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Category: Syria

  • Biden Jeopardizes Nuclear Talks With Iran by Bombing Militias in Syria

    Biden Jeopardizes Nuclear Talks With Iran by Bombing Militias in Syria

    The Biden administration is facing intense criticism from U.S. progressives after carrying out airstrikes on eastern Syria said to be targeting Iranian-backed militia groups. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports at least 22 people died. The Pentagon called the assault a response to recent rocket attacks on U.S. forces in northern Iraq. Those attacks came more than a year after Iraq’s parliament voted to expel U.S. troops — an order ignored by both the Trump and Biden administrations. “Very quickly the Biden administration is falling into the same old patterns of before, of responding to this and that without having a clear strategy that actually would extract us from these various conflicts and actually pave the way for much more productive diplomacy,” says Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. We also speak with California Congressmember Ro Khanna, who says President Biden’s recent airstrikes in Syria lacked legal authority. “This is not an ambiguous case. The administration’s actions are clearly illegal under the United States’ law and under international law,” says Khanna.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to Syria. The Biden administration is facing intense criticism after U.S. Air Force fighter jets bombed eastern Syria Thursday. The Pentagon claimed the strikes targeted Iranian-backed militant groups. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports at least 22 people died.

    Biden ordered the airstrike on the same day he spoke with the king of Saudi Arabia, Iran’s arch rival in the region. According to the White House, Biden committed on the call to helping Saudi Arabia defend its territory from Iranian-aligned groups.

    The Pentagon called the assault a response to recent rocket attacks on U.S. forces in northern Iraq. Those attacks came more than a year after Iraq’s parliament voted to expel U.S. troops — an order that’s been ignored by both Trump and Biden.

    On Friday, Biden was asked about the airstrikes.

    REPORTER: Mr. President, what message were you sending to Iran with your first military action?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: You can’t get — you can’t act with impunity. Be careful.

    AMY GOODMAN: Still with us is Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California. We’re also joined by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the new think tank, the Quincy Institute. His most recent book is titled Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

    Trita Parsi, can you respond to the attack, the U.S. bombing of Syria?

    TRITA PARSI: Yes. The Biden administration, I think President Biden himself specifically, felt strongly that because of the attacks in Iraq earlier, that a response was warranted. But what I think many people are fearing is that very quickly the Biden administration is falling into the same old patterns of before, of responding to this and that without having a clear strategy that actually would extract us from these various conflicts and actually pave the way for much more productive diplomacy.

    The idea that this actually would help us with the diplomacy with Iran, for instance, seems really difficult to understand, mindful of the fact that we are now in a situation in which the Iranians have rejected the offer from the Europeans to come to the talks precisely because of these attacks, because of other measures that have been done, which means that these first two months of the Biden administration, that could have been used for really productively laying the groundwork for new talks, seem to instead have been used to just fall into the old patterns. And this is quite concerning, because, at the end of the day, reviving the JCPOA is another promise that the Biden administration gave during the campaign and said that it would pursue diligently.

    AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised by these attacks? And explain exactly where they took place in Syria.

    TRITA PARSI: Took place in eastern part of Syria. These are various groups that the Biden administration describes as pro-Iranian, certainly seem to have a degree of support from Iran. Whether they’re under the command of Iran is not as clear.

    And at the end of the day, you know, the fact that this was said the same day as the Biden administration decided not to pursue sanctions on MBS, again, seems to suggest that the Biden administration is more concerned at this point of making sure that it doesn’t upset certain allies in the region, doesn’t pay a political cost at home, for pursuing compromise with Iran over the nuclear issue, which I think sends a very, very concerning message, because, at the end of the day, in order for the JCPOA to be revived, both the Iranians and the U.S. side have to give compromises, and they’re going to have to pay a political price at home. The Obama administration did so. The Rouhani government did so. There is no escaping from that. But if at already this stage we’re signaling that we’re not ready to do so and we’re too concerned about those political costs, that really sets a question mark as to whether the political will exists for seeing these negotiations on the nuclear program come to completion.

    AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Ro Khanna, your response to the bombing of Syria?

    REP. RO KHANNA: Well, this is not an ambiguous case. The administration’s actions are clearly illegal under the United States’ law and under international law. We do not have any authorization of military force to go into Syria. In fact, President Obama tried and then backed off in getting that authorization. We do not have any authorization of military force to attack Iran. The idea that this was an imminent attack on U.S. self-defense is simply not borne out by the facts. And under international law, for self-defense, we have to go to the United Nations. The administration did not do that. So, my concern is that this president ran on ending endless wars, ran on respecting the United States’ and international law, and these actions clearly violate both.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Trita Parsi, if you could talk about the European Union, Iran rejecting an offer by the EU to hold direct talks with the U.S. on the nuclear deal after the U.S. attack on eastern Syria? The significance of this?

    TRITA PARSI: It’s a very unfortunate decision by the Iranians. I mean, I think it would have much better if they accepted this invitation.

    But at the same time, it is not a surprising decision. In fact, one of President Biden’s own senior officials, Wendy Sherman, who is now going to be confirmed next week or having hearings to become the deputy secretary, said — she was a lead negotiator under Obama for the nuclear deal — said, in 2019, that the idea that the Iranians would come to the table and talk to the United States without some sanctions relief, meaning that the United States would continue to violate the JCPOA and yet the Iranians would come, was extremely unlikely. It’s not clear to me why the Biden administration has chosen a strategy that some of its own senior officials earlier on had deemed to be extremely unlikely to succeed.

    So it’s not surprising. It’s very negative. And now we’re in a worse situation. There’s going to be a fight potentially today at the IAEA Board of Governors about whether to censure Iran for some of its reductions of obligations under the JCPOA, while the United States continues to completely disregard all of its obligations.

    So, these are all the type of wrong measures and steps that should be taken at this stage of diplomacy. At this stage, there should be goodwill measures, there should be positive signals of intent, in order to create the best possible circumstances for diplomacy to start. Now we’re having the opposite.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain, Trita, Iran’s demand that the U.S. end sanctions before returning to negotiations? Explain what the U.S. sanctions against Iran are and how they’re affecting the people there.

    TRITA PARSI: Well, the Iranians have now suffered tremendously under sanctions that President Trump put in place in 2018 and 2019 and onwards. These have been devastating to the Iranian economy. In fact, President Trump intensified those once COVID broke out, seeing the pandemic as a way to further enhance the impact of sanctions. And this means including blocking Iran’s ability to get IMF loans for the purpose of fighting the virus. So, the Iranians have suffered tremendously under these sanctions for the last couple of years.

    I think part of the reason why they’re fearful of going to the table without getting some indication — not all sanctions need to be lifted, from their perspective, but some indication that the U.S. is going to lift sanctions, is that, otherwise, they fear that the talks may not succeed, they will get blamed for the breakdown of talks, they will be seen as being at fault, even though the United States, under Biden, has not changed Trump’s position of maximum pressure. So the U.S. doesn’t even come back into the deal but manages to shift the blame onto the Iranians. I think this is part of their fear.

    I think, at the same time, demanding that all sanctions be lifted, which they did earlier on, is completely unrealistic. What is happening right now is that the Iranian demand is that the U.S. side promises that once the U.S. is inside of the deal, it will lift sanctions. But it’s also very difficult to see how the U.S. could reject that, mindful of the fact that once it is inside the deal, it has to lift the sanctions; otherwise, it will be in complete violation of the deal.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ro Khanna, if you can talk about the timing of this attack? All week, the buildup to the release of the report on the murder of Khashoggi and the clear connection to MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, so all of that was building. Then President Biden says he’s speaking with the king, and they talk about defending Saudi’s borders. And just before the release of the report, they bomb Syria, and they talk about attacking Iranian-backed militias, the major enemy of Saudi Arabia. Can you respond to this, this idea that they are releasing a report that proves the murder of Khashoggi is the crown — behind it is the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, but then they do Saudi Arabia’s bidding?

    REP. RO KHANNA: Well, Amy, this is why the Constitution says that before a president takes these actions, they have to come to Congress, because those issues would have been debated in Congress. Questions would have been asked: Is this in any way in response to conversations with the Saudis? Why do we need to take this action now? Why is it that suddenly we feel that there’s an imminent threat? Is this action going to be escalatory? They’re saying that the action is deescalatory. I haven’t understood how. How is a military strike deescalatory?

    And the main point here is that the maximum pressure campaign has not worked. Iran’s enriched uranium was about 102 kilograms when President Trump took office. It is 2.5 tons now. It is 25 times more. So, repeating this continued strategy not only has implications for our staying entangled in the Middle East, it actually has not worked in the objectives. And the challenge is a naive view in the United States that somehow our actions are going to force regime change in Iran. If anything, they’re entrenching the regime. We need a totally different approach. And I actually think the American people want a totally different approach.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Trita Parsi, thank you for joining us, with the Quincy Institute. I also want to thank Ro Khanna and ask you to stay with us, because a lot has happened in the House, where you’re a member from California. We want to ask you about the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. The House has included the $15-an-hour minimum wage, but it will be stripped out. Get your response to that and other issues. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Reckless Syria Bombing Is Not The Diplomacy He Promised

    The February 25 U.S. bombing of Syria immediately puts the policies of the newly-formed Biden administration into sharp relief. Why is this administration bombing the sovereign nation of Syria? Why is it bombing “Iranian-backed militias” who pose absolutely no threat to the United States and are actually involved in fighting ISIS? If this is about getting more leverage vis-a-vis Iran, why hasn’t the Biden administration just done what it said it would do: rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and de-escalate the Middle East conflicts?

    According to the Pentagon, the U.S. strike was in response to the February 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member. Accounts of the number killed in the U.S. attack vary from one to 22. 

    The post Biden’s Reckless Syria Bombing Is Not The Diplomacy He Promised appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • More than 75% of Syrian refugees may have PTSD, says charity

    ‘There is a huge amount of damage you can’t see – the mental trauma’, says Syria Relief report author

    More than three-quarters of Syrian refugees may be suffering serious mental health symptoms, 10 years after the start of the civil war.

    A UK charity is calling for more investment in mental health services for refugees in several countries after it found symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were widespread in a survey of displaced Syrians.

    Related: Experts sound alarm over mental health toll borne by migrants and refugees

    Continue reading…

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

  • On Contact: Realities Of War

    On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the realities of war, its appeal for young men and its destruction of them, with Salar Abdoh, novelist and essayist. Abdoh’s new novel, ‘Out of Mesopotamia’, considered one of a handful of great modern war novels, tells the story of Saleh, a jaded, middle-aged Iranian reporter who accompanies Shia militias, as Abdoh did, in Iraq and Syria during the heavy fighting between 2014 and 2017.

    The post On Contact: Realities Of War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Shamima Begum court decision brings shame on UK | Letters

    Readers respond to the supreme court decision that Begum will not have her citizenship restored

    Every day it seems the Guardian serves up another reason for being ashamed to be British. On Friday, it was the case of Shamima Begum (Shamima Begum loses fight to restore UK citizenship after supreme court ruling, 26 February). It makes it particularly difficult that I’m tutoring someone who is hoping to take an A-level in British politics. All the books list human rights and explain how carefully protected they are in our system. Article 5 is supposed to protect the right to liberty and freedom from arbitrary detention. Yet the supreme court is unable to protect Begum’s rights against a home secretary who is operating a policy based on pandering to public opinion in return for (hoped-for) votes.

    We are told that legal protections are particularly important in difficult cases – that is, cases where an individual presents as unpleasant or undeserving. Begum was a teenager who took the extraordinary step of leaving her country to defend something she believed was deserving of her support. But even if she left with the firm intention of terrorising her fellow citizens, does this mean she should be deprived of her rights? It is a matter not of what Begum deserves but of what our national honour, and our constitution, deserve. This has been increasingly in doubt in recent years, with the government threatening to renege over the Northern Irish border agreement; not to mention the Chagos Islands and our participation in rendering citizens to be tortured during the “war on terror”.
    Jeremy Cushing
    Exeter

    Continue reading…

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

  • Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    This latest Biden airstrike is being spun as “defensive” and “retaliatory” despite its targeting a nation the US invaded (Syria) in response to alleged attacks on US forces in another nation the US invaded (Iraq). You can’t invade a nation and then claim self-defense there. That’s not a thing.

    If you’re uncritically repeating US government claims about its justifications for acts of mass military violence, you’re not doing journalism, you’re writing Pentagon press releases.

    It’s like the Biden administration is actively trying to vindicate everyone who spent the last four years saying that as far as policy decisions are concerned there’s nothing unusual about the Trump administration.

    The post Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden’s First Strike

    The United States carried out airstrikes in Syria early Friday morning, killing several people and destroying several buildings. The Pentagon says that the airstrikes were a response to a rocket attack that occurred on Feb. 15, some 10 days earlier, at Erbil airport in northern Iraq, some 400 km away. That rocket attack killed a Filipino contractor, wounded four American contractors, and wounded a U.S. soldier.

    It’s not clear whether the U.S. airstrikes targeted the group responsible for the rocket attack, or other groups affiliated with it. The Pentagon says “the strikes destroyed multiple facilities located at a border control point used by a number of Iranian backed militant groups including Kait’ib Hezbollah and Kait’ib Sayyid al Shuhada.”

    The post Biden’s First Strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Bullshit Spoken In An Assertive Tone: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Watching the slow, silent realization creep over online Democrats that Biden really isn’t going to do anything for them.

    ❖

    Americans: $2000 checks please

    Government: Sorry did you say airstrikes on Syria?

    Americans: No, $2000 checks

    Government: Okay, since you asked nicely here’s your airstrikes on Syria.

    ❖

    This latest Biden airstrike is being spun as “defensive” and “retaliatory” despite its targeting a nation the US invaded (Syria) in response to alleged attacks on US forces in another nation the US invaded (Iraq). You can’t invade a nation and then claim self-defense there. That’s not a thing.

    ❖

    If you’re uncritically repeating US government claims about its justifications for acts of mass military violence, you’re not doing journalism, you’re writing Pentagon press releases.

    ❖

    It’s like the Biden administration is actively trying to vindicate everyone who spent the last four years saying that as far as policy decisions are concerned there’s nothing unusual about the Trump administration.

    ❖

    The only way to see the Biden administration as significantly different from the Trump administration is to jack your mind into an alternate reality made of partisan narrative constructs.

    ❖

    The short-term plan to fix America: Get rid of Trump.

    The long-term plan to fix America: Mumble mumble diverse cabinet mumble mumble mumble I bet Trump is hatching some pretty bad schemes for 2024 mumble mumble.

    ❖

    The facts are in and the debate is settled. Those who claimed the Democratic Party can be used to move the United States toward sanity were wrong. The first step to escaping a burning building is to stop pushing on the fake emergency exit door that’s been painted on the wall.

    ❖

    Biden is doing to his campaign promises what MBS did to Jamal Khashoggi.

    ❖

    Yes what Mohammed bin Salman is doing to Yemen may be quantifiably hundreds of thousands of times worse than what he did to Jamal Khashoggi, but as a liberal I am more offended by the latter because Yemeni children don’t write for my favorite newspaper.

    ❖

    China’s success on the world stage benefits the Chinese people. America’s success on the world stage comes at the expense of the American people.

    ❖

    The second-most profitable ability is a knack for moving numbers around in a way that benefits the powerful. The most profitable ability is a knack for moving words around in a way that benefits the powerful.

    ❖

    You can convince people to believe absolute bullshit if you say it in a confident-sounding and assertive tone. If you say it when designated an authority figure it becomes even more convincing. Powerful manipulators are acutely aware of this, while the general public is not.

    ❖

    If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, spend billions of dollars in mass media influence convincing everyone that it’s not broke and doesn’t need to be fixed.

    ❖

    When everyone’s been marinating in propaganda their entire life, common sense is often non-sense.

    ❖

    Coming to a mature understanding of the world is the slow, humbling process of realizing that the socialists and anti-imperialists have been pretty much right about pretty much everything, and that everyone who calls them crazy or extremist is wrong.

    ❖

    Lord, please let me love myself the way western centrists love criticizing the brutality of non-western governments while ignoring their own.

    ❖

    They snatched the slingshot out of the child’s hand because he might hurt someone, then a few short years later they handed him an automatic rifle and gave him the power of life and death over people in a village overseas.

    ❖

    Alternate answer to Fermi’s paradox: we haven’t met the aliens because a civilization far more advanced than our own would have matured emotionally and spiritually beyond the need to sail around the galaxy molesting the natives like a bunch of fifteenth century Europeans.

    ❖

    Whether or not you will make the best decision in a given moment has a lot less to do with what’s happening in that moment than with how consciously you have lived each moment leading up to it.

    ❖

    Deep inner looking will reveal a kind of “event horizon” to your field of experience beyond which there’s only emptiness. Deeper looking will reveal that your perception of your field of experience is actually coming from that emptiness. That emptiness is therefore your true self. This is the only sensible place from which to take your stand.

    ❖

    Putting truth before all else makes it harder to be comfortable, but it’s also the only path to real lasting happiness.

    __________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Biden’s Reckless Syria Bombing Is Not the Diplomacy He Promised

    Photo: CODEPINK

    The February 25 U.S. bombing of Syria immediately puts the policies of the newly-formed Biden administration into sharp relief. Why is this administration bombing the sovereign nation of Syria? Why is it bombing “Iranian-backed militias” who pose absolutely no threat to the United States and are actually involved in fighting ISIS? If this is about getting more leverage vis-a-vis Iran, why hasn’t the Biden administration just done what it said it would do: rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and de-escalate the Middle East conflicts?

    According to the Pentagon, the U.S. strike was in response to the February 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member. Accounts of the number killed in the U.S. attack vary from one to 22.

    The Pentagon made the incredible claim that this action “aims to de-escalate the overall situation in both Eastern Syria and Iraq.” This was countered by the Syrian government, which condemned the illegal attack on its territory and said the strikes “will lead to consequences that will escalate the situation in the region.” The strike was also condemned by the governments of China and Russia. A member of Russia’s Federation Council warned that such escalations in the area could lead to “a massive conflict.”

    Ironically, Jen Psaki, now Biden’s White House spokesperson, questioned the lawfulness of attacking Syria in 2017, when it was the Trump administration doing the bombing. Back then she asked: “What is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.”

    The airstrikes were supposedly authorized by the 20-year-old, post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), legislation that Rep. Barbara Lee has been trying for years to repeal since it has been misused, according to the congresswoman, “to justify waging war in at least seven different countries, against a continuously expanding list of targetable adversaries.”

    The United States claims that its targeting of the militia in Syria was based on intelligence provided by the Iraqi government. Defense Secretary Austin told reporters: “We’re confident that target was being used by the same Shia militia that conducted the strike [against U.S. and coalition forces].”

    But a report by Middle East Eye (MEE) suggests that Iran has strongly urged the militias it supports in Iraq to refrain from such attacks, or any warlike actions that could derail its sensitive diplomacy to bring the U.S. and Iran back into compliance with the 2015 international nuclear agreement or JCPOA.

    “None of our known factions carried out this attack,” a senior Iraqi militia commander told MEE. “The Iranian orders have not changed regarding attacking the American forces, and the Iranians are still keen to maintain calm with the Americans until they see how the new administration will act.”

    The inflammatory nature of this U.S. attack on Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, who are an integral part of Iraq’s armed forces and have played a critical role in the war with ISIS, was implicitly acknowledged in the U.S. decision to attack them in Syria instead of in Iraq. Did Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, a pro-Western British-Iraqi, who is trying to rein in the Iranian-backed Shiite militias, deny permission for a U.S. attack on Iraqi soil?

    At Kadhimi’s request, NATO is increasing its presence from 500 troops to 4,000 (from Denmark, the U.K. and Turkey, not the U.S.) to train the Iraqi military and reduce its dependence on the Iranian-backed militias. But Kadhimi risks losing his job in an election this October if he alienates Iraq’s Shiite majority. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein is heading to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials over the weekend, and the world will be watching to see how Iraq and Iran will respond to the U.S. attack.

    Some analysts say the bombing may have been intended to strengthen the U.S. hand in its negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal (JCPOA). “The strike, the way I see it, was meant to set the tone with Tehran and dent its inflated confidence ahead of negotiations,” said Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is currently a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute.

    But this attack will make it more difficult to resume negotiations with Iran. It comes at a delicate moment when the Europeans are trying to orchestrate a “compliance for compliance” maneuver to revive the JCPOA. This strike will make the diplomatic process more difficult, as it gives more power to the Iranian factions who oppose the deal and any negotiations with the United States.

    Showing bipartisan support for attacking sovereign nations, key Republicans on the foreign affairs committees such as Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Michael McCaul immediately welcomed the attacks. So did some Biden supporters, who crassly displayed their partiality to bombing by a Democratic president.

    Party organizer Amy Siskind tweeted: “So different having military action under Biden. No middle school level threats on Twitter. Trust Biden and his team’s competence.” Biden supporter Suzanne Lamminen tweeted: “Such a quiet attack. No drama, no TV coverage of bombs hitting targets, no comments on how presidential Biden is. What a difference.”

    Thankfully, though, some Members of Congress are speaking out against the strikes. “We cannot stand up for Congressional authorization before military strikes only when there is a Republican President,” Congressman Ro Khanna tweeted, “The Administration should have sought Congressional authorization here. We need to work to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate.” Peace groups around the country are echoing that call. Rep. Barbara Lee and Senators Bernie Sanders, Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy also released statements either questioning or condemning the strikes.

    Americans should remind President Biden that he promised to prioritize diplomacy over military action as the primary instrument of his foreign policy. Biden should recognize that the best way to protect U.S. personnel is to take them out of the Middle East. He should recall that the Iraqi Parliament voted a year ago for U.S. troops to leave their country. He should also recognize that U.S. troops have no right to be in Syria, still “protecting the oil,” on the orders of Donald Trump.

    After failing to prioritize diplomacy and rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement, Biden has now, barely a month into his presidency, reverted to the use of military force in a region already shattered by two decades of U.S. war-making. This is not what he promised in his campaign and it is not what the American people voted for.

    The post Biden’s Reckless Syria Bombing Is Not the Diplomacy He Promised first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden’s Reckless Syria Bombing Is Not the Diplomacy He Promised

    by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies / February 27th, 2021

    Photo: CODEPINK

    The February 25 U.S. bombing of Syria immediately puts the policies of the newly-formed Biden administration into sharp relief. Why is this administration bombing the sovereign nation of Syria? Why is it bombing “Iranian-backed militias” who pose absolutely no threat to the United States and are actually involved in fighting ISIS? If this is about getting more leverage vis-a-vis Iran, why hasn’t the Biden administration just done what it said it would do: rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and de-escalate the Middle East conflicts?

    According to the Pentagon, the U.S. strike was in response to the February 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member. Accounts of the number killed in the U.S. attack vary from one to 22.

    The Pentagon made the incredible claim that this action “aims to de-escalate the overall situation in both Eastern Syria and Iraq.” This was countered by the Syrian government, which condemned the illegal attack on its territory and said the strikes “will lead to consequences that will escalate the situation in the region.” The strike was also condemned by the governments of China and Russia. A member of Russia’s Federation Council warned that such escalations in the area could lead to “a massive conflict.”

    Ironically, Jen Psaki, now Biden’s White House spokesperson, questioned the lawfulness of attacking Syria in 2017, when it was the Trump administration doing the bombing. Back then she asked: “What is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.”

    The airstrikes were supposedly authorized by the 20-year-old, post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), legislation that Rep. Barbara Lee has been trying for years to repeal since it has been misused, according to the congresswoman, “to justify waging war in at least seven different countries, against a continuously expanding list of targetable adversaries.”

    The United States claims that its targeting of the militia in Syria was based on intelligence provided by the Iraqi government. Defense Secretary Austin told reporters: “We’re confident that target was being used by the same Shia militia that conducted the strike [against U.S. and coalition forces].”

    But a report by Middle East Eye (MEE) suggests that Iran has strongly urged the militias it supports in Iraq to refrain from such attacks, or any warlike actions that could derail its sensitive diplomacy to bring the U.S. and Iran back into compliance with the 2015 international nuclear agreement or JCPOA.

    “None of our known factions carried out this attack,” a senior Iraqi militia commander told MEE. “The Iranian orders have not changed regarding attacking the American forces, and the Iranians are still keen to maintain calm with the Americans until they see how the new administration will act.”

    The inflammatory nature of this U.S. attack on Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, who are an integral part of Iraq’s armed forces and have played a critical role in the war with ISIS, was implicitly acknowledged in the U.S. decision to attack them in Syria instead of in Iraq. Did Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, a pro-Western British-Iraqi, who is trying to rein in the Iranian-backed Shiite militias, deny permission for a U.S. attack on Iraqi soil?

    At Kadhimi’s request, NATO is increasing its presence from 500 troops to 4,000 (from Denmark, the U.K. and Turkey, not the U.S.) to train the Iraqi military and reduce its dependence on the Iranian-backed militias. But Kadhimi risks losing his job in an election this October if he alienates Iraq’s Shiite majority. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein is heading to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials over the weekend, and the world will be watching to see how Iraq and Iran will respond to the U.S. attack.

    Some analysts say the bombing may have been intended to strengthen the U.S. hand in its negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal (JCPOA). “The strike, the way I see it, was meant to set the tone with Tehran and dent its inflated confidence ahead of negotiations,” said Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is currently a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute.

    But this attack will make it more difficult to resume negotiations with Iran. It comes at a delicate moment when the Europeans are trying to orchestrate a “compliance for compliance” maneuver to revive the JCPOA. This strike will make the diplomatic process more difficult, as it gives more power to the Iranian factions who oppose the deal and any negotiations with the United States.

    Showing bipartisan support for attacking sovereign nations, key Republicans on the foreign affairs committees such as Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Michael McCaul immediately welcomed the attacks. So did some Biden supporters, who crassly displayed their partiality to bombing by a Democratic president.

    Party organizer Amy Siskind tweeted: “So different having military action under Biden. No middle school level threats on Twitter. Trust Biden and his team’s competence.” Biden supporter Suzanne Lamminen tweeted: “Such a quiet attack. No drama, no TV coverage of bombs hitting targets, no comments on how presidential Biden is. What a difference.”

    Thankfully, though, some Members of Congress are speaking out against the strikes. “We cannot stand up for Congressional authorization before military strikes only when there is a Republican President,” Congressman Ro Khanna tweeted, “The Administration should have sought Congressional authorization here. We need to work to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate.” Peace groups around the country are echoing that call. Rep. Barbara Lee and Senators Bernie Sanders, Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy also released statements either questioning or condemning the strikes.

    Americans should remind President Biden that he promised to prioritize diplomacy over military action as the primary instrument of his foreign policy. Biden should recognize that the best way to protect U.S. personnel is to take them out of the Middle East. He should recall that the Iraqi Parliament voted a year ago for U.S. troops to leave their country. He should also recognize that U.S. troops have no right to be in Syria, still “protecting the oil,” on the orders of Donald Trump.

    After failing to prioritize diplomacy and rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement, Biden has now, barely a month into his presidency, reverted to the use of military force in a region already shattered by two decades of U.S. war-making. This is not what he promised in his campaign and it is not what the American people voted for.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2021 at 9:05am and is filed under Bombs, Democrats, Iran, Iraq, Joe Biden, Militarism, Syria, US War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden’s Syria Airstrike Prompts Demands for Answers From Social Media, Lawmakers

    President Biden answers a reporter's question as he departs with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Vice President Kamala Harris at the Pentagon on February 10, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Democratic lawmakers and anti-war activists have slammed the Biden administration for carrying out illegal airstrikes in Syria while abandoning progressive policy priorities.

    The United States carried out an airstrike in Syria on Thursday, claiming it was targeting militias allegedly backed by Iran in what is the first known military action by President Joe Biden since he was sworn into office.

    “We didn’t flip Georgia Blue for Biden to air strike Syria. We flipped Georgia Blue for our $2,000 Stimulus Checks,” said Ja’Mal Green, a civil rights advocate and former surrogate for Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president.

    Anti-war organization CODEPINK similarly criticized the Biden administration for failing to de-escalate U.S. foreign policy while rejecting policies such as student debt relief.

    The Pentagon has stated that “multiple facilities” were destroyed in the attack, which was ostensibly ordered in response to a rocket attack against U.S. and other coalition personnel in Iraq earlier this month, which killed a civilian contractor.

    While the militia attacked by the U.S. said that just one individual had died, a separate war monitor suggested there were at least 22 fatalities, the BBC reported.

    Syria has condemned the attack, calling it a “bad sign” for the new administration. The Pentagon justified the airstrike as a “proportionate military response” that was taken in consultation with allies in the region.

    Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) criticized the Biden administration for authorizing a unilateral strike that keeps the U.S. entangled in conflicts overseas.

    “There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) said in a statement. “We need to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate.”

    Mainstream analysts said that the new administration launched the airstrike to demonstrate its willingness to use military force in its rivalry with Iran.

    “It is sending a message: The bottom line is that we won’t tolerate this and will use military force when we feel you’ve crossed the line,” Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said to The New York Times regarding Biden’s possible motivations for the airstrike.

    Stephen Kinzer, former foreign affairs correspondent for The New York Times, noted that Biden is now the third successive president to have bombed Syria.

    “Syria is a sovereign country with which we are not at war,” Kinzer added. “Therefore we have no legal or moral right to bomb its territory. Yet the bipartisan attitude in DC seems to be ‘We’re the USA, we bomb wherever we want.’”

    Iraq War veteran and former lawyer for the Brennan Center for Justice Chris Deluzio lambasted the Biden administration for failing to get congressional authorization, and noting that the justification for the attack would likely lean on an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that dates back to nearly 20 years ago.

    “Reminder: the Congress never authorized military action in Syria,” Deluzio said. “Relying for nearly two decades on the 2001 AUMF passed after 9/11 is part of how we find ourselves mired in Forever War, with no end in sight.”

    Adil Ahmad Haque, a Rutgers law school professor who writes on the ethics of armed conflict and international criminal law, said the airstrikes were “almost certainly” in violation of international law.

    “The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time,” Haque wrote in a blog post for Just Security. “And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor,” which Haque argued is unlawful when there isn’t an ongoing attack.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Britain risks creating new Guantánamo in Syria, says rights group

    Charity Reprieve criticises government’s ‘abdication of responsibility’ over Shamima Begum

    Britain risks creating “a new Guantánamo” in Syria by leaving Shamima Begum and others like her stranded in Syrian detention camps, it has been claimed, after the supreme court rejected Begum’s appeal against a decision to revoke her UK citizenship.

    A key figure who has been involved with Begum’s case said the judgment left the 21-year-old in a legal limbo, unable to return to the UK or mount an effective challenge to the deprivation decision remotely.

    Related: Shamima Begum is a victim of trafficking – and the UK should treat her as such | Maya Foa

    Continue reading…

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

  • The Guardian view on Shamima Begum: she ought to have her day in court | Editorial

    The supreme court’s decision to allow this formerly British woman to be exiled does more harm to the public interest than bringing her back

    Shamima Begum was born and brought up in London, as a British citizen. Six years ago, when she was 15, she and two other girls, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, left the UK to join Islamic State. Today, Ms Begum is the widowed mother of three dead children, imprisoned in the al-Roj camp in territory controlled by Syrian Kurds. On Friday, the UK supreme court reversed a decision by the court of appeal, judged that she is not entitled to have her British citizenship restored, and that she should not be allowed to return to the UK to fight her case in person.

    These are wrong rulings. The UK is the correct place for an examination of this British-born woman’s mistakes or crimes, however horrific. By exiling her, as the court decided that the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, was entitled to do, the UK is ducking its international responsibilities. Ms Begum cannot properly instruct lawyers. The court held out the faint hope that a “fair hearing” could possibly take place at some future date. In the meantime, it is hard to see why other countries, or non-state actors such as the Syrian Kurds, should have to detain British fighters or their families (around 60 British adults and children remain in detention in Syria). For Britain to offload Ms Begum, on grounds that this would not make her stateless because her heritage entitles her to apply for citizenship of Bangladesh (where she has never been), is an abuse of position and of history.

    Continue reading…

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

  • The For the People Act

    In the face of voter suppression legislation in Republican legislatures around the country, Democrats in Congress are trying to pass a law, called the For the People Act, to stop partisan gerrymandering, limit money in politics, and expand voting access. Continue reading

    The post The For the People Act appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Tell Biden: Stop Bombing Syria!

    It has taken only 36 days in office for the Biden administration to show the world, through a bombing attack on Syria, that it is belligerent, aggressive and hell-bent on war. There was only a short respite from Trump’s vile words and actions. Now we have to face Biden’s vile deeds and resist them.

    Even the excuse U.S. imperialism gave for bombing Syria was feeble. A rocket attack some weeks ago killed a mercenary in Iraq. Excuses like that open the door to new U.S. wars and interventions all over countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America where Washington has replaced official U.S. troops with soldiers of fortune.

    You might think the Biden administration had enough problems at home to keep it busy. The COVID-19 pandemic still rages despite the vaccines – whose distribution has been a disgrace.

    The post Tell Biden: Stop Bombing Syria! appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Bombs Syria And Ridiculously Claims Self Defense

    On orders of President Biden, the United States has launched an airstrike on a facility in Syria. As of this writing the exact number of killed and injured is unknown, with early reports claiming “a handful” of people were killed.

    Rather than doing anything remotely resembling journalism, the western mass media have opted instead to uncritically repeat what they’ve been told about the airstrike by US officials, which is the same as just publishing Pentagon press releases.

    Here’s this from The Washington Post:

    The Biden administration conducted an airstrike against alleged Iranian-linked fighters in Syria on Thursday, signaling its intent to push back against violence believed to be sponsored by Tehran.

     

    Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the attack, the first action ordered by the Biden administration to push back against alleged Iranian-linked violence in Iraq and Syria, on a border control point in eastern Syria was “authorized in response to recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq, and to ongoing threats.”

     

    He said the facilities were used by Iranian-linked militias including Kaitib Hezbollah and Kaitib Sayyid al-Shuhada.

     

    The operation follows the latest serious attack on U.S. locations in Iraq that American officials have attributed to Iranian-linked groups operating in Iraq and Syria. Earlier this month, a rocket attack in northern Iraq killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member there.

    So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the US invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force. And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.

    This is Defense Department stenography. The US military is an invading force in both Syria and Iraq; it is impossible for its actions in either of those countries to be defensive. It is always necessarily the aggressor. It’s the people trying to eject them who are acting defensively. The deaths of US troops and contractors in those countries can only be blamed on the powerful people who sent them there.

    The US is just taking it as a given that it has de facto jurisdiction over the nations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and that any attempt to interfere in its authority in the region is an unprovoked attack which must be defended against. This is completely backwards and illegitimate. Only through the most perversely warped American supremacist reality tunnels can it look valid to dictate the affairs of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet and respond with violence if anyone in those nations tries to eject them.

    It’s illegitimate for the US to be in the Middle East at all. It’s illegitimate for the US to claim to be acting defensively in nations it invaded. It’s illegitimate for the US to act like Iranian-backed fighters aren’t allowed to be in Syria, where they are fighting alongside the Syrian government against ISIS and other extremist militias with the permission of Damascus. It is illegitimate for the US to claim the fighters attacking US personnel in Iraq are controlled by Iran when Iraqis have every reason to want the US out of their country themselves.

    Even the official narrative reveals itself as illegitimate from within its own worldview. CNN reports that the site of the airstrike “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” in Iraq, and a Reuters/AP report says “Biden administration officials condemned the February 15 rocket attack near the city of Irbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-run region, but as recently as this week officials indicated they had not determined for certain who carried it out.”

    This is all so very typical of the American supremacist worldview that is being aggressively shoved down our throats by all western mainstream news media. The US can bomb who it likes, whenever it likes, and when it does it is only ever doing so in self defense, because the entire planet is the property of Washington, DC. It can seize control of entire clusters of nations, and if any of those nations resist in any way they are invading America’s sovereignty.

    It’s like if you broke into your neighbor’s house to rob him, killed him when he tried to stop you, and then claimed self defense because you consider his home your property. Only in the American exceptionalist alternate universe is this considered normal and acceptable.

    This sort of nonsense is why it’s so important to prioritize opposition to western imperialism. World warmongering and domination is the front upon which all the most egregious evils inflicted by the powerful take place, and it plays such a crucial role in upholding the power structures we are up against. Without endless war, the oligarchic empire which is the cause of so much of our suffering cannot function, and must give way to something else. If you’re looking to throw sand in the gears of the machine, anti-imperialism is your most efficacious path toward that end, and should therefore be your priority.

    In America especially it is important to oppose war and imperialism, because an entire empire depends on keeping the locals too poor and propagandized to force their nation’s resources to go to their own wellbeing. As long as the United States functions as the hub of a globe-spanning power structure, all the progressive agendas that are being sought by what passes for the US left these days will be denied them. Opposing warmongering must come first.

    Standing against imperialism and American supremacism cuts directly to the heart of our difficulties in this world, which is why so much energy goes into keeping us focused on identity politics and vapid energy sucks which inconvenience the powerful in no way whatsoever. If you want to out-wrestle a crocodile, you must bind shut its mouth. If you want to take down a globe-spanning empire, you must take out its weapons. Opposing warmongering and killing public trust in the propaganda used to justify it is the best way to do this.

    _____________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • US-Backed Militants Steal 140,000 Barrels Per Day Of Syrian Oil

    Tehran – Militants of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is supported by Washington, steal 140,000 barrels of crude oil on a daily basis from oil fields in Syria’s northeastern province of Hasakah, according to a report.

    Ghassan Halim Khalil, governor of Hasakah, announced the grim news in an interview with the Lebanese al-Akhbar newspaper on Saturday, adding that the SDF militants are plundering Syrian oil in various ways, all with the participation and support of American forces deployed to the region.

    He stressed that precise intelligence collected and received show that US-backed militants use tanker trucks from the Taramish area in Tigris and al-Malikiyah to smuggle the Syrian oil to neighboring Iraq.

    The post US-Backed Militants Steal 140,000 Barrels Per Day Of Syrian Oil appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • An American Murder in Istanbul: Justice for Halla

    An American journalist and her mom are found murdered in Istanbul. Police say they caught the killer. Friends and family say the investigation was incomplete. In collaboration with ABC News and freelance reporter Fariba Nawa, we dig into the investigative files against the convicted killer and learn that the U.S. government chose not to get involved in the investigation.

    This show was originally released on Oct. 10, 2020.

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Government Secrecy Causes Conspiracy Theories

    The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

    As Sputnik‘s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

    “In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for…

    The post Government Secrecy Causes Conspiracy Theories appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Conspiracy Theories Are Caused By Government Secrecy

    The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

    As Sputnik‘s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

    “In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny,” Artyukhina writes, calling to mind the Julian Assange quote “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

    The CIA’s brazen collaboration with dangerous extremist factions seeking to topple Damascus, and its equally brazen refusal to provide the public with any information about the extent of its involvement in Syria from the earliest stages of the violence in that nation onwards, will necessarily provide fodder for conspiracy theories.

    It is public knowledge that the CIA was involved in the Syrian war to some extent, it is public knowledge that the CIA has a well-documented history of doing extremely evil things, and it is public knowledge that the US government has long sought control over Syria. Due to the agency’s refusal to be transparent about the exact nature of its involvement in that nation, people are left to fill in the knowledge gaps with their own speculation.

    Of course they will do this. Why wouldn’t they? Why would anyone give the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency the benefit of the doubt and assume their actions in Syria have been benevolent just because the hard facts have been hidden behind a wall of government secrecy?

    Yet they will be expected to. Anyone with a sufficient degree of influence who comes right out and says the CIA knowingly armed violent jihadists with the goal of orchestrating regime change in Syria will be attacked as a crazy conspiracy theorist by the narrative managers of the establishment media. If their words are really disruptive to establishment narratives, there will be calls to deplatform, unemploy, and ban them from social media.

    And really such is the case with all the melodramatic garment rending about the dangers of conspiracy theories today. All the fixation on the way unregulated speech on the internet has contributed to the circulation of conspiracy theories conveniently ignores the real cause of those theories: government secrecy.

    If the most powerful government in the world were not hiding a massive amount of its behavior behind increasingly opaque walls of secrecy, people would not need to fill in the gaps with theories about what’s happening, because there would be no gaps; they would simply see what’s happening.

    “But Caitlin!” one might object. “How could America engage in all its military operations around the world if it didn’t keep information about its behaviors a secret?”

    Exactly, my smooth-brained friend. Exactly.

    Government secrecy is indeed necessary for winning wars. Government secrecy is also necessary for starting those wars in the first place. US government agencies have an extensive history of using false pretenses to initiate military conflicts; if they could not hide the facts behind a veil of government opacity, the public would never engage in them. The American people would never have allowed their sons to go to Vietnam if they’d known the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. They’d never have sent their sons and daughters to invade Iraq if they’d known weapons of mass destruction were a lie. They would lose the support of the public, and the international community would refuse to back them.

    Image

    Protecting the lives of foreign military and intelligence personnel is the primary argument against government transparency in the United States, a premise which takes it for granted that there need to be foreign military and intelligence personnel at all. The only reason the lives of troops and intelligence officers would be endangered without massive walls of government secrecy is because those personnel are out there facilitating imperialist acts of mass murder and tyranny. The argument is essentially “Well we can’t tell you the truth about what’s happening in our government, because it would mean we’d have to stop doing extremely evil things.”

    The argument that the internet needs strict censorship to eliminate dangerous conspiracy theories takes it as a given that simply eliminating government secrecy is impossible, which in turn takes it as a given that the US government cannot simply stop inflicting grave evils around the world. Our ability to share information with each other online is therefore ultimately being increasingly choked off by monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations because no one in charge can fathom the idea of the United States government ceasing to butcher human beings around the world.

    That is the real underlying argument over internet censorship today. Should people have free access to information about what their own government is doing, or should their government be permitted to do evil things in secret while people who form theories about what they’re doing are shoved further and further away from audibility? That’s the real debate here.

    The powerful should not be permitted to keep secrets from the public. They should not be permitted to jail journalists who try to reveal those secrets to the public, and they should not be permitted to collaborate with monopolistic corporations to censor people who form theories about those secrets. The amount of secrecy you are entitled to should be directly inverse to the amount of power that you have.

    The US government has powerful agencies whose literal job is to conspire. The fact that people are punished and condemned for forming theories about how that conspiring might take place, even while those agencies are completely lacking in transparency, is abusive.

    If the government was not doing evil things in secret, then it wouldn’t need secrecy. If the government didn’t have secrecy, there would be no conspiracy theories. Stop pointing your attacks at powerless people who are just trying to figure out what’s going on in the world amidst a sea of government secrecy and propaganda, and point your attacks instead at the power structures that are actually responsible for the existence of conspiracy theories in the first place.

    ________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Why Victoria Nuland is Dangerous and Should Not be Confirmed

    Victoria Nuland exemplifies the neocons who have led US foreign policy from one disaster to another for the past 30 years while evading accountability. It is a bad sign that President Joe Biden has nominated Victoria Nuland for the third highest position at the State Department, Under Secretary for Political Affairs.

    As a top-level appointee, Victoria Nuland must be confirmed by the US Senate. There is a campaign to Stop her confirmation. The following review of her work shows why Victoria Nuland is incompetent, highly dangerous and should not be confirmed.

    Afghanistan and Iraq

    From 2000 to 2003, Nuland was US permanent representative to NATO as the Bush administration attacked then invaded Afghanistan. The Afghan government offered to work with the US remove Al Qaeda, but this was rejected. After Al Qaeda was defeated, the US could have left Afghanistan but instead stayed, established semi-permanent bases, split the country, and is still fighting there two decades later.

    From 2003 to 2005 Nuland was principal foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney who “helped plan and manage the war that toppled Saddam Hussein, including making Bush administration’s case for preemptive military actions based on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.” The foreign policy establishment, with Nuland on the far right, believed that removing Saddam Hussein and installing a US “ally” would be simple.

    The invasion and continuing occupation have resulted in over a million dead Iraqis, many thousands of dead Americans, hundreds of thousands with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at a cost of 2 to 6 TRILLION dollars.

    From 2005 to 2008 Victoria Nuland was US Ambassador to NATO where her role was to “strengthen Allied support” for the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, when asked about the lessons learned Nuland responded: “Compared to where we were in the Saddam era, we now have a bilateral security agreement … We have deep economic interests and ties. We have a security relationship. We have a political relationship.” Nuland is oblivious to the costs. Nuland’s loyalties are to the elite who have benefitted from the tragedy. According to online google, “One of the top profiteers from the Iraq War was oil field services corporation, Halliburton. Halliburton gained $39.5 billion in ‘federal contracts related to the Iraq war.’ Nuland’s boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, was the former the CEO of Halliburton.

    In January 2020, seventeen years after the US invasion, the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution demanding the US troops and contractors leave. Now, over one year later, they still have not left.

    Libya

    In spring 2011, Victoria Nuland became State Department spokesperson under Hillary Clinton as she ramped up the “regime change” assault on Moammar Gaddafi of Libya. UN Security Council resolution 1973 authorized a “No Fly Zone” for the protection of civilians but NOT an air assault on Libyan government forces.

    That summer, as US and others bombed and attacked Libyan forces, she dismissed the option of a peaceful transition in Libya and falsely suggested the UN Security Council required the removal of Gaddafi.

    The campaign led to the toppling of the Libyan government and killing of Gadaffi. Commenting on the murder and bayonet sodomizing of Gaddafi, Nuland’s boss Hillary Clinton chortled: “We came, we saw, he died.”

    Before the overthrow, Libya had the highest standard of living in all of Africa. Since the US led assault, Libya has become a failed state with competing warlords, huge inflation, huge unemployment, and exploding extremism and violence that has spread to neighboring countries. Most of the migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, or drowned trying to, are coming from Libya. By any measure, the goal of “protecting” Libyan civilians has failed spectacularly.

    Syria

    One reason that Clinton and hawks such as Nuland wanted to overthrow Gaddafi was to get access to the Libyan military arsenal. That way they could funnel arms to insurgents seeking to overthrow the Syrian government. This was confirmed in secret DOD documents which state: “During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Gaddafi] regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”

    In January 2012, Nuland claimed the US is “on the side of those wanting peaceful change in Syria.” While saying this, the US was supplying sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenades, and 125 mm and 155 mm howitzer missiles to the “peaceful” protestors.

    The US “regime change” strategy for Syria followed the pattern of Libya. First, claim that the protestors are peaceful. Then claim the government response is disproportionate. Put pressure on the target government to paralyze it, while increasing support to proxy protesters and terrorists. As documented, there were violent Syrian protesters from the start. During the first days of protest in Deraa in mid-March 2011, seven police were killed. As spokesperson for the State Department, Nuland was a major figure promoting the false narrative to justify the “regime change” campaign.

    Ukraine


    In September 2013 Victoria Nuland was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. The uprising in the central plaza known as the Maidan began soon after her arrival. To underscore the US support for the protests, Nuland and Senator John McCain passed out bread and cookies to the crowd.

    Protests continued into January 2014. The immediate issue was whether to accept a loan from the International Monetary Fund which was going to require a 40% increase in natural gas bills or to accept a loan from Russia with the inclusion of cheap oil and gas. The opposition wanted the Yanukovych government to take the EU/IMF loan. The opposition was comprised of different factions, including the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and Right Sector.

    In early February 2014, an audio recording of Victoria Nuland talking the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, was leaked to the public. The 4-minute conversation was a media sensation because it included Victoria Nuland saying, “Fuck the EU.”

    But Nuland’s cursing was a distraction from what was truly significant. The recording showed that Nuland was meddling in domestic Ukraine affairs, had direct contacts with key opposition leaders, and was managing the protests to the extent she was deciding who would and would not be in the post-coup government! She says, “I don’t think Klitsch [Vitaly Klitschko] should go into government…… I think Yats [Arseniy Yatseniuk] is the guy… “

    The reason she wanted to “Fuck the EU” was because she did not approve the EU negotiations and compromise. Nuland and Pyatt wanted to “midwife” and “glue” the toppling of the Yanukovych government despite it being in power after an election that was observed and substantially approved by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).

    Over the next few weeks, the protests escalated. The President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kiev, Bernard Casey, described what happened next. “On February 18-20, snipers massacred about 100 people [both protestors and police] on the Maidan …. Although the US Ambassador and the opposition blamed the Yanukovych Administration, the evidence points to the shots coming from a hotel controlled by the ultranationalists, and the ballistics revealed that the protestors and the police were all shot with the same weapons.”

    The Estonian Foreign Minister later said the same thing: “behind the snipers it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new (opposition) coalition”.

    President of the American Chamber of Commerce President for Ukraine, Bernard Casey, continues: “On February 20, 2014 an EU delegation moderated negotiations between President Yanukovych and the protestors, agreeing to early elections – in May 2014 instead of February 2015…. Despite the signing of an agreement … the ultranationalist protestors, and their American sponsors, rejected it, and stepped up their campaign of violence.”

    The coup was finalized over the coming days. Yanukovych fled to for his life and Yatsenyuk became President after the coup as planned.

    One of the first acts of the coup leadership was to remove Russian as an official state language, even though it is the first language of millions of Ukrainians, especially in the south and east. Over the coming period, the “birth” of the coup government, violence by ultranationalists and neo-Nazis was prevalent. In Odessa, they attacked people peacefully protesting the coup. This video shows the sequence of events with the initial attack followed by fire-bombing the building where protestors had retreated. Fire trucks were prevented from reaching the building to put out the fire and rescue citizens inside. Forty-two people died and a 100 were injured.

    A bus convoy heading back to Crimea was attacked with the anti-coup passengers beaten and some killed.

    In the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, protests against the coup were met by deadly force.

    Victoria Nuland claims to be a “victim” because her conversation was leaked publicly. The real victims are the many thousands of Ukrainians who have died and hundreds of thousands who have become refugees because of Nuland’s crusade to bring Ukraine into NATO.

    The audio recording confirms that Nuland was managing the protests at a top level and the results (Yats is the guy) was as planned. Thus, it is probable that Nuland approved the decision to 1) deploy snipers to escalate the crisis and 2) overturn the EU mediated agreement which would have led to elections in just 3 months.

    Why were snipers deployed on February 18? Probably because time was running out. The Russian leadership was distracted with the Sochi Olympic Games ending on February 23. Perhaps the coup managers were in a hurry to “glue” it in advance.

    Russia

    During the 1990’s, Nuland worked for the State Department on Russia related issues including a stint as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. The US meddled in Russian internal affairs in myriad ways. Time magazine proudly proclaimed: “Yanks to the rescue: the secret story of how American advisors helped Yeltsin win.” The Yeltsin leadership and policies pushed by the US had disastrous consequences. Between 1991 and 1999, Russian Gross Domestic Product decreased by nearly 50% as the social safety net was removed. The Russian economy collapsed, oligarchs and lawlessness arose. Nuland was part of the US group meddling in Russia, deploying economic “shock therapy” and causing widespread social despair.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. reneged on promises to Soviet leader Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch” eastward. Instead, NATO became an offensive pact, bombing Yugoslavia in violation of international law and then absorbing Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Albania, Croatia and more.

    Coming into power in 2000, Putin clamped down on the oligarchs, restored order and started rebuilding the economy. Oligarchs were forced to pay taxes and start investing in productive enterprises. The economy and confidence were restored. Over seven years, GDP went from $1300 billion (US dollars) to $2300 billion. That is why Putin’s public approval rating has been consistently high, ranging between 85% and a “low” approval rating of 60%.

    Most Americans are unaware of these facts. Instead, Putin and Russia are persistently demonized. This has been convenient for the Democratic Party establishment which needed a distraction for their dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders and subsequent loss to Donald Trump. The demonization of Russia is also especially useful and profitable for the military industrial media complex.

    Victoria Nuland boosted the “Steele Dossier” which alleged collaboration between Russia and Trump and other salacious claims. The allegations filled the media and poisoned attitudes to Russia. Belatedly, the truth about the “Steele Dossier” is coming out. Last summer the Wall Street Journal reported “the bureau (FBI) knew the Russia info was phony in 2017” and that “There was no factual basis to the dossier’s claims”.

    While promoting disinformation, Victoria Nuland is pushing for a more aggressive US foreign policy. In an article titled “Pinning Down Putin”, she says “Russia’s threat to the liberal world has grown”, that Washington should “deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin” and “rebuff Russian encroachments in hot spots around the world.”

    The major “hot spots” are the conflicts which Victoria Nuland and other Washington neocons promoted, especially Syria and Ukraine. In Syria, the US and allies have spent hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars promoting the overthrow of the Assad government. So far, they have failed but have not given up. The facts are clear: US troops and military bases in Syria do not have the authorization of the Syrian government. They are actively stealing the precious oil resources of the Syrian state. It is the US not Russia that is “encroaching”. The dangerous behavior is by Washington not Moscow.

    Conclusion

    Victoria Nuland has promoted a foreign policy of intervention through coups, proxy wars, aggression, and ongoing occupations. The policy has been implemented with bloody and disastrous results in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

    With consummate hypocrisy she accuses Russia of spreading misinformation in the US, while she openly seeks to put “stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” She wants to “establish permanent bases along NATO’s eastern border and increase the pace and visibility of joint training exercises.”

    Victoria Nuland is the queen of chicken hawks, the Lady Macbeth of perpetual war. There are hundreds of thousands of victims from the policies she has promoted. Yet she has not received a scratch. On the contrary, Victoria Nuland probably has profited from a stock portfolio filled with military contractors.

    Now Victoria Nuland wants to provoke, threaten and “rollback” Russia. A quick look at a map of US military bases shows who is threatening whom.

    Victoria Nuland is highly dangerous and should not be confirmed.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2021 at 7:42am and is filed under Imperialism, Libya, Militarism, Russia, Syria, Ukraine.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why Victoria Nuland is Dangerous and Should Not be Confirmed

    Victoria Nuland exemplifies the neocons who have led US foreign policy from one disaster to another for the past 30 years while evading accountability. It is a bad sign that President Joe Biden has nominated Victoria Nuland for the third highest position at the State Department, Under Secretary for Political Affairs.

    As a top-level appointee, Victoria Nuland must be confirmed by the US Senate. There is a campaign to Stop her confirmation. The following review of her work shows why Victoria Nuland is incompetent, highly dangerous and should not be confirmed.

    Afghanistan and Iraq

    From 2000 to 2003, Nuland was US permanent representative to NATO as the Bush administration attacked then invaded Afghanistan. The Afghan government offered to work with the US remove Al Qaeda, but this was rejected. After Al Qaeda was defeated, the US could have left Afghanistan but instead stayed, established semi-permanent bases, split the country, and is still fighting there two decades later.

    From 2003 to 2005 Nuland was principal foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney who “helped plan and manage the war that toppled Saddam Hussein, including making Bush administration’s case for preemptive military actions based on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.” The foreign policy establishment, with Nuland on the far right, believed that removing Saddam Hussein and installing a US “ally” would be simple.

    The invasion and continuing occupation have resulted in over a million dead Iraqis, many thousands of dead Americans, hundreds of thousands with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at a cost of 2 to 6 TRILLION dollars.

    From 2005 to 2008 Victoria Nuland was US Ambassador to NATO where her role was to “strengthen Allied support” for the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, when asked about the lessons learned Nuland responded: “Compared to where we were in the Saddam era, we now have a bilateral security agreement … We have deep economic interests and ties. We have a security relationship. We have a political relationship.” Nuland is oblivious to the costs. Nuland’s loyalties are to the elite who have benefitted from the tragedy. According to online google, “One of the top profiteers from the Iraq War was oil field services corporation, Halliburton. Halliburton gained $39.5 billion in ‘federal contracts related to the Iraq war.’ Nuland’s boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, was the former the CEO of Halliburton.

    In January 2020, seventeen years after the US invasion, the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution demanding the US troops and contractors leave. Now, over one year later, they still have not left.

    Libya

    In spring 2011, Victoria Nuland became State Department spokesperson under Hillary Clinton as she ramped up the “regime change” assault on Moammar Gaddafi of Libya. UN Security Council resolution 1973 authorized a “No Fly Zone” for the protection of civilians but NOT an air assault on Libyan government forces.

    That summer, as US and others bombed and attacked Libyan forces, she dismissed the option of a peaceful transition in Libya and falsely suggested the UN Security Council required the removal of Gaddafi.

    The campaign led to the toppling of the Libyan government and killing of Gadaffi. Commenting on the murder and bayonet sodomizing of Gaddafi, Nuland’s boss Hillary Clinton chortled: “We came, we saw, he died.”

    Before the overthrow, Libya had the highest standard of living in all of Africa. Since the US led assault, Libya has become a failed state with competing warlords, huge inflation, huge unemployment, and exploding extremism and violence that has spread to neighboring countries. Most of the migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, or drowned trying to, are coming from Libya. By any measure, the goal of “protecting” Libyan civilians has failed spectacularly.

    Syria

    One reason that Clinton and hawks such as Nuland wanted to overthrow Gaddafi was to get access to the Libyan military arsenal. That way they could funnel arms to insurgents seeking to overthrow the Syrian government. This was confirmed in secret DOD documents which state: “During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Gaddafi] regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”

    In January 2012, Nuland claimed the US is “on the side of those wanting peaceful change in Syria.” While saying this, the US was supplying sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenades, and 125 mm and 155 mm howitzer missiles to the “peaceful” protestors.

    The US “regime change” strategy for Syria followed the pattern of Libya. First, claim that the protestors are peaceful. Then claim the government response is disproportionate. Put pressure on the target government to paralyze it, while increasing support to proxy protesters and terrorists. As documented, there were violent Syrian protesters from the start. During the first days of protest in Deraa in mid-March 2011, seven police were killed. As spokesperson for the State Department, Nuland was a major figure promoting the false narrative to justify the “regime change” campaign.

    Ukraine


    In September 2013 Victoria Nuland was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. The uprising in the central plaza known as the Maidan began soon after her arrival. To underscore the US support for the protests, Nuland and Senator John McCain passed out bread and cookies to the crowd.

    Protests continued into January 2014. The immediate issue was whether to accept a loan from the International Monetary Fund which was going to require a 40% increase in natural gas bills or to accept a loan from Russia with the inclusion of cheap oil and gas. The opposition wanted the Yanukovych government to take the EU/IMF loan. The opposition was comprised of different factions, including the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and Right Sector.

    In early February 2014, an audio recording of Victoria Nuland talking the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, was leaked to the public. The 4-minute conversation was a media sensation because it included Victoria Nuland saying, “Fuck the EU.”

    But Nuland’s cursing was a distraction from what was truly significant. The recording showed that Nuland was meddling in domestic Ukraine affairs, had direct contacts with key opposition leaders, and was managing the protests to the extent she was deciding who would and would not be in the post-coup government! She says, “I don’t think Klitsch [Vitaly Klitschko] should go into government…… I think Yats [Arseniy Yatseniuk] is the guy… “

    The reason she wanted to “Fuck the EU” was because she did not approve the EU negotiations and compromise. Nuland and Pyatt wanted to “midwife” and “glue” the toppling of the Yanukovych government despite it being in power after an election that was observed and substantially approved by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).

    Over the next few weeks, the protests escalated. The President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kiev, Bernard Casey, described what happened next. “On February 18-20, snipers massacred about 100 people [both protestors and police] on the Maidan …. Although the US Ambassador and the opposition blamed the Yanukovych Administration, the evidence points to the shots coming from a hotel controlled by the ultranationalists, and the ballistics revealed that the protestors and the police were all shot with the same weapons.”

    The Estonian Foreign Minister later said the same thing: “behind the snipers it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new (opposition) coalition”.

    President of the American Chamber of Commerce President for Ukraine, Bernard Casey, continues: “On February 20, 2014 an EU delegation moderated negotiations between President Yanukovych and the protestors, agreeing to early elections – in May 2014 instead of February 2015…. Despite the signing of an agreement … the ultranationalist protestors, and their American sponsors, rejected it, and stepped up their campaign of violence.”

    The coup was finalized over the coming days. Yanukovych fled to for his life and Yatsenyuk became President after the coup as planned.

    One of the first acts of the coup leadership was to remove Russian as an official state language, even though it is the first language of millions of Ukrainians, especially in the south and east. Over the coming period, the “birth” of the coup government, violence by ultranationalists and neo-Nazis was prevalent. In Odessa, they attacked people peacefully protesting the coup. This video shows the sequence of events with the initial attack followed by fire-bombing the building where protestors had retreated. Fire trucks were prevented from reaching the building to put out the fire and rescue citizens inside. Forty-two people died and a 100 were injured.

    A bus convoy heading back to Crimea was attacked with the anti-coup passengers beaten and some killed.

    In the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, protests against the coup were met by deadly force.

    Victoria Nuland claims to be a “victim” because her conversation was leaked publicly. The real victims are the many thousands of Ukrainians who have died and hundreds of thousands who have become refugees because of Nuland’s crusade to bring Ukraine into NATO.

    The audio recording confirms that Nuland was managing the protests at a top level and the results (Yats is the guy) was as planned. Thus, it is probable that Nuland approved the decision to 1) deploy snipers to escalate the crisis and 2) overturn the EU mediated agreement which would have led to elections in just 3 months.

    Why were snipers deployed on February 18? Probably because time was running out. The Russian leadership was distracted with the Sochi Olympic Games ending on February 23. Perhaps the coup managers were in a hurry to “glue” it in advance.

    Russia

    During the 1990’s, Nuland worked for the State Department on Russia related issues including a stint as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. The US meddled in Russian internal affairs in myriad ways. Time magazine proudly proclaimed: “Yanks to the rescue: the secret story of how American advisors helped Yeltsin win.” The Yeltsin leadership and policies pushed by the US had disastrous consequences. Between 1991 and 1999, Russian Gross Domestic Product decreased by nearly 50% as the social safety net was removed. The Russian economy collapsed, oligarchs and lawlessness arose. Nuland was part of the US group meddling in Russia, deploying economic “shock therapy” and causing widespread social despair.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. reneged on promises to Soviet leader Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch” eastward. Instead, NATO became an offensive pact, bombing Yugoslavia in violation of international law and then absorbing Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Albania, Croatia and more.

    Coming into power in 2000, Putin clamped down on the oligarchs, restored order and started rebuilding the economy. Oligarchs were forced to pay taxes and start investing in productive enterprises. The economy and confidence were restored. Over seven years, GDP went from $1300 billion (US dollars) to $2300 billion. That is why Putin’s public approval rating has been consistently high, ranging between 85% and a “low” approval rating of 60%.

    Most Americans are unaware of these facts. Instead, Putin and Russia are persistently demonized. This has been convenient for the Democratic Party establishment which needed a distraction for their dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders and subsequent loss to Donald Trump. The demonization of Russia is also especially useful and profitable for the military industrial media complex.

    Victoria Nuland boosted the “Steele Dossier” which alleged collaboration between Russia and Trump and other salacious claims. The allegations filled the media and poisoned attitudes to Russia. Belatedly, the truth about the “Steele Dossier” is coming out. Last summer the Wall Street Journal reported “the bureau (FBI) knew the Russia info was phony in 2017” and that “There was no factual basis to the dossier’s claims”.

    While promoting disinformation, Victoria Nuland is pushing for a more aggressive US foreign policy. In an article titled “Pinning Down Putin”, she says “Russia’s threat to the liberal world has grown”, that Washington should “deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin” and “rebuff Russian encroachments in hot spots around the world.”

    The major “hot spots” are the conflicts which Victoria Nuland and other Washington neocons promoted, especially Syria and Ukraine. In Syria, the US and allies have spent hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars promoting the overthrow of the Assad government. So far, they have failed but have not given up. The facts are clear: US troops and military bases in Syria do not have the authorization of the Syrian government. They are actively stealing the precious oil resources of the Syrian state. It is the US not Russia that is “encroaching”. The dangerous behavior is by Washington not Moscow.

    Conclusion

    Victoria Nuland has promoted a foreign policy of intervention through coups, proxy wars, aggression, and ongoing occupations. The policy has been implemented with bloody and disastrous results in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

    With consummate hypocrisy she accuses Russia of spreading misinformation in the US, while she openly seeks to put “stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” She wants to “establish permanent bases along NATO’s eastern border and increase the pace and visibility of joint training exercises.”

    Victoria Nuland is the queen of chicken hawks, the Lady Macbeth of perpetual war. There are hundreds of thousands of victims from the policies she has promoted. Yet she has not received a scratch. On the contrary, Victoria Nuland probably has profited from a stock portfolio filled with military contractors.

    Now Victoria Nuland wants to provoke, threaten and “rollback” Russia. A quick look at a map of US military bases shows who is threatening whom.

    Victoria Nuland is highly dangerous and should not be confirmed.

    The post Why Victoria Nuland is Dangerous and Should Not be Confirmed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The “humanitarian” left still ignores the lessons of Iraq, Libya and Syria to cheer on more war

    The instinct among parts of the left to cheer lead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones reveals in a column today on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands.

    The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and UK; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that unleashed a new regional trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria apart.

    In fact, those weren’t really separate horror shows: they were instalments of one long horror show.

    The vacuum left in Iraq by the west – the execution of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his armed forces – sucked in Islamic extremists from every corner of the Middle East. The US and UK occupations of Iraq served both as fuel to rationalise new, more nihilistic Islamic doctrines that culminated in the emergence of Islamic State, and as a training ground for jihadists to develop better methods of militarised resistance.

    That process accelerated in post-Gaddafi Libya, where Islamic extremists were handed an even more lawless country than post-invasion Iraq in which to recruit followers and train them, and trade arms. All of that know-how and weaponry ended up flooding into Syria where the same Islamic extremists hoped to establish the seat of their new caliphate.

    Many millions of Arabs across the region were either slaughtered or forced to flee their homes, becoming permanent refugees, because of the supposedly “humanitarian” impulse unleashed by George W Bush and Tony Blair.

    No lesson learnt

    One might imagine that by this stage liberal humanitarianism was entirely discredited, at least on the left. But you would be wrong. There are still those who have learnt no lessons at all – like the Guardian’s Owen Jones. In his column today he picks up and runs with the latest pretext for global warmongering by the right: the Uighurs, a Muslim minority that has long been oppressed by China.

    After acknowledging the bad faith arguments and general unreliability of the right, Jones sallies forth to argue – as if Iraq, Libya and Syria never happened – that the left must not avoid good causes just because bad people support them. We must not, he writes:

    sacrifice oppressed Muslims on the altar of geopolitics: and indeed, it is possible to walk and to chew gum; to oppose western militarism and to stand with victims of state violence. It would be perverse to cede a defence of China’s Muslims – however disingenuous – to reactionaries and warmongers.

    But this is to entirely miss the point of the anti-war and anti-imperialist politics that are the bedrock of any progressive left wing movement.

    Jones does at least note, even if very cursorily, the bad-faith reasoning of the right when it accuses the left of being all too ready to protest outside a US or Israeli embassy but not a Chinese or Russian one:

    Citizens [in the west] have at least some potential leverage over their own governments: whether it be to stop participation in foreign action, or encourage them to confront human rights abusing allies.

    But he then ignores this important observation about power and responsibility and repurposes it as a stick to beat the left with:

    But that doesn’t mean abandoning a commitment to defending the oppressed, whoever their oppressor might be. To speak out against Islamophobia in western societies but to remain silent about the Uighurs is to declare that the security of Muslims only matters in some countries. We need genuine universalists.

    That is not only a facile argument, it’s a deeply dangerous one. There are two important additional reasons why the left needs to avoid cheerleading the right’s favoured warmongering causes, based on both its anti-imperialist and anti-war priorities.

    Virtue-signalling

    Jones misunderstands the goal of the left’s anti-imperialist politics. It is not, as the right so often claims, about left wing “virtue-signalling”. It is the very opposite of that. It is about carefully selecting our political priorities – priorities necessarily antithetical to the dominant narratives promoted by the west’s warmongering political and media establishments. Our primary goal is to undermine imperialist causes that have led to such great violence and suffering around the world.

    Jones forgets that the purpose of the anti-war left is not to back the west’s warmongering establishment for picking a ‘humanitarian’ cause for its wars. It is to discredit the establishment, expose its warmongering and stop its wars.

    The best measure – practical and ethical – for the western left to use to determine which causes to expend its limited resources and energies on are those that can help others to wake up to the continuing destructive behaviours of the west’s political establishment, even when that warmongering establishment presents itself in two guises: whether the Republicans and the Democrats in the United States, or the Conservatives and the (non-Corbyn) Labour party in the UK.

    We on the left cannot influence China or Russia. But we can try to influence debates in our own societies that discredit the western elite headquartered in the US – the world’s sole military superpower.

    Our job is not just to weigh the scales of injustice – in any case, the thumb of the west’s power-elite is far heavier than any of its rivals. It is to highlight the bad faith nature of western foreign policy, and underscore to the wider public that the real aim of the west’s foreign policy elite is either to attack or to intimidate those who refuse to submit to its power or hand over their resources.

    Do no harm

    That is what modern imperialism looks like. To ignore the bad faith of a Pompeo, a Blair, an Obama, a Bush or a Trump simply because they briefly adopt a good cause for ignoble reasons is to betray anti-imperialist politics. To use a medical analogy, it is to fixate on one symptom of global injustice while refusing to diagnose the actual disease so that it can be treated.

    Requiring, as Jones does, that we prioritise the Uighurs – especially when they are the momentary pet project of the west’s warmongering, anti-China right – does not advance our anti-imperialist goals, it actively harms them. Because the left offers its own credibility, its own stamp of approval, to the right’s warmongering.

    When the left is weak – when, unlike the right, it has no corporate media to dominate the airwaves with its political concerns and priorities, when it has almost no politicians articulating its worldview – it cannot control how its support for humanitarian causes is presented to the general public. Instead it always finds itself coopted into the drumbeat for war.

    That is a lesson Jones should have learnt personally – in fact, a lesson he promised he had learnt – after his cooption by the corporate Guardian to damage the political fortunes of Jeremy Corbyn, the only anti-war, anti-imperialist politician Britain has ever had who was in sight of power.

    Anti-imperialist politics is not about good intentions; it’s about beneficial outcomes. To employ another medical analogy, our credo must to be to do no harm – or, if that is not possible, at least to minimise harm.

    The ‘defence’ industry

    Which is why the flaw in Jones’ argument runs deeper still.

    The anti-war left is not just against acts of wars, though of course it is against those too. It is against the global war economy: the weapons manufacturers that fund our politicians; the arms trade lobbies that now sit in our governments; our leaders, of the right and so-called left, who divide the world into a Manichean struggle between the good guys and bad guys to justify their warmongering and weapons purchases; the arms traders that profit from human violence and suffering; the stock-piling of nuclear weapons that threaten our future as a species.

    The anti-war left is against the globe’s dominant, western war economy, one that deceives us into believing it is really a “defence industry”. That “defence industry” needs villains, like China and Russia, that it must extravagantly arm itself against. And that means fixating on the crimes of China and Russia, while largely ignoring our own crimes, so that those “defence industries” can prosper.

    Yes, Russia and China have armies too. But no one in the west can credibly believe Moscow or Beijing are going to disarm when the far superior military might of the west – of NATO – flexes its muscles daily in their faces, when it surrounds them with military bases that encroach ever nearer their territory, when it points its missiles menacingly in their direction.

    Rhetoric of war

    Jones and George Monbiot, the other token leftist at the Guardian with no understanding of how global politics works, can always be relied on to cheerlead the western establishment’s humanitarian claims – and demand that we do too. That is also doubtless the reason they are allowed their solitary slots in the liberal corporate media.

    When called out, the pair argue that, even though they loudly trumpet their detestation of Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad, that does not implicate them in the wars that are subsequently waged against Iraq or Syria.

    This is obviously infantile logic, which assumes that the left can echo the rhetoric of the west’s warmongering power-elite without taking any responsibility for the wars that result from that warmongering.

    But Jones’ logic is even more grossly flawed than that. It pretends that the left can echo the rhetoric of the warmongers and not take responsibility for the war industries that constantly thrive and expand, whether or not actual wars are being waged at any one time.

    The western foreign policy elite is concerned about the Uighurs not because it wishes to save them from Chinese persecution or even because it necessarily intends to use them as a pretext to attack China. Rather, its professed concerns serve to underpin claims that are essential to the success of its war industries: that the west is the global good guy; that China is a potential nemesis, the Joker to our Batman; and that the west therefore needs an even bigger arsenal, paid by us as taxpayers, to protect itself.

    The Uighurs’ cause is being instrumentalised by the west’s foreign policy establishment to further enhance its power and make the world even less safe for us all, the Uighurs included. Whatever Jones claims, there should be no obligation on the left to give succour to the west’s war industries.

    Vilifying “official enemies” while safely ensconced inside the “defence” umbrella of the global superpower and hegemony is a crime against peace, against justice, against survival. Jones is free to flaunt his humanitarian credentials, but so are we to reject political demands dictated to us by the west’s war machine.

    The anti-war left has its own struggles, its own priorities. It does not need to be gaslit by Mike Pompeo or Tony Blair – or, for that matter, by Owen Jones.

    This article was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2021 at 5:32pm and is filed under China, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Iraq, Libya, Media Bias, Media Criticism, President Bashar al-Assad, Propaganda, Russia, Syria, The “Left”, The “Right”, The “West”, UK Media, UK Military, United Kingdom, US Foreign Policy, US Hegemony, US Military, War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Changing World, But the West Remains Locked in a Time Warp

    Western politicians in general, and the American and Australian versions are not exempted, are fond of using phrases such as “the rules-based international order.” What they unfailingly really mean is the Western version of a rules-based order. The classic definition was set out in Wikipedia when it said:

    The rules based international order describes the notion that contemporary international relations are organised around principles of international cooperation through multilateral institutions, like WTO, open markets, security cooperation, promotion of liberal democracy and leadership by the United States and its allies.

    The key lies in the last part of that quote, “leadership by the United States and its allies.” For the United States any other concept was simply unthinkable. Not only was the United States self- represented as the personification of the “liberal rules-based order”, it fought almost continuous wars between 1945 and the present to ensure that the rest of the world understood and accepted that principle.

    It was never realistic. As Nick Bisley (AIIA 27/7/18) pointed out, the rules-based international order became a rhetorical centrepiece of Australian international policy. The problem for Australia (and the United States) is that the premises underlying the policy are being progressively more challenged as world power relentlessly shifts away from a United States centred approach.

    Bisley suggests that the apogee of the policy was, in fact, 2016 when the phrase was mentioned no less than 48 times in the Australian defence department White Paper of that year. The notion of an international rules-based order has a number of problems which the western media were remarkably reluctant to face.

    Perhaps the foremost problem lies in the assumption that the rules and the associated principles were built on the clear assumption of United States military supremacy. That was always a dubious proposition. It has become increasingly untenable as power in the world shifts.

    The Western powers had become accustomed to having their own way over the previous 200-300 years. Unfortunately for them, they never questioned the basis of that power, nor conceived that the sun would indeed set upon the Empire. This power was reflected in the United Nations Security Council’s permanent membership.

    Until the early 1970s that permanent membership consisted of three Western powers who had been victorious in World War II, plus the Soviet Union and China. The expulsion of the Nationalist regime from China in 1949 was not reflected in the Security Council, where they clung to power for a further 23 years.

    Nowadays the privileged status of France and the United Kingdom as permanent members of the Security Council looks increasingly anachronistic. 75 years after the war ended, Germany and Japan are still excluded from permanent membership. Some would argue that others, such as India and Brazil, should also be considered for permanent membership.

    The retention of the current permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council represents a world that no longer exists. A major part of the problem is that the Western powers are reluctant to acknowledge that the world has changed since 1945, and with those changes there has been a diminution of their political power.

    They may still think in terms of the rules-based international order, but are reluctant to ask some fundamental questions. For example, whose rules are we really talking about? How valid is a system of Western rules when the vast majority of the membership of the United Nations are neither “Western” nor particularly addicted to the West’s system of rules.

    Those nations see the rules-based order as simply a device designed to maintain Western power. Their disquiet or even rejection of this principle is enhanced when they observe the actual actions of those same Western powers. The United States is but one example, but it is a major one. As noted before, the United States has been almost continuously at war somewhere in the world since 1945. None of these wars could be described as in defence of a truly liberal rules-based order. One has only to look at the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to make the point.

    Afghanistan was invaded based on a lie, and when the object of that lie, Osama bin Laden, was long dead, the invading troops failed to leave. There is currently speculation about whether the new United States president, Biden, will honour even Trump’s manifestly flawed commitment to leave.

    A different set of lies was used to justify the invasion of Iraq and again, 18 years later the Americans and their allies like Australia are still there. In Iraq’s case the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution in January 2020 that all foreign troops should leave the country. One year later they are still there.

    The invasion of Syria was a regime change operation. That has failed, but United States troops are still there. The felony is compounded by the systematic theft of Syrian oil. Israel continues to regularly bomb Syrian targets, a felony that compounds the theft of Syrian territory more than 50 years ago. The Australian government does them the courtesy of not mentioning the theft, and is regularly part of a tiny minority of votes for Israel in United Nations General Assembly resolutions. None of this is fit for publication in the Australian mainstream media.

    Looking at this long history of bad international behaviour it is little wonder that the bulk of the world’s nations look askance at notions of the “rules-based international order”. They see it for the hypocrisy that it manifestly is.

    It is a little surprising therefore that an ever growing number of nations look to China as the leader of a different order. China has a number of features that distinguish it from the western view. One of the most important is the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations.

    This article was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2021 at 11:08am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Iraq, Israel, Syria, The “West”, US Military, US War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Will Biden’s America Stop Creating Terrorists?

    (Photo Credit:  CODEPINK)

    Joe Biden will take command of the White House at a time when the American public is more concerned about battling coronavirus than fighting overseas wars. But America’s wars rage on regardless, and the militarized counterterrorism policy Biden has supported in the past—based on airstrikes, special operations and the use of proxy forces—is precisely what keeps these conflicts raging.

    In Afghanistan, Biden opposed Obama’s 2009 troop surge, and after the surge failed, Obama reverted to the policy that Biden favored to begin with, which became the hallmark of their war policy in other countries as well. In insider circles, this was referred to as “counterterrorism,” as opposed to “counterinsurgency.”

    In Afghanistan, that meant abandoning the large-scale deployment of U.S. forces, and relying instead on air strikes, drone strikes and special operations “kill or capture” raids, while recruiting and training Afghan forces to do nearly all the ground fighting and holding of territory.

    In the 2011 Libya intervention, the NATO-Arab monarchist coalition embedded hundreds of Qatari special operations forces and Western mercenaries with the Libyan rebels to call in NATO airstrikes and train local militias, including Islamist groups with links to Al Qaeda. The forces they unleashed are still fighting over the spoils nine years later.

    While Joe Biden now takes credit for opposing the disastrous intervention in Libya, at the time he was quick to hail its deceptive short-term success and Colonel Gaddafi’s gruesome assassination. “NATO got it right,” Biden said in a speech at Plymouth State College in October 2011 on the very day President Obama announced Gaddafi’s death. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.”

    While Biden has since washed his hands of the debacle in Libya, that operation was, in fact, emblematic of the doctrine of covert and proxy war backed by airstrikes that he supported, and which he has yet to disavow. Biden still says he supports “counterterrorism” operations, but he was elected president without ever publicly answering a direct question about his support for the massive use of airstrikes and drone strikes that are an integral part of that doctrine.

    In the campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, U.S.-led forces dropped over 118,000 bombs and missiles, reducing major cities like Mosul and Raqqa to rubble and killing tens of thousands of civilians. When Biden said America “didn’t lose a single life” in Libya, he clearly meant “American life.” If “life” simply means life, the war in Libya obviously cost countless lives, and made a mockery of a UN Security Council resolution that approved the use of military force only to protect civilians.

    As Rob Hewson, the editor of the arms trade journal Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, told the AP as the U.S. unleashed its “Shock and Awe” bombardment on Iraq in 2003, “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.” The same obviously applies to people in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and wherever American bombs have been falling for 20 years.

    As Obama and Trump both tried to pivot from the failed “global war on terrorism” to what the Trump administration has branded “great power competition,” or a reversion to the Cold War, the war on terror has stubbornly refused to exit on cue. Al Qaeda and Islamic State have been driven from places the U.S. has bombed or invaded, but keep reappearing in new countries and regions. Islamic State now occupies a swath of northern Mozambique, and has also taken root in Afghanistan. Other Al Qaeda affiliates are active across Africa, from Somalia and Kenya in East Africa to eleven countries in West Africa.

    After nearly 20 years of “war on terror,” there is now a large body of research into what drives people to join Islamist armed groups fighting local government forces or Western invaders. While American politicians still wring their hands over what twisted motives can possibly account for such incomprehensible behavior, it turns out that it’s really not that complicated. Most fighters are not motivated by Islamist ideology as much as by the desire to protect themselves, their families or their communities from militarized “counterterrorism” forces, as documented in this report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

    Another study, titled The Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment, found that the tipping point or “final straw” that drives over 70% of fighters to join armed groups is the killing or detention of a family member by “counterterrorism” or “security” forces. The study exposes the U.S. brand of militarized counterterrorism as a self-fulfilling policy that fuels an intractable cycle of violence by generating and replenishing an ever-expanding pool of “terrorists” as it destroys families, communities and countries.

    For example, the U.S. formed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with 11 West African countries in 2005 and has so far sunk a billion dollars into it. In a recent report from Burkina Faso, Nick Turse cited U.S. government reports that confirm how 15 years of U.S.-led “counterterrorism” have only fueled an explosion of terrorism across West Africa.

    The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies reports that the 1,000 violent incidents involving militant Islamist groups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the past year amount to a seven-fold increase since 2017, while the confirmed minimum number of people killed has increased from 1,538 in 2017 to 4,404 in 2020

    Heni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at ACLED (Armed Conflict Location Event Data), told Turse that, “Focusing on Western concepts of counterterrorism and embracing a strictly military model has been a major mistake. Ignoring drivers of militancy, such as poverty and lack of social mobility, and failing to alleviate the conditions that foster insurgencies, like widespread human rights abuses by security forces, have caused irreparable harm.”

    Indeed, even the New York Times has confirmed that “counterterrorism” forces in Burkina Faso are killing as many civilians as the “terrorists” they are supposed to be fighting. A 2019 U.S. State Department Country Report on Burkina Faso documented allegations of “hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians as part of its counterterrorism strategy,” mainly killing members of the Fulani ethnic group.

    Souaibou Diallo, the president of a regional association of Muslim scholars, told Turse that these abuses are the main factor driving the Fulani to join militant groups. “Eighty percent of those who join terrorist groups told us that it isn’t because they support jihadism, it is because their father or mother or brother was killed by the armed forces,” said Diallo. “So many people have been killed—assassinated—but there has been no justice.”

    Since the inception of the Global War on Terror, both sides have used the violence of their enemies to justify their own violence, fueling a seemingly endless spiral of chaos spreading from country to country and region to region across the world.

    But the U.S. roots of all this violence and chaos run even deeper than this. Both Al Qaeda and Islamic State evolved from groups originally recruited, trained, armed and supported by the CIA to overthrow foreign governments: Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Nusra Front and Islamic State in Syria since 2011.

    If the Biden administration really wants to stop fueling chaos and terrorism in the world, it must radically transform the CIA, whose role in destabilizing countries, supporting terrorism, spreading chaos and creating false pretexts for war and hostility has been well documented since the 1970s by Colonel Fletcher Prouty, William Blum, Gareth Porter and others.

    The United States will never have an objective, depoliticized national intelligence system, or therefore a reality-based, coherent foreign policy, until it exorcises this ghost in the machine. Biden has chosen Avril Haines, who crafted the secret quasi-legal basis for Obama’s drone program and protected CIA torturers, to be his Director of National Intelligence. Is Haines up to the job of transforming these agencies of violence and chaos into a legitimate, working intelligence system? That seems unlikely, and yet it is vital.

    The new Biden administration needs to take a truly fresh look at the whole range of destructive policies the United States has pursued around the world for decades, and the insidious role the CIA has played in so many of them.

    We hope Biden will finally renounce hare-brained, militarized policies that destroy societies and ruin people’s lives for the sake of unattainable geopolitical ambitions, and that he will instead invest in humanitarian and economic aid that really helps people to live more peaceful and prosperous lives.

    We also hope that Biden will reverse Trump’s pivot back to the Cold War and prevent the diversion of more of our country’s resources to a futile and dangerous arms race with China and Russia.

    We have real problems to deal with in this century – existential problems that can only be solved by genuine international cooperation. We can no longer afford to sacrifice our future on the altar of the Global War on Terror, a New Cold War, Pax Americana or other imperialist fantasies.

    The post Will Biden’s America Stop Creating Terrorists? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Evasions and Cover-ups by Western Governments over Funding of Terrorist Groups in Syria Start to Unravel

    People walk past damaged buildings at the Yarmouk refugee camp on the southern outskirts of Damascus © Reuters

    Evidence of Dutch and British funding for extremists who’ve beheaded children & carried out ethnic-cleansing grows by the day. Yet most of the mainstream media – including the BBC – still try to keep this truth silent.

    Recently, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte effectively blocked a Parliamentary motion to allow an external independent investigation of Dutch government funding of terrorist groups in Syria.

    Rutte initially tried to deny his involvement in the burial of the investigation but tenacious questioning from journalists forced him to admit his personal interference. According to Rutte, such an investigation could result in “tensions with our allies […] the lives of former members of opposition groups could be put at stake.” 

    Rutte’s protection of illegal armed groups wreaking havoc in Syria are reminiscent of the UK Government’s response to similar Parliamentary questions requesting clarity on the armed groups supported by its Foreign Office (UK FCO). The standard line is, “for security reasons, we do not disclose the names of those moderate opposition groups supported.” 

    This article will demonstrate that Rutte is very probably preventing tensions with the UK by quashing an investigation, and that the “moderate opposition” promoted by both governments actually consist of savage, extremist gangs who think nothing of conducting ethnic cleansing pogroms in Syria.

    Turning ‘non-lethal aid’ into deadly weapons

    In 2018, Dutch officials were accused of providing equipment to terrorist groups in Syria. Equipment that included Toyota and Isuzu trucks that were, probably, later converted into machine-gun carriers by groups such as Jabhat al-Shamiya, considered a “Salafist” group by the Dutch Prosecution Service. This equipment was euphemistically described as non-lethal aid, a convenient caveat for governments ensuring the armed groups are given the means to recast this ‘aid’ into military hardware.

    Dutch journalist Eric Van Den Beek has followed this affair from the outset. He wrote recently: “It’s a mystery why the Dutch Public Prosecution Office still has not launched a criminal investigation against current and former political officials who were involved in the support of Jabhat al-Shamiya.” 

    In October 2020, Dutch media reported that a former leader of a terrorist group operating in Syria had been receiving funding from the Dutch Foreign Ministry for years. The group, Ahrar Al Sham, was designated a terrorist organisation by the Dutch Court in 2019.

    It is worth noting that Ahrar Al Sham merged with Nour Al Din Zinki in 2018, to form the “Syrian Liberation Front.” Zinki had been formerly funded as “moderates” by the US, but this aid was withdrawn after the group tortured and beheaded a 12-year-old boy, Abdullah Issa, in Al Ansari square, Aleppo in July 2016.

    White Helmets soaked in blood

    Incidentally, the square where this heinous crime took place was only 200 meters from the White Helmet center that featured in the Oscar-nominated promotional movie for the FCO-midwived, terrorist-linked organisation, “Last Men in Aleppo.” The Dutch government only withdrew funding from the White Helmets in 2018, citing lack of assurances that funds would not be funneled to terrorist groups in Syria. Up until this point, the Netherlands had given the White Helmets $14.5 million.

    It was Dutch media that broke the story of the suspected involvement of the White Helmets founder, James Le Mesurier, in defrauding Mayday Rescue – the organisation Le Mesurier established to siphon UK and EU funding to his organisation.

    The BBC has recently produced a 15-part radio documentary ‘probe’ into the Le Mesurier fraud allegation and the White Helmets. The “Mayday” series, produced by Chloe Hadjimatheou, turned out to be nothing more than an attempt to smear and discredit researchers, academics, scientists and journalists whose work has exposed the White Helmets to be an armed-group-auxiliary, an extension of power for the UK/US-led regime-change coalition, whose failed agenda is the removal of the Syrian government and President Bashar Assad.

    Rutte’s denial of a rigorous and transparent investigation into Dutch sponsorship of terrorist groups in Syria is likely to be connected to the BBC-Mayday series and the FCO’s support for sectarian armed groups in Syria as part of an externally managed “political process.” A recent leak of FCO documents has revealed the extent to which the British government and intelligence agencies have been involved in extensive public relations and media operations to clean up the image of bands of war-crime-committing extremist groups.

    This context is important to understand why the alleged financial support provided to the leader of Ahrar Al Sham by the Dutch Foreign Ministry, is very likely connected to the UK efforts to create a vast complex of PR and media back-up for these mercenary armed groups in Syria.

    The ex-UK student turned fundraiser for Islamism

    The former “foreign  affairs minister” of Ahrar Al Sham is a UK-educated, Spanish-Syrian called Labib Al Nahhas. Dutch media has reported that documents show that the country awarded two million euros in subsidies  to the European Institute of Peace (EIP), based in Brussels. Much of this funding went on to the Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity (SACD). Al Nahhas is the program director and he, personally, receives 700 euros per day, for an average of more than ten days per month as a senior consultant for EIP. This funding covers 2018-2021.

    A recent article by journalist Kit Klarenberg revealed the role that Le Mesurier’s widow, Emma Winberg, played in the PR support for Syrian armed groups. Winberg was co-founder of Incostrat, a FCO-outreach agencyfunded by the Conflict Stability and Security Fund that also finances Mayday Rescue and the White Helmets. The BBC, curiously, made no mention of Winberg’s involvement in what is effectively a clandestine black-op run by the British government in an effort to destabilise Syria and to effect “regime change.”

    Among the groups believed to be provided with PR and media support via Incostrat, are Jaish Al Islam, and, according to French journalist Thierry Meyssan, Ahrar Al Sham. In 2016,the Guardian ran a story on an “ex-UK student clock[ing] up air miles on mission to rebrand Syrian Islamists” (emphasis added). The Guardian admits that Ahrar Al Sham had fought in alliance with Nusra Front (Al Qaeda in Syria) and that their goal was to establish an Islamist theocracy in Syria. The Guardian also reports that one of the original leaders of AS had “personal connections with Osama Bin Laden.”

    Al Nahhas had deep connections to the US, EU and UK, where he had established a tech company in a West London suburb. IKPA Communications Ltd was set up in October 2012 and apparently liquidated in 2014. Two other directors were named at Company House, Labib Shalak and Swedish-born UK resident, John Carl Gandeborn. This background builds the picture of someone who would be an ideal candidate for the UK FCO-sponsored agencies to promote as an acceptable frontman of an unacceptably sectarian, brutal armed group.

    Al Nahhas resigned as director of his tech company in April 2014, the same year he joined Liwa al-Haq, a faction that merged with Ahrar Al Sham in late 2014. Al Nahhas was appointed Ahrar Al Sham’s “foreign minister” after the assassination of the majority of the armed group’s leaders in September 2014. This event is recorded in the leaked FCO documents, in a submission by Analysis Research and Knowledge (ARK) for the “Rapid Response” contract. ARK was also responsible for the creation of the White Helmets in Turkey and Jordan in 2013, with James Le Mesurier at the helm while an employee of ARK.

    Turning a blind eye to outrages

    Immediately after the largely unexplained assassination of Ahrar Al Sham leaders, Al Nahhas was dispatched on a mission to secure US/UK/EU support for the armed group, visiting Western diplomats and publishing “opinion pieces” in the Washington Post and the Telegraph that called on the West to “engage with Ahrar Al Sham”. Former US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, accused by Syrian officials of fomenting the armed uprising in 2011, joined the campaign (in 2015) to whitewash Ahrar Al Sham and to distance them from their alliance with Nusra Front.

    The access and UK/US state-aligned-media support given to Al Nahhas and the timing of his moves to join armed groups fighting on behalf of the US Coalition in Syria, must lead to speculation that his role was managed by entities like Incosrat with the backing of the FCO and intelligence agencies. Ahrar Al Sham did not cease their ethnic cleansing atrocities in Syria despite the elevation of the group to “political process” status. In May 2016, just before Nour Al Din Zinki beheaded Abdullah Issa, Ahrar Al Sham and Nusra Front carried out the massacre of Syrian Alawite civilians in Zara, in the Aleppo governorate. The UK and US still refusedto bow to pressure from Russia to designate Ahrar Al Sham a terrorist group.

    Ahrar Al Sham’s involvement with the BBC dates back to the 2013 BBC Panorama report, “Saving Syria’s Children,” when the armed group escorted the BBC production team during the fabrication of what is suspected to be an elaborate hoax based on the forensic analysis of independent researcher Robert Stuart.

    As late as 2017, it was reported that Kenan Al Nahhas, Labib’s brother, was appointed the new “political” leader of Ahrar Al Sham. At this time, the group was participating in the brutal siege and daily targeting of Shia Muslim Syrian civilians in the villages of Kafarya and Foua in Idlib. Ahrar Al Sham was also present, with Nusra Front, in Rashideen, Aleppo, in April 2017, when a terrorist suicide car attack massacred recently evacuated children and families from Kafarya and Foua.

    The western campaign to rebrand and decriminalise this armed group continued unaffected by the war crimes they were systematically committing against the Syrian people. An opinion piece by Al Nahhas was published by the Guardian in February 2020. The Guardian has also been instrumental in maintaining the criminalisation of the Syrian government, an effort designed to corroborate the FCO’s “regime change” policy. The Guardian was drafted in to posthumously rebrand James Le Mesurier as a “mainstream saint” and was heavily involved in the White Hemet PR industry, alongside the BBC and Channel 4.

    Al Nahhas allegedly distanced himself from Ahrar Al Sham in November 2016, but his brother stepped up to lead the armed group. While the Dutch officials involved in the financial sponsorship of a terrorist group profess ignorance of this, opposition members of Parliament say this suggests a lack of robust screening of recipients of government funding. This, combined with the 2018 revelations of the funding of Jabhat Al Shamiya, paint a damning picture of Dutch government involvement in the promotion and material support for violent, criminal armed groups involved in ten years of bloodshed in Syria.

    In a curious turn of fate, Chloe Hadjimatheou, the producer of the BBC “Mayday” series, had been “the driving engine” behind a King’s College London, War Department, paper, entitled “The New Jihadism: A Global Snapshot.” The paper concluded that Ahrar Al Sham should be placed alongside Nusra Front and ISIS as a “Salafist,” in other words, a terrorist organisation operating in Syria.

    Hadjimatheou refused to answer when asked if she subscribed to the view that the organisation that collaborated closely with the BBC Panorama team was deemed to be a terrorist group. It seems that the promoters, financiers and supporters of terrorism in Syria are not too keen to own up to their involvement in sustaining the illegal war against the Syrian people for ten years.

    • First published at RT.com.
    • Vanessa Beeley is a photographer, writer, peace activist and volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. She lived in Gaza during Operation Pillar of Defence and again in 2013. In 2014 she established the Gaza Smile Project to raise funds for children in Gaza. She spent her childhood in Egypt with her father, Sir Harold Beeley who was Special Envoy to Cairo during both Suez Crises, confirmed Nasserist and Middle East Advisor to Ernest Bevin. Since 2011, Vanessa has spent most of her time in the Middle East . She was invited to be on the steering committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement. Read other articles by Vanessa, or visit Vanessa’s website.

      This article was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2020 at 4:50pm and is filed under Netherlands, Syria.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Establishment Journalists are Piling On to Smear Robert Fisk Now He Cannot Answer Back

    Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar.

    What is most ironic is that the journalists doing this are some of the biggest frauds themselves, journalists who have made a career out of deceiving their readers. In fact, many of the crowd attacking Fisk when he can no longer defend himself are precisely the journalists who have the worst record of journalistic malpractice and on some of the biggest issues of our times.

    At least I have the courage to criticise them while they are alive. They know dead men can’t sue. It is complete and utter cowardice to attack Fisk when they could have made their comments earlier, to his face. In fact, if they truly believed any of the things they are so keen to tell us now, they had an absolute duty to say them when Fisk was alive rather than allowing the public to be deceived by someone they regarded as a liar and fantasist. They didn’t make public these serious allegations – they didn’t air their concerns about the supposedly fabricated facts in Fisk’s stories – when he was alive because they know he would have made mincemeat of them.

    Most preposterous of all is the fact that the actual trigger for this sudden, very belated outpouring of concern about Fisk is a hit-piece written by Oz Katerji. I’m not sure whether I can find the generosity to call Katerji a journalist. Like Elliot Higgins of the US government-funded Bellingcat, he’s more like an attack dog beloved by establishment blue-ticks: he is there to enforce accepted western imperial narratives, disguising his lock-step support for the establishment line as edgy, power-to-the-people radicalism.

    Anyone who challenges Katerji’s establishment-serving agenda gets called names – sometimes very rude ones. Fisk is just the latest target of a Katerji hatchet job against any journalist (myself, of course, included) who dares to step outside of the Overton Window. That these “serious” journalists think they can hang their defamation of Fisk on to anything said by Katerji, most especially the thin gruel he produces in his latest article, is truly shameful. If their concerns really relate to journalistic integrity and reliability, Katerji would be the very last person to cite.

    Katerji’s prime area of western narrative enforcement is the Middle East – perhaps not surprisingly, as it is the place where there is an awful lot of oil that western states and corporations are desperate to control. But one should not ignore his wide-ranging efforts to boot-lick wherever he is needed on behalf of western establishment narratives.

    Here he is desperately trying to breathe life into two fairy tales: that the election of the leftwing Evo Morales as Bolivia’s president was fraudulent, and that Morales was forced to resign last year rather than that he was ousted in a CIA-backed military coup. Notably, Katerji was clinging to these discredited story lines as late as last month, long after even the liberal corporate media had abandoned them as no longer tenable.

    Katerji was also, of course, an enthusiastic recruit to evidence-free establishment smears that Labour was overrun with antisemitism under the leadership of the leftwing Jeremy Corbyn, the very same anecdotal claims promoted by the entire corporate media.

    Not only that, but he even had the gall to argue that he was speaking on behalf of Palestinians in smearing Corbyn, the only leader of a major European party ever to champion their cause. Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer, like most other politicians in the wake of the Corbyn episode, has all but disappeared the Palestinians from the political agenda. Katerji must be delighted – on behalf of Palestinians, of course.

    But Katerji’s beef with Fisk derives chiefly from the fact that the Independent’s foreign correspondent broke ranks with the rest of the western press corps over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.

    Katerji is part of what – if we were being more brutally honest about these things – would be called the west’s al-Qaeda lobby. These are a motley crew of journalists and academics using their self-publicised “Arabhood” to justify the intimidation and silencing of anyone not entirely convinced that ordinary Syrians might prefer, however reluctantly, their standard-issue dictator, Bashar al-Assad, over the head-chopping, women-stoning, Saudi-financed jihadists of Islamic State and al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria; or who question whether the western powers ought to be covertly funding and backing these extremists.

    Exercise any doubt at all on either of these points and Katerji will lose no time in calling you an “Assadist”, “war crimes denier”, “antisemite”, “9/11 truther” and worse. Then in yet more evidence of a circle jerk, those establishment blue ticks, even ones beloved by much of the left, will cite his smears as proof that you are indeed an Assadist, war crimes denier, and so on.

    Here are just a few examples of Katerji engaging with those critical of the imperial western narrative on Syria, so you get the idea:

    Back in 2011 and 2012, in what looked like the possible eruption of an Arab Spring in Syria, the arguments of Katerji and Co. at least had an air of plausibility. But their real agenda – one that accorded with western imperialism rather than an Arab awakening – became much clearer once local protests against Assad were subsumed by an influx of jihadi fighters of the very kind that had been labelled “terrorists” by the western media everywhere else they appeared in the Middle East.

    Inevitably, anyone like Fisk who adopted a position of caution or scepticism about whether the majority of Syrians actually wanted a return to some kind of Islamic Dark Age incurred the wrath of Katerji and his cohorts.

    But Fisk infuriated these western al-Nusra lobbyists even further when he visited the town of Douma in 2018 and raised serious questions about claims made by the jihadists who had been ruling the town that, just before Assad’s forces drove them out, the Syrian military had bombed it with chemical gas, killing many civilians. The story, which at that stage was based exclusively on the claims of these head-chopping jihadists, was instantly reported as verified fact by the credulous western media.

    Based solely on claims made by the al-Qaeda franchise in Douma, President Donald Trump hurriedly fired off missiles at Syria, in flagrant violation of international law and to cheers from the western media.

    Fisk, of course, knew that in discrediting the evidence-free narrative being promoted by the western press corps (who had never been in Douma) he was doing himself no favours at all. They would resent him all the more. Most of his peers preferred to ignore his revelations, even though they were earth-shattering in their implications. But once the official watchdog body the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued its report into Douma many months later, implicitly backing the jihadists’ version of events, Fisk’s earlier coverage was snidely dismissed by fellow journalists.

    Sadly for them, however, the story did not end there. Following publication of the OPCW’s Douma report, a number of its senior experts started coming forward as whistleblowers to say that, under pressure from the US, the OPCW bureaucracy tampered with their research and misrepresented their findings in the final report. The evidence they had found indicated that Assad had not carried out a chemical attack in Douma. More likely the jihadists, who were about to be expelled by Assad’s forces, had staged the scene to make it look like a chemical attack and draw the US deeper into Syria.

    Of course, just as the corporate media ignored Fisk’s original reporting from Douma that would have made their own accounts sound like journalistic malpractice, they resolutely ignored the whistleblowers too. You can scour the corporate media and you will be lucky to find even an allusion to the months-long row over the OPCW report, which gained enough real-world prominence to erupt into a major row at the United Nations, including denunciations of the OPCW’s behaviour from the organisation’s former head, Jose Bustani.

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    This is the way frauds like Katerji are able to ply their own misinformation. They sound credible only because the counter-evidence that would show they are writing nonsense is entirely absent from the mainstream. Only those active on social media and open-minded enough to listen to voices not employed by a major corporate platform (with, in this case, the notable exception of Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail) are able to find any of this counter-information. It is as if we are living in parallel universes.

    The reason why Fisk was so cherished by readers, and why there was a real sense of loss when he died a month ago, was that he was one of the very few journalists who belonged to the mainstream but reported as though he were not beholden to the agenda of his corporate platform.

    There were specific reasons for that. Like a handful of others – John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges among them – Fisk made his name in the corporate media at a time when it reluctantly indulged the odd maverick foreign correspondent because they had a habit of exposing war crimes everyone else missed, exclusives that then garnered their publications prestigious journalism awards. Ownership of the media was then far less concentrated, so there was a greater commercial incentive for risk-taking and breaking stories. And these journalists emerged in a period when power was briefly more contested, with the labour movement trying to assert its muscle in the post-war decades, and before western societies were forced by the corporate elite to submit to neoliberal orthodoxy on all matters.

    Notably, Pilger, Hersh and Hedges all found themselves struggling to keep a place in the corporate media. Fisk alone managed to cling on. That was more by luck. After being forced out of Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper for breaking a disturbing story in 1989 on the US shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane, he found a new home at Britain’s Independent newspaper, which had been recently founded. As a late-comer to the British media scene, the paper struggled not only to make money but to create a proper, distinctive identity or gain any real visibility. Fisk survived, it seems, because he quickly established himself as one of the very few reasons to buy the paper. He was a rare example of a journalist who was bigger than the outlet he served.

    Readers trusted him because he not only refused to submit to his peers’ herd-think but endlessly called them out as journalistically and intellectually lazy.

    Those now trying to tarnish his good name are actually inverting the truth. They want to suggest that support for Fisk was cultish and he was hero-worshipped by those incapable of thinking critically. They will say as much about this piece. So let me point out that I am not without my own criticisms of Fisk. I wrote, for example, an article criticising some unsubstantiated claims he made during Israel’s massive bombardment of Lebanon in 2006.

    But my criticism was precisely the opposite of the blue-tick crowd now traducing him. I questioned Fisk for striving to find an implausible middle ground with those establishment blue ticks (before we knew what blue ticks were) by hedging his bets about who was responsible for the destruction of Lebanon. It was a rare, if understandable, example of journalistic timidity from Fisk – a desire to maintain credibility with his peers, and a reluctance to follow through on where the evidence appeared to lead. Maybe this was a run-in with the pro-Israel crowd and the corporate journalists who echo them that, on this occasion, he did not think worth fighting.

    The discomfort Fisk aroused in his peers was all too obvious to anyone working in the corporate media, even in its liberal outlets, as I was during the 1990s. I never heard a good word said about Fisk at the Guardian or the Observer. His death has allowed an outpouring of resentment towards him that built up over decades from journalists jealous of the fact that no readers will mourn or remember their own passing. Fisk’s journalism spoke up for the downtrodden and spoke directly to the reader rather than, as with his colleagues, pandering to editors in the hope of career advancement. In the immediate wake of his death, his colleagues’ disdain for Fisk was veiled in weaselly language. As Media Lens have noted, the favourite term used to describe him in obituaries, even in his own newspaper, was “controversial”.

    It turns out that the term ‘controversial’ is only applied in corporate media to political writers and leaders deemed ‘controversial’ by elite interests.

    This was unwittingly made clear by the big brains at the BBC who noted that Fisk ‘drew controversy for his sharp criticism of the US and Israel, and of Western foreign policy’. If Fisk had drawn ‘controversy’ from China, Iran or North Korea, the ‘weasel word’ would not have appeared in the Beeb’s analysis…

    In corporate media newspeak, ‘controversial’ can actually be translated as ‘offensive to power’. The term is intended as a scare word to warn readers that the labelled person is ‘dodgy’, ‘suspect’: ‘Handle with care!’ The journalist is also signalling to his or her editors and other colleagues: ‘I’m not one of “them”!’

    The journalists who now claim Fisk was a fraud and fantasist are many of those who happily worked for papers that readily promoted the gravest lies imaginable to rationalise an illegal attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. Those publications eagerly supported lies supplied by the US and British governments that Iraq had WMD and that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was colluding with al-Qaeda – claims that were easily disprovable at the time.

    Journalists now attacking Fisk include ones, like the Guardian’s Jessica Elgot, who have been at the forefront of advancing the evidence-free antisemitism smears against Corbyn. Or, like the Guardian’s Hannah Jane Parkinson, have engaged in another favourite corporate journalist pastime, ridiculing the plight of Julian Assange, a fellow journalist who puts their craven stenography to shame and who is facing a lifetime in a US super-max jail for revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Even the Guardian’s Jason Burke, who claims to have experienced Fisk’s lying first-hand while working for the Observer newspaper in 2001 (as was I at that time), has been unable to come up with the goods when challenged, as the pitiable Twitter thread retweeted here confirms:

    Noticeably, there is a pattern to the claims of those now maligning Fisk: they hurry to tell us that he was an inspiration in their student days. They presumably think that mentioning this will suggest their disillusionment was hard-earned and therefore make it sound more plausible. But actually it suggests something different.

    It indicates instead that in their youthful idealism they aspired to become a journalist who would dig out the truth, who would monitor centres of power, who would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. To do, in fact, exactly what Fisk did.

    But once they got a footing on the corporate career ladder, they slowly learnt that they would need to adopt a more “nuanced” approach to journalism – certainly if they hoped to progress up that ladder, earning the right to their blue tick, and gaining a big enough salary to cover the mortgage in London or New York.

    In other words, they became everything they despised in their student days. Fisk was the constant reminder of just how much they had sold out. His very existence shamed them for what they were too cowardly to do themselves. And now in death, when he cannot answer back, they are feasting on his corpse like the vultures that they are, until there is nothing left to remind us that, unlike them, Robert Fisk told uncomfortable truths to the very end.

    UPDATE:

    As a reader service, I will do my best to update you on the blue ticks, especially the Guardian’s, so keen to “just add their voice” in defaming Fisk. If you see any more, please send them my way via Facebook or Twitter.

    Notice how confidently these journalists join the denunciations of their dead colleague, even though the biggest “adventure” most of them have ever experienced is an all-expenses lunch at El Vino’s.

    Adam Parsons, Sky’s Europe correspondent:

    Tim Shipman, political editor of the Sunday Times, formerly of the Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail and Express:

    Oliver Kamm, columnist and leader writer for The Times, formerly a City banker:

    The post Establishment Journalists are Piling On to Smear Robert Fisk Now He Cannot Answer Back first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Planet Cannot Begin to Heal Until We Rip the Mask off the West’s War Machine

    Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.

    In a recent post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.

    Our own societies must deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs dropped by our “defence” industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.

    Divine right to rule

    In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the media’s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too, as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies, their billionaire owners and their advertisers.

    Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through the doctrine of divine right, their subjects to passively submit to exploitation. Today, “mainstream” media are there to persuade us that capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the natural order of things, that this is the best economic system imaginable.

    Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.

    Lifeblood of empire

    There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the life blood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.

    US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed. Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s appeal is not diminished.

    As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.

    Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive products of the “defence” industries, from fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into private hands.

    The lobbies associated with these “defence” industries have every incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities, and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.

    Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended, resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.

    War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.

    Fog of war

    For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of jail” card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.

    The “fog of war” does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed, shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations and their political cronies at home.

    The “fog of war” engineers the disruption of established systems of control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the licence provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that quickly become normalised. It is the disinformation that passes for national responsibility and patriotism.

    Permanent austerity

    All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged an extra £16.5 billion in “defence” spending at a time when the UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing “systemic crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released this week show the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.

    If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.

    To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real, which means massive spending on “defence”. Such expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via their media arms.

    New salesman needed

    The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as “Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded us this week. The CIA memo addressed the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed 9/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.

    The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9/11 had chiefly relied on “public apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There was an urgent need to further manipulate public opinion more decisively in favour of war.

    The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which they believed would play better with European publics.

    Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for peace, and would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this same effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were reminded that Obama backed these wars.

    As Greenwald observes:

    Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the US and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric US wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.

    Obama-style facelift

    Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power – and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence” or peace – are still the core western mission.

    That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them, may have been shocked to learn this week that the UK still operates 145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second largest network of such bases after the US.

    Such information is not made available in the UK “mainstream” media, of course. It has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site, Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of the British public are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told further belt-tightening is essential.

    The UK’s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world’s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK – whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no” to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.

    Ideological alchemy

    Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias and Eastasias – becomes clearer.

    Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today’s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.

    Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.

    Quite how opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.

    During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.

    The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, “terrorism” against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.

    But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of itself as a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson’s £16 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.

    Crushed or tamed

    Anyone of significance who questions these narratives that rationalise and perpetuate war is the enemy too. Current political and legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into subservience.

    Trump was initially just such a figure that needed breaking in. The CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition to Trump – helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate “scandal” – not because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies, but for two more specific reasons.

    First, Trump’s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US empire depends on. Despite open disdain for him from most of the media, he was criticised more often for failing to prosecute wars enthusiastically enough rather than for being too hawkish. And second, even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued after the 2016 election by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials, Trump proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than packaging it as “intervention” intended to help women and people of colour.

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    But Trump’s amateurish isolationism paled in comparison to two far bigger threats to the war machine that emerged over the past decade. One was the danger – in our newly interconnected, digital world – of information leaks that risked stripping away the mask of US democracy, of the “shining city on the hill”, to reveal the tawdry reality underneath.

    Julian Assange and his Wikileaks project proved just such a danger. The most memorable leak – at least as far as the general public was concerned – occurred in 2010, with publication of a classified video, titled Collateral Murder, showing a US air crew joking and celebrating as they murdered civilians far below in the streets of Baghdad. It gave a small taste of why western “humanitarianism” might prove so unpopular with those to whom we were busy supposedly bringing “democracy”.

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    The threat posed by Assange’s new transparency project was recognised instantly by US officials.

    Exhibiting a carefully honed naivety, the political and media establishments have sought to uncouple the fact that Assange has spent most of the last decade in various forms of detention, and is currently locked up in a London high-security prison awaiting extradition to the US, from his success in exposing the war machine. Nonetheless, to ensure his incarceration till death in one of its super-max jails, the US empire has had to conflate the accepted definitions of “journalism” and “espionage”, and radically overhaul traditional understandings of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment.

    Dress rehearsal for a coup

    An equally grave threat to the war machine was posed by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Britain’s Labour party. Corbyn presented as exceptional a problem as Assange.

    Before Corbyn, Labour had never seriously challenged the UK’s dominant military-industrial complex, even if its support for war back in the 1960s and 1970s was often tempered by its then-social democratic politics. It was in this period, at the height of the Cold War, that Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was suspected by British elites of failing to share their anti-Communist and anti-Soviet paranoia, and was therefore viewed as a potential threat to their entrenched privileges.

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    As a BBC documentary from 2006 notes, Wilson faced the very real prospect of enforced “regime change”, coordinated by the military, the intelligence services and members of the royal family. It culminated in a show of force by the military as they briefly took over Heathrow airport without warning or coordination with Wilson’s government. Marcia Williams, his secretary, called it a “dress rehearsal” for a coup. Wilson resigned unexpectedly soon afterwards, apparently as the pressure started to take its toll.

    ‘Mutiny’ by the army

    Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learnt the Wilson lesson: never, ever take on the “defence” establishment. The chief role of the UK is to serve as the US war machine’s attack dog. Defying that allotted role would be political suicide.

    By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British establishment only in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a real danger to the militaristic status quo.

    He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged specifically to challenge the premises of the “war on terror”. He explicitly demanded an end to Israel’s role as a forward base of the imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own party – and claims he was undermining “national security” – Corbyn urged a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the “defence” establishment for the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine programme, effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn’s socialist agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many billions spent in maintaining the UK’s 145 military bases around the globe back into domestic social programmes.

    In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely unquestioned, Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour leader, Corbyn’s own MPs – still loyal to Blairism – sought to oust him with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper soon offered a platform to an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.

    Weeks after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the general warned that the army would take “direct action” using “whatever means possible, fair or foul” to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would be “mutiny”, he said. “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.”

    Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with American-Jewish organisations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to “run the gauntlet” as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime minister. The military metaphor was telling.

    In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added: “You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

    This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”

    Smears and Brexit

    After a 2017 election that Labour only narrowly lost, the Corbyn threat was decisively neutralised in the follow-up election two years later, after the Labour leader was floored by a mix of antisemitism slurs and a largely jingoistic Brexit campaign to leave Europe.

    Claims that this prominent anti-racism campaigner had overseen a surge of antisemitism in Labour were unsupported by evidence, but the smears – amplified in the media – quickly gained a life of their own. The allegations often bled into broader – and more transparently weaponised – suggestions that Corbyn’s socialist platform and criticisms of capitalism were also antisemitic. (See here, here and here.) But the smears were nevertheless dramatically effective in removing the sheen of idealism that had propelled Corbyn on to the national stage.

    By happy coincidence for the power establishment, Brexit also posed a deep political challenge to Corbyn. He was naturally antagonistic to keeping the UK trapped inside a neoliberal European project that, as a semi-detached ally of the US empire, would always eschew socialism. But Corbyn never had control over how the Brexit debate was framed. Helped by the corporate media, Dominic Cummings and Johnson centred that debate on simplistic claims that severing ties with Europe would liberate the UK socially, economically and culturally. But their concealed agenda was very different. An exit from Europe was not intended to liberate Britain but to incorporate it more fully into the US imperial war machine.

    Which is one reason that Johnson’s cash-strapped Britain is now promising an extra £16bn on “defence”. The Tory government’s  priorities are to prove both its special usefulness to the imperial project and its ability to continue using war – as well as the unique circumstances of the pandemic – to channel billions from public coffers into the pockets of the establishment.

    A Biden makeover

    After four years of Trump, the war machine once again desperately needs a makeover. The once-confident, youthful Wikileaks is now less able to peek behind the curtain and listen in to the power establishment’s plans for a new administration under Joe Biden.

    We can be sure nonetheless that its priorities are no different from those set out in the CIA memo of 2010. Biden’s cabinet, the media has been excitedly trumpeting, is the most “diverse” ever, with women especially prominent in the incoming foreign policy establishment.

    There has been a huge investment by Pentagon officials and Congressional war hawks in pushing for Michèle Flournoy to be appointed as the first female defence secretary. Flournoy, like Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has played a central role in prosecuting every US war dating back to the Bill Clinton administration.

    The other main contender for the spot is Jeh Johnson, who would become the first black defence secretary. As Biden dithers, his advisers’ assessment will focus on who will be best positioned to sell yet more war to a war-weary public.

    The role of the imperial project is to use violence as a tool to capture and funnel ever greater wealth – whether it be resources seized in foreign lands or the communal wealth of domestic western populations – into the pockets of the power establishment, and to exercise that power covertly enough, or at a great enough distance, that no meaningful resistance is provoked.

    A strong dose of identity politics may buy a little more time. But the war economy is as unsustainable as everything else our societies are currently founded on. Sooner or later the war machine is going to run out of fuel.

    The post The Planet Cannot Begin to Heal Until We Rip the Mask off the West’s War Machine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • An American Murder in Istanbul: Justice for Halla

    An American journalist and her mom are found murdered in Istanbul. Police say they caught the killer. Friends and family say the investigation was incomplete. In collaboration with ABC News and freelance reporter Fariba Nawa, we dig into the investigative files against the convicted killer and learn that the U.S. government chose not to get involved in the investigation.

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.