new fighter jets has little to do with protecting Canadians. It’s about funneling public resources to arms firms and strengthening the Royal Canadian Air Force’s capacity to fight in offensive US and NATO wars. Is this really how we should be spending public resources? If the government was truly concerned about security, it would spend the money on public/co-op housing, cleaning up ecological devastation and preparing for the next pandemic.
The post Fighter Jets Useless against Real Security Threats first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The year 2021 has witnessed the implementation of hundreds of reconstruction projects in several sectors in Syria despite the challenges and obstacles that face the process, mainly the acute economic crisis the country is going through besides the western sanctions imposed on the people of Syria.
The post Hundreds Of Reconstruction Projects Carried Out In Syria In 2021 Despite Difficulties And Challenges appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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The deaths of at least 27 people who drowned as they tried to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy in search of asylum have quickly been overshadowed by a diplomatic row engulfing Britain and France.
As European states struggle to shut their borders to refugees, the two countries are in a war of words over who is responsible for stopping the growing number of small boats trying to reach British shores. Britain has demanded the right to patrol French waters and station border police on French territory, suggesting that France is not up to the job. The French government, meanwhile, has blamed the UK for serving as a magnet for illegal workers by failing to regulate its labour market.
European leaders are desperate for quick answers. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of regional leaders a week ago to address the “migration” crisis, though Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, was disinvited.
Britain’s post-Brexit government is readier to act unilaterally. It has been intensifying its “hostile environment” policy towards asylum seekers. That includes plans to drive back small boats crossing the Channel, in violation of maritime and international law, and to “offshore” refugees in remote detention camps in places such as Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. UK legislation is also being drafted to help deport refugees and prosecute those who aid them, in breach of its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Not surprisingly, anti-immigration parties are on the rise across Europe, as governments question the legitimacy of most of those arriving in the region, calling them variously “illegal immigrants”, “invaders” and “economic migrants”.
The terminology is not only meant to dehumanise those seeking refuge. It is also designed to obscure the West’s responsibility for creating the very conditions that have driven these people from their homes and on to a perilous journey towards a new life.
Power projection
In recent years, more than 20,000 refugees are estimated to have died crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Europe, including at least 1,300 so far this year. Only a few of these deaths have been given a face – most notably Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose body washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after he and others in his family drowned on a small boat trying to get to Europe.
The numbers trying to reach the UK across the Channel, though smaller, are rising too – as are the deaths. The 27 people who drowned two weeks ago were the single largest loss of life from a Channel crossing since agencies began keeping records seven years ago. Barely noted by the media was the fact that the only two survivors separately said British and French coastguards ignored their phone calls for help as their boat began to sink.
But no European leader appears ready to address the deeper reasons for the waves of refugees arriving on Europe’s shores – or the West’s role in causing the “migration crisis”.
The 17 men, seven women, including one who was pregnant, and three children who died were reportedly mostly from Iraq. Others trying to reach Europe are predominantly from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of North Africa.
That is not accidental. There is probably nowhere the legacy of western meddling – directly and indirectly – has been felt more acutely than the resource-rich Middle East.
The roots of this can be traced back more than a century, when Britain, France and other European powers carved up, ruled and plundered the region as part of a colonial project to enrich themselves, especially through the control of oil.
They pursued strategies of divide and rule to accentuate ethnic tensions and delay local pressure for nation-building and independence. The colonisers also intentionally starved Middle Eastern states of the institutions needed to govern after independence.
The truth is, however, that Europe never really left the region, and was soon joined by the United States, the new global superpower, to keep rivals such as the Soviet Union and China at bay. They propped up corrupt dictators and intervened to make sure favoured allies stayed put. Oil was too rich a prize to be abandoned to local control.
Brutal policies
After the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the Middle East was once again torn apart by western interference – this time masquerading as “humanitarianism”.
The US has led sanctions regimes, “shock and awe” air strikes, invasions and occupations that devastated states independent of western control, such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. They may have been held together by dictators, but these states – until they were broken apart – provided some of the best education, healthcare and welfare services in the region.
The brutality of western policies, even before the region’s strongmen were toppled, was trumpeted by figures such as Madeleine Albright, former US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state. In 1996, when asked about economic sanctions that by then were estimated to have killed half a million Iraqi children in a failed bid to remove Saddam Hussein, she responded: “We think the price is worth it.”
Groups such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State quickly moved in to fill the void that was left after the West laid waste to the economic and social infrastructure associated with these authoritarian governments. They brought their own kind of occupation, fragmenting, oppressing and weakening these societies, and providing additional pretexts for meddling, either directly by the West or through local clients, such as Saudi Arabia.
States in the region that so far have managed to withstand this western “slash and burn” policy, or have ousted their occupiers – such as Iran and Afghanistan – continue to suffer from crippling, punitive sanctions imposed by the US and Europe. Notably, Afghanistan has emerged from its two-decade, US-led occupation in even poorer shape than when it was invaded.
Elsewhere, Britain and others have aided Saudi Arabia in its prolonged, near-genocidal bombing campaigns and blockade against Yemen. Recent reports have suggested that as many as 300 Yemeni children are dying each day as a result. And yet, after decades of waging economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, western states have the gall to decry those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants”.
Climate crisis
The fallout from western interference has turned millions across the region into refugees, forced from their homes by escalating ethnic discord, continued fighting, the loss of vital infrastructure, and lands contaminated with ordnance. Today, most are languishing in tent encampments in the region, subsisting on food handouts and little else. The West’s goal is local reintegration: settling these refugees back into a life close to where they formerly lived.
But the destabilisation caused by western actions throughout the Middle East is being compounded by a second blow, for which the West must also take the lion’s share of the blame.
Societies destroyed and divided by western-fuelled wars and economic sanctions have been in no position to withstand rising temperatures and ever-longer droughts, which are afflicting the Middle East as the climate crisis takes hold. Chronic water shortages and repeated crop failures – compounded by weak governments unable to assist – are driving people off their lands, in search of better lives elsewhere.
In recent years, some 1.2 million Afghans were reportedly forced from their homes by a mix of droughts and floods. In August, aid groups warned that more than 12 million Syrians and Iraqis had lost access to water, food and electricity. “The total collapse of water and food production for millions of Syrians and Iraqis is imminent,” said Carsten Hansen, the regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council.
According to recent research, “Iran is experiencing unprecedented climate-related problems such as drying of lakes and rivers, dust storms, record-breaking temperatures, droughts, and floods.” In October, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted that climate change was wreaking havoc in Yemen too, with extreme flooding and an increased risk of waterborne diseases.
Western states cannot evade their responsibility for this. Those same countries that asset-stripped the Middle East over the past century also exploited the resulting fossil-fuel bonanza to intensify the industrialisation and modernisation of their own economies. The US and Australia had the highest rates of fossil fuel consumption per capita in 2019, followed by Germany and the UK. China also ranks high, but much of its oil consumption is expended on producing cheap goods for western markets.
The planet is heating up because of oil-hungry western lifestyles. And now, the early victims of the climate crisis – those in the Middle East whose lands provided that oil – are being denied access to Europe by the very same states that caused their lands to become increasingly uninhabitable.
Impregnable borders
Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial interference, its wars and the climate crisis that its consumption-driven economies have generated. Countries such as Britain are not just worried about the tens of thousands of applications they receive each year for asylum from those who have risked everything for a new life.
They are looking to the future. Refugee camps are already under severe strain across the Middle East, testing the capacities of their host countries – Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – to cope.
Western states know the effects of climate change are only going to worsen, even as they pay lip service to tackling the crisis with a Green New Deal. Millions, rather than the current thousands, will be hammering on Europe’s doors in decades to come.
Rather than aiding those seeking asylum in the West, the 1951 Refugee Convention may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles they face. It excludes those displaced by climate change, and western states are in no hurry to broaden its provisions. It serves instead as their insurance policy.
Last month, immediately after the 27 refugees drowned in the Channel, Patel told fellow legislators that it was time “to send a clear message that crossing the Channel in this lethal way, in a small boat, is not the way to come to our country.”
But the truth is that, if the British government and other European states get their way, there will be no legitimate route to enter for those from the Middle East whose lives and homelands have been destroyed by the West.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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The US and its allies are pushing the world toward nuclear armageddon. The US and its allies armed Al Qaeda in Syria. The US and its allies are carrying out a literal genocide in Yemen. The US and its allies are deliberately starving children by the thousands. Shut up about Russia and China.
Desmond Tutu said “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This is especially true of the unjust situation in which the largest power structure on earth oppresses and tyrannizes populations around the world to force their obedience. Refusing to take a clear stance against that power structure is siding with it.
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William Van Wagenen has a new article out with The Libertarian Institute documenting the mountains of evidence that the US and its allies were supporting Al Qaeda-tied militias in Syria from the beginning of the war, in direct contradiction of the mainstream narrative that that started later.
This is what happened in Syria, it’s what happened in Libya, and it’s what was on track to happen in Xinjiang before Beijing said “nah” and launched its crackdown. The west isn’t mad at Beijing for committing a “genocide”, it’s mad at Beijing for preventing one.
Like so many other western propaganda operations these days, this one is predominantly about China’s Belt and Road Initiative which it plans to use to help rise above US hegemony and create a multipolar world. The actual interest in Xinjiang has been about the fact that it is a key geostrategic region that the western empire would greatly benefit from balkanizing away from China so it can’t fulfill the crucial role planned for it in the BRI.
This map says more than any article you'll ever see in corporate media about why Western imperialist countries (that have spent decades killing Muslims) suddenly pretend to care about Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China.
They want to break China up and stop its Belt and Road Initiative. pic.twitter.com/mhWSsrtSIu
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 25, 2020
Criticize Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang all you want, but it is indisputably orders of magnitude less draconian than the US “war on terror” approach which has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since 9/11.
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Yes, China’s government is more authoritarian than yours in some ways. Also, you’re being deceived by a massive, sweeping propaganda campaign about the things China’s government does and the threat it poses to you. Both of these things are true. They do not contradict each other.
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If somebody somehow managed to leak 100 percent of all classified information on all US government malfeasance, it probably wouldn’t have the effect you’d imagine. The mass media would either ignore it or spin it into obscurity, and it would be quickly shuffled out of the spotlight. We may be sure this is true because there’s already more than enough publicly available information on US government depravity to completely discredit all of its leading institutions. The reason that information hasn’t caused uproar and unrest is because of narrative management. Propaganda is the ultimate enemy.
The real problem isn’t access to information so much as the way that information is presented to the average citizen. That’s why it’s so important to attack and discredit the means of information presentation at mass scale wherever there’s an opportunity. Imperial narrative control is our real prison.
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You can understand why the US political system refuses to bring Americans out of debt and impoverishment by imagining what would happen if it didn’t. Ordinary people would use their new financial influence to create a system that serves them rather than serving a globe-spanning empire. In a system where money equals power, people would begin using their new economic power to change political and economic realities for their benefit. They’d begin working to divert wasteful war machine spending to themselves. The oligarchs who control both US political parties can’t have that.
Money is power and power is relative, so those with lots of money are incentivised to keep as much money as possible for themselves to maximize their power. If everyone is a king then nobody is a king. There is a tremendous amount of power riding on keeping Americans poor and busy.
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Echo chamber dynamics and cognitive biases are the uncrowned rulers of the human worldview. They shape our perceptions of what’s happening in the world and tend to do so without ever even being noticed. That’s why introspection and self-awareness are fundamental to understanding.
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The world is burning and psychopaths are brandishing armageddon weapons in the name of global domination. If you are going to spend any of your remaining time on this planet fighting, it would probably be wise to spend it fighting for something that truly matters.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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Senior OPCW officials doctored the original report; erased the conclusions of expert toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death; and thwarted the key investigate area of forensic pathology, which could have helped determine how the dozens of civilian victims in Douma lost their lives. Instead of explaining the extensive suppression, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias has avoided questions; offered false excuses; and smeared the veteran scientists who challenged the cover-up from within.
Guest: Dr. Piers Robinson. Co-Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, and convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. Working with the Berlin Group 21, led by veteran diplomats Hans von Sponeck and Jose Bustani to seek accountability for the OPCW cover-up.
The post How The OPCW’s Syria Probe Censored Science appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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Over the past month, in a break from its usual focus on COVID-19, the Western mainstream media has dedicated a sizeable amount of coverage to unverified claims by unnamed US intelligence officials that the Russian Federation is planning an imminent military invasion of its western neighbour Ukraine – under the rule of the successive US-EU friendly governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky since 2014, when the CIA-orchestrated Euromaidan colour revolution toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, following his November 2013 decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favour of pursuing closer ties with Moscow.
The coverage, which comes at a time of increased tensions in Eastern Europe amidst a build-up of refugees on the Belarus-Poland border being labelled as an attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko to destabilise the European Union, has resulted in widespread condemnation of Moscow by the Western media and political establishment…
The post Russia And Israel – A Double Standard In International Condemnation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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Huge media coverage has been devoted to allegations, and now serious evidence, that a Christmas party was held at 10 Downing Street on 18 December 2020. London was then in a strict lockdown with social events banned, including parties.
In leaked footage obtained by ITV News, senior Downing Street staff are shown four days later, laughing and joking about the party being a ‘business meeting’ with ‘cheese and wine’. Allegra Stratton, then Boris Johnson’s press secretary, was leading a mock televised press briefing and, through laughter, said there had been ‘definitely no social distancing.’
The original story was broken on 30 November by Pippa Crerar, the Daily Mirror political editor. When pressed at Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson refused to deny three times that a ‘boozy party’ had taken place at 10 Downing Street when such events were banned.
One source who was aware of the party in Downing Street told ITV News:
‘We all know someone who died from Covid and after seeing this all in the papers I couldn’t not say anything. I’m so angry about it all, the way it is being denied.’
Understandably, there is much public anger, though perhaps little surprise, that the Tory government under Johnson has once again been found to have broken rules and then attempted to deceive the public about it. That anger is felt most keenly by those who suffered the unimaginable pain and grief of not being allowed to be with loved ones who were dying of Covid.
Even BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, who has spent much of her latter career shielding Johnson, began her BBC News website piece on the latest revelations with condemnations from Tory MPs: ‘Indefensible’, ‘catastrophic’ and ‘astonishing’.
She added:
‘Expect to hear plenty of the charge of “one rule for us, one rule for them” in the next few days.
‘On the back of Downing Street’s attempt to change the rules on MPs’ behaviour after former minister Owen Paterson broke them, even some senior Conservatives are making that claim tonight.’
It is possible that this is yet another nail in the coffin for Johnson’s leadership of the Tory party. There will surely come a time, if it has not already, when the Conservatives will assess that he has become an electoral liability and that he must be replaced to ‘steady the ship’ in order to continue promoting elite interests. After all, financial capital and the establishment require a ‘respectable’ figure at the helm.
While public anger is justified and entirely understandable, with the ‘mainstream’ media judging that the scandal deserves laser-like focus and intensity, the bigger picture is that the government has committed much greater crimes that have not received the same level of scrutiny.
A Surreptitious Parade Of Parliamentary Bills
Just one example is the Health and Care Bill that was being passed while the furore over the Downing Street Christmas party was erupting. As John Pilger observed:
‘The US assault on the National Health Service, legislated by the Johnson govt, is now relentless – but always by “stealth”, as Thatcher planned.’
Pilger, whose 2019 documentary, The Dirty War on the NHS, is a must-watch, urged everyone to read ‘a rare explanatory piece’ on this assault, largely ignored by corporate media including the BBC. The article, by policy analyst Stewart Player and GP Bob Gill, warned that the ‘Health and Care Bill making its way through official channels simply reinforces’ the ‘penetration of the healthcare system’ by private interests; in particular, the giant U.S. insurer UnitedHealth.
Player and Gill explained that the bill’s centrepiece is a national scheme of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) across all 42 health regions of England. This network of ICSs ‘is being effectively designed and fast-tracked by the private UnitedHealth’.
They continued:
‘The Health and Care Bill will essentially provide legislative lock-in for the changes already embedded throughout the NHS. Patients will be denied care to generate profits for the ICS, over which their family physician or hospital specialist will have no influence, while the growing unmet patient need will have to be serviced either through out-of-pocket payments, top-up private insurance, or not at all.’
Player and Gill warned:
‘The NHS will, in the immediate future, resemble “Medicare Advantage” or “Medicaid Managed Care”, a basic, publicly funded, privately controlled and delivered corporate cash cow repurposed to make profit, though in time the full range of the organizational options found in the U.S. will follow.
‘All this will increase the total cost of healthcare, deliver less, harm thousands, enrich foreign corporations and destroy what was once Britain’s national pride.’
Where is the in-depth scrutiny and across-the-board coverage of this scandal?
Likewise, where is the large-scale, non-stop ‘mainstream’ media outrage over the Tory government’s Nationality and Border Bill to be voted on this week? Home Secretary Priti Patel said the Bill would tackle ‘illegal’ immigration and the ‘underlying pull factors into the UK’s asylum system’.
However, as Labour activist Mish Rahman noted via Twitter:
‘While ppl are focused on the video of the govt laughing at us a year ago and a Downing Street Party – the government, with the minimum of media coverage are getting the Nationality & Borders bill passed which will allow them to strip ppl like me of my citizenship without notice’
A report by the New Statesman found that almost six million people from ethnic minority backgrounds in England and Wales could have their British citizenship in jeopardy. Al Jazeera noted that:
‘The bill also aims to rule as inadmissible asylum claims made by undocumented people as well as criminalise them and anyone taking part in refugee rescue missions in the English Channel.’
But, as Jonathan Cook, pointed out: ‘Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out’, adding:
‘Those making perilous journeys for asylum in Europe have been displaced by wars and droughts, for which the West is largely to blame.’
The bill is being pushed through shortly after the appalling tragedy of 27 people losing their lives at sea while attempting a Channel crossing from France to England. Compounding the tragedy:
‘Barely noted by the media was the fact that the only two survivors separately said British and French coastguards ignored their phone calls for help as their boat began to sink.’
Cook summarised his analysis:
‘Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial interference, its wars and the climate crisis that its consumption-driven economies have generated.’
Meanwhile, yet another bill endangering life and liberty is being pushed by the government. Patel has just added an extra 18-page amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. George Monbiot warned:
‘It looks like a deliberate ploy to avoid effective parliamentary scrutiny. Yet in most of the media there’s a resounding silence.’
The bill seeks to add to the existing plethora of legislation, together with sinister undercover police and surveillance operations, that obstruct and criminalise protest and dissent. Monbiot noted that, if the bill passes, it will become:
‘a criminal offence to obstruct in any way major transport works from being carried out, again with a maximum sentence of 51 weeks. This looks like an attempt to end meaningful protest against road-building and airport expansion. Other amendments would greatly expand police stop and search powers.’
He added:
‘Protest is an essential corrective to the mistakes of government. Had it not been for the tactics Patel now seeks to ban, the pointless and destructive road-building programme the government began in the early 1990s would have continued: eventually John Major’s government conceded it was a mistake, and dropped it. Now governments are making the greatest mistake in human history – driving us towards systemic environmental collapse – and Boris Johnson’s administration is seeking to ensure that there is nothing we can do to stop it.’
Unscrutinised UK Foreign Policy
While corporate news coverage continues to delve into the 2020 Downing Street Christmas party, the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, fuelled in significant part by UK foreign policy, barely gets a mention. Cook rightly observed:
‘Britain and others have aided Saudi Arabia in its prolonged, near-genocidal bombing campaigns and blockade against Yemen. Recent reports have suggested that as many as 300 Yemeni children are dying each day as a result. And yet, after decades of waging economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, western states have the gall to decry those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants”.’
We wrote in a recent media alert that Matt Kennard and Phil Miller of Declassified UK had investigated the largely-hidden role of a factory owned by arms exporter BAE Systems in the Lancashire village of Warton. The factory supplies military equipment to the Saudi Arabian regime, enabling it to continue its devastating attacks on Yemen.
Kennard and Miller reported that:
‘Boris Johnson recently visited Warton and claimed the BAE site was part of his “levelling up agenda”. No journalist covering the visit seems to have reported the factory’s role in a war.’
In fact, you could take just about any article published on the exemplary Declassified UK website and compare its quality journalism with the omission-ridden, power-friendly output of ‘respectable’ media. Here is a recent sample:
- Anne Cadwallader on the UK government’s attempt to rewrite the history of British policy in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, the UK government is actually ‘censoring numerous files showing British army complicity in the deaths of civilians, depriving bereaved families of access to the truth.’ See also Michael Oswald’s documentary film, ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’, about Colin Wallace, an intelligence officer in Northern Ireland who became a whistleblower and was framed for murder, likely by UK intelligence. Declassified UK published a review of this important film, describing it as ‘essential viewing for anyone who seeks to hold power to account, who seeks to understand the dark links between state intelligence and the media apparatus.’
- An article by Richard Norton-Taylor, the former Guardian security editor, titled, ‘Manchester bombing: What are the security agencies hiding?’. He wrote: ‘We need to know why MI5 and MI6 appear to have placed their involvement in power struggles in Libya, and Britain’s commercial interests there, above those of the safety of its own citizens.’
- Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis reported that Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the judge that will soon decide Julian Assange’s fate, is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan who once described Assange in Parliament as a ‘miserable little worm’. When Duncan was the UK foreign minister, he arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy.
- Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote that ‘Britain is ensuring the death of a Palestinian state’. His piece explained that: ‘The UK claims to support a “two-state” solution in Israel-Palestine but the body of a Palestinian state has long been in the morgue, although nobody dares to have a funeral. As long as Britain and other states continue to superficially endorse a two-state solution, Israel will become entrenched as a full-blown apartheid state with international blessing.’
Any one of these topics, and many more on the Declassified UK website, would be a major item on ‘mainstream’ news if there was a functioning ‘Fourth Estate’ to scrutinise power and hold it to account. In particular, Israel is continually given a free pass by the ‘free press’.
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy – a rare example of a journalist who regularly reports and comments on Israel’s serious crimes – published a recent piece, ‘A Brief History of Killing Children’. He wrote:
‘Soldiers and pilots have killed 2,171 children and teenagers, and not one of these cases shocked anyone here, or sparked a real investigation or led to a trial. More than 2,000 children in 20 years – 100 children, three classrooms a year. And all of them, down to the last, were found guilty of their own death.’
Needless to say, these facts are hidden, or at best glossed over, by ‘responsible’ news outlets. As we pointed out last month on Twitter after Israel had dropped bombs on Syria’s capital Damascus – the fourth Israeli attack on Syria in three weeks:
‘Hello @BBCNews
‘Seen this? Of course you have. But most likely you’ll ignore Israel’s latest breaking of international law. Or, at best, you’ll mention it briefly at 3am on @bbcworldservice
‘You are indeed the world’s most refined propaganda service, as @johnpilger says.’
The ‘mainstream’ media has almost entirely ignored major reports by two human rights groups – B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch – classing Israel as an apartheid state. Cook observed that, despite this, ‘the Labour and Tory parties are now competing to be its best friend’. Commenting on a ‘shameful speech’ by Labour leader Keir Starmer that uncritically supported Israel, Cook added:
‘Israel’s apartheid character, its vigorous lobby and support for a boycott are all off the table. But worse, Labour, like the Conservative party, is once again reluctant even to criticise the occupation.’
Near-silence also greeted human rights groups’ condemnation of the UK government’s announcement of a new 10-year trade and defence deal with Israel. The Morning Star was virtually alone in giving ample space to critical voices, such as Katie Fallon of Campaign Against the Arms Trade:
‘The evidence that Israeli spyware has been used against journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers in the UK continues to pile up. This agreement signals that the government prioritises trade deals to the degree that they are willing to jeopardise the security of people in the UK who are most at risk of illegal surveillance — totally at odds with their stated foreign policy priority to protect and support human rights defenders.’
War on War’s senior campaigner for militarism and security, Chi-Chi Shi said:
‘If the UK government observed its duty to uphold human rights and international law, it would end the UK-Israel arms trade.
‘Instead, it is actively enabling grave human rights abuses and Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people.’
But full, accurate and critical coverage of anything to do with Israel is essentially out of bounds for ‘mainstream’ news media.
So, too, is anything that truly exposes the role of corporate and financial power in driving humanity to the point of extinction: a vital point which we have repeatedly emphasised since Media Lens began in 2001.
Following the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the esteemed climate scientist James Hansen summarised that ‘COP meetings are actually Conferences of the Pretenders’ 1.
He continued:
‘Political leaders make statements that they know – or should know – are blatant nonsense. COPs can produce numerous minor accomplishments, which is sufficient reason to continue with the meetings.’
In typically blunt fashion, Hansen stated:
‘Why is nobody telling young people the truth? “We preserved the chance at COP26 to keep global warming below 1.5°C.” What bullshit! “Solar panels are now cheaper than fossil fuels, so all we are missing is political will.” What horse manure! “If we would just agree to consume less, the climate problem could be solved.” More nonsense!’
‘Young people, I am sorry to say that – although the path to a bright future exists and is straightforward – it will not happen without your understanding and involvement in the political process.’
Noam Chomsky, who recently turned 93, concurs. Asked what is the greatest obstacle to solving the climate crisis, he responded:
‘There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel companies. Second is the governments of the world, including Europe and the United States.’
Ending the climate crisis, says Chomsky, ‘has to come from mass popular action’, not politicians.
While corporate news media are content to expose the galling, but comparatively minor crime of holding a Christmas party at 10 Downing Street during lockdown, they remain essentially silent about much bigger state crimes.
- ‘A Realistic Path to a Bright Future’, newsletter [pdf], 3 December 2021
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share – over 65% – of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act.
The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.
Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for however many hundreds of billions in funding Pentagon and arms industry lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committees they should cough up.
Let’s make no mistake about this: Congress’s choice to keep investing in a massive, ineffective and absurdly expensive war machine has nothing to do with “national security” as most people understand it, or “defense” as the dictionary defines it.
U.S. society does face critical threats to our security, including the climate crisis, systemic racism, erosion of voting rights, gun violence, grave inequalities and the corporate hijacking of political power. But one problem we fortunately do not have is the threat of attack or invasion by a rampant global aggressor or, in fact, by any other country at all.
Maintaining a war machine that outspends the 12 or 13 next largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that the United States’ overwhelmingly destructive military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests anywhere in the world—even when there is clearly no military solution and when many of the underlying problems were caused by past misapplications of U.S. military power in the first place.
While the international challenges we face in this century require a genuine commitment to international cooperation and diplomacy, Congress allocates only $58 billion, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, to the diplomatic corps of our government: the State Department even worse, both Democratic and Republican administrations keep filling top diplomatic posts with officials indoctrinated and steeped in policies of war and coercion, with scant experience and meager skills in the peaceful diplomacy we so desperately need.
This only perpetuates a failed foreign policy based on false choices between economic sanctions that UN officials have compared to medieval sieges, coups that destabilize countries and regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that kill millions of people and leave cities in rubble, like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.
The end of the Cold War was a golden opportunity for the United States to reduce its forces and military budget to match its legitimate defense needs. The American public naturally expected and hoped for a “Peace Dividend,” and even veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50% over the next ten years.
But no such cut happened. U.S. officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War “Power Dividend,” a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States, by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
In 1999, as Secretary of State under President Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia.
The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” This was neither. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over NATO’s illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to “get new lawyers.”
Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third-poorest country in Europe (after Moldova and post-coup Ukraine) and its independence is still not recognized by 96 countries. Hashim Thaçi, Albright’s hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at the Hague, charged with murdering at least 300 civilians under cover of NATO bombing in 1999 to extract and sell their internal organs on the international transplant market.
Clinton and Albright’s gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results. But America’s failed wars have not led Congress or successive administrations to seriously rethink the U.S. decision to rely on illegal threats and uses of military force to project U.S. power all over the world, nor have they reined in the trillions of dollars invested in these imperial ambitions.
Instead, in the upside-down world of institutionally corrupt U.S. politics, a generation of failed and pointlessly destructive wars have had the perverse effect of normalizing even more expensive military budgets than during the Cold War, and reducing congressional debate to questions of how many more of each useless weapons system they should force U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for.
It seems that no amount of killing, torture, mass destruction or lives ruined in the real world can shake the militaristic delusions of America’s political class, as long as the “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex” (President Eisenhower’s original wording) is reaping the benefits.
Today, most political and media references to the Military-Industrial Complex refer only to the arms industry as a self-serving corporate interest group on a par with Wall Street, Big Pharma or the fossil fuel industry. But in his Farewell Address, Eisenhower explicitly pointed to, not just the arms industry, but the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”
Eisenhower was just as worried about the anti-democratic impact of the military as the arms industry. Weeks before his Farewell Address, he told his senior advisors, “God help this country when somebody sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” His fears have been realized in every subsequent presidency.
According to Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, who helped him draft his Farewell Address, Ike also wanted to talk about the “revolving door.” Early drafts of his speech referred to “a permanent, war-based industry,” with “flag and general officers retiring at an early age to take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” He wanted to warn that steps must be taken to “insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.”
As Eisenhower feared, the careers of figures like Generals Austin and Mattis now span all branches of the corrupt MIC conglomerate: commanding invasion and occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; then donning suits and ties to sell weapons to new generals who served under them as majors and colonels; and finally re-emerging from the same revolving door as cabinet members at the apex of American politics and government.
So why does the Pentagon brass get a free pass, even as Americans feel increasingly conflicted about the arms industry? After all, it is the military that actually uses all these weapons to kill people and wreak havoc in other countries.
Even as it loses war after war overseas, the U.S. military has waged a far more successful one to burnish its image in the hearts and minds of Americans and win every budget battle in Washington.
The complicity of Congress, the third leg of the stool in Eisenhower’s original formulation, turns the annual battle of the budget into the “cakewalk” that the war in Iraq was supposed to be, with no accountability for lost wars, war crimes, civilian massacres, cost overruns or the dysfunctional military leadership that presides over it all.
There is no congressional debate over the economic impact on America or the geopolitical consequences for the world of uncritically rubber-stamping huge investments in powerful weapons that will sooner or later be used to kill our neighbors and smash their countries, as they have for the past 22 years and far too often throughout our history.
If the public is ever to have any impact on this dysfunctional and deadly money-go-round, we must learn to see through the fog of propaganda that masks self-serving corruption behind red, white and blue bunting, and allows the military brass to cynically exploit the public’s natural respect for brave young men and women who are ready to risk their lives to defend our country. In the Crimean War, the Russians called British troops “lions led by donkeys.” That is an accurate description of today’s U.S. military.
Sixty years after Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, exactly as he predicted, the “weight of this combination” of corrupt generals and admirals, the profitable “merchants of death” whose goods they peddle, and the Senators and Representatives who blindly entrust them with trillions of dollars of the public’s money, constitute the full flowering of President Eisenhower’s greatest fears for our country.
Eisenhower concluded, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” That clarion call echoes through the decades and should unite Americans in every form of democratic organizing and movement building, from elections to education and advocacy to mass protests, to finally reject and dispel the “unwarranted influence” of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.
The post How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In the early days of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death for the more than 40 civilians reported at the scene. Instead of publishing this finding, senior OPCW officials concealed it, and then launched an investigation of a veteran inspector who questioned the censorship. The suppression of the toxicologists is among a series of deceptions by the OPCW leadership to corrupt the Douma probe’s scientific process, as detailed in this new multi-part investigation by The Grayzone. More than three years later, the high-level campaign of censorship and muzzling has mired the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog in scandal.
The post In Syria Probe, OPCW Erased Experts’ Inconvenient Findings appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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More than 30 bipartisan US lawmakers sent a letter to President Joe Biden questioning the administration’s reasoning for bypassing Congress and launching a military strike in Syria earlier this year. Led by Democrats Jamaal Bowman, Peter DeFazio and Republican Nancy Mace, the lawmakers said that Biden appeared to be “acting in contravention of the Constitution”. They also said that the administration has offered less of a basis for its strike than the previous Donald Trump administration did when conducting a strike in Syria.
The post US Lawmakers Raise Questions Over Biden’s Reasoning For Syria Air Strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.
And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.
At the weekend, the Pentagon exonerated itself again. It called a 2019 air strike on Baghuz in Syria that killed dozens of women and children “justified”. It did so even after an investigation by the New York Times showed that the group of civilians who were bombed had already been identified as fleeing fighting between US-backed militias and the Islamic State group.
A US military lawyer, Dean Korsak, flagged the incident at the time as a potential war crime but the Pentagon never carried out an investigation. It came to public attention only because Korsak sent details to a Senate oversight committee.
In announcing the conclusions of its Afghanistan inquiry, the Pentagon made clear what its true priorities are in the wake of its hurried, Saigon-style exit from Afghanistan following two decades of failed occupation. It cares about image management, not accountability.
Contrast its refusal to take action against the drone operators and commanders who fired on a civilian vehicle with the Pentagon’s immediate crackdown on one of its soldiers who criticised the handling of the withdrawal. Veteran marine Stuart Scheller was court-martialled last month after he used social media to publicly berate his bosses.
Which of the two – Scheller’s comment or the impunity of those who killed an innocent family – is likely to do more to discredit the role of the US military, in Afghanistan or in other theatres around the globe in which it operates?
Colonial narrative
The Pentagon is far from alone in expecting to be exempted from scrutiny for its war crimes.
The “honest mistake” is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands – and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way – it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.
This self-righteousness is the source of western indignation at any suggestion that the International Criminal Court at The Hague should investigate, let alone prosecute, US, European and Israeli commanders or politicians for carrying out or overseeing war crimes.
It is only African leaders or enemies of Nato who need to be dragged before tribunals and made to pay a price. But nothing in the latest Pentagon inquiry confirms the narrative of an “honest mistake”, despite indulgent coverage in western media referring to the drone strike as “botched”.
Even the establishment of the inquiry was not honest. How is it “independent” for a Pentagon general to investigate an incident involving US troops?
The drone operators who killed the family of Zemerai Ahmadi, an employee of a US aid organisation, were authorised to do so because his white Toyota Corolla was mistaken for a similar vehicle reported as belonging to the local franchise of Islamic State. But that make is one of the most common vehicles in Afghanistan.
The head of the aid organisation where he worked told reporters pointedly: “I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow [Mr Ahmadi], an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”
The decision was, at best, recklessly indifferent as to whether Ahmadi was a genuine target and whether children would die as a result. But more likely, when it attacked Ahmadi’s vehicle, the entire US military system was in the grip of a blinding thirst for revenge. Three days earlier, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians had been killed when a bomb exploded close to Kabul airport, as Afghans massed there in the hope of gaining a place on one of the last evacuation flights.
That airport explosion was the final military humiliation – this one inflicted by Islamic State – after the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of Afghanistan. Revenge – even when it is dressed up as restoring “deterrence” or “military honour” – is not an “honest mistake”.
Pattern of behaviour
But there is an even deeper reason to be sceptical of the Pentagon inquiry. There is no “honest mistake” defence when the same mistakes keep happening. “Honest mistakes” can’t be a pattern of behaviour.
And yet the long years of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and meddling in Syria, have been pockmarked with air strikes that obliterated families or slammed into wedding parties. That information rarely makes headlines, eclipsed by the Pentagon’s earlier, faulty claims of the successful “neutralisation of terrorists”.
But just such “mistakes” were the reason why the US occupation of Afghanistan ultimately imploded. The Pentagon’s scatter-gun killing of Afghans created so many enemies among the local population that US-backed local rulers lost all legitimacy.
Something similar happened during the US and UK’s occupation of Iraq. Anyone who believes the Pentagon commits “honest mistakes” when it kills civilians needs to watch the video, Collateral Murder, issued by WikiLeaks in 2012.
It shows the aerial view of helicopter pilots in 2007 as they discuss with a mix of technical indifference and gruesome glee their missile strikes on a crowd of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, moving about on the streets of Baghdad below.
When a passing van tries to come to the aid of one of wounded, the pilots fire again, even though a child is visible in the front seat. In fact, two children were found inside the van. US soldiers arriving at the scene made the decision to deny both treatment from US physicians.
As the pilots were told of the casualties, one commented: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other responded: “That’s right.”
Before the video was leaked, the military claimed that the civilians killed that day had been caught in the crossfire of a gun battle. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” a statement read.
The video, however, shows that there was nothing honest or mistaken about the way those Iraqis died, even if there was no specific intention to kill civilians. They were killed because US commanders were uninterested in the safety of those it occupied, because they were indifferent to whether Iraqis, even Iraqi children, lived or died.
Killing innocents
The states that cry loudest that they kill innocents “by accident” or “unintentionally” or because “the terrorists shield behind them” are also the ones that keep killing innocents.
Israel’s version of this is the “tragic mistake” – the excuse it used in 2014 when its navy fired two precision missiles at a beach in Gaza at exactly the spot where four boys were playing football. They were killed instantly. In seven weeks of pummelling Gaza in 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children and more than 850 adult civilians. And yet all were apparently “honest mistakes” because no soldiers, commanders or politicians were ever held to account for those deaths.
Palestinian civilians keep dying year after year, decade after decade, and yet they are always killed by an “honest mistake”. Israel’s excuses are entirely unconvincing for the same reason the Pentagon’s carry no weight.
Both have committed their crimes in another people’s territory to which they have not been invited. Both militaries rule over those people without good cause, treating the local population as “hostiles”. And both act in the knowledge that their soldiers enjoy absolute impunity.
In reaching its decision on the killing of the Afghan family this month, the Pentagon stated that it had not “broken the law“. That verdict too is not honest. What the US military means is that it did not break its own self-serving rules of engagement, rules that permit anything the US military decides it wants to do. It behaves as if no laws apply to it when it invades others’ lands, not even the laws of the territories it occupies.
That argument is dishonest too. There are the laws of war and the laws of occupation. There is international law. The US has broken those laws over and over again in Afghanistan and Iraq, as has Israel in ruling over the Palestinians for more than five decades and blockading parts of their territory.
The problem is that there is no appetite to enforce international law against the planet’s sole military superpower and its allies. Instead it is allowed to claim the role of benevolent global policeman.
No scrutiny
Both the US and Israel declined to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) that judges war crimes. That refusal was no “honest mistake” either. Each expected to avoid the court’s scrutiny.
US and Israeli leaders know their soldiers commit war crimes, and that they themselves commit war crimes by approving either the wars of aggression these soldiers are expected to wage or the messy, long-term belligerent occupations they are supposed to enforce. But whatever they hope, the failure to ratify the statute does not serve as a stay-out-of-jail card. US and Israeli leaders still risk falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction if the countries they invade or occupy have ratified the statute, as is the case with Afghanistan and Palestine.
The catch is that the Hague court can be used only as a last resort – in other words, it has to be shown first that any country accused of war crimes failed to seriously investigate those crimes itself.
The chorus from the US and Israel of “honest mistake” every time they kill civilians is just such proof. It demonstrates that the US and Israeli legal systems are entirely incapable of upholding the laws of war, or holding their own political and military officials to account. That must be the job of the ICC instead.
But the court is fearful. The Trump administration launched a mafia-style campaign against it last year to stop its officials investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. The assets of the court’s officials were blocked and they were denied the right to enter the US.
That is the reason why the court keeps failing to stand up for the victims of western war crimes like Zemerai Ahmadi and his children. The ICC had spent 15 years dragging its feet before it finally announced last year that it would investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan. That resolve quickly dissolved under the subsequent campaign of pressure.
In September, shortly after Ahmadi’s family was killed by US drone operators, the court’s chief prosecutor declared that investigations into US actions in Afghanistan, including widespread claims of torture of Afghans, would be “deprioritised.” The investigation would focus instead on the Taliban and Islamic State.
Once again, enemies of the US, but not the US itself, will be called to account. That too is no “honest mistake”.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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This is Matt Broomfield. He’s a professional journalist from the UK, banned from 26 European countries, just for doing his job.
Earlier in 2021, Broomfield was detained at the Italian border while on holiday in Greece, thrown into a Greek detention centre, and imprisoned for two months. He was subsequently banned from the 26 countries that make up the Schengen Area for ten years.
While imprisoned, he had a taster of what life is like for refugees trapped in European detention centres. Broomfield said:
My two months in detention were just a brief taste of what many refugees, political activists and journalists from the Middle East and beyond must spend a lifetime enduring. My case provided a window into the violence, squalor and farce of day-to-day life in the EU’s detention-deportation machine.
The blue area marks the Schengen countries that Broomfield is banned from. The amber countries are due to join Schengen. Photo via Wikimedia Commons You can read his account of his experiences here.
A threat to European ‘democracy’
Broomfield hasn’t been given any reason as to why he has been banned from most of Europe, but it is almost certainly because he volunteered as a journalist in North and East Syria (NES), more commonly known by its Kurdish name of Rojava. A region of around 3 million people, the people of NES organise themselves using a model of direct democracy, attempting to give power to the grassroots. It is a society that centres on women’s liberation, religious tolerance, and minority protection as key.
European countries see democracy, in the true sense of the word, as a threat, because they rely on their populations believing in a façade that is labelled as such. NES’s model of grassroots organising has inspired a whole generation of Leftists around the world, so even though the region has been a key ally with the US in fighting Daesh (ISIS/Isil), it is still seen as a grave danger to capitalist countries.
Turkey’s influence
Broomfield suspects that Turkey has been instrumental in him being banned from the majority of Europe. He says:
Since I have never had anything to do with the German authorities, and given Germany’s strong trade ties and strategic relationship with Turkey, it appears likely Turkey asked Germany to issue the ban.
Turkey has massive sway over the Schengen countries. Turkey is the largest host of refugees in the world, with some 3.7 million refugees within its borders, trying to find a passage into Europe. Broomfield continues:
[Turkish president] Erdoğan is able to use the millions of Syrians now resident in Turkey to tacitly or openly threaten Europe with another influx of refugees if they do not accede to his demands.
Turkey has done its utmost to destroy the revolution in NES. It has attacked and occupied parts of the region, backing militias to torture and rape residents. It has carried out bombings and drone strikes on inhabitants, and attacked NES’s water supplies. Women are continually murdered by Turkey and affiliated groups. In 2019, Hevrîn Xelef was murdered by a “jihadist gang allied with Turkey”, while in June 2020, Zehra Berkel, Hebûn Mele Xelîl, and Amina Waysî were murdered by a Turkish drone strike in Kobanê. On top of this, Turkey has been accused a number of times of funding and arming Daesh and other extremists in Syria, and yet it still continues to be a key ally of both Germany and the UK.
Alistair Lyon, a solicitor at Birnberg Peirce, spoke to The Canary about Broomfield’s ban. He said:
It is speculation at this stage as to who is involved beyond Germany, but the decision is certainly in accordance with Turkey’s view of the conflict and it is known to lobby extensively within Europe to promote its views.
A decision made in secret
Lyon went on to say:
The particularly concerning feature here is that a highly controversial political decision, dressed up as a decision in relation to national security, has been made, in secret and without notice or possibility of prior challenge. This immediately calls into question its legitimacy.
Broomfield isn’t the only person from the UK who has been banned from the Schengen area because of his stay in NES. Meanwhile, the British state has attempted to prosecute some of those who have fought for the very same forces that defeated Daesh.
Kevin Blowe, coordinator of Network for Police Monitoring, told The Canary that Broomfield’s case:
highlights the concerted efforts by European nations to suppress dissenting voices who support or sympathetically report on the Kurdish struggle in Rojava.
He continued:
The lack of British government assistance for Matt Broomfield sends a message that solidarity with the Kurds, where no laws are broken, is liable to place campaigners outside of basic human rights protections expected by citizens in Britain and in EU states.
It escalates the already disturbing use of terrorism laws to criminalise those who have travelled to resist the Islamic State in any manner in northern Syria, by a British government that has happily sold arms to the Turkish state that killed British citizens like Anna Campbell.
The Canary contacted the Foreign Office for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Featured image of Matt Broomfield in Deir ez Zor, Syria, with permission
By Eliza Egret
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Guards come and laugh at me through the bars of my cell.
“You’re the English, right?”, they ask me. “What are you doing here?”
“You tell me,” I say, for the hundredth time. But they just laugh and wander off.
I am the only Westerner in a detention centre full of thousands of refugees. I am also the only inmate waiting to be deported to the UK – though of course, I am pretty much the only person here who would not do anything for a one-way plane ticket to London. In a similar irony, the Greek police who run the facility make it very plain they do not want any of my fellow inmates (Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, North Africans) in their country. And yet it’s the same police force which violently arrested them and prevented them leaving.
Earlier this year, while on holiday in Greece, I was detained at the Italian border, arrested, thrown into the Greek detention and migration system for two months, and informed I was banned from the Schengen Area for the next ten years. Though I still haven’t been provided with any documentation about the ban, it appears likely that I am being targeted as a result of my reporting and media advocacy from North and East Syria (NES), the democratic, women-led, autonomous region built around Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), which the Turkish government is hell-bent on destroying. Chillingly, it seems the autocratic Turkish government now has the power to impose a unilateral ban from Europe on a British citizen, professional journalist, and media activist like myself.
My two months in detention were just a brief taste of what many refugees, political activists, and journalists from the Middle East and beyond must spend a lifetime enduring. My case provided a window into the violence, squalor, and farce of day-to-day life in the EU’s detention-deportation machine. But it also illustrates the complicity of European states and the Turkish regime in suppressing journalistic freedom, political dissent, and democratic movements.
Inside the Greek migrant detention system
While travelling from Greece to Italy with a friend earlier this year, I was met off the ferry at the Italian border by a group of armed, balaclava-clad police. I was banned from the Schengen Area for ten years, they told me, at the request of the German government. Thus began my whirlwind tour of the Greek migrant detention system. The port where I was arrested, Ancona, lies on a popular route for people without papers trying to travel through Greece on to Western Europe, and so the Greek police simply dealt with me as they would deal with any irregular migrant pushed back from Italy by the Italian police.
I was variously detained in Patras police station, the notorious Migrant Pre-Removal Detention Center at Korinthos which was condemned by the Committee to Prevent Torture, and another Pre-Removal Center in Petrorali, Athens. Conditions were as you might expect. The police station in Patras only has small holding cells, but I spent a week here sleeping on the bare stone. Others were held in the same conditions for a month or more. For days at a time, I was locked in my cell and not allowed to mix with other inmates, passing the time squashing cockroaches and playing chess with myself on a contraband paper set. Most of my fellow inmates were cut and bruised from the beatings they’d received upon arrest, trying to smuggle themselves on to ferries at the port. On one occasion, the police violently beat a petty drug dealer on the floor outside my cell.
One day myself and a group of my new friends – Afghan migrants – were handcuffed and bundled into a windowless van. To keep us quiet, the police implied we were soon to be released, but instead we found ourselves issued with new prison numbers and lined up along the wall at Korinthos, a massive, police-run prison facility officially known as a ‘Pre-Removal Detention Center’. This name, we soon learned, had become a farce, since there were virtually no ‘removals’ (deportations) taking place due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis.
Officially, people here should have exhausted all possible legal routes to remain in the EU, or else have voluntarily accepted deportation. In practice, they are held for six to eighteen months, or even more. before suddenly being released – sometimes with the assistance of the shadowy lawyers who circle the centre like vultures demanding huge cash payments for unclear forms of ‘assistance’ – sometimes seemingly at random. People are interviewed about their asylum cases, but these days everyone is being rejected, regardless of the validity of their case. Some people are released, re-arrested days later, and placed back in the detention centre for another undetermined spell.
In Korinthos, as elsewhere, the system is totally opaque. All NGOs are banned from entering. Particularly Kafkaeseque is the way some guards will tell you whatever you want to hear; some will say they know nothing, and some will tell you to fuck off, with added racist abuse, where applicable. But they are all simply trying to make their own lives easier. It’s impossible to know how your case is going, where you will be sent next, when your interview will be, whether the lawyers (who never actually visit their clients in the detention facility, only occasionally shouting at them through the barbed wire) really can speed up your release. The conditions are squalid, with frequent water outages, and up to forty men sharing each cell.
The result is desperation. In the cell where I stayed, one Kurdish refugee had recently killed himself in desperation, hanging himself with two phone chargers woven together. The lights are kept burning 24 hours a day, and yet when the residents need a doctor, or the water runs dry, no-one comes. I see one long-term inmate climb up the prison building and threaten to throw himself off just to get access to a dentist.
Another slashed himself all over with a razor after being consistently denied access to the doctor for his agonising kidney problems. There are hunger strikes, fights, and clashes with the guards with stones, and burning mattresses. For the final two weeks, I am transferred to a higher-security facility in Petrorali, Athens, where we once again spend most of the time in isolation. Here, more troubled inmates kept in isolation thrash against the bars, screaming, cursing, begging, fighting.
Rumours fly through the bars as frequently as the cigarettes and teabags passed around via cardboard chutes. Transfers occur in windowless vans. On arrival at a new facility, we are stripped and cavity searched, have our blood taken and are given injections, but not told what the injection is for, fostering a dangerous paranoia among the migrant population.
When I arrive at Petrorali the medical staff tell me, laughing, that I have somehow contracted multiple forms of hepatitis: that I will never be able to have children: and that there’s nothing to be done about this. They send me back to my cell, untreated. It’s only after many weeks of worry later, back in England, that my doctor tells me I have nothing to worry about, and what the Greek tests picked up were my vaccinations against the disease. Whether this was done through malice or oversight, I don’t know.
I see much comradeship and joy too. In Patras, a brace of Hells’ Angels held on drug charges make the migrants and I laugh by breaking wind. They also share the festal food brought in by their wives for orthodox Easter, and advise the young Afghans on how to handle the guards.
In Korinthos, we organise language classes, legal training ahead of the migrants’ admissibility interviews, work-out sessions where we leg-press the fattest guy in the cell, and hold a clandestine livestream where we relay conditions in the prison to the outside world. We play ludo, chess, football, run out into the yard in the rain, and belly-flop on the flooded concrete. I write poetry on the cell wall, Blake, Milton: the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. We laugh a lot, debate politics and religion, comfort one another as best we can.
When I am woken at dawn for the last time and put on a plane back to the UK, my overriding emotion is guilt that I cannot bring all my new friends and comrades with me. It’s all I can do to dish out my last remaining cigarettes before I am handcuffed and swept away.
A cause worth defending
Six months later, back in the UK, I am still trying to get my hands on any official paperwork to explain exactly what has happened. Since I have never had anything to do with the German authorities and given Germany’s strong trade ties and strategic relationship with Turkey, it appears likely Turkey asked Germany to issue the ban. This was done via an opaque institution known as the Schengen Information System, which has been the target of sustained criticism by academics, EU bodies and civil rights organisations since its inception.
But why should the Turkish government care so deeply about a British journalist on holiday in Greece? You will have seen the world-famous images of ‘Kurdish women fighting ISIS’ broadcast around the world, as Kurdish-led forces spent years pushing back ISIS from strongholds like Raqqa before totally eradicating their caliphate in March 2019 – as the main partner force of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, led by the US but including the UK, Germany, and most Schengen Area member states. You will probably also have seen footage from the two Turkish invasions of the region, including the October 2019 assault green-lit by Donald Trump. Turkish warplanes and tanks backed radical militias, including scores of former ISIS members, to take over swathes of NES, looting, raping, pillaging and murdering as they conducted forcible ethnic cleansing against the region’s Kurdish, Yezidi, and Christian minorities.
And beyond the frontlines, the political project in NES has endured. Several million people now live in a system of direct, grassroots democracy, with guaranteed female participation and women’s leadership at all levels of political and civil life. The project is not flawless, but in a region beset by war, poverty, and a total breakdown of infrastructure, NES continues to guarantee remarkably high standards of human rights, rule of law, and due process. The three years I spent living and working in NES were an education in both utopic thinking and practical action, as I witnessed refugees coming together around cooperative farming projects to beat the Turkish-imposed embargo on the region, and the women of Raqqa taking control of their own autonomous council in defiance of ISIS’ continued presence. The revolution is very much alive.
You may also be aware that a number of Westerners have travelled out to join the ‘Rojava revolution’. At first, many joined the military struggle against ISIS, with scores sacrificing their lives in the process. But these days, the majority of Western volunteers work in the burgeoning civil sphere, in women’s projects, health, education – or, in my case, media.
I am a professional journalist, and during my time in Syria, I filed reports for top international news sources like VICE, the Independent, and the New Statesman, as well as hosting a documentary series for a Kurdish TV channel. But my main role was as a co-founder of the region’s top independent news source, Rojava Information Center (RIC). As RIC, we worked with all the world’s top media companies and human rights organisations, including the BBC, ITV, Sky, CNN, Fox, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the US Government, and many more, to help them cover the situation on the ground.
Our raison d’etre was connecting these news sources with people on the ground, to help them understand the reality of NES, without propaganda. I never sought to hide my presence in Syria, or what I was doing there. On the contrary, I was proud to lend my voice to advocate for a political project I wanted the international community to recognise, understand, and engage with.
Political repression
Working in Kurdistan as a journalist is enough to incur political repression from Turkey. Turkey is the world’s number one jailer of journalists, has the highest incarceration rate in Europe, and in recent years has dismissed or detained over 160,000 judges, teachers, civil servants, and politicians – particularly targeting Kurdish politicians and members of the pro-Kurdish and pro-democratic HDP party. Turkey’s actions reach far beyond Turkey and the regions it invades and occupies in Syria and Iraq, with Turkish intelligence going so far as to assassinate three female Kurdish activists in Paris in 2013, while fascist ‘Grey Wolves’ paramilitaries linked to Recep Erdoğan’s AKP party regularly carry out violent attacks in Europe.
The EU must turn a blind eye to these abuses because it relies on Turkey to host millions of refugees who would otherwise travel to Europe. Turkey uses these refugees as leverage to threaten Europe, even while its invasions of NES and military interventions in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and elsewhere force hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes in the face of ethnic cleansing. Absurdly, even Kurdish refugees in the EU must prove that Turkey is not safe for them, with almost all applications being rejected. If Turkey was shown to be unsafe, after all, that would mean the EU admitting it was refouling migrants into life-threatening danger, in defiance of international law.
The issue is not Turkey alone. EU and Western governments regularly target, harass, and detain their own nationals for lending support to the democratic project in NES or the Kurdish rights movement. Volunteers who fought against ISIS have been charged and jailed in Denmark, Australia, Italy, Spain, France and my own home country, the UK. Danes and Australians can be jailed simply for setting foot in NES – something the UK has threatened but not yet enacted.
Fighting for women’s rights, democracy and freedom should not be a crime. But as my case illustrates, this repression is not limited to combatants. In the UK, even members of ecological delegations have been detained under terror laws and prevented from travelling to the region. Facing intense, targeted police harassment, unable to find work as a result, feeling isolated and alone, several former volunteers have killed themselves. At least one other British volunteer in NES has been handed the same ten-year ban from the Schengen Area as myself, and we suspect other peaceful activists have also been listed on the SIS.
Turkish pressure, therefore, contributes to Western governments’ own desire to stop the spread of the decentralised, transformative vision of society put forward by NES. (Turkey, of course, knows they incur much more negative press when their bombs kill British or European citizens than when they are simply wiping out Kurdish and Arab locals – one reason why continued Western engagement in NES is so important.)
Erdoğan is able to use the millions of Syrians now resident in Turkey to tacitly or openly threaten Europe with another influx of refugees if it does not consent to his demands. The UK is particularly close to Turkey as a key trading partner, the more so post-Brexit, and accordingly takes a much harder line against NES than, say, France or the USA, both of whom have welcomed NES’ political leaders to the White House and the Champs-Élysées. Notably, in the UK, repressive moves have come in response to high-level meetings between Turkey and the UK, in particular when arrests targeted not only former volunteers in NES but even their family members in the days following Erdoğan’s 2019 visit to London.
The same shared interests lie behind my own, relatively brief, detention. The political movement in NES resists borders and the violence inherent in the capitalist nation-state. These ideas are anathema to Erdoğan, but they also constitute a challenge to the EU border regime. Little wonder, then, that Turkey and the EU work together to stifle legitimate journalism and political advocacy.
Outside the law
As the British novelty act in the Greek detention centre, I was of course spared the racism, the violence, and the worst of the uncertainty. I knew it would only be so long before I was back in the UK, where, though I had to sit through a ‘Schedule 7’ interview on my return, the police assured me that I was not facing charges and had done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law. It is an immense frustration to be summarily banned from Europe, but then I FaceTime with friends still detained in Korinthos or playing the dangerous ‘game’ trying to jump onto lorries at Patras ferry port, and I remember how incredibly free I am.
The effect of repression against Western volunteers, activists and journalists who have worked in NES is to place us, temporarily, outside the normal protections afforded to UK or EU citizens. Millions of civilians in NES, like millions of migrants in Europe, exist in this vacuum as their constant condition. Turkey feels it has impunity to rape, murder, bomb and ethnically cleanse in NES, which remains unrecognised by any government or international organisation, despite its leading role in defeating ISIS.
The Greek police can beat, humiliate, and dehumanise the migrants in Patras, Korinthos, or Petrorali as much as they please, knowing no lawyers or NGOs are able to enter the detention centres to monitor their behaviour. The inmates of the Greek migrant detention system and the free people of NES are both victims of the same system, which sacrifices peoples’ lives in the name of bilateral trade agreements, arms sales, and ethno-nationalist state politics. But this is precisely why I, and other international supporters of the political movement in NES, have chosen to make our voices heard, even in the face of imprisonment and police repression. This is why I hope my ban will be overturned, and that I can continue my peaceful journalism and advocacy in support of this vital cause.
The vision being promoted in NES, of local, decentralised, grassroots democracy, is the only way to resolve not only the Syrian conflict but also a global crisis occasioned by capitalist extraction overseen by neo-imperialist states. Only in this way can we provide people with what they want most – a safe home they have no need to flee.
Featured image and all other images via the author
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Whistleblowers in the United States military exposed a strike in Syria that resulted in the massacre of around 70 women and children, according to an investigation by the New York Times.
The command responsible for the strike conceded a war crime may have taken place, but a report by the Office of the Inspector General for the Defense Department removed this opinion.
Officials in the Pentagon impeded an investigation and ensured no one would ever be held accountable for the civilian deaths. They also turned on one of the whistleblowers, forcing them out of their position in the I.G.’s office.
What happened proves once again that going through proper channels can be a fruitless and risky career-ending effort.
Lisa Ling, a former tech sergeant who worked on drone surveillance systems and is a known whistleblower, reacted, “Again, the public is notified of a ‘possible’ war crime by a brave whistleblower who was eventually forced out of their job.”
“This is a pattern that exemplifies the need for robust whistleblower protections especially for the intelligence community so often carved out of them. We need more light shined in these secret spaces so that this doesn’t happen again, and again, and again, without the public knowing what is done in our name.”
As the Times reported, on March 18, 2019, “In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank.”
U.S. military forces launched a double tap strike. An American F-15E “attack jet” dropped a 500-pound bomb. As survivors scrambled for cover, another jet dropped a 2,000-pound bomb that killed “most of the survivors.” A “high-definition drone” recorded the scene prior to the bombing. Two or three men were near a compound. Though they had rifles, neither engaged coalition forces. Women and children were observed in the area.“
At nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized, and classified,” and the Times added, “Coalition forces bulldozed the blast site.”
The strike was the work of a classified U.S. special operations unit known as Task Force 9. They were responsible for the third-worst “casualty event” in Syria. According to the Times, an unnamed Air Force intelligence officer in the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar contacted Lieutenant Colonel Dean Korsak, who was an Air Force lawyer. They were ordered to preserve video and other evidence from the “F-15E squadron and drone crew.”
Korsak concluded a “possible war crime” was committed that required an independent investigation. He noted that Task Force 9 was “clearly seeking to cover up” incidents like this strike by logging false entries after the fact—for example, the man had a gun.
The Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations was notified. However, as the Times recalled, a major refused to investigate because civilian casualties were only investigated if there was a “potential for media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, [and/or] concern sensitive images may get out.”In other words, if the Pentagon needed to get ahead of a potential scandal, they would investigate and craft a narrative that could tamp down outrage. But they did not believe the Baghuz strike would ever make headlines.
Korsak tried once more to convince his superiors to investigate in May 2019. They still refused. So Korsak filed a “hotline complaint” with the I.G.’s office in August 2019.
Gene Tate, a “former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office,” told the Times, “When [Korsak] came to us, he wanted to make it very clear he had tried everything else first. He felt the I.G. hotline was the only option remaining.”
Roadblocks prevented Tate from having any success. He could not find the footage from the task force drone that called in the strike. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) removed the war crime finding from a report on the massacre.
In January 2020, according to the Times investigation, the deputy inspector general refused to sign off on a memo that would have alerted authorities to the war crime.
Tate did not hesitate to criticize leadership in the I.G.’s office, and by October 2020, he was forced out of the office.
In May 2021, Tate contacted the Senate Armed Services Committee and sent a 10-page letter that detailed the Baghuz strike. However, as of November 13, he was still waiting for any member of the committee to call him back.
*
To further illustrate how stunning it is that senators on the committee ignored what Tate shared, CIA officers in Syria were so alarmed by the conduct of Task Force 9 that they complained to the I.G.’s office for the Defense Department.
“CIA officers alleged that in 10 incidents the secretive task force hit targets knowing civilians would be killed,” according to one former task force officer quoted by the Times.
The New York Times shared their reporting with CENTCOM prior to publication and asked for official comment. CENTCOM acknowledged “80 people were killed” but insisted the strike was justified.
“The bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians.”“As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms,” according to CENTCOM.This is part of the legacy of President Barack Obama’s administration. He developed a method of counting civilian casualties that would not “box him in.”
In 2012, the Times reported all “military-age males in a strike zone” found dead were presumed to be “combatants” unless there was “explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
If commanding officers refuse to support an investigation into a massacre, then they never have to worry about an investigation moving deaths in the “combatant” column to the “civilian” column, which would make them look bad.
On November 3, the Air Force released the findings of the investigation into the U.S. drone strike in Kabul on August 29 that killed Zemerai Ahmadi, an aid worker and father, his three sons, two of his nephews, and three girls who were toddlers. They exonerated themselves.
“The investigation found no violation of law including the law of war,” Air Force Inspector General Sami Said declared. “We did find execution errors.” Combined with “confirmation bias” and “communication breakdowns,” that “regrettably led to civilian casualties.”
But Said is undoubtedly implicated in the coverup of countless war crimes committed by Task Force 9 and various other special operations units, which engage in similar bombing attacks.
Meanwhile, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale is in a communications management unit (CMU) at a medium-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois. He is closely monitored by the FBI and Bureau of Prisons officials so they can prevent him from further commenting on the bloodshed caused by U.S. drone strikes.
Reflecting on how the cycle of violence with militant groups continues, Ling stated, “They don’t hate our way of life. They rightfully hate our way of killing. Seventy innocent women and children were needlessly killed in Syria, 10 killed in Afghanistan, and plenty more we will never know about.”
“These are human beings, and we took their lives while using sanitized words with fancy legal footwork to get away with breaking international law. It is wrong. It is terror, and I believe Americans are complicit as long as we remain silent about what is being done in our name.”
“We cannot fight a war on terror with more terror,” Ling concluded.The post Pentagon And Its Overseers Suppressed Whistleblowers Who Challenged Massacre In Syria appeared first on Shadowproof.
This post was originally published on Shadowproof.
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As a CIA analyst, David McCloskey covered Syria from 2008 to 2014. He draws on his experience for his new spy thriller, “Damascus Station,” set during the early years of the Syrian war.
David McCloskey joins Aaron Maté to discuss “Damascus Station”; the early years of the Syrian war; the role of foreign powers including the US; the US decision to support the insurgency despite knowing that Al Qaeda and other Salafi jihadist groups were its “primary engine”; allegations of chemical weapons attacks in Syria; and the direction of US policy in post-war Syria.
Guest: David McCloskey. Former CIA analyst who covered Syria for six years, from 2008 to 2014. Wrote memos for the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), lived and worked in CIA field stations throughout the region, and briefed senior White House officials, members of Congress, and Arab royalty.
The post Ex-CIA Analyst On Hidden Realities Of Syria War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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President Bashar al-Assad made a telephone call on Friday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which the two sides discussed the close bilateral relations and means of expanding mutual cooperation.
During the phone call, the two sides affirmed the great importance given to develop bilateral relations as President al-Assad considered the relationship with China as pivotal and important in order to support the Syrian people’s struggle against internationally-backed terrorism and the blockade that largely affected different aspects of their life.
President al-Assad stressed Syria’s keenness to develop ties between the government institutions in both countries, particularly with the improvement of security situation in most regions, and at the same time, accessing to “the Belt and Road Initiative,” which constitutes a road for economy and development.
President al-Assad expressed the Syrian people’s appreciation for China’s political support at international forums, a thing that affirms China’s commitment to international law and world peace and the efforts exerted to preserve the territorial integrity of Syria and stop the terrorist war waged on it.
The president thanked the Chinese President for the large humanitarian assistance that China offered to the Syrian people to alleviate their suffering in light of terrorism and the blockade to which they are exposed.
President Al-Assad reaffirmed that Syria is determined to liberate all its territory from terrorists and the occupied foreign armies. At the same time, Syria is determined to push the process of dialogue among political parties forwards without any external interference until reaching full stability.
President al-Assad congratulated his Chinese counterpart on the 50th anniversary of China’s regaining its legitimate seat at the United Nations, which represents a victory for the right of Chinese people and reflects the importance of the constructive role that China plays on international arena and its contribution to peace and development in the world .
President al-Assad stressed Syria’s support to China in the face of western campaigns which attempt to strike stability in Asia southeastern region and China South Sea, as the world today needs peace and development, not tension or threats.
The Chinese President, for his part, said that friendship between China and Syria is deeply rooted and Syria was one of the first Arab countries that held diplomatic relations with China and one of the countries that proposed the draft resolution regarding China’s regaining its legal seat at the United Nations.
He added that throughout 65 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, bilateral relations have been able to withstand the tests of changes in international situations, and friendship between the two countries become more stronger with the passing of time, as both countries adhere to principle of non-intervention in internal affairs, reject hegemony and policy of force and maintain common interests.
The Chinese president underlined that his country is ready to exert efforts for enhancing the friendly cooperation between the two countries and fulfilling more common achievements, affirming that China firmly supports the Syrian efforts for reconstruction and development, and welcomes the Syrian participation in “the Belt and Road Initiative.”
• First published in SANA Syrian Arab News Agency
The post President al-Assad: Syria is keen on developing relations with China first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Government pocketed half of donations in 2020 as central bank forced UN agencies to use lower exchange rate
The Syrian government is siphoning off millions of dollars of foreign aid by forcing UN agencies to use a lower exchange rate, according to new research.The Central Bank of Syria, which is sanctioned by the UK, US and EU, in effect made $60m (£44m) in 2020 by pocketing $0.51 of every aid dollar sent to Syria, making UN contracts one of the biggest money-making avenues for President Bashar al-Assad and his government, researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Operations & Policy Center thinktank and the Center for Operational Analysis and Research found.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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On October 12 I referred the report Freedom on the Net [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/10/12/report-freedom-on-the-net-2021/ and on 24 April to the latest RSF report [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/04/24/world-press-freedom-index-2021-is-out/]. Now my attention was drawn to another tool to measure internet censorship:
Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population (4.66 billion people) uses the internet. It’s our source of instant information, entertainment, news, and social interactions.
But where in the world can citizens enjoy equal and open internet access – if anywhere?
In this exploratory study, our researchers have conducted a country-by-country comparison to see which countries impose the harshest internet restrictions and where citizens can enjoy the most online freedom. This includes restrictions or bans for torrenting, pornography, social media, and VPNs, and restrictions or heavy censorship of political media. This year, we have also added the restriction of messaging/VoIP apps.
Although the usual culprits take the top spots, a few seemingly free countries rank surprisingly high. With ongoing restrictions and pending laws, our online freedom is at more risk than ever.
We scored each country on six criteria. Each of these is worth two points aside from messaging/VoIP apps which is worth one (this is due to many countries banning or restricting certain apps but allowing ones run by the government/telecoms providers within the country). The country receives one point if the content—torrents, pornography, news media, social media, VPNs, messaging/VoIP apps—is restricted but accessible, and two points if it is banned entirely. The higher the score, the more censorship. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/IBnNS/3/
The worst countries for internet censorship
- North Korea and China (11/11) – No map of online censorship would be complete without these two at the top of the list. There isn’t anything either of them doesn’t heavily censor thanks to their iron grip over the entire internet. Users are unable to use western social media, watch porn, or use torrents or VPNs*. And all of the political media published in the country is heavily censored and influenced by the government. Both also shut down messaging apps from abroad, forcing residents to use ones that have been made (and are likely controlled) within the country, e.g. WeChat in China. Not only does WeChat have no form of end-to-end encryption, the app also has backdoors that enable third parties to access messages.
- Iran (10/11): Iran blocks VPNs (only government-approved ones are permitted, which renders them almost useless) but doesn’t completely ban torrenting. Pornography is also banned and social media is under increasing restrictions. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all blocked with increasing pressures to block other popular social media sites. Many messaging apps are also banned with authorities pushing domestic apps and services as an alternative. Political media is heavily censored.
- Belarus, Qatar, Syria, Thailand, Turkmenistan, and the UAE (8/11): Turkmenistan, Belarus, and the UAE all featured in our “worst countries” breakdown in 2020. But this year they are joined by Qatar, Syria, and Thailand. All of these countries ban pornography, have heavily censored political media, restrict social media (bans have also been seen in Turkmenistan), and restrict the use of VPNs. Thailand saw the biggest increase in censorship, including the introduction of an online porn ban which saw 190 adult websites being taken down. This included Pornhub (which featured as one of the top 20 most visited websites in the country in 2019).
https://comparite.ch/internetcensorshipmap
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
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Rights watchdog accuses Britain of turning a blind eye to degrading treatment of those who lived under IS
Britain is colluding in torture and degrading treatment by refusing to repatriate women and children held in indefinite detention in Syrian prison camps, according to a report from a human rights watchdog.
The assessment by Rights and Security International (RSI) accuses the UK and others of turning a blind eye to lawless and squalid conditions in two camps that contain 60,000 women and children, many held since the collapse of Islamic State.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Since its launch in July 2014, the self-styled open-source investigations website Bellingcat has cemented itself as a darling of mainstream Western media, with its dives into alleged Syrian government chemical weapon attacks and Russian intelligence operations showered with praise, puff pieces, and glitzy awards.
While vehemently insisting that it is independent of government influence, Bellingcat is funded by both the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy and the European Union. CIA officials have declared their “love” for Bellingcat, and there are unambiguous signs that the outlet has partnered closely with London and Washington to further the pair’s imperial objectives.
Now that the media consortium has obtained access to high-tech satellites capable of capturing 50cm resolution imagery of any place on Earth, it is time to place these connections under the microscope.
The post Bellingcat Funded By Contractors That Aided Extremists In Syria appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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During last week’s Tory Cabinet reshuffle, ITV political editor Robert Peston inadvertently summed up the primary function of political journalists:
‘I simply pass on’
His tweet was in reference to a ministerial source saying that Priti Patel was ‘not looking happy’. She remained in her job as Home Secretary.
Peston’s phrase was a tragicomic echo of a remark by Nick Robinson, ITV political editor during the Iraq war, who infamously declared that:
‘It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do.’
(‘“Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor’, The Times, 16 July, 2004)
In 2012, Robinson, by now the BBC’s political editor, mourned:
‘The build-up to the invasion of Iraq is the point in my career when I have most regretted not pushing harder and not asking more questions’.1
However, Robinson’s career certainly did not appear to have been harmed having abdicated this basic responsibility of journalism; namely, holding those in power to account. After a ten-year stint as the BBC political editor, he became a presenter on the high-profile BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Peston’s counterpart at the BBC, political editor Laura Kuenssberg, also performs the required function of ‘I simply pass on’, broadcasting and amplifying the words of those in power with minimal ‘analysis’, far less critical appraisal. Relaying Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s words on the current crisis in gas supply in the UK, as he flew to New York to attend climate talks, she tweeted:
‘Speaking on the plane Johnson said..
1. gas supply probs shd be “temporary”, the squeeze is a result of world waking up from pandemic shutdowns like everyone “going to put the kettle on at the end of the TV programme” and he said he was confident in UK supply chains’
Gary Neville, the football pundit and former Manchester United defender, replied to Kuenssberg’s tweet:
‘Hi Laura do you believe this guys crap ?’
A tad blunt perhaps. But, judging by the number of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’, it was a welcome challenge from someone with a public profile to the endless channelling by highly-paid political journalists of Johnson’s twaddle – and worse (as we will see below).
Daniel Finkelstein, the Tory peer and Times columnist, defended Kuenssberg and responded that reporting the Prime Minister’s words ‘is a part of her job’ so that the public can judge them for themselves. Three obvious glaring holes in his argument are that the BBC political editor:
(a) rarely challenges Johnson (or other government ministers) to any significant extent;
(b) provides very few perspectives or opinions from outside the narrow range of ‘mainstream’ Parliamentary debate (Labour hardly counts as an effective ‘Opposition’ under the Blair-lite Sir Keir Starmer;
(c) ignores Johnson’s many lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations which have been well-documented by several independent political observers, including Peter Oborne and Peter Stefanovic. Kuenssberg and her corporate media peers have given the Prime Minister a free pass on his serial deceptions.
There are countless examples of establishment bias by Kuenssberg (and her predecessors as BBC political editor). Recall, for example, that for years she channelled a one-sided account of Labour’s supposed antisemitism crisis, including an infamous BBC Panorama programme that was demolished as a ‘catalogue of reporting failures’ by the Media Reform Coalition. Recall, too, her evident disapproval when Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, refused to give her a commitment in a BBC News television interview that he was willing to press the nuclear button to launch weapons that would cause untold death and suffering.
On 20 September, 2021, The National newspaper in Scotland reported that the flagship BBC News at Six ‘did not run a single negative news story about the UK Government’ during the previous week, 13-17 September. This was probably not an unusual week in that regard. Genuinely hard-hitting critical reporting of the Tory government is notable by its absence on BBC News and other establishment news media.
The truth is, that on one issue after another, leading journalists like Kuenssberg, Peston, and all the high-profile correspondents ‘reporting’ on politicians, the military and intelligence services spend too much time performing as mere stenographers to power. Rational and critical opposing voices are routinely ignored, marginalised or ridiculed.
Media Lens has documented and explained over the past two decades how ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ are alien concepts to state-corporate journalism. As the US commentator Michael Parenti once noted:
‘Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for “objectivity”. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.’
Similarly, Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, a vital resource for independent journalism, put it well:
‘If you’re sympathetic to the weak, it’s activist journalism. If you’re sympathetic to the powerful, it’s objective journalism.’
The public are, in effect, constantly being subjected to gaslighting by corporate journalists purporting to inform the public what is happening around us. We are being told, explicitly and implicitly, that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the system of economics and power politics that prevail in the world. We are being misled that any serious problems that arise – even climate instability – can be ‘fixed’ by ‘incentivising’ changes to consumer behaviour, rejigging the economy by redirecting public subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, but all still within a corporate-driven ‘market’ framework to maximise private profit, and by implementing technical ‘solutions’, such as capturing and storing carbon emissions (which have failed to live up to the grandiose PR promises made, while fossil fuel companies have received large injections of public cash from governments).
In fact, ‘mainstream’ news is characterised by serial deceptions and omissions that hide essential truths about the world. We are being drip-fed propaganda that preserves the current inequitable system of power, privilege and class – even as we hurtle towards the abyss of climate chaos.
Any one of the topics addressed here could merit a media alert in its own right. Indeed, in each case, we have done so several times before. The objective here is to provide something of an overview of the propaganda system that is leading us towards ever greater levels of inequality and misery, even human extinction; a timely reminder of what is at stake.
Endless War
Consider the recent pull-out of US troops from Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation. In an excellent article for the Morning Star, Ian Sinclair observed that BBC News and other outlets continued to promote ‘misleading narratives about the Afghan invasion and its motives’. As just one example, Sinclair highlighted Johnson’s ‘astonishingly deceitful claim’ that:
‘It was no accident that there has been no terrorist attack launched against Britain or any other Western country from Afghanistan in the last 20 years.’
Sinclair countered:
‘First, terrorist attacks have taken place in Britain and the US that have been inspired by the US-British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.’
He continued:
‘Second, it is widely understood by intelligence agencies and experts that the West’s military intervention in Afghanistan led to a heightened terrorist threat to the West.’
Sinclair added:
‘The final problem with the government’s claim that the war stopped terrorism on the West from Afghanistan is that it’s based on a simplistic understanding of the September 11 2001 terror attacks — that it was necessary for terrorists to “have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilised nations,” as president George W Bush explained in 2006.’
However, the 9-11 attacks were planned initially in Germany, training was implemented in the US and most of the hijackers were Saudi. A recent article in CovertAction Magazine noted that:
‘The invasion of Afghanistan was launched following the NATO invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but eventually it emerged that the report presented to NATO by U.S. Ambassador Frank Taylor contained no actual forensic evidence to support the assertion that the terror attacks had been orchestrated in Afghanistan.’
The 7 July 2005 bomb attacks in London, and the Manchester Arena bombing and London Bridge attacks in 2017, required no ‘safe haven’ for terrorists to commit atrocities in Britain.
Sinclair summed up:
‘The omissions and distortions that have been made by politicians about Afghanistan over the last few weeks, echoed by much of the media, have been so big and unremitting it’s easy to start questioning one’s own grip on reality.’
But following corporate news media daily can have precisely that effect. In gaslighting media audiences, ‘mainstream’ news routinely skews the agenda in favour of what Washington and its allies wish to project. Thus, as Julie Hollar noted in a piece for US-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the corporate media only rediscovered Afghan women and their human rights when US troops left:
‘[corporate media] coverage gives the impression that Afghan women desperately want the US occupation to continue, and that military occupation has always been the only way for the US to help them. But for two decades, women’s rights groups have been arguing that the US needed to support local women’s efforts and a local peace process. Instead, both Democrat and Republican administrations continued to funnel trillions of dollars into the war effort, propping up misogynist warlords and fueling violence and corruption.’
Hollar continued:
‘The US did not “rescue” Afghan women with its military invasion in 2001, or its subsequent 20-year occupation. Afghan women need international help, but facile and opportunistic US media coverage pushes toward the same wrong kind of help that it’s been pushing for the last two decades: military “assistance,” rather than diplomacy and aid.’
She concluded:
‘For more than 20 years, US corporate media could have listened seriously to Afghan women and their concerns, bringing attention to their own efforts to improve their situation. Instead, those media outlets are proving once again that Afghan women’s rights are only of interest to them when they can be used to prop up imperialism and the military industrial complex.’
FAIR has summarised a 20-year-long pattern of corporate media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography since 9-11. The US ‘war on terror’ has likely killed more than one million people at a cost of $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The report states:
‘Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars – because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and water-related disease.’
Cost of War co-director Stephanie Savell said:
‘Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – long after US forces are gone.’
The corporate media played a major role in bringing about this catastrophe, then covering it up afterwards.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is continuing its immoral mission to prosecute Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks co-founder and publisher, for telling the truth about US crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Assange rightly said in 2011 that the US goal was ‘an endless war, not a successful war’. The aim is to line the pockets of the narrow sector of society that profits from the military-industrial complex, at the expense of the general population.
In a piece for Newsweek, Daniel Ellsberg, Alice Walker and Noam Chomsky wrote that:
‘When Assange published hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the public was given an unprecedented window into the lack of justification and the futility of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth was hidden by a generation of governmental lies. Assange’s efforts helped show the American public what their government was doing in their name.’
As we have noted in previous media alerts, Assange’s continued incarceration and long-term confinement, described as torture by Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, is a damning indictment of Western ‘democracy’.
Political commentator Philip Roddis observes astutely that ‘Western democracy is ninety-five percent bogus’ because:
‘(a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when they are “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other large corporations” [quoting Noam Chomsky].’
A recurring feature of ‘democracy’ and its ‘free press’ is judicious silence or quiet mumbling when a ‘mistake’ is made. Consider the BBC’s limited apology, and dearth of follow-up by almost all media, when the BBC conceded its coverage of an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Syrian city of Douma on 7 April, 2018 was ‘seriously flawed’.
As we have described in numerous media alerts, the corporate media declared with instant unanimity and certainty that Syria’s President Bashar Assad was responsible for the attack. One week later, the US, UK and France launched missiles on Syria in response to the unproven allegations. Since then, there has been a mounting deluge of evidence, in particular from whistleblowers, that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the UN poison gas watchdog, has perpetrated a cover-up to preserve the Western narrative that Assad gassed civilians in Douma.
Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens had complained to the BBC following last November’s Radio 4 broadcast of ‘Mayday: The Canister On The Bed’, which propagated the official Western narrative of the attack. In particular, Hitchens had objected to the slurs against an anonymous OPCW whistleblower named ‘Alex’. The BBC had claimed that ‘Alex’ only cast doubt on the official narrative because he had been promised $100,000 by WikiLeaks. The claim was false, as the BBC later admitted. There was no evidence to suggest that ‘Alex’, described as ‘a highly qualified and apolitical scientist’, was motivated by anything other than a desire for truth in sharing his doubts about the attack.
Aaron Maté, an independent journalist with The Grayzone, has vigorously and repeatedly pursued the story, shaming both ‘mainstream’ media and most progressive media outlets who, like the corporate media, have blanked the scandal. He recently wrote a devastating account of the deceptions and evasions by OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias when appearing before the UN. Now, in a must-watch interview with Jimmy Dore about the BBC’s apology, Maté said that the BBC only retracted part of its attack on the OPCW whistleblowers and that ‘the retraction only scratches the surface of its deceit.’
Steve Sweeney, international editor of the Morning Star, noted in response to the BBC’s apology on its Douma coverage that:
‘None of the major British newspapers such as The Times, The Telegraph, or the liberal mouthpiece for war with a human face, The Guardian, gave it column space despite the serious nature of the matter.’
The Stark Reality Of Newspeak
But, of course, ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’. And when evidence emerges to the contrary, it is shunted to the margins or buried. Other countries might be ‘belligerent’, but not us. Hence the deeply skewed reporting of the recent ‘Aukus pact’ between the US, UK and Australia which will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. This was largely presented by state-corporate news, including the BBC and the Guardian, as a ‘defence’ deal to ‘counter’ China in its ‘belligerent behaviour’ in the Indo-Pacific.
BBC News at Ten declared on 16 September:
‘The deal will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian navy to promote stability in the Indo-Pacific region which has come under increasing pressure from China.’
The BBC might as well admit that they are reading out press releases on behalf of Western power.
An online BBC News article included the deceptive wording:
‘Aukus is being widely viewed as an effort to counter Beijing’s influence in the contested South China Sea.’
The weasel phrase ‘widely viewed’ is newspeak for ‘the view from Washington and London’.
Likewise, the Guardian dutifully carried the official US-UK view and framed its reporting accordingly:
‘In Washington, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, made clear that the administration had chosen to close ranks with Australia in the face of belligerent Chinese behaviour.
‘Austin said he had discussed with Australian ministers “China’s destabilising activities and Beijing’s efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms”, adding: “While we seek a constructive results-oriented relationship with [China], we will remain clear-eyed in our view of Beijing’s efforts to undermine the established international order.”’
Imagine if western journalists regularly wrote news reports about the plentiful examples of belligerent US behaviour. And about America’s destabilising activities and efforts to coerce and intimidate other countries, contrary to established rules and norms. But that would be real journalism. Instead, a Guardian editorial oozed its approval:
‘A firm and unified response to China’s actions by democratic nations is both sensible and desirable.’
There was no mention in any of the current reporting, as far as we could see, that the UK is set to increase its number of nuclear warheads by over 40 per cent, breaking international law. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is encouraging the public to report the UK government to the UN.
This behaviour by the UK is no exception. ‘We’ routinely flout the law on arms, nuclear or conventional. Andrew Feinstein and Alexandra Smidman recently reported for Declassified UK, that Britain’s ‘robust’ arms export controls are a fiction:
‘In practice, UK controls on arms exports are all but voluntary, and Britain routinely arms states abusing human rights and those at war.
‘Britain exported more than £11-billion worth of arms around the world in 2019 but UK ministers claim this trade is properly administered in a mantra that goes like this:
‘“HM Government takes its export control responsibilities very seriously and operates one of the most robust arms export control regimes in the world. We consider all export applications thoroughly against a strict risk assessment framework and keep all licences under careful and continual review as standard.”’
However, Feinstein and Smidman pointed out that:
‘These contentions are not true and the stark, unavoidable reality is that the British government and its weapons manufacturers, between whom there is a symbiotic relationship, repeatedly violate domestic law and international agreements on arms controls with no repercussions.’
In short:
‘The British arms industry, politicians, the military and intelligence services can all essentially do what they want, with limited scrutiny and virtually no accountability.’
As just one damning example: in supplying arms and other support, including military training and maintenance services to Saudi Arabia, Britain is an active contributor to the brutal Saudi subjugation of the Yemeni people.
The UK also defies its own arms exports criteria in relation to Israel, to whom the UK has sold military equipment worth more than £400 million since 2015. Even this year’s deadly Israeli attacks in Gaza caused no let-up in UK sales to Israel.
These are all yet more examples of the gaslighting that state-corporate news media are guilty of: the constant framing of the UK as a ‘defender’ and ‘promoter’ of ‘security’ and ‘stability’, while the state and military companies pursue arms sales and a wider foreign policy that kills and endangers people abroad and at home.
‘Nothing Is Moving’ On Climate
Almost inevitably, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg makes a return in this alert for another dishonourable mention. ‘Boris Johnson aims to push for more climate action during trip’, she gushed after travelling as part of a press pack with him and his entourage on a plane headed to New York for climate talks. She wrote that Johnson was ‘delighted’ to be:
‘acting as the host of the government plane he has had repainted with the Union Jack on the tail, urging journalists to approve of the new paint job.’
But the most significant ‘paint job’ here was the BBC’s depiction of Johnson as some kind of climate hero. ‘Brokering climate deals a political priority’, was one headline in Kuenssberg’s report. She added:
‘the prime minister’s main task on this trip to New York is to push other countries to make more meaningful promises on cash and climate.’
The notion that Johnson, who has frequently cast doubt on global warming and made derogatory remarks about ‘bunny-hugging’, is a true champion of climate and environmental protection is bogus and dangerous. As recently as December 2015, when it was unseasonably warm, he published a Telegraph piece titled, ‘I can’t stand this December heat, but it has nothing to do with global warming’.
He wrote:
‘We may all be sweating in the winter air, but remember, we humans have always put ourselves at the centre of cosmic events.’
Referring to the leaders of state who had been at the 2015 Paris climate talks, Johnson added:
‘I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation.
‘There may be all kinds of reasons why I was sweating at ping-pong [in December] – but they don’t include global warming.’
The reference to ‘ping-pong’, and his flippant remarks on the climate talks, suggest the whole thing was all just a game to Johnson; a ‘jolly wheeze’ to provide ammo to churn out another newspaper column.
In this month’s Cabinet reshuffle, Johnson appointed Anne-Marie Trevelyan as his new International Trade Secretary. She had previously rejected climate science in a series of tweets between 2010 and 2012, stating in one:
‘Clear evidence that the ice caps aren’t melting after all, to counter those doom-mongers and global warming fanatics.’
People can, of course, change their minds when confronted by cast-iron evidence and solid arguments. Johnson himself said this month that ‘the facts change and people change their minds’. But the facts had not changed. Certainly not since 1988 when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up and renowned climate scientist James Hansen testified to the US Congress about the already-known dangers of climate instability.
Moreover, how sincere can someone like Johnson be with his appalling track record? Has his understanding around the serious reality and implications of catastrophic climate change really changed? Or does he just say whatever he believes is politically expedient to retain his grip on power?
In April 2021, Johnson waffled about ‘building back greener’ after the pandemic.
‘It’s vital for all of us to show that this is not all about some expensive, politically correct, green act of bunny hugging.
‘What I’m driving at is this is about growth and jobs.’
Experienced observers of political rhetoric will recognise that ‘jobs’ is often newspeak for ‘corporate profits’.
Johnson’s insincerity and disregard for those he considers beneath him surfaced once more in the grossly insensitive remarks he made in ‘joking’ about Margaret Thatcher’s ‘green legacy’. During a visit to a windfarm off the Aberdeenshire coast in July, he was asked if he would set a deadline for ending fossil fuel extraction. He replied with what he clearly thought was a witty remark:
‘Look at what we’ve done already. We’ve transitioned away from coal in my lifetime.
‘Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether.’
Continuing his track record of serial deceptions, Johnson boasted this month that:
‘The fact is the UK is leading the world [in tackling the climate crisis] and you should be proud of it.’
The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was scathing of this ‘lie’ that has been channelled repeatedly by Johnson and other cabinet ministers ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this November:
‘There’s a lie that the UK is a climate leader and that they have reduced their emissions by 45 per cent since 1990.’
She pointed out that the statistics do not include the UK’s share of emissions from international aviation, shipping and imported goods:
‘Of course, if you don’t include all emissions of course the statistics are going to look much nicer. I’m really hoping that we stop referring to the UK as a climate leader, because if you look at the reality that is simply not true. They are very good at creative carbon accounting, I must give them that, but it doesn’t mean much in practice.’
Rational analysis also shows that none of the world’s major economies – in particular, the entire G20 (which includes the UK) – is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate.
The watchdog Climate Action Tracker (CAT) analysed the policies of 36 countries, as well as the 27-nation European Union, and found that all major economies were off track to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The countries together make up 80 per cent of the world’s emissions.
Niklas Höhne, a founding partner of the NewClimate Institute, a CAT partner, warned that:
‘there has been little to no improvement: nothing is moving. Anyone would think they have all the time in the world, when in fact the opposite is the case.’
The lack of seriousness given by UK broadcasters to the crisis is evident in the results of a recent study that showed that the word ‘cake’ appeared 10 times more on British television than ‘climate change’ in 2020 while ‘dog’ was mentioned 22 times more. Mentions of climate change and global warming fell by 10 per cent and 19 per cent respectively compared with 2019, the report from BAFTA-backed sustainability initiative Albert found.
Joanna Donnelly of Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Service, told viewers of the ‘Claire Byrne Live’ programme on Irish television that:
‘when it comes to climate change, we are in an emergency situation’
Irish journalist John Gibbons highlighted the TV clip on Twitter, praising Donnelly’s forthright words, adding:
‘We’re in a Code Red national/global emergency, might be a good time to start acting like it (yes, media friends, that means YOU)’
A soberly-worded, but terrifying, assessment of climate change risk published last week by Chatham House warned that, unless countries dramatically increase their commitments in carbon cuts:
‘many of the climate change impacts described in this research paper are likely to be locked in by 2040, and become so severe they go beyond the limits of what nations can adapt to.’
The report added that:
‘Any relapse or stasis in emissions reduction policies could lead to a plausible worst case of 7°C of warming by the end of the century’
That prospect is terrifying. John Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, warned a decade ago that:
‘the difference between two degrees and four degrees [of global warming] is human civilisation.’
In other words, we are potentially talking about the end of human life as we know it; perhaps even human extinction.
James Hansen, the previously mentioned climate expert, remains sceptical about a truly successful outcome of COP26 in Glasgow. He wrote earlier this month:
‘The bad news: we approach the gas bag season – the next Conference of the Parties (COP26) is scheduled for November 1-12. Gas bag politicians won’t show you the data that matter because that would reveal their miserable performances. Instead, they set climate goals for their children while adopting no polices that would give such goals a chance. Some of them may have been honestly duped about the science and engineering, but many must be blatant hypocrites.’ 2
Other than the ever-present risk of nuclear war, there is no greater threat to humanity than the climate crisis. And there is no more damning example of gaslighting by state-corporate media when they tell us we can trust governments and corporations to do what is required to avert catastrophe.
- Nick Robinson, ‘Live From Downing Street’, Bantam Books, London, 2012, p. 332
- James Hansen, ‘August Temperature Update & Gas Bag Season Approaches’, email, 14 September 2021.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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It is almost taken for granted, if not an article of faith, in the progressive milieu (e.g., here) that the US empire is declining. Does this hold up, or is it comfort food for the frustrated hoping for the revolution?
First, it is essential not to confuse the ongoing decline of the living conditions of US working people with a decline in the power of the US corporate empire. The decline of one often means the strengthening of the other.
In the aftermath of World War II, the US was the world manufacturing center, with the middle class rapidly expanding, and this era did end in the 1970s. It is also true the heyday of uncontested US world and corporate neoliberal supremacy is over, its zenith being the decade of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies. Now, looming on the horizon is China, with the US empire and its subordinate imperial allies (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Italy) unable to thwart its rise this century, even more than when China stood up in 1949.
Yet the US imperial system still maintains decisive economic and political dominance, cultural and ideological hegemony, backed by tremendous military muscle. If US ruling class power were in decline, why have there been no socialist revolutions − the overturning of capitalist rule − in almost half a century? What would the world look like if the US lacked the muscle to be world cop?
Imperialism continually faces crises; this is inherent to their system. The question is: which class takes advantage of these crises to advance their interests, the corporate capitalist class or the working class and its allies at home and abroad. In the recent decades, capitalist crises have resulted in setbacks for our class, and a steady worsening of our conditions of life.
Previous proponents of US empire decline have predicted its demise with an expanding Communist bloc, then Germany and Japan with their supposedly more efficient capitalist production methods, then the European Union encompassing most of Western Europe into a supra-national entity, then the Asian Tigers, and then BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). All challenges turned out to be wishful thinking. Now the proponents of decline expect China itself will soon supplant US dominion. We explore a number of the economic, political, and military difficulties the US empire confronts in its role as world cop.
Imperial Decline or Adjustments in Methods of Rule?
A common misconception among believers of US ruling class demise holds that imperial failure to succeed in some particular aim signifies imperial weakening. Examples of setbacks include Afghanistan, the failure to block North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, catastrophic mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and seeming inability to reign in the mammoth US national debt. However, throughout history, successful maintenance of imperial hegemony has never precluded absence of terrible setbacks and defeats. Most importantly, the fundamental question arising from a setback is which class learns to advance its interests more effectively, the imperial overlords or the oppressed.
The US rulers, as with other imperial nations, have proven adept at engineering more effective methods of control from crises, as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine illustrates. For instance, in the mid-20th century the imperial powers were forced to relinquish direct political governance of their colonial empires, often due to costly wars. Until after World War II, the Western nations owned outright most of Africa and much of Asia. Yet this new Third World political independence did not herald the end of imperial rule over their former colonies. The imperialists simply readjusted their domination through a neocolonial setup and continued to loot these countries, such as siphoning off over $1 trillion every year since 2005 just through tax havens.
Likewise, for seven decades the imperial ruling classes endured repeated defeats attempting to overturn the seemingly invincible Russian revolution. But they only needed to succeed one time, using a new strategy, to emerge victorious.
A third example, the growing US national deficit due to the cost of the war on Vietnam forced Nixon to no longer peg the value of the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce. After World War II, the US had imposed the dollar as the international reserve currency, fixed at this exchange rate. Today gold is $1806 an ounce, yet the dollar continues as the world reserve currency. The US rulers resolved their crisis by readjusting the manner their dollar reigned in international markets.
A fourth example is the world historic defeat dealt the empire at the hands of the Vietnamese. Yet Vietnam today poses no challenge to US supremacy, in sharp contrast to 50 years ago.
The US ruling class is well versed in the lessons gained from centuries of Western imperial supremacy. They have repeatedly demonstrated that the no longer effective methods of world control can be updated. Bankruptcy in methods of rule may not signify a decline, but only the need for a reset, allowing the domination to continue.
Part 1: US Economic and Financial Strength
Decline in US Share of World Production
A central element of the waning US empire argument comes from the unparalleled economic rise of China. As a productive powerhouse, the US has been losing ground. As of 2019, before the COVID year reduced it further, the US share of world manufacturing amounted to 16.8%, while China was number one, at 28.7%.
Similarly, the US Gross Domestic Product itself (GDP) slipped from 40% of the world economy in 1960 to 24% in 2019. GDP is the total market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country.
When GDP is measured by the world reserve currency, the dollar, the US ranks first, at $21 trillion, with China number two at $14.7 trillion. Using the Purchasing Power Parity measure of GDP, which measures economic output in terms of a nation’s own prices, China’s GDP surpasses the US at $24.16 trillion. By either measure, a steady US erosion over time is evident, particularly in relation to China, and a major concern for the US bosses.
Worsening US balance of trade reflects this decline. In 1971 the US had a negative balance of trade (the value of imports greater than the value of exports) for the first time in 78 years. Since then, the value of exports has exceeded that of imports only two times, in 1973 and 1975. From 2003 on, the US has been running an annual trade deficit of $500 billion or more. To date the US rulers “pay” for this by creating dollars out of thin air.
Ballooning US National Debt
The ballooning US national debt is considered another indicator of US imperial demise. The US debt clock puts the national debt at $28.5 trillion, up from $5.7 trillion in 2000. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) numbers, the US debt is 118% of the GDP, near a historic high point, up from 79.2% at the end of 2019.
The international reserves of the imperialist nations do not even cover 2% of their foreign debt. In contrast, China tops the list with the largest international reserves, which covers 153% of its foreign debt.
However, today US debt as a percent of GDP is lower than in World War II, at the height of US economic supremacy. Germany’s debt to GDP ratio is 72%. Japan’s is 264%, making its debt over two and a half times the size of the country’s GDP. China’s is 66%.
Yet a key concern with the ballooning national debt − inflation caused by creating money backed with no corresponding increase in production − hasn’t been a problem in any of these countries, not even Japan. The immediate issue with debt is not its size in trillions of dollars, but the degree annual economic growth exceeds the annual interest payment on the debt.
In the US, this payout costs almost $400 billion a year, 1.9% of GDP. Federal Reserve Board president Powell stated: “Given the low level of interest rates, there’s no issue about the United States being able to service its debt at this time or in the foreseeable future.” Former IMF chief economist and president of the American Economic Association, Olivier Blanchard likewise declared: “Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost” given that “the current US situation in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is more the historical norm than the exception.” According to these ruling class economists, the huge size of the US national debt presents no economic difficulty for their bosses.
Technological Patents
Patents are an indicator of a country’s technological progress because they reflect the creation and dissemination of knowledge in productive activities. Today China is on the technological cutting edge in wind power, solar power, online payments, digital currencies, artificial intelligence (such as facial recognition), quantum computing, satellites and space exploration, 5G and 6G, drones, and ultra-high voltage power transmission. In 2019, China ended the US reign as the leading filer of international patents, a position previously held by the US every year since the UN World Intellectual Property Organization’s Patent Cooperation Treaty System began in 1978.
The failure of the US rulers to thwart China’s scientific and technological advances threatens the preeminence the US holds on technological innovation. Rents from the US corner on intellectual property is a major contributor to the US economy. The drastic measures the US has taken against Huawei exemplify the anxiety of the empire’s rulers.
US technological superiority is now being challenged. Yet, as John Ross points out, “Even using PPP measures, the US possesses overall technological superiority compared to China…. the level of productivity of the US economy is more than three times that of China.”1
The US Still Controls the Global Financial Network
While the world share of US manufacturing and exports has shrunk, the US overlords still reign over the world financial order. A pillar of their world primacy lies in the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency,” an innocuous term referring to US sway over the global financial and trade structure, including international banking networks, such as the World Bank and the IMF.
Following the 1971 end of the dollar’s $35 an ounce peg to gold, Nixon engineered deals with the Middle East oil exporting regimes, guaranteeing them military support on condition they sell their oil exclusively in dollars. This gave a compelling new reason for foreign governments and banks to hold dollars. The US could now flood international markets with dollars regardless of the amount of gold it held. Today, most of the world’s currencies remain pegged directly or indirectly to the dollar.
To facilitate growing international trade, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) was created in 1973. SWIFT is a payment and transaction network used by international banks to monitor and process purchases and payments by individuals, companies, banks, and governments. Dominated by the US, it grants the country even greater mastery over world trade and financial markets. Here, China poses no challenge to US supremacy.
After the euro became established, the percent of world reserves held in US dollars diminished from the 71% share it held in 2001. Since 2003, the dollar has kept the principal share, fluctuating in the 60-65% range. Today, the percent of world nations’ currency reserves held in US dollars amounts to $7 trillion, 59.5% of international currency reserves.
In 2021 the dollar’s share of total foreign currency reserves is actually greater than in the 1980s and 1990s.
Because only a few reserve currencies are accepted in international trade, countries are not free to trade their goods in their own money. Rather, over 90% of nations’ imports and exports requires use of the dollar, the euro, or the currencies of other imperial states. The Chinese RMB, in contrast, constitutes merely 2.4% of international reserves, ranking China on the level of Canada. The US continues as the superpower in world currency reserves, while China is a marginal player.
The US Dollar as the World Reserve Currency
The US maintains preeminence because banks, governments and working peoples around the world regards US dollar as the safest, most reliable, and accepted currency to hold their savings.
A capitalist economic crisis, even when caused by the US itself, as in 2008, actually increases demand for the dollar, since the dollar is still viewed as the safe haven. People expect the dollar to be the currency most likely to retain its value in periods of uncertainty. Ironically, an economic crisis precipitated by the US results in money flooding into dollar assets, keeping world demand for dollars high. The 2008-09 crisis enabled the ruling class to advance their domination over working people, fleecing us of hundreds of billions of dollars.
SWIFT data show that China’s RMB plays a minor role in world trade transactions. While China has become the world exporter, its currency was used in merely 1.9% of international payments, versus 38% for the US dollar, with 77% of transactions in the dollar or euro. This means almost all China’s own imports and exports are not traded in Chinese currency, but in that of the US and its subordinates.
Being the leading force in SWIFT gives the US a powerful weapon. The US rulers can target countries it seeks to overthrow (such as Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Iran) with sanctions declared illegal by the United Nations. SWIFT enables the US rulers to prevent those countries’ access to their overseas bank accounts, blocks their access to international trade as well as loans from the World Bank, the IMF and most international banks. The US uses its authority in the World Trade Organization to prevent countries like Venezuela from demanding the WTO punish the US for disrupting Venezuela’s legitimate trade by means of these sanctions.
Arguments that China and Russia are abandoning the dollar point out that, while in 2015 approximately 90% of trade between the two countries was conducted in dollars, by spring 2020 the figure had dropped to 46%, with 24% of the trade in their own currencies. This shows some increasing independence, yet almost twice as much China-Russia trade still takes place in the dollar rather than in their own money. Further, their moves from the dollar have been in reaction to US imposed sanctions and tariffs, forcing them off the dollar, not from their own choice to cast aside the dollar as the international currency.
If China and Russia had the means to create a new world economic order they could withdraw their over $1.1 trillion and $123 billion invested in US Treasury bonds and use the funds to start their own international financial structure.
That China pegs the RMB to the dollar, rather than the dollar pegged to the RMB, also indicates the economic power relations between China and the US. China has expressed unease about the US potential to cut China off from the SWIFT network. Zhou Li, a spokesperson for China’s Communist Party, urged his party’s leaders to prepare for decoupling from the dollar, because the US dollar “has us by the throat… By taking advantage of the dollar’s global monopoly position in the financial sector, the US will pose an increasingly severe threat to China’s further development.”
While China has displaced the US as the primary productive workhouse of the world, it remains far from displacing the US as the world financial center. The size of China’s economy has not translated into a matching economic power.
Part 2: Military and Ideological Forms of Domination
The US regards as its Manifest Destiny to rule the world. The US bosses equate their national security interests with global security interests; no place or issue is insignificant. The US sees its role as defending the world capitalist order even if narrow US interests are not immediately and practically involved.
The Question of a US Military Decline
The second central element of the waning US empire argument is based on the US armed forces failures in the Middle East wars. However, they overlook that the US rulers suffered more stinging defeats in Korea 70 years ago and Vietnam 50 years ago, when the US was considered at the height of its supremacy. While over 7000 US soldiers and 8000 “contractors,” a code word for mercenaries, have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is much smaller than the 41,300 troops killed in Korea, or the 58,000 in Vietnam. Although in wars against Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, the US ruling class could not achieve its aims, these peoples’ anti-imperial struggles were derailed, a US key objective. To the extent the peoples of these countries “won,” they inherited a country in ruins.
Likewise, the rising British empire suffered defeats at the hands of the US in 1783 and 1814, but this had little impact on 19th century British global ascendancy.
Save Iraq in 1991, the US has not won a war since World War II. Yet even in its heyday, the US military did not take on and defeat another major power without considerable outside aid. Spain was mostly defeated in Cuba and the Philippines before the US attacked. The US entered World War I after the other fighting forces were reaching exhaustion. In World War II, the Soviet Red Army broke the back of the German Wehrmacht, not the US. Only against Japan did the US military play a key role in crushing an imperial rival, though even here, the bulk of Japanese troops were tied down fighting the Chinese.
While today, the US military is reluctant about engaging in a full-scale land war, this has been mostly the case for the whole 20th century before any alleged imperial deterioration. Previously, the US rulers proved adept at not entering a war until it could emerge on top once the wars ended.
The “Vietnam syndrome,” code word for the US people’s opposition to fighting wars to defend the corporate world order, continues to haunt and impede the US rulers when they consider new military aggressions. This “syndrome,” which Bush Sr boasted had been overcome, has only deepened as result of the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. Yet the corporate class took advantage of these wars to loot trillions from public funds, with working people to pay the bill.
The US is spending over a trillion dollars to “upgrade” a nuclear capacity which could wipe out life on the planet. Even if US military capacity were diminishing in some areas, this is immaterial so long as the US still can, with a push of the button, annihilate all it considers opponents, even if this means a likely mutually assured destruction. The US also possesses similarly dangerous arsenals of biological and chemical weapons. It is not rational to think the US rulers spend mind-boggling sums of money on this weaponry but will not use them again when considered necessary to preserve their supremacy.
The US empire’s military dominion remains firmly in place around the world. Peoples’ struggles to close US military bases have met with little success. US ruling class de facto military occupations overseas continue through its over 800 bases in over 160 countries. These constitute 95% of the world’s total foreign military bases.
To date, if there has been any lessening of US military destructive capacity, no new armed forces or uprisings have dared to take advantage of this. If some national force considered it possible to break out of the US world jailhouse, we would be seeing that.
Hybrid Warfare: US Regime-Change Tools Besides Military Intervention
Military victory is not necessary for the US rulers to keep “insubordinate” countries in line. It suffices for the US to leave in ruins their attempts to build political and economic systems that prioritize national sovereignty over US dictates.
When incapable of overturning a potential “threat of a good example” through military invasion, the US may engineer palace coups. Since 2000, it has succeeded in engineering coups in Honduras, Bolivia, Georgia, and Haiti, to name a few.
Alternatives to fomenting a military coup include the US conducting lawfare to overturn governments, as seen in Paraguay and Brazil. The US ruling class also skillfully co-opts “color revolutions,” as seen in the Arab Spring and in the implosion of the Soviet bloc. Worldwide, the US regularly violates the sovereignty of nations through its regime-change agencies such as the CIA, USAID, and NED.
Besides invasions, coups, lawfare, election interference, and color revolutions, the US relies on its command over the global financial system and the subservience of other imperialist nations. This enables the US overlords to impose crippling sanctions and blockades on countries that assert their national sovereignty. The blockades on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and Syria constitute a boot on their neck, which have only become more severe the more these peoples valiantly defend their independence.
Condemnation of these blockades by working people and nations worldwide has yet to have material effect in constraining this imperial cruelty against whole peoples. Rather than a decline of the US empire’s ability to thwart another country’s right to determine their own future, there have been changes in method, from overtly militaristic to more covert hybrid warfare. Both are brutal and effective means of regime change.
US-First World Ideological Hegemony
The corporate leaders of the West wield world dominion over the international media, including news services, social media, and advertising. Their Coke and Disney characters, for instance, have penetrated even the remotest corners of the world. Today most of the world’s viewers of the news are fed a version of the news through media stage-managed by the US and its subordinate allies. In addition, there are almost 4 billion social media users in the world, with six social media companies having more than one billion users. China owns just one of these. Only the US and its subordinates have world reach in their control of news and social media, while China does not.
Ramon Labanino, one of the Cuban 5, illustrated how the US rulers use their media to foment the July 12 regime change operation in Cuba:
We are in the presence of an international media dictatorship, the big media are in the hands of imperialism and now the social networks and the alternative media also use them in a masterful way. They have the capacity, through data engineering, bots, to replicate a tweet millions of times, which is what they have done against Cuba. A ruthless attack on social networks and in the media to show a Cuba that is not real. On the other hand, we have an invasion in our networks to disarticulate our computer systems so that even we cannot respond to the lies. The interesting thing is the double purpose, not only that they attack us, but then we cannot defend ourselves because the media belong to them… Within the CIA, for example, they have a special operations group that is in charge of cyber attacks of this type and there is a group called the Political Action Group that organizes, structures and directs this type of attack.
Worldwide use of media disinformation and news spin plays a central role in preserving US primacy and acceptance of its propaganda. As Covert Action Magazine reported:
United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Take the case of Syria. The people and groups one would normally count on to oppose wars have been the ones largely defending it. They have also often been the ones to label war opponents as “Assad apologists” or “genocide deniers”—causing them to be blacklisted.
The ruling class media’s effective massaging of what is called “news” has penetrated and disoriented many anti-war forces. This illustrates the appalling collapse of a world anti-war opposition that almost 20 years ago had been called “the new superpower,” not some decline of the US as world cop. Corporate media operations play a role comparable to military might in perpetuating US global control.
Part 3: The Threat US Rulers Perceive in China
Secretary of State Blinken spelled it out:
China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system, all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin responded to Washington’s view that the international system operates primarily to advance US corporate interests:
The ‘rules-based order’ claimed by the US…refers to rules set by the US alone, then it cannot be called international rules, but rather ‘hegemonic rules,’ which will only be rejected by the whole world.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently said:
The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal…They are promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries.
The Challenge China Presents to US Rulers Differs from that of the Soviet Union
China’s development poses a threat to imperialist hegemony different from the former Soviet bloc. China competes in the world markets run by the Western nations, slowly supplanting their control. China’s economic performance, 70 years after its revolution, has been unprecedented in world history, even compared to the First World countries. In contrast, the Soviet economy after 70 years was faltering.
China does not provide the economic and military protection for nations striving to build a new society the way the Soviet Union had. The importance of the Communist bloc as a force constraining the US was immense and is underappreciated. The Communist bloc generally allied itself with anti-imperialist forces, encouraging Third World national liberation struggles as well as the Non-Aligned Movement. The Communist bloc’s exemplary social programs also prompted the rise of social-democratic welfare state regimes (e.g., Sweden) in the capitalist West to circumvent possible socialist revolution.
Now, with no Soviet Union and its allies to extend international solidarity assistance to oppressed peoples and nations, countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea are much more on their own to defend themselves against US military maneuvers and blockades.
As John Ross points out, China is capable of slowly supplanting US-First World power over a long period of time, but in no position to replace these imperial states as world hegemon, nor does it desire to do so. US products are being driven out by China’s cheaper high-quality products and China’s more equitable “win-win” business arrangements with other countries, offering the opportunity for Third World countries to develop. However, China cannot displace the US in the world financial system, where the US and its allies retain overwhelming control.
The US has proven incapable of impeding China from becoming an independent world force. No matter the tariffs and sanctions placed on China, they have had little impact. Yet, the US has caused China to digress from its socialist planned economy, through US corporations and consumerist values penetrating the Chinese system.
Part 4: The World if the US were in Decline
Revolutions on the International Stage
A weakened US imperialism would encourage peoples and nations to “seize the time” and score significant gains against this overlord’s hold on their countries. Yet since shortly after 1975, with the victories in Vietnam and Laos, a drought in socialist revolutions has persisted for almost half a century. If the US empire were in decline, we would find it handicapped in countering victorious socialist revolutions. However, the opposite has been the case, with the US rulers consolidating their hegemony over the world.
This contrasts with the 40-year period between 1917 and 1959, when socialist revolutions occurred in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, eleven countries across eastern Europe, and Cuba. These took place in the era of US rise, not decline. During this period, the US empire had to confront even greater challenges to its dictates than presented by today’s China and Russia in the form of the world Communist bloc, associated parties in capitalist countries, and the national liberation movements.
During the period of alleged US imperial demise, it has been socialist revolution that experienced catastrophic defeats. In the last 30 years, the struggle for socialist revolution has gone sharply in reverse, with the US and its subordinates not only blocking successful revolutions but overturning socialism in most of the former Communist sphere. The last three decades has witnessed greater consolidation of imperial supremacy over the world, not a deterioration.
The socialist revolutions that continue − North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba − have all had to backtrack and reintroduce private enterprise and capitalist relations of production. North Korea has allowed the growth of private markets; Cuba relies heavily on the Western tourist market. They have this forced upon them to survive more effectively in the present world neoliberal climate.
A victorious socialist revolution, even a much more limited anti-neoliberal revolution2 , requires a nation to stand up to the imperial vengeance that enforces neo-colonial subjugation. Small countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, have established political and some economic independence, but they have been unable to significantly advance against crushing blockades and US-backed coups in order to create developed economies. Historically, the only countries that have effectively broken with dependency and developed independently based on their own resources have been the Soviet Union and China.
Raul Castro made clear this world primacy of the US neoliberal empire:
In many cases, governments [including the subsidiary imperial ones] do not even have the capacity to enforce their sovereign prerogatives over the actions of national entities based in their own territories, as these are often docilely subordinated to Washington, as if we were living in a world subjugated by the unipolar power of the United States. This is a phenomenon that is expressed with particular impact in the financial sector, with national banks of several countries giving a US administration’s stipulations priority over the political decisions of their own governments.
A test of the US overlords’ decline can be measured in the struggle against US economic warfare in the form of sanctions. To date, the US can arm twist most countries besides China and Russia into abiding by its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and Iran. The US rulers still possess the power and self-assurance to ignore United Nations resolutions against economic warfare, including the UN General Assembly’s annual condemnation of the US blockade on Cuba. The peoples and nations of the world cannot make the US rulers pay a price for this warfare.
Domestic Struggles by the Working Class and its Allies that Shake the System
If the US empire were weakened, our working class could be winning strikes and union organizing drives against a capitalist class on the defensive. But the working class remains either quiescent, its struggles derailed, or most strikes settled by limiting the degree of boss takebacks. The 1997 UPS and 2016 Verizon strike were two that heralded important gains for workers. So far, however, the weakening class at home is not the corporate bosses, but the working class and its allies.
The workers movement has not even succeeded in gaining a national $15 minimum wage. The US rulers can spend over $900 billion a year on its war machine even during a pandemic that has killed almost 700,000, amid deteriorating standard of living − no national health care, no quality free education, no raising of the minimum wage − without angry mass protests. This money could be spent on actual national security at home: housing for the homeless, eliminating poverty, countering global warming, jobs programs, and effectively handling the pandemic as China has (with only two deaths since May 2020). Instead, just in the Pentagon budget, nearly a trillion dollars a year of our money is a welfare handout to corporations to maintain their rule over the world. This overwhelming imperial reign over our workers’ movement signifies a degeneration in our working class organizations, not in the corporate overlords.
A weakened empire would provide opportunities for working class victories, re-allocating national wealth in their favor. Instead, we live in a new Gilded Age, with growing impoverishment of our class as the corporate heads keep grabbing greater shares of our national wealth. Americans for Tax Fairness points out:
America’s 719 billionaires held over four times more wealth ($4.56 trillion) than all the roughly 165 million Americans in society’s bottom half ($1.01 trillion), according to Federal Reserve Board data. In 1990, the situation was reversed — billionaires were worth $240 billion and the bottom 50% had $380 billion in collective wealth.
US billionaire wealth increased 19-fold over the last 31 years, with the combined wealth of 713 billionaires surging by $1.8 trillion during the pandemic, one-third of their wealth gains since 1990.
This scandalous appropriation of working people’s wealth by less than one thousand bosses at the top without causing mass indignation and working class fightback, encapsules the present power relations between the two contending classes.
With a weakened empire, we would expect a rise of a militant mass current in the trade unions and the working class committed to the struggle to reverse this trend. Instead, trade unions support corporate governance and their political candidates for office, not even making noise about a labor party.
With a weakened empire, we would expect the US working people to be turning away from the two corporate parties and building our own labor party as an alternative. In 2016 the US electorate backed two “outsiders,” Bernie Sanders and Trump, in the primaries against the traditional Democratic and Republican candidates, but this movement was co-opted with little difficulty. That the two corporate-owned parties still wield the power to co-opt, if not extinguish, our working class movements, as with the mass anti-Iraq war movement, the Occupy movement, the Madison trade union protests, the pro-Bernie groundswells in 2016 and 2020, shows the empire’s continued vitality, not deterioration.
In 2020 most all liberals and lefts capitulated to the Democrats’ anti-Trumpism, under the guise of “fighting fascism.” The “resistance” became the “assistance.” The promising Black Lives Matter movement of summer 2020 became largely absorbed into the Biden campaign a few months later. If the corporate empire were declining, progressive forces and leftist groups would not have bowed to neoliberal politicians and the national security state by climbing on the elect-Biden bandwagon. The 2020 election brought out the highest percent of voters in over a century to vote for one or the other of two neoliberal politicians. This stunning victory for the US ruling class resulted from a stunning surrender by progressive forces. To speak of declining corporate US supremacy in this context is nonsense.
Likely Indicators of a Demise of US Supremacy
For all our political lives we have been reading reports of the impending decline of US global supremacy. If just a fraction of these reports were accurate, then surely the presidential executive orders that Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, and Cuba are “unusual and extraordinary threats to the national security of the United States” would have some basis in reality.
If US corporate dominion were declining, we might see:
- The long called for democratization of the United Nations and other international bodies with one nation, one vote
- Social democratic welfare governments would again be supplanting neoliberal regimes
- Replacement of World Bank, WTO, and IMF with international financial institutions independent of US control
- Curtailing NATO and other imperialist military alliances
- End of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency
- Dismantling of US overseas military bases
- Emergence of regional blocs independent of the US, replacing the current vassal organizations (e.g., European Union, OAS, Arab League, Organization of African Unity)
- Nuclear disarmament rather than nuclear escalation
- Working peoples of the world enforcing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
- A decline of the allure of US controlled world media culture (e.g., Disney, Hollywood)
Part 5: Conclusion: US Decline looks like a Mirage
Proponents of US decline point to two key indicators: its diminished role in global production and ineffectiveness of the US ruler’s military as world cop. Yet, the US rulers, with the aid of those in the European Union and Japan, maintain world financial control and continue to keep both our country and the world under lock and key.
The US overlords represent the spokesperson and enforcer of the First World imperial system of looting, while compelling subservience from the other imperial nations. None dare pose as potential imperial rivals to the US, nor challenge it in any substantial manner.
It is misleading to compare China’s rise to the US alone, since the US represents a bloc of imperial states. To supplant US economic preeminence, China would have to supplant the economic power of this entire bloc. These countries still generate most world production with little prospect this will change. A China-Russia alliance scarcely equals this US controlled First World club.
To date, each capitalist crisis has only reinforced the US rulers’ dominion as the world financial hub. Just the first half of this year, world investors have poured $900 billion into the safe haven US assets, more than they put into funds in the rest of the world combined. So long as the US capitalists can export their economic downturns to other countries and onto the backs of its own working people, so long as the world turns to the US dollar as the safe haven, decline of US ruling class preeminence is not on the table.
The last period of imperial weakening occurred from the time of US defeat in Vietnam up to the reimposition of imperial diktat under Reagan and his sidekick, Margaret Thatcher. During this time, working peoples’ victories were achieved across the international stage: Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Grenada; Cuban military solidarity in Angola, Vietnam’s equivalent in Cambodia; revolution in Portugal and in its African colonies, in Zimbabwe, and seeming imminent victories in El Salvador and Guatemala. At home, a rising class struggle current arose in the working class, as in the Sadlowski Steelworkers Fight Back movement and the militant 110-day coal miners strike, which forced President Carter to back down. This worldwide upsurge against corporate rule ended about 40 years ago, as yet unmatched by new ones.
Proclamations of a waning US empire portray a wishful thinking bordering on empty bravado. Moreover, a crumbling empire will not lead to its final exit without a massive working peoples’ movement at home to overthrow it. Glen Ford observed that capitalism has lost its legitimacy, especially among the young: “But that doesn’t by itself bring down a system. It is simply a sign that people are not happy. Mass unhappiness may bring down an administration. But it doesn’t necessarily change a system one bit.”
Capitalism is wracked by crisis – inherent to the system, Marx explained. Yet, as the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath showed, as the Great Depression showed, as Europe in chaos after World War II showed, capitalist crises are no harbinger of its collapse. The question is not how severe the crisis, but which class, capitalist or working class, takes advantage of it to advance their own interests.
A ruling class crisis allows us to seize the opportunity if our forces are willing to fight, are organized, and are well-led. As Lenin emphasized, “The proletariat has no other weapon in the fight for power except organization.” In regards to organization, we are unprepared. Contributing to our lack of effective anti-imperialist organization is our profound disbelief that a serious challenge at home to US ruling class control is even possible.
Whatever the indications of US deterioration as world superpower, recall that the Roman empire’s decay began around 177 AD. But it did not collapse in the West until 300 years later, in 476, and the eastern half did not collapse for 1000 years after that. Informing a Roman slave or plebe in 200 AD that the boot on their necks was faltering would fall on deaf ears. We are now in a similar situation. The empire will never collapse by itself, even with the engulfing climate catastrophe. Wishful thinking presents a dysfunctional substitute for actual organizing, for preparing people to seize the time when the opening arises.
- John Ross, “China and South-South Cooperation in the present global situation,” in China’s Great Road, p. 203.
- There is a continuous class struggle between popular forces demanding increased government resources and programs to serve their needs, against corporate power seeking to privatize in corporate hands all such government spending and authority. This unchecked corporate centralization of wealth and power is euphemistically called “neoliberalism.” An anti-neoliberal revolution places popular forces in political control while economic power remains in the hands of the capitalist class.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Mythology of humans’ natural impulse for empathy
Warfare has been a plague haunting the human species ever since our evolution to become Homo Sapiens, finally, around 300,000 years ago in Africa. Etymologically, homo means human and sapiens means wise or knowledgeable. One can see that in this 18th century anthropocentric characterization of our species, the notion of wisdom was highly overrated. What made our common Homo sapiens ancestors any wiser than the Neanderthals that they would eventually invade and annihilate? History is narrated by victors, therefore we were told that Homo sapiens were highly superior to the so-called brutal Neanderthals. It could be true in territorial ambitions, and some technological aspects, but it remains questionable in other area of social activity.
Ultimately, a taste for adventure and conquest is what drove Homo sapiens to expand their territories on Earth. It would be utterly naive to think that this progressive form of colonization was accomplished through peaceful means. No, unfortunately for our species, a propensity for aggression, for domination through warfare was always present in Homo sapiens DNA.
Wars of necessity or of choice: all wars are for profit
Warfare in the 20th century was rather simple compared to today’s predicaments. Either during World War I or World War II, nations had traditional alliances which were usually respected and recognized by treaties. Usually formal declarations of wars were issued before a military action — with the exception of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl-Harbor. The two wars were sold by leaders to their respective populations as wars of necessity. In both cases, they were still wars fought by conscripts, as professional soldiers, a euphemism for mercenaries, are usually not eager to become cannon fodder.
While the United States cautiously, one could say cowardly, stood on the sideline during World War I until 1917, the conflict unquestionably triggered the Russian revolution, as poor Russians conscripts refused to fight the tsar’s war. As Marxist ideas were quickly spreading elsewhere in Europe, many French soldiers refused to fight their German brothers for the sake of capitalism. Many conscripts then knew that the so-called war of necessity was a scheme of war for profit. At the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to pay an enormous amount to France, in gold, as war compensation. In the Middle East, in an even more substantial perennial spoils of war story, the two dominant empires of the time, the United Kingdom and France had grabbed for themselves the bulk of the Ottoman empire through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.
If you analyze the war of necessity versus war of choice, and correlation of war for profit during World War II, in the case of the United States, first you wonder what took the US so long to enter the war alongside their allies France and England? The answer is often murky, as many major US corporations such as Ford Motor and General Motors, as well as policymakers such as Joe Kennedy (father of JFK), had either vested economic interests in Nazi Germany or were upfront in their support for Adolf Hitler.
Photo Credit: from the archive of Recuerdos de PandoraFurther, once the United States was attacked by Japan and finally committed to the European part of the conflict against Germany, a large part of Detroit’s manufacturing sector was converted to military purposes. In the United States, it is arguably more this massive war effort than FDR’s New Deal which turned the US economy into a juggernaut, in a dramatic recovery from the Great Depression, which the Wall Street crash of 1929 had started. Warfare writes human history using blood and tears for ink, but the merchants of death of the military-industrial complex and their financial market affiliates always profit handsomely.
If slavery or slave labor is the ideal structure for capitalism, any war, under any pretext, is the perfect business venture, as it provides a fast consumption of goods (weapons and ammunition), cheap labor force using the leverage of patriotism — defend the motherland or fatherland — and infinite money to rebuild once capitalism’s wars for profit have turned everything to ruins and ashes. After World War II, the US Marshall Plan was painted as some great altruistic venture, but, in fact, it justified a long-term occupation of Germany and incredibly lucrative contracts, some of them aimed at controlling West Germany’s economy and government.
Photo Credit: Gilbert MercierRise of conceptual wars: war on terror and war on Covid
If the wars of the 20th century were conventional as they either opposed sovereign nations or were in the context of imperial-colonial setback, like the French war in Indochina, Algeria’s independence war against France, some were specifically defined by the Cold War era, like the Korea war. From World War II at the Yalta conference, two new empires had emerged as dominant: the United States and the USSR. The world had then the predictability of this duality. The collapse of the Soviet Union altered this balance, but it took a bit more than a decade to make a quantum leap.
Almost exactly 20 years ago, an event, the September 11, 2001 attack, radically changed the dynamic, as it marked the start of the conceptual war on terror. Terror is an effect, an emotion. How can one possibly wage war against an emotion? However absurd conceptually, this turning point in history allowed more or less all governments worldwide to embark into surveillance, obsession for security and a crackdown on personal liberties. Using the shock and fear in the population, which followed the collapse of the New York City Twin Towers in the US, a form of police state was almost immediately born using new administrative branches of government like the Department of Homeland Security. We still live in the post 9/11 world, as that coercive apparatus keep dragging on.
Just like in standard, more conventional warfare, capitalism doesn’t create crises like 9/11, but seems always to find ways to benefit from it. In the war-on-terror era, a narrative also popular with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, the beneficiaries were and still are the global military-industrial complex, private security apparatus more like small private armies, and layers of police forces. How can one go wrong in terms of maximum profit?
In complete haste, and with a massive international support, using the trauma to influence worldwide public opinion, an attack on Afghanistan was launched by NATO’s invincible armada. Were the Taliban governing the country at the time responsible for 9/11? Not so. Their fault was to host the man who was arguably the architect of the attack: enemy-number-one Osama bin-Laden, of course. The fact that most of the pilots who flew the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were Saudi Arabian nationals was not even dismissed, it wasn’t even publicly considered by governments or the corporate controlled mainstream media.
As matter of fact, many families of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack victims are still trying to get a sense of closure on a potential involvement of Saudi Arabia, at the highest level, in the tragedy to this day without much success, as a form of foreign policy Omerta seems to prevail in the US with the Saudis royal family. This was certainly not a war of necessity, it barely qualified as a war of choice, as it was a pure fit of anger against an individual and his relatively small organization, not even against a state.
Twenty years later, back to square one, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan affairs, but NATO, the military coalition of the impulsive and ill informed, are still not candidly making mea culpa, and admitting their gross ineptitude and almost criminal negligence. Colossal failure was always written all over Afghanistan’s bullets ridden walls, mosques and even modest fruit stands! Quagmires were also perfectly predictable in the war on terror sequels in Iraq; Libya (using French/Anglo/UAE proxies); Syria (using proxy good Jihadists), then ISIS (once many of the good Sunni Jihadists somehow decided to turn bad). Described like this the 20-year war on terror’s horrendous fiascos sound like the theater of the absurd! Absurd for the successive policy makers and incompetent or corrupt planners, but tragic for the almost one million dead and their surviving families, the 38 million refugees or internally displaced, and countries like Libya, turned into wrecked failed states. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex, including the private contractors, has become more powerful than ever.
The tragically failed policies of the past 20 years have to be quantified. According to Brown University Watson Institute, and this is a conservative estimate, the human cost of post 9/11 wars is around 800,000 in direct deaths; 38 million people worldwide is the number of war refugees and displaced persons collateral victims of the war on terror; and finally, the US war on terror spending from 2001 to 2020 was $6.4 trillion. All this money extracted from the US taxpayers, and enthusiastically approved in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, was injected into the private corporations of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, of course, to a lesser extent, and ultimately as a billionaire-making cash bonanza into Wall Street and all global financial markets. How it works is rather simple: below are two prime examples, among countless other similar schemes, to profit from the war machine.
Photo Credit: from the Christopher Dombres archiveOne quick example of war for mega-profit comes to mind. Before he accepted to be George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney was the CEO of the giant construction, oil and mineral extraction firm Halliburton. Right before he started to campaign, he, of course, resigned from his CEO function and sold his huge Halliburton stock portfolio to avoid conflict of interests. Fast forward to 2003, and guess which firm is getting the lion share of private contracts for the Iraq war? Halliburton, of course. Coincidence? Hard to believe. Such example of vast sums of money being recycled from the taxpayers’ pocket book to the coffers of private companies war profiteers are countless.
The other example is the major weapon systems manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin manufactures fighter jets like F-15, F-16, F-35, and F-21; helicopters like Blackhawks and Cyclone, as well as Drones. On January 19, 2000 the share value for Lockheed Martin was $12.10. By January 17, 2020 Lockheed Martin stock traded at $408.77 a share. The bottom line: who in the US Congress would dare to say no to funding the military-industrial complex via the US Defense Department budget? Basically nobody. It would be deemed unpatriotic and bad for the job market, considering that the military-industrial complex employs a lot of people.
Terror is out, global pandemic is in
One cannot help making an analogy between the war on terror and the new global war for profit, which is the war on Covid. As the war on terror is being exposed as a complete fiasco and receding in history’s rear view mirror, global capitalism needed something else. It magically materialized as a global biological warfare against a virus.What a golden opportunity! Since March 2020 — a bit later in the crisis actually — the beneficiaries of the war on Covid have been, not only pharmaceutical companies, but also digital giants that benefit from remote-location work due to measures like lockdowns, online commerce; and, finally, the global financial markets.
France’s President Macron was, to my knowledge, the very first world leader to use the bellicose semantic of war on Covid. He did it in March 2020. We have seen previously that the war on terror has been immensely profitable for the nexus of global corporate imperialism, but the recent war on Covid could be even more profitable, as its protagonists/profiteers appear to be benevolent, even altruistic. The current push worldwide, and Macron was once again ahead of the game, is either to make vaccination mandatory, or blackmail the population with coercive measures like the Pass Sanitaire in France, to obey and comply.
This is the calculus and assumption that all governments and biotech affiliates are likely making. Let’s say that they manage to make vaccination mandatory. Worldwide, you would have a captive market of around 7.8 billion people. Even if 800 million people globally resist vaccination, we are talking about an extraordinarily profitable market. At around $15 per dose for the best-adopted vaccines on the market, which are from Pfizer and Moderna, multiplied by two, or even better by three, as is now recommended by pharmaceutical companies and some governments, because of the Delta variant, we are talking about some serious cash flow. With booster jabs likely recommended down the line every nine months or so, we are talking about a biotech Eldorado!
Photo Credit: Jeremy HunsingerAs an example of the heavenly jolt of joy vaccines have already injected into the arms of the Masters of the Universe of global finance, Moderna stock on January 2, 2020 traded at $19.57 a share. On August 11, 2021, Moderna stock traded on Wall Street at $440.00 a share. It is rather obvious, besides various stimulus package schemes applied in all countries to boost economies and prevent a massive Covid economic recession, global financial markets, with the big hedge funds pulling the strings, have become addicted to vaccines. It is no wonder that all major Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already made vaccination mandatory for their employees. It is no wonder either, why stock markets, like the CAC40 in France, have reached record high despite a severe contraction of the real economy.
I previously mentioned the real cost of the 20-year war on terror as being $6.4 trillion for the United States alone. It is not yet possible to quantify the real cost of the so-called global war on Covid. One can suspect it will be very high as well, and its human cost higher in term of diminished personal liberties. The negative side effects of the war on Covid are mainly sociological and psychological, as it has already increased human isolation and fragmented communities. This 18-month old pseudo war on a virus has also withdrawn global resources and focus from the only war of necessity, the one critical for our species survival: namely the war on climate collapse.
War on climate collapse is a war against capitalism
The war on Covid could even last longer than the war on terror. Cynically, the reason for this is that the war on Covid has worked wonders for the benefit of corporations and the super-rich. It has also allowed for governments that are supposed to be neoliberal economically and progressive socially to become paradoxically authoritarian. A prime example, in this instance, is again Emmanuel Macron’s government in France. As long as wars, invented or not, either conventional or conceptual, can be used to extract a profit, they will remain the modus operandi for the billionaire class and their political surrogates. It might sound Utopian, but let’s just imagine for a moment what humanity could do collectively to address the climate crisis existential threat, if we were going to implement a global policy of massive cuts in military spending and security apparatus.
Trillion of dollars could be allocated to the true emergency that will determine our survival or extinction. What could be more critical than this for our children and grandchildren? Climate collapse is on its way. During this entire summer, large areas of Earth were on fire, and others were flooded. Killer storms will keep coming relentlessly at us. Before 2050 many coastlines will be submerged, causing more than 1 billion people worldwide to become the climate collapse refugees. This is not a projection or speculation, it is documented by the scientific community.
Unfortunately, the reason why our Banana Republic styles of governments are not willing to fight this war of necessity, the war on climate change, is because it can only be really fought by getting rid of the capitalist system altogether. Radical approaches are needed, such as scrapping capitalism’s holy precept of permanent economic growth and its correlation of population growth. The remedies to try to mitigate the unfolding climate collapse would be many tough pills to swallow, because it’s about drastic systemic changes. Such as a zero-growth, sometime called negative-growth, economic model, which even Green parties at large do not embrace. The notion of Green New Deal is ludicrous. Green politicians either do not get it or are complete hypocrites if they are not also staunch anti-capitalists.
Another issue almost never addressed by Green politicians anywhere is the one of overpopulation. The rapid growth of the human population is a fundamental factor for capitalism as it provides two critical elements: plenty of cheap labor as well as a continuously growing consumption base. Case in point, in 1850 or at the start of the industrial revolution, the global world population stood at around 1 billion people; currently, or 171 years later and not much time in term of human history, it stands at around 7.8 billion. Some demographic projections forecast that it will reach between 10 to 13 billion by 2100. Needless to say, from a purely physical standpoint, this is entirely unsustainable as the surface of Earth’s landmass has gone unchanged. The problem with overpopulation, as an issue, is that almost everyone in every culture rightly views his or her ability to procreate as a fundamental right. My News Junkie Post partner, Dady Chery, and I, we know that even to bring up overpopulation as an issue is extremely unpopular. However, it has to be done.
Without a massive reduction in carbon emissions, we are on track to pass the fatal mark of a 2-degree Celsius global warming, not by 2050 but by 2035. In other words, a wrench has to be jammed into the gear of the infernal machine created by humans since the mid-19th century’s industrial revolution. Carbon emitting fossil fuels, of any kind, have to stay in the ground. Combustion vehicles should be banned promptly, and massive subsidies should be given to produce extremely affordable and fully electrical cars immediately.
Many in the West point the finger at the big carbon emitters, which are China, India and Brazil. But they are not the only culprits for the nearly criminal inaction of our governing instances. The populations of countries that rely heavily on extraction must put a severe pressure on their politicians or vote them out of office. One thinks, of course, of the Gulf’s usual suspects like Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but other major players are almost as nefarious as far as having an economy built on energy or mineral extraction. A short list of the main countries heavily involved in the fossil fuel extraction business, either for domestic consumption or exports, would be: Russia, The United States, Canada, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran.
Would the various radical changes – including capping human population growth- which seem to be objectively needed be painful? Certainly. But the alternative option, which is basically to keep the course of this giant high-speed bullet train without a pilot that is global capitalism, amounts to a medium-term collective suicide.
The post Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gilbert Mercier.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The ISHR and 17 other organisations (see below for their names) share reflections on the key outcomes of the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council, as well as the missed opportunities to address key issues and situations. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/06/22/key-issues-affecting-hrds-in-47th-session-of-un-human-rights-council-june-2021/
CIVIL SOCIETY PARTICIPATION
We deplore the systemic underfunding of the UN human rights system and the drive for so-called efficiency, including the cancellation of general debates in June, which are a vital part of the agenda by which NGOs can address the Council without restrictions. We call for the reinstatement of general debates at all sessions, with the option of civil society participation through video statements. We welcome the focus of the civil society space resolution on the critical role played by civil society in the COVID-19 response, and the existential threats to civil society engendered or exacerbated by the pandemic. For the resolution to fulfil its goal, States must now take action to address these threats; while we welcome the broad support indicated by a consensus text, this cannot come at the cost of initiatives that will protect and support civil society.
HUMAN RIGHTS ONLINE
We welcome a resolution on the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet and its thematic focus on bridging digital divides, an issue which has become ever-important during the COVID-19 pandemic. We urge all States to implement the resolution by taking concrete measures to enhance Internet accessibility and affordability and by ceasing Internet shutdowns and other disruptions, such as website blocking and filtering and network throttling. In future iterations of the text, we encourage the core group to go further in mentioning concrete examples that could be explored by States in adopting alternative models for expanding accessibility, such as the sharing of infrastructure and community networks. We welcome the resolution on new and emerging digital technologies and human rights, which aims to promote a greater role for human rights in technical standard-setting processes for new and emerging digital technologies, and in the policies of States and businesses. While aspects of the resolution risk perpetuating “technology solutionism”, we welcome that it places a stronger focus on the human rights impacts of new and emerging digital technologies since the previous version of the resolution, such as introducing new language reiterating the importance of respecting and promoting human rights in the conception, design, use, development, further deployment and impact assessments of such technologies.
GENDER EQUALITY AND NON-DISCRIMINATION
We are concerned by the increasing number of amendments and attempts to weaken the texts. We are particularly concerned by the continued resistance of many States to previously adopted texts and States’ willful misinterpretation of key concepts related in resolutions on human rights in the context of HIV and AIDS, accelerating efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls: preventing and responding to all forms of violence against women and girls with disabilities and preventable maternal mortality and morbidity and human rights on maternal morbidities. We deplore the instrumentalising of women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights. We encourage States to center the rights of people most affected and adopt strong texts on these resolutions. We welcome the resolution on menstrual hygiene management, human rights and gender equality as the first step in addressing deep-rooted stigma and discrimination. We urge all States to address the root causes for the discrimination and stigma on menstruation and its impact.
RACIAL JUSTICE AND EQUALITY
The High Commissioner’s report highlighted the long-overdue need to confront legacies of slavery, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism and to seek reparatory justice. We welcome the historic consensus decision, led by the Africa Group, to adopt a resolution mandating an independent international expert mechanism to address systemic racism and promote racial justice and equality for Africans and people of African descent. The adoption of this resolution is testament to the resilience, bravery and commitment of victims, their families, their representatives and anti-racism defenders globally. We deplore efforts by some Western States, particularly former colonial powers, to weaken the text and urge them to now cooperate fully with the mechanism to dismantle systemic racism, ensure accountability and reparations for past and present gross human rights violations against Black people, end impunity for racialized State violence and address the root causes, especially the legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
MIGRANTS RIGHTS
Whilst we welcome the return of a resolution on human rights of migrants, we deplore the continued failure of the Council to respond meaningfully to the severity and global scale of human rights violations at international borders including connected to pushbacks. International borders are not and must not be treated as places outside of international human rights law. Migrants are not and must not be treated as people outside of international human rights law. Expressions of deep concern in interactive dialogues must be translated into action on independent monitoring and accountability.
ARMS TRANSFERS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
We welcome the resolution on the impact of arms transfers on human rights and its focus on children and youth. However, we note with concern the resistance of the Council to meaningfully focus on legal arms transfers beyond those diverted, unregulated or illicitly transferred. The Council should be concerned with all negative human rights impacts of arms transfers, without focusing only on those stemming from diversion and unregulated or illicit trade.
CLIMATE CHANGE
We are disappointed that the resolution on human rights and climate change fails to establish a new Special Rapporteur. However, we welcome the increasing cross regional support for a new mandate. It is a matter of urgent priority for the Council to establish it this year.
COUNTRY SPECIFIC SITUATIONS
ALGERIA
While special procedures, the OHCHR and multiple States have recognized the intensifying Algerian authorities’ crackdown on freedom of association and expression, the Council failed to act to protect Algerians striving to advance human rights and democracy.
BELARUS
We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Belarus. Given the ongoing human rights crisis in Belarus, the mandate complements the OHCHR Examination in ensuring continuous monitoring of the situation, and the mandate remains an accessible and safe channel for Belarusian civil society to deliver diverse and up-to-date information from within the country.
CHINA
The Council has once again failed to respond meaningfully to grave human rights violations committed by Chinese authorities. We reiterate our call on the High Commissioner and member States to take decisive action toward accountability.
COLOMBIA
We are disappointed that few States made mention of the use of excessive force against protestors in a context of serious human rights violations, including systemic racism, and urge greater resolve in support of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in the country and globally
ETHIOPIA
The resolution on Ethiopia’s Tigray region, albeit modest in its scope and language, ensures much-needed international scrutiny and public discussions on one of Africa’s worst human rights crises. We urge the Ethiopian government to engage ahead of HRC48.
ERITREA
We welcome the extension of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Eritrea, as scrutiny for violations committed at home and in Tigray is vital.
NICARAGUA
We warmly welcome the joint statement delivered by Canada on behalf of 59 States, on harassment and detention of journalists, human rights defenders, and presidential pre-candidates, urging Nicaragua to engage with the international community and take meaningful steps for free and fair elections. States should closely monitor the implementation of resolution 46/2, and send a strong collective message to Nicaragua at the 48th session of the Council, as the Council should ‘urgently consider all measures within its power’ to strengthen human rights protection in the country.
PALESTINE
We welcome the Special Rapporteur’s report that “Israeli settlements are the engine of this forever occupation, and amount to a war crime,” emphasizing that settler colonialism infringes on “the right of the indigenous population […] to be free from racial and ethnic discrimination and apartheid.” We also reiterate his recommendation to the High Commissioner “to regularly update the database of businesses involved in settlements, in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 31/36.”
THE PHILIPPINES
While acknowledging the signing of the Joint Human Rights Programme with the UN OHCHR, the Government of the Philippines fails to address the long-standing issues on law enforcement and accountability institutions, including in the context of war on drugs. We continue to urge the Council to launch the long-overdue independent and transparent investigation on the on-going human rights violations.
SYRIA
We welcome mounting recognition for the need to establish a mechanism to reveal the fate and whereabouts of the missing in Syria, including by UN member states during the interactive dialogue on Syria, and the adoption of the resolution on Syria addressing the issue of the missing and emphasizing the centrality of victim participation, building on the momentum created by the Syrian Charter for Truth and Justice.
VENEZUELA
In the context of the recent arbitrary detention of 3 defenders from NGO Fundaredes, we welcome the denunciation by several States of persistent restrictions on civil society and again for visits of Special Rapporteurs to be accepted and accelerated.
*American Civil Liberties Union, Association for Progressive Communications, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), Center for Reproductive Rights, Child Rights Connect, CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Conectas Direitos Humanos, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, FIDH, Franciscans International, Human Rights House Foundation, International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, International Commission of Jurists, International Lesbian and Gay Association, International Service for Human Rights, US Human Rights Network
https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/hrc47-civil-society-presents-key-takeaways-from-human-rights-council/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
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A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Haiti to Pakistan
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Alla Mousa is accused of 18 counts of torturing people in military hospitals in Homs and Damascus
A Syrian doctor has been charged in Germany with crimes against humanity for allegedly torturing people in military hospitals in his homeland and killing one of them, German federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.
The federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe said in a statement that Alla Mousa, who came to Germany in 2015 and practised medicine before he was arrested last year, was accused of 18 counts of torturing people in military hospitals in the Syrian cities of Homs and Damascus. The allegations include charges that Mousa tried to make people infertile.
Related: Germany convicts former Assad regime agent in historic Syria torture verdict
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Activists fear a ‘dangerous precedent’ being set as Copenhagen uses a report that deems Damascus safe to deny residency status
Denmark’s attempt to return hundreds of Syrians to Damascus after deeming the city safe will “set a dangerous precedent” for other countries to do the same, say lawyers who are preparing to take the Danish government to the European court of human rights (ECHR) over the issue.
Authorities in Denmark began rejecting Syrian refugees’ applications for renewal of temporary residency status last summer, and justified the move because a report had found the security situation in some parts of the country had “improved significantly”. About 1,200 people from Damascus currently living in Denmark are believed to be affected by the policy.
Related: Greek police arrest Dutch journalist for helping Afghan asylum seeker
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
