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Category: Ukraine

  • Fans of Cluster Bombs Dominate WaPo’s Opinion Section

     

    The Washington Post (6/23/22) describes its opinion section as a platform for articles that “provide a diversity of voices and perspectives for our readers.” Yet as the US and its allies pour military aid into Ukraine, escalating the already bloody conflict with ever-more deadly new weapons, the paper’s opinion pages begin to look less like a platform for diverse voices and more like a cheerleading squad for the military/industrial complex.

    Post opinion journalism abounds with pieces advocating the sort of “light side vs. dark side” moral rhetoric characteristic of corporate media’s war coverage (FAIR.org, 12/1/22). A consequence of this binary worldview is the tendency to present the deployment of increasingly horrific means, like President Joe Biden’s recent decision to arm Ukraine with US cluster munitions, as essentially just and necessary to achieve the West’s always-noble ends.

    From war crime to ‘correct call’

    Cluster munitions are a type of ordinance which can leave unexploded “bomblets” around for decades. Almost 50 years after the end of the US government’s war of aggression against Laos, unexploded cluster bombs continue to kill and maim innocent people—frequently children.

    These weapons are rightly so reviled that, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then–White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to the possibility that Russia had already begun using cluster munitions against Ukraine by calling it “potentially a war crime.” Even so, US cluster munitions have arrived in Ukraine, and are now being used by Kyiv (Washington Post, 7/20/23).

    WaPo: NATO’s annual summit could define a decade of Western security

    Washington Post editorial (7/8/23): “Mr. Biden made a tough but correct call this week…sending Kyiv thousands of cluster munitions, which are expected to help Ukrainian forces break through heavily entrenched Russian lines.”

    Advocating for escalation, a Post editorial headlined “NATO’s Annual Summit Could Define a Decade of Western Security” (7/8/23) argued that NATO needs to “step up their game” in order to meet the threat of Putin’s regime in Moscow. It called Biden’s decision to arm Ukraine with cluster munitions a “tough but correct call.” The editorial board explained:

    Their use is banned by some major NATO allies, because dud bombs left behind on the battlefield pose a threat to civilians. But Russia has used them intensively in Ukraine, and the Biden administration is legally required to export only shells that have a very low dud rate.

    “Some” major allies? Out of the 31 NATO member states, the US finds company with only seven others in its refusal to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions. More than two-thirds of NATO countries, including “major” allies like Canada, Britain, Germany and France—and every European country west of Poland—have signed.

    The editorial board cites the fact that the cluster munitions being sent by the US have a “very low dud rate,” and will therefore pose less of a risk to civilians. The Pentagon claims that the munitions it is sending have a dud rate of 2.35%; even if that’s accurate, it exceeds the 1% limit the Pentagon itself considers acceptable.

    According to the New York Times’ John Ismay (7/7/23), a failure rate of 2.35% “would mean that for every two shells fired, about three unexploded grenades would be left scattered on the target area.” There is reason to believe that the true dud rate may be much higher—possibly exceeding 14%, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning.

    Ends justify the means?

    WaPo: Why liberals protesting cluster munitions for Ukraine are wrong

    Max Boot (Washington Post, 7/11/23): Ukrainian officials have “balanced the risks of civilian casualties from unexploded ordnance against the risk of not being able to expel the Russian invaders, and they have decided that the latter is a greater concern than the former.” In other words, sometimes you have to destroy the separatists to save them.

    Another Post op-ed, by columnist Max Boot (7/11/23), headlined “Why Liberals Protesting Cluster Munitions for Ukraine Are Wrong,” illustrates the “ends justify the means” rhetoric so pervasive in discourse over the war in Ukraine.

    Boot acknowledged the devastating impact of cluster munitions, noting that “in Laos alone, at least 25,000 people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the US bombing ended.” He added:

    Such concerns led more than 100 nations—but not the United States, Russia or Ukraine—to join the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions abolishing the use of these weapons.

    Of course, the United States is notorious for isolating itself from the rest of the world when it comes to the signing of international treaties—as the Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Boot is a senior fellow, has shown. The US signed but failed to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (which has 178 state parties) and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which has 189 state parties). It refused to even sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (which has 164 state parties).

    Boot cited the probability that the dud rate of US cluster munitions is much higher than the given 2.35%, but immediately downplayed this fact on the basis that

    Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders, whose relatives, friends and neighbors are in the line of fire, are more mindful of minimizing Ukrainian casualties than are self-appointed humanitarians in the West watching the war on television.

    In other words, the Ukraine government should be allowed to decide how many Ukrainian civilians are acceptable to kill. This is a dubious principle even when you aren’t talking about a war against separatists; in the areas where the weapons are likely to be used, a large minority to a majority of the population identifies as ethnically Russian. Is the Iraqi government the best judge of how many Kurdish civilians are all right to kill?

    “Using cluster munitions has the potential to save the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers,” Boot claimed, despite the fact that these same US munitions have a history of killing both civilians and US personnel alike.

    Moreover, Boot argued,

    cluster munitions remain a lawful instrument of warfare for countries that haven’t signed the 2008 convention, and Kyiv has shown itself a responsible steward of all the Western weaponry it has received.

    Setting aside international norms, even countries who have not joined the cluster munitions convention must respect the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas. That makes cluster munitions used in such areas illegal—yet “responsible steward” Ukraine has already used its own cluster munitions in the city of Izium, predictably resulting in civilian casualties (Human Rights Watch, 7/6/23).

    ‘Running out of options’

    WaPo: Ukrainians are begging for cluster munitions to stop the Russians

    Josh Rogin (Washington Post, 3/2/23): Sure, cluster bombs are ” highly indiscriminate and especially dangerous to civilians,” but “those are concerns Ukrainians don’t have the time or luxury to parse.”

    Meanwhile, Post columnist David Ignatius (7/8/23) approvingly quoted National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan touting the deployment of cluster munitions as giving Ukraine a “wider window” for success, with no mention of any arguments against them. Ignatius later stated in his biweekly Q&A (7/17/23) that he was compelled by the Ukrainians’ reported “moral argument” for cluster bombs.

    The Post’s sole “Counterpoint” piece  (7/7/23) on cluster munitions, authored by Sen. Jeff Merkley and former Sen. Patrick Leahy, justly pointed out the “unsupportable moral and political price” of supplying Kyiv with cluster munitions. Unfortunately, the Post didn’t seem to have much time for such considerations, with the only other traces of criticism within the opinion section being found amidst the letters to the editor.

    This was true even months before Biden made his decision. A March piece by columnist Josh Rogin (3/2/23) framed the weapons as a sort of necessary evil as the Ukrainian forces are “running out of options.” Rogin referred to concerns from human rights groups and deemed the use of cluster munitions as “not to be taken lightly,” but did not dwell on these concerns, arguing, similar to Boot, that “more innocent lives will be saved if Ukrainian forces can kill more invading Russians faster.” Rogin concluded: “Because it is their lives on the line, it is their risk to take, and we should honor their request.”

    In total, the Post has published five pieces in its opinion section (including Ignatius’ Q&A) that take a direct stance in favor of arming Ukraine with US cluster munitions, and only one opposed to it. Meanwhile, a recent poll by Quinnipiac University concluded that 51% of Americans disapprove of the president’s decision, while only 39% approve (The Hill, 7/19/23).

    With so much preference for escalation and so little toward military restraint, one thing seems clear: There aren’t many Einsteins in the Washington Post op-ed section.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost.

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

    The post Fans of Cluster Bombs Dominate WaPo’s Opinion Section appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Russia, Donbass and the Reality of The Conflict in Ukraine

    I just returned from my third trip to Russia, and my second trip to Donbass (now referring to the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk collectively) in about 8 months.  This time, I flew into lovely Tallinn, Estonia and took what should be about a 6-hour bus ride to St. Petersburg.  In the end, the bus trip took me about 12 hours due to a long wait in Customs on the Russian side of the border.

    Having a US passport and trying to pass the frontier from a hostile, NATO country into Russia during wartime got me immediately flagged for questioning.  And then, it turned out I didn’t have all my papers in order as I was still without my journalist credential from the Russian Foreign Ministry which was necessary given that I told the border patrol that I was traveling to do reporting.  I was treated very nicely, though the long layover forced me to lose my bus which understandably went on without me.

    However, sometimes we find opportunity in seemingly inconvenient detours, and that was true in this case.  Thus, I became a witness to a number of Ukrainians, some of them entire families, trying to cross the border and to immigrate to Russia.  Indeed, the only other type of passport (besides my US passport) I saw amongst those held over for questioning and processing was the blue Ukranian passport.  This is evidence of an inconvenient fact to the Western narrative of the war which portrays Russia as an invader of Ukraine.  In fact, many Ukrainians have an affinity for Russia and have voluntarily chosen to live there over the years.

    Between 2014 – the real start of the war when the Ukrainian government began attacking its own people in the Donbass – and the beginning of Russia’s intervention in February of 2022, around 1 million Ukrainians had already immigrated to Russia.  This was reported in the mainstream press back then, with the BBC writing about these 1 million refugees, and also explaining, “[s]eparatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.  Since the violence erupted, some 2,600 people have been killed and thousands more wounded. The city of Luhansk has been under siege by government forces for the past month and is without proper supplies of food and water.”  The number of dead in this war would grow to 14,000 by February of 2022, again before Russia’s Special Military Operations (SMO) had even begun.

    Around 1.3 million additional Ukrainians have immigrated to Russia since February of 2022, making Russia the largest recipient of Ukrainian refugees in the world since the beginning of the SMO.

    When I commented to one of the Russian border officials, Kirill is his name, about the stack of Ukrainian passports sitting on his desk, he made a point to tell me that they treat the Ukrainians coming in “as human beings.”  When my contact in St Petersburg, Boris, was able to send a photo of my newly-acquired press credential to Kirill, I was sent on my way with a handshake and was able to catch the next bus coming through to St. Petersburg almost immediately.

    Once in St. Petersburg, I went to Boris’s house for a short rest and then was off by car to Rostov-on-Don, the last Russian city before Donetsk.  I was driven in a black Lexus by a kind Russian businessman named Vladimir and along with German, the founder of the humanitarian aid group known as “Leningrad Volunteers.”  The car was indeed loaded with humanitarian aid to take to Donbas.  After some short introductions, and my dad joke about the “Lexus from Texas,” we were off on our 20-hour journey at a brisk pace of about 110 miles an hour.

    We arrived in Rostov in the evening and checked into the Sholokhov Lofts hotel, named after Mikhail Sholokhov, Rostov’s favorite son who wrote the great novel, And Quite Flows the Don. We were told that, up until recently, a portrait of the titular head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had adorned the lobby wall.  They took this down after members of the Wagner Group invaded Rostov, putting fear in many of the residents.  Now, the hotel only has Hollywood movie posters decorating the walls.

    In the early afternoon the next day, my translator Sasha arrived from her hometown of Krasnodar, Russia – a 7-hour train ride from Rostov.  Sasha, who is just 22 years old, is a tiny red-headed woman who quickly turned out to be one of the most interesting people I met on my journey.  As she explained to me, Sasha has been supporting humanitarian work in Donbass since the age of 12.  She told me that she derived her interest in this work from her grandmother who raised her in the “patriotic spirit” of the USSR.  As Sasha explained, her parents were too busy working to do much raising of her at all.  Sasha, who is from the mainland of Russia, attends the University of Donetsk to live in solidarity with the people who have been under attack there since 2014.

    At age 22, Sasha, who wore open-toed sandals even when we traveled to the frontlines, is one of the bravest people I have ever met, and she certainly disabused me of any notion that I was doing anything especially brave by going to the Donbass.  But, of course, as Graham Greene once wrote, “with a return ticket, courage becomes an intellectual exercise” anyway.

    We quickly set out on our approximately 3-to-4-hour drive to Donetsk City, with a brief stop at a passport control office now run by the Russian Federation subsequent to the September, 2022 referendum in which the people of Donetsk and three other Ukrainian republics voted to join Russia.  I was again questioned by officials at this stop, but for only 15 minutes or so.  I just resigned myself to the fact that, as an American traveling through Russia at this time, I was not going to go through any border area without some level of questioning.  However, the tone of the questioning was always friendly.

    We arrived in Donetsk City, a small but lovely town along the Kalmius River, without incident.  Our first stop was at the Leningrad Volunteers warehouse to unload some of the aid we had brought and to meet some of the local volunteers.  Almost all of these volunteers are life-long residents of Donetsk, and nearly all of them wore military fatigues and have been fighting the Ukrainian forces as part of the Donetsk militia for years, many since the beginning of the conflict in 2014.  This is something I cannot impress upon the reader enough.  While we are often told that these fighters in the Donbass are Russians or “Russian proxies,” this is simply not true.  The lion’s share of these fighters are locals of varying ages, some quite old, who have been fighting for their homes, families and survival since 2014.  While there have been Russian and international volunteers who have supported these forces – just as there were international volunteers who went to support the Republicans in Spain in the 1930’s —  they are mostly local.  Of course, this changed in February of 2022 when Russia began the SMO.  But even still, the locals of Donetsk continue to fight on, now alongside the Russian forces.

    The lie of “Russian proxies” fighting in the Donbass after 2014 is actually one of the smaller ones of the Western mainstream press, for the claim at least acknowledges that there has been such fighting.  Of course, the mainstream media has tried to convince us that there was never such fighting at all and that the Russian SMO beginning in February of 2022 was completely “unprovoked.”  This is the big lie that has been peddled in order to gain the consent of the Western populations to militarily support Ukraine.  What is also ignored is the fact that this war was escalating greatly before the beginning of the SMO and this escalation indeed provoked it.  Thus, according to the Organization for European Security and Cooperation (OESC) — a 57-member organization including many Western countries, including the United States – there were around 2000 cease-fire violations in the Donbass in the weekend just before the SMO began on February 24, 2022.  In a rare moment of candor, Reuters reported on February 19, 2022, “Almost 2,000 ceasefire violations were registered in eastern Ukraine by monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Saturday, a diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday. Ukrainian government and separatist forces have been fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2014.”

    Jacques Baud, a Swiss intelligence and security consultant and former NATO military analyst, further explains the precipitating events of the SMO:

    as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun shelling the civilian population of Donbass, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.

    . . .   This is what he explained in his speech on February 21.

    On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbass Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them.

    The Ukrainian artillery bombardment of the Donbass population continued, and, on 23 February, the two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.

    In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware. Jurists will judge.

    Of course, none of this was news to the people I met in Donetsk, for they had been living this reality for years.  For example, Dimitri, a young resident of Donetsk who has been fighting since 2014 along with his mother and father, told me quite exasperated as he pointed to some of the weapons and ammunition behind him, “what is all this stuff doing here?  Why have we been getting this since 2014?  Because the war has been going on since then.”  Dimitri, who was studying at the university when the conflict began, can no longer fight due to injuries received in the war, including damage to his hearing which is evidenced by the earplugs he wears. He hopes he can go back to his studies.

    Just a few days before my arrival in Donetsk, Dimitri’s apartment building was shelled by Ukrainian forces, just as it had been before in 2016.  Like many in Donetsk, he is used to quickly repairing the damage and going on with his life.

    Dimitri took me to the Donetsk airport and nearby Orthodox church and monastery which were destroyed in fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk militia forces back in 2014-2015.  Dimitri participated in the fighting in this area back then, explaining that during that time, this was the area of the most intense fighting in the world.  But you would not know this from the mainstream press coverage which has largely ignored this war before February of 2022.

    One of the first individuals I interviewed in Donetsk was 36-year-old Vitaly, a big guy with a chubby, boyish face who wore a baseball hat with the red Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle.  Vitaly, the father of three children, is from Donetsk and has been fighting there for four years, including in the very tough battle for the steel plant in Mariupol in the summer of 2022.  He decided to take up arms after friends of his were killed by Ukrainian forces, including some who were killed by being burned alive by fascist forces –- the same forces, we are told, don’t exist.  Vitaly, referring to the mainstream Western media, laughed when saying, “they’ve been saying we’ve been shelling ourselves for 9 years.”

    Vitaly has personally fought against soldiers wearing Nazi insignia, and he is very clear that he is fighting fascism. Indeed, when I asked him what the Soviet flag on his hat meant to him, he said that it signified the defeat over Nazism, and he hopes he will contribute to this again.  When I asked him about claims that Russia had intervened with soldiers in the war prior to February of 2022 as some allege, he adamantly denied this, as did everyone else I interviewed in Donetsk.  However, he has witnessed the fact that Polish and UK soldiers have been fighting with the Ukrainian military since the beginning.  Vitaly opined that, given what has transpired over the past 9 years, he does not believe that the Donbass will ever return to Ukraine, and he certainly hopes it will not.  Vitaly told me quite stoically that he believes he will not see peace in his lifetime.

    During my stay in Donetsk, I twice had dinner with Anastasia, my interpreter during my first trip to the Donbass in November.  Anastasia teaches at the University of Donetsk.  She has been traveling around Russia, including to the far east, telling of what has been happening in the Donbass since 2014 because many in Russia themselves do not fully understand what has been going on.  She told me that when she was recounting her story, she found herself reliving her trauma from 9 years of war and feeling overwhelmed.  Anastasia’s parents and 13-year-old brother live near the frontlines in the Donetsk Republic, and she worries greatly about them.  Olga is glad that Russia has intervened in the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian SMO as an “invasion,” telling me that Russia did not invade.  Rather, they were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in Donetsk as far as I can tell.

    During my 5-day trip to Donetsk, I was taken to two cities within the conflict zone – Yasinovataya and Gorlovka. I was required to wear body armor and a helmet during this journey, though wearing a seat belt was optional, if not frowned upon.  While Donetsk City, which certainly sees its share of shelling, is largely intact and with teeming traffic and a brisk restaurant and café scene, once we got out of the city, this changed pretty quickly.  Yasinovataya showed signs of great destruction, and I was told that a lot of this dated back to 2014.  The destruction going back that far included a machine factory which is now being used as a base of operations for Donetsk forces and the adjacent administrative building which looks like it could have been an opera house before its being shelled.  For its part, the city center of Gorlovka looked largely unmolested with signs of street life and even had an old trolley, clearly from the Soviet era, running through the center of town.  But the outskirts of Gorlovka certainly showed signs of war.  In both cities, one could hear the sound of shelling in the distance quite frequently.

    In Gorlovka, we met with Nikoli, nicknamed “Heavy.”  Nikoli looks like a Greek god, standing at probably 6 feet, 5 inches and all muscle.  I joked with him while I was standing next to him that I felt like I was appearing next to Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.  He got the joke and laughed.  While a giant of a man, he seemed very nice and with a strong moral compass.  He led us over to a makeshift Orthodox chapel in the cafeteria of what was a school, but which is now the base of operations for his Donetsk militia forces.  He told us that, even now after the SMO began, about 90 percent of the forces in Gorlovka are still local Donetsk soldiers, and the other 10 percent are Russian.  Again, this is something we rarely get a sense of from the mainstream press.

    Nikoli, while sitting in front of the makeshift chapel, explained that while he still considers himself Ukrainian, for after all he was born in Ukraine, he said that Donetsk would never go back to Ukraine because Ukraine had “acted against God” when it began to attack its own people in the Donbass.  He made it clear that he was prepared to fight to the end to ensure the survival of the people of Donetsk, and I had no doubt that he was telling the truth about that.

    At my request, I met with the First Secretary of the Donetsk section of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Boris Litvinov. Boris, who has also served in the Donetsk parliament, explained that the Communist Party under his leadership had been one of the leaders and initiators of the 2014 Referendum in which the people of Donetsk voted to become an autonomous republic and leave Ukraine.  According to Boris, about 100 members of the Donetsk section of the CPRF are serving on the frontlines of the conflict.  Indeed, as Boris explained, the CPRF supports the Russian SMO, only wishing that it had commenced in 2014.  Boris is clear that the war in Ukraine is one over the very survival of Russia (regardless of whether it is capitalist or socialist) and that Russia is fighting the collective West which wants to destroy Russia.

    Boris compares the fight in the Donbass to the fight of the Republicans against the fascists in Spain in the 1930’s, and he says that there are international fighters from all over the world (Americans, Israelis, Spanish and Colombians, for example) who are fighting alongside the people of Donbass against the fascists just as international fighters helped in Spain.

    The last person I interviewed, again at my own request, was Olga Tseselskaya, assistant to the head of the Union of Women of the Republic of Donetsk and First Secretary of the Mothers’ United organization.  The Mothers’ United organization, which has 6000 members throughout the Donetsk Republic, advocates for, and provides social services to, the mothers of children killed in the conflict since 2014.  I was excited that Olga opened our discussion by saying that she was glad to be talking to someone from Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh and Donetsk City had once been sister cities.

    I asked Olga about how she viewed the Russian forces now in Donetsk, and she made it clear that she supported their presence in Donetsk and believed that they were treating the population well.  She adamantly denied the claims of mass rape made against the Russians earlier in the conflict.  Of course, it should be noted, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova, who was the source of these claims was ultimately fired because her claims were found to be unverified and without substantiation, but again the Western media has barely reported on that fact.

    When I asked Olga whether she agreed with some Western peace groups, such as the Stop the War Coalition in the UK, that Russia should pull its troops out of the Donbass, she disagreed, saying that she hates to think what would happen to the people of the Donbass if they did.  I think that this is something the people of the West need to come to grips with – that the government of Ukraine has done great violence against its own people in the Donbass, and that the people of the Donbass had every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia.  If Westerners understood this reality, they would think twice about “standing with” and continuing to arm Ukraine.

    A cathedral near the Donetsk City airport was destroyed in 2014.  The airport was also destroyed.

    A bridge near the Donetsk airport which was destroyed in 2015 by Donetsk militia forces to prevent Ukrainian troops and tanks from crossing. 

    • Both photos were taken by Daniel Kovalik.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Does Putin Understand that Russia Is at War?

    This morning Russian media sources reported that a Ukrainian followup attack to the one on the Crimea bridge by 28 drones was defeated by Russian air defenses. In response, Russia destroyed the manufacturing sites of the drones and fuel storage facilities that provide fuel for Ukraine’s military.  The two words, “in response” tells us what is wrong with Putin’s conduct of the war.  Why did it take a Ukrainian attack on Crimea for Russia to do what any other country at war would have done a long time ago—destroy its enemy’s armaments factories and fuel depots? It is as if Russia is not at war. The offensive initiatives are with Ukraine. All Russia does is to retaliate to Ukrainian attacks.

    This is a mindless way for the Kremlin to conduct a war. It encourages the US neoconservatives to continue and to widen the conflict. Russia should have shut down Odessa long ago.  It was mindless to leave Ukraine with bases on the Black Sea from which to launch attacks on the Crimea bridge. If Putin was conducting war as war should be conducted, the young girl’s parents would still be alive.

    The Russian Foreign Ministry, like the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry, does not seen to comprehend that a war is in process. Russia termed the attack on the bridge a “terror attack.” The bridge is a legitimate military target. It was Putin’s limited operation that allowed Ukraine the resources and naval base with which to attack the bridge. Calling it a terror attack is a pretense that a war is not underway.

    Perhaps one day the Russian government will come to its senses and comprehend that a war has too long been underway and make the decision to get it over with. As Prigozhin said, the Russian Ministry of Defense is asking his Wagner troops to die without offering them a prospect of victory.

    Putin’s refusal to fight a war is going to cause the Russian people to tire of it. Why is Putin playing so totally into Washington’s hands?

    Putin’s refusal to fight has even convinced his Chinese ally that Russia cannot win the conflict with Ukraine. Yesterday China’s UN representative, Geng Shuang, speaking to the UN Security Council wrote off any prospect of a Russian victory: “The evolution of the battlefield situation shows that military means cannot resolve the Ukrainian crisis, and the continuation of the conflict will only bring more suffering to civilians, and may even lead to unpredictable and irreparable situations.” Shuang agrees with me that the never-ending conflict is in danger of “getting out of control.”

    It must be extremely embarrassing to Putin, to the Russian military, and to the Russian people to be seen as too weak and irresolute to defeat a third world military force.  The encouragement Putin has given to Washington’s neoconservatives to push ever harder against Russia is leading, as I fear, to a wider conflict that could destroy organized life on earth.

    Update:

    Another Consequence for Putin for Failing to Bring the Conflict to a Close

    Putin cannot attend in person a meeting of BRICS without the risk of his arrest.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Free Press, Propaganda and Censorship

    In war, truth is the first casualty.

    — Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)

    How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current list of adversaries, from the point of view of those adversaries? We supposedly pride ourselves on listening to both or many sides of an issue before forming an opinion (or, better still, a sound analysis). It’s the core of our system of justice, however flawed. It’s why we value free speech.

    It’s not that the viewpoints we commonly hear are not different from each other, or that we don’t hear from people with foreign accents from the parts of the world in question. It’s that mainstream news, information and analysis are from a very narrow spectrum. The differences in the viewpoints are in the details, not the fundamentals. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the differences are mainly about how, and how much, to support Ukraine, not whether to do so. Do we hear the Russian view that they were compelled to come to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian population, which was being massacred by racist, pro-Nazi elements running the Ukrainian government and supported by NATO? Not from the mainstream news, we don’t.

    Similarly, when we hear from nationals of adversary countries, our media rarely offer space or air time to persons who represent the adversarial point of view. We are rather more likely to hear from exiles seeking to overthrow the government and hoping for western support. When have we heard from a representative of Hezbollah or Hamas? Or of the government of China or North Korea, or the Sandinista government of Nicaragua? The point is not whether their point of view is correct or whether we decide that it’s reasonable or not, but rather whether we even know what it is, and whether we try to understand it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in order to negotiate with our adversaries, solve our differences and achieve peace? The closest we come to that in our media is to invite such representatives to an on-air ambush where we browbeat them and shout them down instead of listening to them.

    But it’s worse than that. Our vaunted “free press” closes down the offices and facilities of journalists from countries or movements selected for vilification, and blocks their websites within the boundaries of our country. Thus, the Russian RT media channel and the Iranian Press TV, among others, are no longer permitted to operate within most western countries. Apparently, their words are considered hazardous to western ears. Similarly, many journalists and other individuals have found themselves banned from western-based social media for revealing unwelcome facts or contradicting official truth. Many have been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.

    It’s not just censorship, either. Our journalistic media have been taken over by advertising and PR principles, going so far as to fabricate stories and substitute lies for the truth on a massive scale. Even “fact checking” has become the province of distortion, where the “authorized” version of events has displaced actual facts.  The mainstream media remove journalists who tell too much truth, contradicting the lies. The New York Times “disappeared” war correspondent Chris Hedges for reporting on war crimes committed by Israel and similar news. Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal used to report their investigative journalism on Democracy Now, which has now ceased inviting them, in order to become more of a mainstream outlet. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch migrated from The New Yorker and the New York Times to foreign media and eventually alternative outlets as his investigative journalism began to cast doubt on mainstream accounts of the Syrian war, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines and other events. Julian Assange is paying the highest price for publishing a modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, originally published by a younger, more courageous New York Times.

    Sadly, many members of the public consider themselves well-informed and openminded if they read the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, watch or listen to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, and subscribe to Asia Times. To the extent that this may have been true in the past, it no longer is. Today, the ownership and funding sources of the major news media are all oligarchs and powerful corporations. Their job is no longer to inform the public, but rather to inculcate them with whatever information and ideas will manufacture consent for the policies that the powerful wish to enact. And no more, please.

    This explains the actions of those who rule us, who are not just the elected leadership. In fact, even the elections themselves are limited to candidates selected by the powerful interests, and centered upon a few issues that do not threaten those interests (e.g. abortion and civil rights), and where the campaigning takes place almost exclusively in the few “swing” states that will determine the outcome of the election. As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

    If we want to be worthy of calling ourselves educated, we cannot depend solely upon the mainstream press; we will have to do a lot of the work ourselves. There is bias in all media, but we can expose ourselves to opposing biases in order to get a wider variety of facts and analyses, and form our views accordingly. We have choices, if we only seek them out. The biases of Yahoo and Google are different from those of Russian and Chinese search engines. If we don’t find what we’re looking for on one, we might find it on another. The same is true with social media. Telegram is becoming increasingly popular, especially with those who have been banned elsewhere. Substack.com is a website that thus far has accommodated most subjects and viewpoints. Many of the journalists who are less than welcome in the mainstream media can be found at serenashimaward.org, a project that rewards journalists who present alternate views and information (and for which I am proud to serve as Treasurer). Due diligence is worth the rewards.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations?

    Bassim Al Shaker (Iraq), Symphony of Death 1, 2019

    The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit on 11–12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania. The communiqué released after the first day’s proceedings claimed that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance’, a statement that encapsulates why many struggle to grasp its true essence. A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a ‘defensive alliance’.

    Currently, NATO has thirty-one member states, the most recent addition being Finland, which joined in April 2023. Its membership has more than doubled since its twelve founding members, all countries in Europe and North America that had been part of the war against the Axis powers, signed its founding treaty (the Washington Treaty or the North Atlantic Treaty) on 4 April 1949. It is telling that one of these original members – Portugal – remained under a fascist dictatorship at the time, known as Estado Novo (in place from 1933 until 1974).

    Article 10 of this treaty declares that NATO members – ‘by unanimous agreement’ – can ‘invite any other European state’ to join the military alliance. Based on that principle, NATO welcomed Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), and Spain (1982), expanding its membership at the time to include sixteen countries. The disintegration of the USSR and communist states in Eastern Europe – the purported threat that compelled the need for NATO to begin with – did not put an end to the need for the alliance. Instead, NATO’s increasing membership has doubled down on its ambition to use its military power, through Article 5, to subdue anyone who challenges the ‘Atlantic Alliance’.

    Nino Morbedadze (Georgia), Strolling Couple, 2017.

    The ‘Atlantic Alliance’, a phrase that is part of NATO’s name, was part of a wider network of military treaties secured by the US against the USSR and, after October 1949, against the People’s Republic of China. This network included the Manila Pact of September 1954, which created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), and the Baghdad Pact of February 1955, which created the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). Turkey and Pakistan signed a military agreement in April 1954 which brought them together in an alliance against the USSR and anchored this network through NATO’s southernmost member (Turkey) and SEATO’s westernmost member (Pakistan). The US signed a military deal with each of the members of CENTO and SEATO and ensured that it had a seat at the table in these structures.

    At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reacted strongly to the creation of these military alliances, which exported tensions between the US and the USSR across Asia. The concept of NATO, he said, ‘has extended itself in two ways’: first, NATO ‘has gone far away from the Atlantic and has reached other oceans and seas’ and second, ‘NATO today is one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism’. As an example, Nehru pointed to Goa, which was still held by fascist Portugal and whose grip had been validated by NATO members – an act, Nehru said, of ‘gross impertinence’. This characterisation of NATO as a global belligerent and defender of colonialism remains intact, with some modifications.

    Slobodan Trajković (Yugoslavia), The Flag, 1983.

    SEATO was disbanded in 1977, partly due to the defeat of the US in Vietnam, and CENTO was shuttered in 1979, precisely due to the Iranian Revolution that year. US military strategy shifted its focus from wielding these kinds of pacts to establishing a direct military presence with the founding of US Central Command in 1983 and the revitalisation of the US Pacific Command that same year. The US expanded the power of its own global military footprint, including its ability to strike anywhere on the planet due to its structure of military bases and armed flotillas (which were no longer restricted once the 1930 Second London Naval Treaty expired in 1939). Although NATO has always had global ambitions, the alliance was given material reality through the US military’s force projection and its creation of new structures that further tied allied states into its orbit (with programmes such as ‘Partnership for Peace’, set up in 1994, and concepts such as ‘global NATO partner’ and ‘non-NATO ally’, as exemplified by Japan and South Korea). In its 1991 Strategic Concept, NATO wrote that it would ‘contribute to global stability and peace by providing forces for United Nations missions’, which was realised with deadly force in Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2003), and Libya (2011).

    By the Riga Summit (2006), NATO was confident that it operated ‘from Afghanistan to the Balkans and from the Mediterranean Sea to Darfur’. Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem anachronistic now, but, in fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt the global majority’s desire for sovereignty and dignity, two key anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project that exerts these two concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons system.

    Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Kaska, Dance of War, 2020.

    The collapse of the USSR and the Eastern European communist state system transformed Europe’s reality. NATO quickly ignored the ‘ironclad guarantees’ offered by US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow on 9 February 1990 that NATO’s ‘forces would not move eastward’ of the German border. Several states that bordered the NATO zone suffered greatly in the immediate period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with economies in the doldrums as privatisation eclipsed the possibility for their populations to live with dignity. Many states in Eastern Europe, desperate to enter the European Union (EU), which at least promised access to the common market, understood that entry into NATO was the price of admission. In 1999, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO, followed in 2004 by the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Eager for investments and markets, by 2004 many of these countries waltzed into the Atlantic Alliance of NATO and the EU.

    NATO continued to expand, absorbing Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. However, the breakdown of some US banks, the waning attraction of the US as the market of last resort, and the entry of the Atlantic world into a relentless economic depression after 2007 changed the context. No longer were Atlantic states reliable as investors or as markets. After 2008, infrastructure investment in the EU declined by 75% due to reduced public spending, and the European Investment Bank warned that government investment would hit a twenty-five-year low.

    ArtLords (including Kabir Mokamel, Abdul Hakim Maqsodi, Meher Agha Sultani, Omaid Sharifi, Yama Farhard, Negina Azimi, Enayat Hikmat, Zahid Amini, Ali Hashimi, Mohammad Razeq Meherpour, Abdul Razaq Hashemi, and Nadima Rustam), The Unseen Afghanistan, 2021.

    The arrival of Chinese investment and the possibility of integration with the Chinese economy began to reorient many economies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, away from the Atlantic. In 2012, the first summit between China and central and eastern European countries (China–CEEC summit) was held in Warsaw (Poland), with sixteen countries in the region participating. The process eventually drew in fifteen NATO members, including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (in 2021 and 2022, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania withdrew from the initiative). In March 2015, six then-EU member states – France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, Sweden, and the UK – joined the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Four years later, Italy became the first G7 country to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Two-thirds of EU member states are now part of the BRI, and the EU concluded the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment in 2020.

    These manoeuvres towards China threatened to weaken the Atlantic Alliance, with the US describing the country as a ‘strategic competitor’ in its 2018 National Defense Strategy – a phrase indicative of its shifting focus on the so-called threat of China. Nonetheless, as recently as November 2019, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that ‘there [are] no plans, no proposal, no intention to move NATO into, for instance, the South China Sea’. However, by 2020, the mood had changed: a mere seven months later, Stoltenberg said, ‘NATO does not see China as the new enemy or an adversary. But what we see is that the rise of China is fundamentally changing the global balance of power’. NATO’s response has been to work with its partners – including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea – ‘to address… the security consequences of the rise of China’, Stoltenberg continued. The talk of a global NATO and an Asian NATO is front and centre in these deliberations, with Stoltenberg stating in Vilnius that the idea of a liaison office in Japan is ‘on the table’.

    The war in Ukraine provided new life to the Atlantic Alliance, driving several hesitant European countries – such as Sweden – into its ranks. Yet, even amongst people living within NATO countries there are groups who are sceptical of the alliance’s aims, with the Vilnius summit marked by anti-NATO protests. The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO and sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares, for instance, that China challenges ‘our interests, security, and values’, with the word ‘our’ claiming to represent not only NATO countries but the entire international order. Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the UN, suggesting that it – and not the actual international community – is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security, and values’. This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, seven billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries (whose total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder why it is that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trinity’s Shadow

    I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist.  I wonder why.  It is my birthday.  The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.

    Someday I will die and I wonder why.  This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young.  That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.

    Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days.

    Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death.  They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy.  They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were.  They thought they were gods.

    Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.

    Where are they now?

    Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

    Where are the just and the unjust?

    Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living?  Will they sing as they launch the missiles – “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night?”

    Joseph Biden, the second Roman Catholic president, while mocking the essence of Jesus’s message, pushes the world toward a nuclear holocaust, unlike JFK, the first Catholic president, who was assassinated by the CIA for pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.

    The wheel turns.  We count the years.  We wonder why.

    Years ago I started my academic life by writing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.”  It was a study of the transformation of cultural symbol systems, death, and nuclear weapons.  The last hundred years and more have brought a transformation and disintegration of the traditional religious symbol system – the sacred canopy – that once gave people comfort, meaning, and hope.  Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold comfort. The ultimate power of death over all life has been transferred from God to men, those controlling the nuclear weapons. This subject has never left me.  I suppose it has haunted me.  It is not a jolly subject, but I think it has chosen me.

    Was I born in a normal time?  Is war time our normal time?  It is. I was.

    But to be born at a time and place when your country’s leaders were denouncing their German and Japanese enemies as savage war criminals while execrably emulating them and then outdoing them is something else again.  With Operation Paperclip following World War II, the United States government secretly brought 1,600 or more Nazi war criminals into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs.  We became Nazis.  Lewis Mumford put it this way in The Pentagon of Power:

    By the curious dialectic of history, Hitler’s enlargement and the refurbishment of the Nazi megamachine gave rise to the conditions for creating those counter-instruments that would conquer it and temporarily wreck it. In short, in the very act of dying the Nazis transmitted their disease to their American opponents; not only the methods of compulsive organization or physical destruction, but the moral corruption that made it feasible to employ those methods without stirring opposition.

    There are always excuses for such moral corruption.  When during WW II the U.S. firebombed almost all Japanese cities, Dresden and Cologne in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as necessary to defeat evil enemies.  Just as Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who became the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war crimes of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral nation fighting a good war.  What has followed are decades of U.S. war crimes from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc.  A very long list.

    The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly:

    It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force  for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

    Nothing could be truer.  When in 2014 the U.S. engineered the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia.  This alliance should have shocked no one; it is the American way.  Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death squads in Central America, Ronald Reagan told the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”  Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a great hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.”  Such alliances are not anomalies but the crude reality of U. S. history.

    But let me return to “Trinity,” the ultimate weapon of mass destruction since I was reading a recent article about it.

    Kai Bird, the coauthor of  American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book that inspired the new film Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the man who named the first atomic bomb Trinity, has written an Op Ed piece in The New York Times titled, “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” True in certain respects, this article is an example of how history can be slyly used to distort the present for political purposes.  In typical NY Times fashion, Bird tells certain truths while concealing, distorting, and falsifying others.

    I do not consider Oppenheimer a tragic figure, as does Bird.  Complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future.  Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical or big tech industries to regulate themselves.

    Bird rightly says that Oppenheimer did not regret his work inventing the atomic bomb, and he correctly points out the injustice of his being maligned and stripped of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations. “Celebrated in 1945 as the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’” Bird writes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.”  A “victim,” I should add, who named names to save his own reputation.

    But tucked within his article, Bird tells us: “Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.”  By which he means these officials like Anthony Fauci were maligned when they gave the public correct scientific information.  This is absurd.  Fauci – “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” – and other government “civil servants” misinformed the public and lied over and over again, but Bird implies they too were tragic figures like Oppenheimer.

    He writes:

    We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. Our politicians need to listen more to technology innovators like Sam Altman and quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku.

    Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very people responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” should have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb.  Implicit here is the belief that science just marches progressively on and there’s no stopping it, and when dangerous technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we should trust them to control them.  Nowhere does Bird suggest that scientists have a moral obligation before the fact to not pursue a certain line of research because of its grave possible consequences.  Maybe he has never read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, only written over two hundred years ago.

    Finally, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words:

    Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark reminder that we can never be complacent about living with nuclear weapons.

    This is simply U.S. propaganda.  The U.S. has provoked and fueled the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its first strike policy and threats, etc.  Putin has said in response that if – and only if – the very existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with extinction would the use of nuclear weapons be considered.

    So Bird, in writing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “tragedy” and defending science, has also subtly defended a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. There is no mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons.  This is how the “paper of record” does its job.

    I sit here now at the end of the day.  Shadows are falling and I contemplate such trinities.  I am stunned by the fact that we exist, but under a terrifying Shadow that many wish to ignore.  Jung saw this shadow side as not just personal but social, and when it is ignored, the collective evils of modern societies can autonomously erupt.

    Bird argues that nuclear weapons are the result of a scientific quest that is unstoppable.  He writes that Oppenheimer “understood that you cannot stop curious human beings from discovering the physical world around them [and then making nuclear bombs or designer babies].”

    This is the ideology of progress that brooks no opposition since it is declared inevitable. It is a philosophy that believes there should be no limits to human knowledge, which would include the knowledge of good and evil, but which can then be ignored since it and all thought and beliefs are considered a priori to be relative.  The modern premise that everything is relative is, of course, a contradiction since it is an absolute statement.  Many share this philosophy of despair disguised as progress as it has crept into everything today.  It is tragic, for if people accept it, we are doomed to follow a Faustian pact with the devil and all hell will follow.

    I think of Bob Dylan singing :

    I just don’t see why I should even care
    It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there

    But I do care, and I wonder why.  As night comes on, I sit here and wonder.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine justifies massive nukes and Western ‘way of war’ spending increase, military claims

    Ukraine highlights the need for nuclear weapons and affirms the ‘western way of war’, a new report claims. This report comes as the Tories announced a £6bn hike in nuclear warhead spending over the next six years.

    But, critics are not having it. Anti-war leaders said the decision was counter to peace and social justice, and would not deliver security or stability in any meaningful sense.

    This announcement of the report was made by defence secretary Ben Wallace, who is due to retire. But a brief look at the rogue’s gallery of Tories touted to replace him bodes poorly for real peace and stability.

    Contested world

    A new command paper outlines the UK view on war and nuclear weapons. Titled “Defence’s response to a more contested and volatile world”, the paper claims:

    The war in Ukraine highlights the importance of the credibility of our capabilities, both conventional and nuclear, on the earth or in space or cyberspace, to deter threats against us. It affirms the modern western way of warfare…

    However, it also indicated that the Tories would spend an extra £6bn over six years on the UK’s so-called nuclear deterrent. Outlining the command paper in parliament on 18 July, Wallace said Ukraine had taught new lessons to the West:

    As Defence Secretary it is important to import the lessons learned from the conflict to our own forces. While I wish such lessons were generated in a different way, the conflict has become an incubator of new ways of war.

    Crumbling services

    However, critics of UK militarism were having none of it. They expressed shock that once again the magic money tree had turned up billions for war, while the country is crumbling. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s (CND’s) Kate Hudson pointed to collapsing services here at home. She said the new hike would deny:

    crumbling public services vital funds while spending billions of pounds on maintaining and investing in these weapons of mass destruction.

    She added:

    A week ago, the Prime Minister was announcing a below-inflation pay rise for public-sector workers, insisting it was their best and final offer.

    Now, the Defence Secretary is finding billions of pounds of new money for nuclear weapons seemingly without any pushback.

    Hospitals not nuclear weapons

    Stop the War Coalition’s Lindsey German said it was typical of the current Tory regime to deny wages while splashing vast amounts on war. She added that the increase “does nothing to make the world a safer space”.

    German called for real security for the population:

    If we want security it should start with a decent housing, health and education spending – not weapons of mass destruction.

    Wallace has also announced he will retire ahead of the next cabinet reshuffle. Favourites to replace him include foreign secretary James Cleverly, security minister Tom Tugendhat, and Commons leader Penny Mordaunt.

    What unites them is that they have all, like Wallace, spent time in military uniform: Tugendhat and Cleverly as army officers and Mordaunt with a brief stint as a naval reservist.

    This increasing militarisation of democracy should concern us all. It’s true, ex-military MPs might have insights into service life. But the lesson of the recent batch of veterans-turned-politicians is that if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    And in a contested, nuclear weapon-filled world, that mindset carries its own dangers.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/bodgerbrooks, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under CC BY 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Ukrainian woman human rights defender and writer Viktoria Amelina killed in Russian missile strike on Kramatorsk

    On 1 July 2023, woman human rights defender and author Viktoria Amelina died in hospital in Dnipro, Ukraine after sustaining fatal injuries during the Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk, Ukraine on 27 June 2023. PEN Ukraine reported the death of the woman human rights defender on 3 July 2023 with the consent of her relatives. Viktoria is survived by her husband and 10-year old son.

    Viktoria Amelina was a woman human rights defender and writer. In June 2022, after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, she joined the Ukrainian human rights organisation Truth Hounds to document war crimes. She had been documenting apparent Russian war crimes in the liberated territories of eastern, southern and northern Ukraine, and particularly the village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv region. During one of her missions, Viktoria Amelina discovered a diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer who was abducted and killed by the Russian military. She was also working on a non-fiction project “War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War”, a research project about the Ukrainian women human rights defenders documenting and investigating war crimes committed by the Russian military. Before joining Truth Hounds, Viktoria Amelina actively campaigned for the liberation of Oleh Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director from Crimea who was a political prisoner of the Russian authorities from 2014 to 2019.

    Viktoria Amelina won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works, including the novels Dom’s Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome, and was a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2021, she founded the New York book festival in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, where New York refers to a village in Donetsk that is very close to the military frontline.

    On 27 June 2023, the woman human rights defender Viktoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, accompanying a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists who represented #AguantaUcrania, a group that raises awareness about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Latin America. Before coming to Kramatorsk, the group took part in a prominent Ukraninan literary fair “Book Arsenal.” They all arrived to Kramatorsk to document the situation in Ukrainian cities in the Donetsk region to support the visibility work of #AguantaUcrania.

    On the evening of 27 June 2023, the group was having dinner in the Ria Lounge restaurant in Kramatorsk, when a Russian missile hit the building in which the restaurant was located. This missile killed 13 civilians and injured a further 60. As a result of the missile strike, Viktoria Amelina suffered a severe head injury and was hospitalised in Kramatorsk, before being transferred to the hospital in Dnipro. The woman human rights defender died in the hospital in Dnipro three days later, on 1 June 2023.

    Truth Hounds and PEN Ukraine reported that, in the aftermath of the attack, Russian state propaganda media falsely claimed that the target of the missile was the temporary headquarters of one of the Ukrainian Armed Forces brigades. In reality, the Ria Lounge restaurant in Kramatorsk was one of the most popular restaurants in the city and was frequented by Ukrainian and international human rights and civil society actors, humanitarian volunteers, and media and film crews. Truth Hounds and PEN Ukraine’s report stated that there were no military objectives that the Russian military could have have been targetting with a missile attack that day. Together, the human rights organisations made a public statement concerning the strike, stating that the precision of the Iskander missiles leads them to believe that the missile strike was an attack against the civilian population.

    In light of the death of the woman human rights defender Viktoria Amelina, Front Line Defenders once again reiterates its grave concern about the killings of Ukrainian human rights defenders, civil society activists, humanitarian volunteers and other community leaders as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine. According to Front Line Defenders’ HRD Memorial, at least 50 human rights defenders were killed in Ukraine in 2022, including humanitarian actors and human rights journalists, as a result of the activities of the Russian military forces.

    Front Line Defenders strongly condemns the killing of the woman human rights defender Viktoria Amelina and urges the authorities of the Russian Federation to cease targeting civilian objects in accordance with Russia’s international humanitarian and human rights law obligations, recalling that the deliberate targeting of civilians is prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The attack on the Ria Lounge restaurant may qualify as a war crime pursuant to Article 8(2)(b)(ii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) – “intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects.” Alternatively, such an attack may be qualified under Article 8(2)(b)(i) – “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population”; or Article 8(2)(b)(iii) – “intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance […] mission.” Front Line Defenders calls for an impartial and independent investigation into the killing of human rights defender Viktoria Amelina while she was on mission conducting her human rights work. All those involved in the commission of this crime must be brought to justice.

    https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/statement-report/ukrainian-woman-human-rights-defender-and-writer-viktoria-amelina-killed-russian

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • World Hunger and the War in Ukraine

    On Monday, June 17, Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, announced, “The Black Sea agreements are no longer in effect.” This was a blunt statement to suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative that emerged out of intense negotiations in the hours after Russian forces entered Ukraine in February 2022. The Initiative went into effect on July 22, 2022, after Russian and Ukrainian officials signed it in Istanbul in the presence of the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. More

    The post World Hunger and the War in Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Investigative Reporter: “The CIA Is Playing an Outsize Role” in Ukraine

    A new investigation reveals the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, where the agency operates clandestinely in what, under a formal declaration of war, would be the domain of the military. We’re joined on the show by the author of the investigation, William Arkin, a national security reporter and senior editor at Newsweek, who says that the CIA has “got its hand in a little bit…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Wanted for Murder, an Army Vet Escaped to Ukraine — and Fought the Russians

    Craig Lang was all alone. It was March 2022, and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine had just begun. There were nightly air raids, the rumble of bombs falling on Kyiv, and cracks of gunfire in the distance. His wife and two children, before leaving for the relative safety of western Ukraine, had been sleeping on mattresses in the hallway, far from windows that could shatter from missile strikes. 

    Weapons and ammunition were being handed out to civilians in the streets of the capital. Lang, who had served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on Ukrainian front lines following Russia’s first incursion into Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, realized that his combat skills would be useful. He thought to himself, “My country is under attack, I have to do something.” 

    Born in North Carolina, Lang enlisted in the U.S. military at the age of 18. After his service, which ended under murky circumstances, he moved to Ukraine and lived there on and off since 2015. Between now and then, he has also been accused of war crimes in Ukraine, a double murder in the U.S., and has spent time inside a jail cell. The man is no stranger to violence.

    On that March day in 2022, Lang woke up early to make a phone call, but before he could dial, his phone rang. The man at the other end of the line went by the call sign “Dragon.” He was an old contact from the Right Sector, an ultranationalist militia once loosely attached to the Ukrainian military.

    “He’s like, ‘You want to come to Irpin with me and fuck the Russians?’” Lang told me in one of our many text and phone conversations over the last year and a half. “And I was like, ‘Absolutely.’”

    The Right Sector largely formed in 2014 during the Maidan protests that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, sparking a Russian-backed invasion of the Donbas region and the annexation of Crimea. The Right Sector was part of a ragtag, emergency mobilization of Ukrainian troops that included groups like the infamous Azov Battalion. 

    To many in Ukraine, the Right Sector and groups like it were a key part of helping the country fend off the initial 2014 invasion and establish the legitimacy of the nascent government, even if the group waved a red and black fascistic flag and counted among its ranks anarchists, soccer hooligans, and some neo-Nazis. 

    With the war entering a new, even more violent phase in 2022, the Right Sector was rallying to join the national resistance. Five minutes after the call, according to Lang, Dragon pulled up to his home in Kyiv. Shortly after that, Lang says, he was asked by Dragon’s commander if he was familiar with a number of “Western weapons” systems and if he could help lead attacks.

    “I looked over everything and I was like: ‘Yeah, I know how to use all of this.’ And it was like, ‘Awesome, take whatever you want.’”

    The Right Sector commander, who Lang said was serving under a branch of the Ukrainian special forces, put him to work in a squad with other foreign vets who were skilled and could take on Russian regulars in the streets of Irpin, a strategically crucial city north of Kyiv and near Bucha, the site of eventual Russian war crimes.

    “We would basically create small kill teams,” Lang explained. “So groups of 10 to 12 guys, and we would go out and we would ambush Russian convoys … basically hit, get away, and disappear.”

    Opposing Russia was second nature to Lang. Fighting was too. But Lang had never before served in uniform while an international fugitive.

    Craig Lang shows a military tattoo of his blood group in Kyiv, on July 14, 2023.

    Photo: Ira Lupu for The Intercept

    The story of Craig Lang is messy and ominous because it raises questions about who we ask to fight for us. 

    Lang’s time in Ukraine is in some ways a microcosm of the muddy and convoluted foreign interventions peppered across the last nine years of warfare in the country. Whether it was the failure of diplomatic interventions by the Obama administration and the fumbling of Javelin rocket sales — or instrumental training missions that helped wean Ukraine off of Russian-styled warfare — Western intervention has both inhibited the Kyiv government’s power and undoubtedly helped it.

    Lang was a trendsetting foreign volunteer years before some 20,000 foreign applicants responded to the February 2022 call by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for NATO veterans and other able-bodied fighters to join his country’s International Legion against Russia. Lang had made his way to Ukraine not long after he left the U.S. Army with what he says was an “Other Than Honorable Discharge” in 2014 after an alleged armed altercation with his ex-wife and going AWOL from his base. (The Pentagon would not clarify the specifics of his exit.) Though Lang once claimed in court to have traumatic brain injuries from one of his tours in the Middle East, he has volunteered — or tried to volunteer — for at least three foreign conflicts (for example, one in South Sudan in 2017), not including his U.S. Army tours. That obsession with fighting, along with his connection to alleged war crimes, is backed up by court documents and yearslong reporting by multiple outlets.

    In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept about his history of fighting in Ukraine and his legal troubles, Lang was candid about his past. 

    In his telling, it all started when a post-military job in the oil fields of North Dakota wasn’t enough. He saw the news clippings about what was happening in Donbas during 2015, a time of intensified trench fighting between Kremlin-backed separatists (plus covert Russian regulars) and Ukrainian forces. Lang decided to try to find a way over to the war. After a little bit of Facebook digging and some text message exchanges with contacts, he found himself on a flight to Ukraine. 

    This coincided with my own foray into covering the conflict. In 2015 and 2016, I was investigatingthe NATO-backed training programs that countries like Canada and the U.S. were leading to bolster the Ukrainian military. The training goal was to quietly and cheaply transform a rusting and corrupt Soviet-era outfit into one capable of countering any future Russian attempts at total war, without triggering an open conflict between the alliance and Russia. 

    It was a classic case of proxy war, and as time went on, the Western training and funding helped grow and professionalize the Ukrainian military.

    But volunteer militias like the Right Sector that had overtly far-right and ultranationalist ideologies continued to play a role in key areas of Donbas. In 2017, I was embedded at a Right Sector base near the now-decimated town of Marinka. I observed a platoon of very capable militiamen engaging in regular firefights and artillery exchanges with Russian-backed forces across the no man’s land. On walls and shoulder patches, I also saw sonnenrads (the Black Sun symbol of the Third Reich) and various other neo-Nazi runes.

    These units formed a tiny fraction of the Ukrainian forces, though some were trained by NATO. Right Sector soldiers fought to defend Kyiv last year and still do; Azov, whose fighters were seen dipping their bullets in pig fat as a taunt to their Chechen Muslim enemies, put up a relentless defense of Mariupol. (Azov was made an official regiment of the Ukrainian military that until recently used a neo-Nazi symbol in its emblem.)

    Even in the U.S. military community, signs of far-right extremism linked to violence aren’t hard to find. According to a University of Maryland study from last year, since 1991 over 600 American active duty and veteran soldiers committed acts of extremist violence. The large majority of those were politically far right, including several of the January 6 attackers and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a strict adherent of the neo-Nazi book “The Turner Diaries.”

    The presence of groups like Right Sector and Azov is a complex feature of Ukraine’s war effort since 2014 but not a sign of widespread Nazism. The country, facing total annihilation, has needed everyone and anyone it could muster to fight back against a vastly superior Russian force. But even if your country is facing an existential battle, that choice comes with a price if the conflict entangles NATO and draws billions of dollars in weapons transfers from the Pentagon. Everyone from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized on these connections to portray Kyiv as a modern-day Fourth Reich, although Ukraine’s president is openly and proudly Jewish. 

    Then there’s the further complicating matter of the thousands of foreign volunteers who have fought on Kyiv’s side, who are sometimes painted as mercenaries in league with a Nazi regime. Not unlike the weapons transfers and NATO’s training efforts, waves of volunteer foot soldiers have been a Western and global export to the war since 2014.

    “I went to the Right Sector because it was easier,” Lang told me. “Because back then, it was actually illegal for foreigners to serve in the [Ukrainian] army. It didn’t become legal for us to serve in the Armed Forces until 2016.”

    The Right Sector was a well-known and popular landing spot for foreign fighters, some with links to American extremist organizations and the global neo-Nazi movement. Though Lang described himself as a “constitutionalist” in a 2016 Vice profile of his Right Sector unit, he fervently denies being a far-right extremist. The United Nations formally accused the Right Sector of human rights violations in a 2017 report before it was subsumed into the regular Ukrainian military after the war intensified last year.

    “It was mostly like trench fighting in some places,” remembered Lang. “Sometimes the Russians would push on the positions and try to take it, and you could get into some sketchy situations.”

    Like many American volunteers with combat tours in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where the enemy rarely has howitzers, Lang experienced incoming shelling for the first time in Donbas. 

    “I’d been around the occasional mortar rocket in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said, “but this was the first time that I actually had force-on-force encounters with artillery.”

    Lang told me the unit he first fought with in 2015 had several foreigners and English speakers, including “a group of Austrians” with military experience, some of whom “were literally AWOL from the Austrian army. They had illegally left their unit.”

    That same Right Sector unit became known to authorities. In 2018, the FBI began investigating claims that Americans and other foreign fighters in Ukraine committed war crimes in 2015 and 2016, when Lang was serving. He was suspected of beating prisoners and possibly executing some of them before burying them in unmarked graves. The probe into the allegations came to light after a pro-Russian and ex-Ukrainian security services worker leaked documents about the war crimes allegations; the documents included correspondence between the U.S. Justice Department and Ukrainian authorities in 2018 and 2019, asking for information on Lang and others.

    The FBI said it “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation” into Lang. But last year, Austrian media reported that an Austrian who served in Lang’s Right Sector unit and with other Americans was convicted of war crimes in a regional court in Feldkirch. Lang has never been charged with any alleged crimes in a U.S. court for his service with the Right Sector. By 2016, he had left the group and joined up officially with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He left the country sometime in 2017 and returned in late 2018, after which he met and married a Ukrainianwoman and had two children.

    Craig Lang at the Teatralna subway station's underpass in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, July 14, 2023. (the Intercept / Ira Lupu)

    Craig Lang at the Teatralna subway station’s underpass in Kyiv.

    Photo: Ira Lupu for The Intercept

    Between July 2017 and late 2018, Lang’s story took a dramatic or sinister turn, depending on whether you believe his version of events or the lengthy one offered by the Justice Department in court records.

    According to a series of Justice Department documents, Lang is accused of murdering Serafin and Deana Lorenzo in a Florida parking lot in April 2018 with the help of another U.S. Army veteran, Alex Zwiefelhofer, who is currently in jail awaiting trial for those murders. The Justice Department says the two men, who met in Ukraine while serving with the Right Sector, intended to rob the couple of $3,000 in a fake gun sale. Their plan, according to court documents, was to use the stolen cash to finance a trip to Venezuela, where they both wanted to join paramilitary forces resisting the government. The same filings note that in June 2017, the two came to the attention of U.S. authorities when Kenyan border guards detained and subsequently deported them for trying to join forces fighting in South Sudan.

    Flight records show Lang flew into Colombia from Mexico City in September 2018 and then left in November of the same year, eventually landing in Spain on his way back to Ukraine. One NBC News report from 2019 cites an Arizona court document saying Lang got a fake passport in North Carolina and then traveled through the border state to Mexico on his way south to Colombia. He categorically denies any involvement in the Florida murders and says that after a brief stint in the Colombian jungles with an unnamed paramilitary unit that opposed the Venezuelan government across the border, he flew back to Ukraine.

    Since 2019, Lang has resisted a U.S. extradition order over the alleged murder of the Lorenzos. He was first taken into custody at the Ukraine-Moldova border crossing, setting off a back-and-forth in Ukrainian courts, which involved time in jail. He was facing almost certain extradition in the waning days of 2021. But his lawyers appealed the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which agreed to hear it over considerations that he could face a life sentence or the death penalty in Florida. Previously, the Ukrainian government had asked for assurances from the Justice Department that Lang wouldn’t face the death penalty, which a U.S. attorney reportedly agreed to in court. By February 2022, Ukrainian prosecutors confined Lang to Kyiv’s city limits as he awaited word from the European Court. 

    Then Russia invaded, and Lang’s fate became intertwined with the region’s bloody geopolitics. In the chaos of that initial period, all seemed potentially lost for Ukraine. The CIA, the Pentagon, and even President Joe Biden, in private chats with Zelenskyy, predicted certain defeat for Ukraine within a matter of days. During that time, when it wasn’t clear whether Zelenskyy would be assassinated or imprisoned or continue as a head of state, Lang found his way back into the war effort. 

    Once Lang linked up with Dragon and his Right Sector unit, he wasted no time getting into combat. He was quickly assigned to a team of foreigners, he said, including British citizens as well as “some Colombians, and some Argentinians.”

    “We had one time where we’re sitting there engaging a BMD,” said Lang, using an acronym for a Soviet armored vehicle. He described firing a rocket propelled grenade at the vehicle in the streets of Irpin when he and his comrades suddenly came face to face with a Russian soldier. 

    “We turn a corner and there’s a [Russian] machine gunner coming, running towards us,” Lang told me. “The two Ukrainians in the front, they pop the guy in the shoulder, he fucking runs behind a piece of cover and we call out to him, we’re like: ‘Hey, man, you surrender. Come on over.’ He won’t come so I prep a [fragmentation grenade], toss the fucking frag at him.”

    The Russian tried to flee but, according to Lang, “He just gets lit up like it’s a fucking turkey shoot.”

    While it can be difficult to confirm the accounts of foreign fighters, Lang provided a series of contract documents signed from the beginning of the full-scale invasion until the summer of 2022. One of the documents is a contract between Lang and the “Special Forces of the Marines of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine from the aggressor — Russian Federation.” It was signed in March 2022 and has no end date. International Legion documents, signed by Lang with a blue pen, state that the legion is enlisting the “service of foreigners and persons without citizenship in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Those documents are dated July 2022. In a Raw Story report from May, an FBI agent confirmed that Lang was “fighting with Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces against Russian forces” as late as August 2022. 

    Photo provided by Lang from what he says is April 2022, while fighting in front of what appears to be a market in Hostomel, a city close to Irpin.

    Photo: Courtesy of Craig Lang

    Kacper Rekawek, a nonresident research fellow at the Counter Extremism Project who is familiar with documents between the Ukrainian military and foreign fighters, said that the legion contract appears to be real.

    The Right Sector declined to speak to The Intercept about Lang’s record fighting with the unit.

    “We are active military personnel and are not authorized to provide any information,” a spokesperson said in a text message, citing a commander who wouldn’t authorize any comment on Lang. “At this stage communication on this matter is prohibited by the management.”

    Did Ukrainian military authorities care about his status as a fugitive from the U.S. government when they enlisted Lang last year? 

    “Oh, they were all aware of it,” Lang said, referring to Ukrainian military leaders and his ongoing extradition case for the Florida killings. “You know, everybody was aware of it. Nobody cared.”

    Lang said he fought as far east as Kharkiv in the Donbas region until an order “came down from the top” demanding that he leave the front and return to Kyiv.

    The Zelenskyy government is now determined to ship him back to the U.S. to face charges, which highlights questions about how foreign fighters and members of the International Legion have been used since the war began. Several foreign volunteers who signed contracts with the legion have denounced what they call the Ukrainian military’s double standards, particularly in the early stages of the war. They have complained of being treated as cannon fodder and given few weapons. Though some standards have risen in the last year, many foreign fighters have left and far fewer are joining up. 

    Lang, meanwhile, faces possible extradition and has again been confined to Kyiv by Ukrainian prosecutors. Ukrainian prosecutors declined to comment, while the Ukrainian Armed Forces have yet to respond to requests for comment on Lang’s criminal case or his military service on behalf of Ukraine.

    A Department of Justice spokesperson said they “cannot make any comments” regarding Lang’s status. But court records show that in July 2022 — around the time Lang claims he was booted from the Ukrainian military — his case was assigned to a new judge in the Middle District of Florida. On June 8, U.S. attorneys filed a notice of status acknowledging that Lang’s extradition “remains pending” as they await the outcome of the European Court appeal. 

    Whether Lang will ever step into a U.S. courtroom remains to be seen. 

    “I don’t want to go back [to the U.S.] because I don’t feel like I’d get a fair trial,” he told me. “When we find out that there’s a secret war crimes investigation against me, it doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy that I’m going to have a fair trial.”

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    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ben Makuch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Wanted for Murder, an Army Vet Escaped to Ukraine — and Fought the Russians

    Craig Lang was all alone. It was March 2022, and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine had just begun. There were nightly air raids, the rumble of bombs falling on Kyiv, and cracks of gunfire in the distance. His wife and two children, before leaving for the relative safety of western Ukraine, had been sleeping on mattresses in the hallway, far from windows that could shatter from missile strikes. 

    Weapons and ammunition were being handed out to civilians in the streets of the capital. Lang, who had served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on Ukrainian front lines following Russia’s first incursion into Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, realized that his combat skills would be useful. He thought to himself, “My country is under attack, I have to do something.” 

    Born in North Carolina, Lang enlisted in the U.S. military at the age of 18. After his service, which ended under murky circumstances, he moved to Ukraine and lived there on and off since 2015. Between now and then, he has also been accused of war crimes in Ukraine, a double murder in the U.S., and has spent time inside a jail cell. The man is no stranger to violence.

    On that March day in 2022, Lang woke up early to make a phone call, but before he could dial, his phone rang. The man at the other end of the line went by the call sign “Dragon.” He was an old contact from the Right Sector, an ultranationalist militia once loosely attached to the Ukrainian military.

    “He’s like, ‘You want to come to Irpin with me and fuck the Russians?’” Lang told me in one of our many text and phone conversations over the last year and a half. “And I was like, ‘Absolutely.’”

    The Right Sector largely formed in 2014 during the Maidan protests that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, sparking a Russian-backed invasion of the Donbas region and the annexation of Crimea. The Right Sector was part of a ragtag, emergency mobilization of Ukrainian troops that included groups like the infamous Azov Battalion. 

    To many in Ukraine, the Right Sector and groups like it were a key part of helping the country fend off the initial 2014 invasion and establish the legitimacy of the nascent government, even if the group waved a red and black fascistic flag and counted among its ranks anarchists, soccer hooligans, and some neo-Nazis. 

    With the war entering a new, even more violent phase in 2022, the Right Sector was rallying to join the national resistance. Five minutes after the call, according to Lang, Dragon pulled up to his home in Kyiv. Shortly after that, Lang says, he was asked by Dragon’s commander if he was familiar with a number of “Western weapons” systems and if he could help lead attacks.

    “I looked over everything and I was like: ‘Yeah, I know how to use all of this.’ And it was like, ‘Awesome, take whatever you want.’”

    The Right Sector commander, who Lang said was serving under a branch of the Ukrainian special forces, put him to work in a squad with other foreign vets who were skilled and could take on Russian regulars in the streets of Irpin, a strategically crucial city north of Kyiv and near Bucha, the site of eventual Russian war crimes.

    “We would basically create small kill teams,” Lang explained. “So groups of 10 to 12 guys, and we would go out and we would ambush Russian convoys … basically hit, get away, and disappear.”

    Opposing Russia was second nature to Lang. Fighting was too. But Lang had never before served in uniform while an international fugitive.

    Craig Lang shows a military tattoo of his blood group in Kyiv, on July 14, 2023.

    Photo: Ira Lupu for The Intercept

    The story of Craig Lang is messy and ominous because it raises questions about who we ask to fight for us. 

    Lang’s time in Ukraine is in some ways a microcosm of the muddy and convoluted foreign interventions peppered across the last nine years of warfare in the country. Whether it was the failure of diplomatic interventions by the Obama administration and the fumbling of Javelin rocket sales — or instrumental training missions that helped wean Ukraine off of Russian-styled warfare — Western intervention has both inhibited the Kyiv government’s power and undoubtedly helped it.

    Lang was a trendsetting foreign volunteer years before some 20,000 foreign applicants responded to the February 2022 call by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for NATO veterans and other able-bodied fighters to join his country’s International Legion against Russia. Lang had made his way to Ukraine not long after he left the U.S. Army with what he says was an “Other Than Honorable Discharge” in 2014 after an alleged armed altercation with his ex-wife and going AWOL from his base. (The Pentagon would not clarify the specifics of his exit.) Though Lang once claimed in court to have traumatic brain injuries from one of his tours in the Middle East, he has volunteered — or tried to volunteer — for at least three foreign conflicts (for example, one in South Sudan in 2017), not including his U.S. Army tours. That obsession with fighting, along with his connection to alleged war crimes, is backed up by court documents and yearslong reporting by multiple outlets.

    In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept about his history of fighting in Ukraine and his legal troubles, Lang was candid about his past. 

    In his telling, it all started when a post-military job in the oil fields of North Dakota wasn’t enough. He saw the news clippings about what was happening in Donbas during 2015, a time of intensified trench fighting between Kremlin-backed separatists (plus covert Russian regulars) and Ukrainian forces. Lang decided to try to find a way over to the war. After a little bit of Facebook digging and some text message exchanges with contacts, he found himself on a flight to Ukraine. 

    This coincided with my own foray into covering the conflict. In 2015 and 2016, I was investigatingthe NATO-backed training programs that countries like Canada and the U.S. were leading to bolster the Ukrainian military. The training goal was to quietly and cheaply transform a rusting and corrupt Soviet-era outfit into one capable of countering any future Russian attempts at total war, without triggering an open conflict between the alliance and Russia. 

    It was a classic case of proxy war, and as time went on, the Western training and funding helped grow and professionalize the Ukrainian military.

    But volunteer militias like the Right Sector that had overtly far-right and ultranationalist ideologies continued to play a role in key areas of Donbas. In 2017, I was embedded at a Right Sector base near the now-decimated town of Marinka. I observed a platoon of very capable militiamen engaging in regular firefights and artillery exchanges with Russian-backed forces across the no man’s land. On walls and shoulder patches, I also saw sonnenrads (the Black Sun symbol of the Third Reich) and various other neo-Nazi runes.

    These units formed a tiny fraction of the Ukrainian forces, though some were trained by NATO. Right Sector soldiers fought to defend Kyiv last year and still do; Azov, whose fighters were seen dipping their bullets in pig fat as a taunt to their Chechen Muslim enemies, put up a relentless defense of Mariupol. (Azov was made an official regiment of the Ukrainian military that until recently used a neo-Nazi symbol in its emblem.)

    Even in the U.S. military community, signs of far-right extremism linked to violence aren’t hard to find. According to a University of Maryland study from last year, since 1991 over 600 American active duty and veteran soldiers committed acts of extremist violence. The large majority of those were politically far right, including several of the January 6 attackers and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a strict adherent of the neo-Nazi book “The Turner Diaries.”

    The presence of groups like Right Sector and Azov is a complex feature of Ukraine’s war effort since 2014 but not a sign of widespread Nazism. The country, facing total annihilation, has needed everyone and anyone it could muster to fight back against a vastly superior Russian force. But even if your country is facing an existential battle, that choice comes with a price if the conflict entangles NATO and draws billions of dollars in weapons transfers from the Pentagon. Everyone from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized on these connections to portray Kyiv as a modern-day Fourth Reich, although Ukraine’s president is openly and proudly Jewish. 

    Then there’s the further complicating matter of the thousands of foreign volunteers who have fought on Kyiv’s side, who are sometimes painted as mercenaries in league with a Nazi regime. Not unlike the weapons transfers and NATO’s training efforts, waves of volunteer foot soldiers have been a Western and global export to the war since 2014.

    “I went to the Right Sector because it was easier,” Lang told me. “Because back then, it was actually illegal for foreigners to serve in the [Ukrainian] army. It didn’t become legal for us to serve in the Armed Forces until 2016.”

    The Right Sector was a well-known and popular landing spot for foreign fighters, some with links to American extremist organizations and the global neo-Nazi movement. Though Lang described himself as a “constitutionalist” in a 2016 Vice profile of his Right Sector unit, he fervently denies being a far-right extremist. The United Nations formally accused the Right Sector of human rights violations in a 2017 report before it was subsumed into the regular Ukrainian military after the war intensified last year.

    “It was mostly like trench fighting in some places,” remembered Lang. “Sometimes the Russians would push on the positions and try to take it, and you could get into some sketchy situations.”

    Like many American volunteers with combat tours in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where the enemy rarely has howitzers, Lang experienced incoming shelling for the first time in Donbas. 

    “I’d been around the occasional mortar rocket in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said, “but this was the first time that I actually had force-on-force encounters with artillery.”

    Lang told me the unit he first fought with in 2015 had several foreigners and English speakers, including “a group of Austrians” with military experience, some of whom “were literally AWOL from the Austrian army. They had illegally left their unit.”

    That same Right Sector unit became known to authorities. In 2018, the FBI began investigating claims that Americans and other foreign fighters in Ukraine committed war crimes in 2015 and 2016, when Lang was serving. He was suspected of beating prisoners and possibly executing some of them before burying them in unmarked graves. The probe into the allegations came to light after a pro-Russian and ex-Ukrainian security services worker leaked documents about the war crimes allegations; the documents included correspondence between the U.S. Justice Department and Ukrainian authorities in 2018 and 2019, asking for information on Lang and others.

    The FBI said it “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation” into Lang. But last year, Austrian media reported that an Austrian who served in Lang’s Right Sector unit and with other Americans was convicted of war crimes in a regional court in Feldkirch. Lang has never been charged with any alleged crimes in a U.S. court for his service with the Right Sector. By 2016, he had left the group and joined up officially with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He left the country sometime in 2017 and returned in late 2018, after which he met and married a Ukrainianwoman and had two children.

    Craig Lang at the Teatralna subway station's underpass in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, July 14, 2023. (the Intercept / Ira Lupu)

    Craig Lang at the Teatralna subway station’s underpass in Kyiv.

    Photo: Ira Lupu for The Intercept

    Between July 2017 and late 2018, Lang’s story took a dramatic or sinister turn, depending on whether you believe his version of events or the lengthy one offered by the Justice Department in court records.

    According to a series of Justice Department documents, Lang is accused of murdering Serafin and Deana Lorenzo in a Florida parking lot in April 2018 with the help of another U.S. Army veteran, Alex Zwiefelhofer, who is currently in jail awaiting trial for those murders. The Justice Department says the two men, who met in Ukraine while serving with the Right Sector, intended to rob the couple of $3,000 in a fake gun sale. Their plan, according to court documents, was to use the stolen cash to finance a trip to Venezuela, where they both wanted to join paramilitary forces resisting the government. The same filings note that in June 2017, the two came to the attention of U.S. authorities when Kenyan border guards detained and subsequently deported them for trying to join forces fighting in South Sudan.

    Flight records show Lang flew into Colombia from Mexico City in September 2018 and then left in November of the same year, eventually landing in Spain on his way back to Ukraine. One NBC News report from 2019 cites an Arizona court document saying Lang got a fake passport in North Carolina and then traveled through the border state to Mexico on his way south to Colombia. He categorically denies any involvement in the Florida murders and says that after a brief stint in the Colombian jungles with an unnamed paramilitary unit that opposed the Venezuelan government across the border, he flew back to Ukraine.

    Since 2019, Lang has resisted a U.S. extradition order over the alleged murder of the Lorenzos. He was first taken into custody at the Ukraine-Moldova border crossing, setting off a back-and-forth in Ukrainian courts, which involved time in jail. He was facing almost certain extradition in the waning days of 2021. But his lawyers appealed the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which agreed to hear it over considerations that he could face a life sentence or the death penalty in Florida. Previously, the Ukrainian government had asked for assurances from the Justice Department that Lang wouldn’t face the death penalty, which a U.S. attorney reportedly agreed to in court. By February 2022, Ukrainian prosecutors confined Lang to Kyiv’s city limits as he awaited word from the European Court. 

    Then Russia invaded, and Lang’s fate became intertwined with the region’s bloody geopolitics. In the chaos of that initial period, all seemed potentially lost for Ukraine. The CIA, the Pentagon, and even President Joe Biden, in private chats with Zelenskyy, predicted certain defeat for Ukraine within a matter of days. During that time, when it wasn’t clear whether Zelenskyy would be assassinated or imprisoned or continue as a head of state, Lang found his way back into the war effort. 

    Once Lang linked up with Dragon and his Right Sector unit, he wasted no time getting into combat. He was quickly assigned to a team of foreigners, he said, including British citizens as well as “some Colombians, and some Argentinians.”

    “We had one time where we’re sitting there engaging a BMD,” said Lang, using an acronym for a Soviet armored vehicle. He described firing a rocket propelled grenade at the vehicle in the streets of Irpin when he and his comrades suddenly came face to face with a Russian soldier. 

    “We turn a corner and there’s a [Russian] machine gunner coming, running towards us,” Lang told me. “The two Ukrainians in the front, they pop the guy in the shoulder, he fucking runs behind a piece of cover and we call out to him, we’re like: ‘Hey, man, you surrender. Come on over.’ He won’t come so I prep a [fragmentation grenade], toss the fucking frag at him.”

    The Russian tried to flee but, according to Lang, “He just gets lit up like it’s a fucking turkey shoot.”

    While it can be difficult to confirm the accounts of foreign fighters, Lang provided a series of contract documents signed from the beginning of the full-scale invasion until the summer of 2022. One of the documents is a contract between Lang and the “Special Forces of the Marines of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine from the aggressor — Russian Federation.” It was signed in March 2022 and has no end date. International Legion documents, signed by Lang with a blue pen, state that the legion is enlisting the “service of foreigners and persons without citizenship in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Those documents are dated July 2022. In a Raw Story report from May, an FBI agent confirmed that Lang was “fighting with Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces against Russian forces” as late as August 2022. 

    Photo provided by Lang from what he says is April 2022, while fighting in front of what appears to be a market in Hostomel, a city close to Irpin.

    Photo: Courtesy of Craig Lang

    Kacper Rekawek, a nonresident research fellow at the Counter Extremism Project who is familiar with documents between the Ukrainian military and foreign fighters, said that the legion contract appears to be real.

    The Right Sector declined to speak to The Intercept about Lang’s record fighting with the unit.

    “We are active military personnel and are not authorized to provide any information,” a spokesperson said in a text message, citing a commander who wouldn’t authorize any comment on Lang. “At this stage communication on this matter is prohibited by the management.”

    Did Ukrainian military authorities care about his status as a fugitive from the U.S. government when they enlisted Lang last year? 

    “Oh, they were all aware of it,” Lang said, referring to Ukrainian military leaders and his ongoing extradition case for the Florida killings. “You know, everybody was aware of it. Nobody cared.”

    Lang said he fought as far east as Kharkiv in the Donbas region until an order “came down from the top” demanding that he leave the front and return to Kyiv.

    The Zelenskyy government is now determined to ship him back to the U.S. to face charges, which highlights questions about how foreign fighters and members of the International Legion have been used since the war began. Several foreign volunteers who signed contracts with the legion have denounced what they call the Ukrainian military’s double standards, particularly in the early stages of the war. They have complained of being treated as cannon fodder and given few weapons. Though some standards have risen in the last year, many foreign fighters have left and far fewer are joining up. 

    Lang, meanwhile, faces possible extradition and has again been confined to Kyiv by Ukrainian prosecutors. Ukrainian prosecutors declined to comment, while the Ukrainian Armed Forces have yet to respond to requests for comment on Lang’s criminal case or his military service on behalf of Ukraine.

    A Department of Justice spokesperson said they “cannot make any comments” regarding Lang’s status. But court records show that in July 2022 — around the time Lang claims he was booted from the Ukrainian military — his case was assigned to a new judge in the Middle District of Florida. On June 8, U.S. attorneys filed a notice of status acknowledging that Lang’s extradition “remains pending” as they await the outcome of the European Court appeal. 

    Whether Lang will ever step into a U.S. courtroom remains to be seen. 

    “I don’t want to go back [to the U.S.] because I don’t feel like I’d get a fair trial,” he told me. “When we find out that there’s a secret war crimes investigation against me, it doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy that I’m going to have a fair trial.”

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    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ben Makuch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Agent Zelensky – Part 2

    In the intelligence business, every agent is assigned tasks by his or her handlers. In the case of Agent Zelensky, I’ve identified ten obligations that define his relationship with his foreign intelligence masters. Once you’ve examined each of these, it becomes clear why Zelensky the comedian said one thing, and Zelensky the President did another. What are the true reasons behind the current situation in Ukraine today? What kind of operation has the CIA been running in Ukraine over the course of many years? You will find the answers to these and other questions in Part 2 of my investigative documentary film, “Agent Zelensky.” Click here to watch Part 1.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Global food security is in jeopardy as Russia suspends the Black Sea Grain Initiative with Ukraine


    This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Agent Zelensky

    As a former intelligence officer, I’ve been wondering why has no one done an investigation about Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine? His rise to power, in my opinion, represents an incredible manipulation of world opinion that will go down in history as a classic case study in social psychological engineering: an ordinary comedian who came to power because he promised a long-awaited peace, who then dragged his fellow citizens into a bloody war that can only be described as a massacre. With the help of colleagues and experts with first-hand insights into Zelensky, I have poured over documents and video to produce a film that captures this investigation. This story has so many twists and turns that I had to break it into two parts. In the first episode, presented here, I will answer the question about Zelensky’s improbable rise to power, and how the Ukrainian President accumulated his vast wealth, a sum that has only become larger since the war with Russia began. And, perhaps most importantly, why I decided to call this film “Agent Zelensky.”

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Top U.N. Human Rights Official & Fmr. Swedish FM on Palestine, Sudan & U.S. Cluster Bombs to Ukraine

    Seg2 alt switch

    On Friday, July 14, Amy Goodman moderated a wide-ranging panel on human rights in Venice, Italy, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The panel’s speakers included United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, former Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström and Eamon Gilmore, the European Union special representative for human rights. They discussed the U.S. sending cluster bombs to Ukraine, the war in Sudan, Palestine, as well as the role of civil society and the media in elevating human rights issues.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Resisting the Shock Doctrine: A Conversation on Ukraine, Debt and Reconstruction

    In this discussion, Yuliya Yurchenko, Eric Toussaint, and Sushovan Dhar contextualize Ukraine’s struggle as part of the global movement against neoliberalism and debt. This public forum was organized by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) on May 12, 2023 and was co-hosted by Haymarket Books. Each speaker made opening comments, with a discussion. Special thanks to Nate Moore for assistance with…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Assange Exposes The Empire’s True Face: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    ❖

    Julian Assange is a journalist who’s been imprisoned for doing journalism on war crimes, by an empire that claims to defend journalists and oppose war crimes.

    Assange and his persecution expose the giant plot holes in every story the western power structure tells about itself. About its love of free speech and the free press. About its opposition to tyranny. About its wars and why it wages them. Assange exposes the empire’s true face.

    And in that sense it’s interesting that the empire made the decision to jail and silence Assange, since in doing so it exposed its own tyranny and criminality far more than WikiLeaks could have ever hoped to.

    ❖

    Assange said, “It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers.” If you accept this as true, you must also accept that there are precisely zero good journalists anywhere in the western mass media, and that Assange is the greatest journalist who has ever lived.

    ❖

    The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That’s the middle ground. But this position is regarded as freakish fringe extremism in the western mainstream and you’ll be accused of literally conducting psyops for a foreign government if you voice it, because the western mainstream is just that freakishly extremist.

    The mainstream position in the west is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that Moscow is 100% responsible for this conflict in every way while the US is just an innocent little flower who just wants to protect freedom and democracy. When you actually spell out what the mainstream position on Ukraine is it sounds like a silly fairy tale for children, but that’s what all the most influential western pundits, politicians and government officials are actually saying. That’s how bat shit insane things are.

    The Overton window has been shifted so far in support of NATO warmongering that this middle-ground position is now regarded as fringe extremism, so they just debate things like whether or not cluster bombs should be used to fight this war that is obviously 10000% Russia’s fault. As is often the case this dynamic has already been well-described by the elderly scholar who we all love to share our opinions about:

    “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
    ~ Noam Chomsky

    ❖

    ❖

    The claim that NATO is a “defensive” alliance that’s set up to promote peace is a lie that’s refuted by a swift glance at recorded history; in terms of evidence it’s crazier than saying there are alien aircraft in our skies. But you constantly hear respected pundits saying it.

    ❖

    The US presidential race is that wonderful season American liberals set aside to remind socialists that they hate them far more than they hate the right and would cheerfully burn the whole country to the ground before they’d share one iota of power with them:

    The only people who hate leftists more than rightists do are liberals, which is a bit funny because rightists think leftists and liberals are the same.

    ❖

    It’s trippy how people pour such effort into disputing whether the planet is warming when the biosphere is showing us many, many other signs of looming collapse. They completely ignore the ocean dead zones, plummeting insect populations, loss of wildlife, trees, fertile soil etc.

    I mean, what specifically is the claim here? That there’s a big evil plot across the entire scientific field to lie about warming, but all the other signs of environmental collapse are legit? Or are those fake too? If so, why only focus on the one message that benefits fossil fuel companies?

    Obviously there are powerful people looking to exploit global warming to shore up wealth and power; that’s to be expected. It would be surprising if that wasn’t happening. None of that changes the need to drastically alter the way humanity operates on this planet right away.

    ❖

    One reason it’s so hard to set up beneficial systems is because in negotiations manipulators always push for the absolute maximum amount of gain they can possibly grab while good people only push for a normal, human-sized amount of space for themselves. You see this constantly in union negotiations and politics alike: people come to the negotiation table with demands that are viewed as “reasonable” by those in power and then are negotiated back halfway from that point of “reason” as a “compromise”, while those with the power grab up everything they can get their mitts on and walk back only if forced to. This has a ratchet effect over the years which sees ordinary people losing more and more power to the ruling class.

    That’s not going to change until normal people stop letting the manipulators set the bar of what’s “reasonable” and start pushing out space for themselves with as much force and entitlement as bad people. People are going to have to stop coming to the negotiating table with their compromise, and instead show up with the demand to take back everything that was stolen from them — and more — with as much force as necessary.

    ______________

    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Foreign Aid

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Another Act of Terror: How the Media do PR for Biden and Zelensky

    The hypocrisy gets starker by the day. The same western media that strains to warn of the dangers of disinformation – at least when it comes to rivals on social media – barely bothers to conceal its own role in purveying disinformation in the Ukraine war.

    In fact, the propaganda peddled by the media grows more audacious by the day – as two stories last week from the frontlines illustrate only too clearly.

    Dominating headlines has been the environmental catastrophe created by the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam under Russian control. Flood waters from the Dnipro river have ruined vast swathes of land downriver from the dam and forced many tens of thousands to flee their homes.

    Rightly, the wrecking of the dam is being called an act of “ecological terrorism” – the second major one associated with the war, following last September’s blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.

    The costs associated with keeping this war going and avoiding peace talks so that Russia can be “weakened”, as Biden administration officials insist is the priority, have grown much steeper than most people could have imagined.

    This is why a clear understanding of what is going on – and what interests are being served by fuelling the fighting rather than resolving the war – is so vitally important.

    There have always been at least two narratives in Ukraine, even if western audiences are rarely exposed to the Russian one – outside of mocking commentary from western reporters.

    In the immediate aftermath of the breaching of the Kakhovka dam, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, visibly sneered as he reported that Russian media were insisting Ukrainian “terrorists” were behind the destruction. Russians, he suggested, were being brainwashed by their government and media.

    He obviously failed to spot the irony that his own reporting, like that of colleagues, has served to reinforce the impression that the only plausible culprit in the dam’s ruin – despite a lack of evidence so far – is Moscow. Like the Russian media, Rosenberg has been hawking precisely the line his own government, and its Nato allies, want from him.

    Pall of fog

    The BBC recently launched its Verify service, ostensibly to root out disinformation. In similar vein, western media have started appending to any report of Russian assertions the warning: “This claim could not be verified.”

    Like a nervous tic, the media added just such an alert to Russian statements that large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in what looked like the first stages of Kyiv’s so-called “counter-offensive”.

    But no such warnings have been attached to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claims that Russia blew up the dam.

    Instead, reporters have been quick to regurgitate, unverified, his self-serving assertions that Moscow caused the destruction, supposedly to ward off the imminent counter-offensive, and that only western help evicting Russia from the areas it has occupied can prevent further “terrorist” acts.

    As has so often been the case in this war, a thick pall of fog is likely to shroud what happened at the Kakhovka dam for the foreseeable future.

    Which means that, if the media is determined to recycle speculation, what it should be doing at this stage – apart from keeping an open mind and investigating for itself – is applying the principle of “cui bono?” or “who profits?”

    And if it bothered to do that properly, it might be far more reluctant to pin responsibility on Russia.

    Rallying support

    As Scott Ritter, a former US marine and United Nations weapons inspector, has noted, the chief beneficiary of the attack has been Ukraine, both militarily and politically.

    After all, the western media has been documenting a series of fortifications – from trenches and mines to concrete spikes – that the Russian army has constructed along its front lines during the long wait for the Ukrainian counter-offensive. As has often been pointed out, they are so extensive, they can easily be seen from space.

    And yet if it did blow up the dam, Moscow just washed away all its carefully built defences in a key area that Ukraine has set its eyes on recapturing – and just at the time Kyiv is said to be preparing for a dramatic military offensive.

    Further, the swollen river behind the dam was a significant obstacle to Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro river for many tens of miles. It will be much less of a barrier now its waters have receded as the river gushes into the Black Sea. The dam explosion punches a surprise hole in a key, natural part of Russia’s defensive line.

    Another critical concern for the Kremlin will be that the explosion poses a direct threat to water supplies to the arid Crimean peninsula – the first piece of Ukrainian territory Russia annexed. After a US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014, Russia made a priority of securing Crimea, long the site of a strategic, warm-water naval base.

    And to top it all, Russia’s control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, upstream of the dam, has already come under renewed international scrutiny as questions are raised about Moscow’s ability to cope with a possible meltdown there as water supplies, needed for cooling, dramatically diminish.

    There are political advantages in the dam’s destruction for Kyiv too. As Ritter observes: “There is a lot of ‘Ukraine fatigue’ right now. The world is just tired of Ukraine, of funding Ukraine… What Ukraine needs is a catastrophic event that rallies international support around Ukraine by blaming Russia for something big.”

    The dam blast does just that. It thrusts the war back into the spotlight, it casts Moscow as a “terrorist” threat not just to Ukraine but to wider humanity, and it will prove a very effective tool to justify yet more weapons and aid to “weaken” Russia, even if Ukraine’s counter-offensive proves a damp squib.

    Reckless ‘test’ strike

    The western media has not only largely ignored these factors, it has also drawn a veil over its own recent reporting that might implicate Ukraine as chief culprit in blowing up the dam.

    As the Washington Post reported back in December, the Ukrainian military had previously considered plans to destroy the Kakhovka – in other words, to carry out what is universally understood now as a major act of ecological terrorism. At the time, the plan barely raised an eyebrow in the West.

    The preparations included what now looks like a reckless “test strike” with a HIMARS missile – supplied courtesy of the US – “making three holes in the metal [of the floodgates] to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages”.

    “The test was a success,” the Post reported Maj Gen Andriy Kovalchuk, a Ukrainian commander, saying back in December. “But the step [of destroying the dam] remained a last resort.”

    Might that “test” or a similar one – possibly in preparation for a Ukrainian offensive – have accidentally undermined the dam’s integrity, making it gradually crumble from the pressure of the water?

    Or could the dam’s destruction have been intentional – part of Ukraine’s offensive – spreading chaos to areas under Russian control, either to force Moscow to redirect its energies away from countering a Ukrainian attack, or deflect western public attention away from any difficulties Kyiv may have launching a credible military operation?

    And why, anyway, would Moscow decide to destroy the dam, forfeiting control over water flow, when it could have simply opened the gates to flood areas downstream at any time of its choosing, such as when faced with an attempt to cross the river by the Ukrainian military?

    These questions aren’t even being posed, let alone answered.

    James Bond mission

    There has been an established pattern with the media during the Ukraine war, one that may serve as a guide in understanding how the story of the breaching of the dam will unfold.

    The reticence of western outlets to ask basic questions, contextualise with relevant background, or pursue obvious lines of inquiry has been equally glaring in another act of ecological terrorism: the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines back in September. They released enormous quantities of the prime global-warming gas methane.

    Again, the media spoke as one. First, they echoed western officials in ascribing the explosions to Moscow, without a shred of evidence and even though the blasts were a huge blow to Russia.

    The Kremlin lost the bountiful income stream that came from supplying Europe with natural gas. Meanwhile, diplomatically, it was stripped of its chief leverage over its biggest energy customer, Germany – leverage it might have used to induce Berlin to break with the West’s sanctions policy.

    All of this was hard to obscure. Soon the western media simply dropped the Nord Stream story entirely.

    Interest surfaced again only much later, in March, when the New York Times and a German publication, Die Zeit, published separate and quite preposterous accounts, based on unnamed intelligence sources.

    According to these accounts, a group of six rogue Ukrainians chartered a yacht and blew up the pipelines off the coast of Denmark in a James Bond-style mission. The story was widely amplified by the western media, even though independent analysts ridiculed it as wildly implausible and technically unfeasible.

    ‘Ukraine did it’

    The problem the media has faced is that a very much more plausible account of the Nord Stream blasts had already been produced by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in February. His unnamed intelligence source offered a far more credible and detailed account, and one that blamed the US itself.

    The circumstantial evidence for US responsibility – or at least involvement – was already substantial, even if the media again ignored it.

    From Joe Biden downwards, US officials either expressed a determination beforehand to stop more Russian gas from reaching Europe through Nord Stream or celebrated the pipelines’ destruction after the fact.

    The Biden administration also had a prime motive for blowing up Nord Stream: a desire to end Europe’s energy dependence on Russia, especially when Washington wanted to line up Moscow and Beijing as the new targets in its permanent “war on terror”.

    Hersh’s source argued that the explosives were placed by special US Navy divers, with Norwegian assistance, during an annual naval exercise, Baltops, and remotely detonated three months later.

    The media studiously ignored this version. When it was referenced on the odd occasion, the story was dismissed because it was attributed to a single unnamed source. None of the media, however, appeared to have similar reservations about the fantastical yacht version, also supplied by an unidentified intelligence source.

    Hersh’s account has refused to go away, gaining ever more traction on social media so long as no credible alternative emerged.

    And so – bingo! The fantastical claim that a group of amateurs was able to locate and blow up the pipelines deep on the ocean floor has been dropped.

    Last week the Washington Post reported that an unnamed European intelligence service had warned the Biden administration of an impending attack on the Nord Stream pipelines three months before it took place. According to this account, a small crack team sent by the Ukrainian military carried out the “covert” operation – again acting, it was stressed, without Zelensky’s knowledge.

    The Post reported that “officials in multiple countries” confirmed that the US had received advance warning.

    White House lied?

    The story raises all kinds of deeply troubling questions – none of which the media seem interested in addressing.

    Not least, if true, it means that the Biden administration has blatantly lied for months in promoting a fiction: that Russia carried out the attack. The White House and European capitals knowingly misled the western media and publics.

    If Biden officials have indeed conspired in maintaining a grand lie about such a momentous act of industrial terror – one that caused untold environmental damage and is contributing to a mounting recession in Europe – what other lies have they been telling? How can anything they claim about the Ukraine war, such as who is responsible for the Kakhovka dam’s destruction, be trusted?

    And yet the western media – which, according to this new account, was deceived for months – seems completely unconcerned.

    Further, if Washington knew of the impending act of terror – which was directed at European energy sources as much as at a nuclear-armed Russia – why did it not intervene?

    The media’s coverage of this new version largely frames the US as impotent, incapable of stopping the Ukrainians from blowing up the pipelines.

    But Washington is the world’s sole superpower. Ukraine is entirely dependent on its support – financially and militarily. If the US withdrew its backing, Ukraine would be forced to engage in peace talks with Russia. The idea that Washington could not have stopped the attack is no more credible than the claim a group of sailing enthusiasts blew up the pipelines.

    If this latest account is true, Washington had the leverage to stop the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure but failed to act. By any reasonable assessment, it should be considered to have willed the pipelines’ destruction, despite the devastating toll on Europe and the environment.

    And thirdly, based on this account, Ukraine – or at least its military – has proven itself quite capable of committing the most heinous act of terrorism, even against its allies in Europe. Why should anyone, least of all the media, now be so dismissive of Russian claims of Ukrainian war crimes, including destroying the Kakhovka dam?

    ‘Good Nazis’

    The truth, however, is that the western media are not concerned by the implications of this latest account, any more than they are by Hersh’s earlier one – not if it means turning the US and its allies into the bad guys. The story was reported cursorily, and will be filed away as another piece of a puzzle no one has any interest in solving.

    The western media’s role in foreign affairs is to prop up a narrative that turns our leaders into good people doing their best in a bad world, one that forces on them difficult, sometimes morally compromised, choices.

    But what if Biden and Zelensky aren’t really heroes, or even good people? What if they are just as ignoble, just as callous and inhumane, as the foreign leaders we so readily dismiss as the “new Hitler”? It’s just that they receive far better public relations from our complicit media.

    Coverage of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and Nord Stream pipelines alludes to a double problem: that western leaders and their allies may be implicated in the most terrible crimes, but we can rarely be sure because our media are so determined not to find out.

    This week, the New York Times finally admitted on its pages something that it and the rest of the western media once openly acknowledged but have cast as a taboo since Russia’s invasion: that the Ukrainian military is awash with neo-Nazi symbols.

    However, even as the paper of record admitted what it had previously condemned as “disinformation” whenever it appeared on social media, the New York Times insisted on an absurd distinction.

    Yes, the paper agreed that Ukrainian soldiers are proud to decorate themselves in Nazi insignia. And yes, much of wider Ukrainian society commemorates notorious Nazi figures from the Second World War such as Stepan Bandera. But no, Ukraine’s prolific use of Nazi symbols does not translate into any attachment to Nazi ideology.

    This is the argument being made by western publications that at the same time have taken seriously claims that a rock star, Roger Waters, is antisemitic for performing a track from his four-decade-old album The Wall satirising a fascist dictator… dressed as a fascist dictator.

    Waters’ real crime is that now Jeremy Corbyn has been ousted from the Labour Party, he is the most visible supporter of Palestinian rights in the western world.

    If the New York Times and the rest of the western media are willing to give Ukrainian Nazis a makeover, making them look good, what are they doing for Biden, Zelensky and European leaders?

    One thing we know for sure: we cannot look to the western media for an answer.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How would Canadians perceive Russian troops on its border?

    The Canadian government’s plan to double its semipermanent military force on Russia’s border ratchets up tensions that should be reduced. It highlights the West’s betrayal of promises made to Soviet officials and Canada’s addiction to stationing troops in Europe.

    On Monday Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will ramp up its military presence in Latvia. The government will add about 1,200 military personnel to the nearly 1,000 Canadians already deployed on Russia’s border. As part of the announcement Trudeau committed $2.6 billion over three years to expand Latvia-focused Operation REASSURANCE. “Canada will also procure and pre-position critical weapon systems, enablers, supplies and support intelligence, cyber, and space activities”, the prime minister said in a statement. Last month Ottawa announced the deployment of 15 Leopard 2 battle tanks to Latvia.

    In 2017 Canada took charge of one of four Eastern European NATO battle groups. In June 2021 Canada opened a $19 million headquarters in Latvia and by the end of the current commitment Canadian Forces will have been stationed there for a decade.

    The semi-permanent stationing of Canadian forces on Russia’s border represents a flagrant violation of the promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War. In 1990 the Soviet/Russian leader agreed not to obstruct German reunification, to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from the east and for the new Germany to be part of NATO in return for assurances that the alliance wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward”. A 1990 Ottawa Citizen wire article quoted West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, saying, “the West is agreed that with a unification of Germany, there will not be any eastward extension of NATO”, which was ostensibly a defence arrangement against the Soviet Union.

    As I’ve detailed, Ottawa led the charge for NATO expansion despite the promises made to Gorbachev. Soon after taking office in 1993 Prime Minister Jean Chretien began promoting Poland’s adhesion to NATO and Ottawa has led the push to double the size of the alliance by expanding into eastern and northern Europe. Ottawa has also promoted Ukraine’s adhesion to the alliance and has trained its military to be interoperable with NATO.

    Alongside ending the stated objective for NATO, the dissolution of the Soviet Union undercut Canada’s rationale for stationing troops in Europe. From the early 1950s to 1990s over one hundred thousand Canadian troops rotated through bases in France and Germany. In the late 1960s the Royal Canadian Air Force had over 250 US atomic bombs at its disposal in Europe.

    Incredibly, the US-led war in Korea was the initial justification for stationing Canadian troops in Europe (and rearming the colonial powers as they suppressed independence movements with Canadian NATO mutual assistance program weaponry). According to defence minister Brooke Claxton, “NATO owes the fact that it was built-up to the Communist aggression in Korea … To meet the challenge of Korea required a buildup of our forces comparable to what was needed to meet our commitments to Europe.” As per the Washington/Ottawa storyline, the North Korean leadership’s effort to unite the country under its direction in mid 1950 was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy. Who controlled the distant, impoverished, country was of limited import to most North Americans so US/Canadian decision makers claimed Moscow stoked the conflict in Korea to divert attention from its plan to invade Western Europe. In response, thousands of Canadian troops were dispatched to France and Germany in 1951. They would remain in Europe until 1993.

    Of course, Canada previously sent large numbers of troops to Europe during World War I and II. Between 1917 and 1920 six thousand Canadian troops invaded Russia. About 600 Canadians fought in Murmansk and Archangel where the British used chemical agent diphenylchloroarsine, which causes uncontrollable coughing and individuals to vomit blood.

    Decades earlier Canadians fought the Russians. Much of the British garrison in Canada left for Crimea during the 1853-56 war and many Canadians also volunteered for British units fighting Russia. In “How the Crimean War of 1853 helped shape the Canada of today” historian C.P. Champion describes how the naval base on Vancouver Island was greatly expanded in response to the war. He also quotes historian John Castell Hopkins explaining that the Militia Act of 1855, which formed the basis for today’s army, was “a result of the feeling aroused by the Crimean War.”

    Canada has a history of belligerence towards Russia. Given that, this country stationing its troops near Russia’s border is perceived as threatening by Moscow. Remember that Russia shipping some missiles to Cuba resulted in an American naval blockade and almost caused a nuclear holocaust in the early 1960s.

    A nation committed to peace must try to understand the viewpoint of potential adversaries. A nation planning war increases tension and prolongs every military standoff. Exactly the way Canada has acted towards Russia for many decades.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Daniel Ellsberg is Lauded in Death by the Same Media that Lets Assange Rot in Jail

    Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam.

    The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later.

    As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations that caused mass civilian casualties. Entire villages had been burned, while captured Vietnamese were tortured or executed. Deceptively, the US referred to these as “pacification programmes”.

    But most of those today loudly hailing Ellsberg as an “American hero” have been far more reluctant to champion the Ellsberg of our times: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    For years, Assange has been rotting in a London high-security prison while the Biden administration seeks his extradition on charges that ludicrously equate his publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs – a modern Pentagon Papers – with “espionage”.

    Like Ellsberg, Assange exposed the way western states had been systematically lying while they perpetrated war crimes. Like Ellsberg, he was fraudulently labelled a threat to national security and charged with espionage. Like Ellsberg, if found guilty, he faces more than 100 years in jail. Like Ellsberg, Assange has learned that the US Congress is unwilling to exercise its powers to curb governmental abuses.

    But unlike Ellsberg’s case, the courts have consistently sided with Assange’s persecutors, not with him for shining a light on state criminality. And, in a further contrast, the western media have stayed largely silent as the noose has tightened around Assange’s neck.

    The similarities in Assange’s and Ellsberg’s deeds – and the stark differences in outcomes – are hard to ignore. The very journalists and publications now extolling Ellsberg for his historic act of bravery have been enabling, if only through years of muteness, western capitals’ moves to demonise Assange for his contemporary act of heroism.

    Docile lapdogs

    The hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by Ellsberg. He was one of the noisiest defenders of Assange. So noisy, in fact, that most media outlets felt obliged in their obituaries to make reference to the fact, even if in passing.

    Ellsberg testified on Assange’s behalf at a London extradition hearing in 2020, observing that the pair’s actions were identical. That was not entirely right, however.

    Assange published classified documents passed to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, just as the New York Times published the secrets handed to them by Ellsberg. Given that media freedoms are protected by the US First Amendment, whereas whistleblowing by an official is not, Assange’s treatment is even more perverse and abusive than Ellsberg’s.

    In contrast to his case, Ellsberg added, the WikiLeaks founder could never receive a fair hearing in the US. His trial has already been assigned to a court in the eastern district of Virginia, home to the US intelligence agencies.

    Late last year, as Assange’s prospects of extradition to the US increased, Ellsberg admitted that he had been secretly given a backup copy of the leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs, in case WikiLeaks was prevented from making public the details of US and UK criminality.

    Ellsberg pointed out that his possession of the documents made him equally culpable with Assange under the justice department’s draconian “espionage” charges. During a BBC interview, he demanded that he be indicted too.

    If the praise being lavished on Ellsberg in death demonstrates anything, it is the degree to which the self-professed watchdogs of western state power have been tamed over subsequent decades into being the most docile of lapdogs.

    In the Assange case, the courts and establishment media have clearly acted as adjuncts of power, not checks on it. And for that reason, if no other, western states are gaining greater and greater control over their citizenry in an age when mass digital surveillance is easier than ever.

    Spied on day and night

    For those reluctant to confer on Assange the praise being heaped on Ellsberg, it is worth remembering how similarly each was viewed by US officials in their respective eras.

    Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and then secretary of state, called Ellsberg the “most dangerous man in America”.

    Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared Assange and WikiLeaks a “non-state, hostile intelligence service”. Pompeo’s CIA also secretly plotted ways to kidnap or assassinate Assange in London.

    Both Ellsberg and Assange were illegally surveilled by government agencies.

    In Ellsberg’s case, Nixon’s officials wiretapped his conversations and tried to dig up dirt by stealing files from his psychiatrist’s office. The same team carried out the Watergate break-in, famously exposed by the US media, that ultimately brought Nixon down.

    In Assange’s case, the CIA spied on him day and night after he was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, even violating his privileged conversations with his lawyers. Astonishingly, this law-breaking has barely been remarked on by the media, even though it should have been grounds alone for throwing out the extradition case against him.

    Nixon officials tried to rig Ellsberg’s trial by offering the judge in his hearings the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    In Assange’s case, a series of judicial irregularities and apparent conflicts of interest have plagued the proceedings, again ignored by the establishment media.

    This month, High Court judge Jonathan Swift rejected what may amount to a last-ditch attempt by Assange’s legal team to halt his extradition. Swift’s previous career was as a government lawyer. Looking back on his time there, he noted that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.

    Above the law

    But if the modern White House is as hostile to transparency as its predecessors – and armed with more secret tools to surveil critics than ever before – the media and the courts are offering far less remedy than they did in Ellsberg’s time.

    Even the Obama administration understood the dangers of targeting Assange. His relationship to Manning was no different from the New York Times’ to Ellsberg. Each publicised state wrongdoing after classified documents were divulged to them by a disenchanted official.

    Prosecuting Assange was seen as setting a precedent that could ensnare any publisher or media outlet that made public state secrets, however egregious the crimes being exposed.

    For that reason, Obama went full guns blazing against whistleblowers, locking up more of them than all his predecessors combined. Whistleblowers were denied any right to claim a public-interest defence. State secrecy was sacrosanct, even when it was being abused to shield evidence of criminality from public view.

    Asked whether Obama would have pursued him through the courts, as Nixon did, Ellsberg answered: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”

    It took a reckless Trump administration to go further, casting aside the long-standing legal distinction between an official who leaks classified documents in violation of their employment contract, and a publisher-journalist who exposes those documents in accordance with their duty to hold the powerful to account.

    Now Biden has chosen to follow Trump’s lead by continuing Assange’s show trial. The new presumption is that it is illegal for anyone – state official, media outlet, ordinary citizen – to disclose criminal activity by an all-powerful state.

    In Assange’s case, the White House is openly manoeuvring to win recognition for itself as officially above the law.

    Disappeared from view

    In the circumstances, one might have assumed that the courts and media would be rallying to uphold basic democratic rights, such as a free press, and impose accountability on state officials shown to have broken the law.

    In the 1970s, however imperfectly, the US media gradually unravelled the threads of the Watergate scandal till they exposed the unconstitutional behaviour of the Nixon administration. At the same time, the liberal press rallied behind Ellsberg, making common cause with him in a fight to hold the executive branch to account.

    Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, charged Ellsberg with espionage and accused the New York Times of the same. Claiming the paper had undermined national security, he threatened it with ruinous legal action. The Times ignored the threats and carried on publishing, forcing the justice department to obtain an injunction.

    The courts, meanwhile, took the side of both Ellsberg and the media in their legal battles. In 1973, the federal court in Los Angeles threw out the case against Ellsberg before it could be put to a jury, accusing the government of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him.

    Meanwhile, the Supreme Court prioritised freedom of the press, denying the government prior restraint. Ultimately, these cases and others forced Nixon from office in disgrace.

    The contrast with Assange’s treatment by the media and the courts could not be starker.

    The media, even “liberal” outlets he worked with on the Afghan and Iraq logs, including the New York Times and the Guardian, have struggled to show even the most rudimentary kind of solidarity, preferring instead to distance themselves from him. They have largely conspired in US and UK efforts to suggest Assange is not a “proper journalist” and therefore does not deserve First Amendment protections.

    These media outlets have effectively partnered with Washington in suggesting that their collaboration with Assange in no way implicates them in his supposed “crimes”.

    As a result, the media has barely bothered to cover his hearings or explain how the courts have twisted themselves into knots by ignoring the most glaring legal obstacles to his extradition: such as the specific exclusion in the UK’s 2007 Extradition Treaty with the US of extraditions for political cases.

    Unlike Ellsberg, who became a cause celebre, Assange has been disappeared from public view by the states he exposed and largely forgotten by the media that should be championing his cause.

    Shortening Odds

    Ellsberg emerged from his court victory over the Pentagon Papers to argue: “The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun. It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”

    In this assessment, time has proved him sadly wrong, as he came to recognise.

    In recent months, Ellsberg had become an increasingly voluble critic of US conduct in the Ukraine war. He drew parallels with the lies told by four administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – to hide the extent of Washington’s involvement in Vietnam before the US went public with its ground war.

    Ellsberg warned that the US was waging a similarly undeclared war in Ukraine – a proxy one, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – to  “weaken the Russians“.  As in Vietnam, the White House was gradually and secretly escalating US involvement.

    As also in Vietnam, western leaders were concealing the fact that the war had reached a stalemate, with the inevitable result that large numbers of Ukrainians and Russians were losing their lives in fruitless combat.

    He called former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hidden, early role in stymying peace talks between Russia and Ukraine “a crime against humanity.”

    Referring to history repeating itself, he observed: “It’s an awakening that’s in many ways painful.”

    Most of all, Ellsberg feared that the West’s war machine – addicted to Cold War belligerence, obscured under the supposedly “defensive” umbrella of Nato – wanted once again to confront China.

    In 2021, as the Biden administration intensified its hostile posturing towards Beijing, Ellsberg revealed that back in 1958 Eisenhower’s officials had drawn up secret plans to attack China with nuclear weapons. That was during an earlier crisis over the Taiwan Strait.

    “At this point, I’m much more aware of… how little has changed in these critical aspects of the danger of nuclear war, and how limited the effectiveness has been to curtail what we’ve done,” he told an interviewer shortly before he died.

    What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.

    Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • U.N. Warns Pandemic, Climate & Ukraine War Have Dramatically Increased World Hunger


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.N. Warns Pandemic, Climate & Ukraine War Have Dramatically Increased World Hunger

    Seg3 hunger 2

    The United Nations this week released its annual report on nutrition, finding that the pandemic, extreme weather shocks and the war in Ukraine have all contributed to food insecurity around the world — now higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials estimate that the world saw an increase of more than 100 million people facing hunger in 2022 compared to 2019. For more, speak with Million Belay, general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, as well as Raj Patel, research professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • West Ignores Role of NATO Expansion in Driving Russia’s War on Ukraine

    After the closing of a major NATO summit in Lithuania, President Biden vowed to support Ukraine and warned the war may continue for a long time, before flying to Finland, the newest member of NATO, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia. The goal of this summit may have been to make Ukraine seem more aligned with NATO, but “they actually revealed that the alliance was split” when they did not…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The UK is a weaponry ‘Amazon’ for Ukraine and a Supermarket Sweep for dictators.

    UK defence secretary Ben Wallace has railed against the idea that the UK is an Amazon shopping service for weaponry. His comments were aimed at Ukraine, whose officials he said once confronted him with a shopping list of arms.

    But there’s a problem with his claim that the UK isn’t simply Amazon for arms and ammunition. It’s that the UK sort of … is Amazon for arms and ammunition.

    Even a brief investigation shows that the UK would sell lethal military hardware to anyone, including your nan if she had the money. This includes people with appalling human rights records, and I don’t mean your nan there. In fact, customers include nations on UK human rights watchlists and states which are long-term rivals.

    Ukraine summit

    Wallace was speaking ahead of a G7 summit to discuss Ukraine joining NATO. He told reporters he wanted to see more gratitude from Ukraine for British support. He also said he had told Ukraine before that their demands for arms in their war with Russia must be carefully framed:

    You know, my counsel to the Ukrainians is sometimes, ‘Look, you are persuading countries to give up their own stocks and yes, your war is a noble war and we see it as you waging a war not just for yourselves but for our freedoms’.

    And he said of British contributions to the war effort:

    We are not Amazon… I told them that last year, when I drove 11 hours to be given a list

    Arms emporium

    One can spend all day debating the Ukrainian approach to lobbying for support. But one thing is clear: if Ben Wallace doesn’t want the UK to be treated like arms and ammunition Amazon, it could try being be less like Amazon.

    UK military support for Ukraine has been belligerent from the start of the war. The Canary has reported on the dangers and risks inherent to the government’s commitment to arming Ukraine. In fact, we only recently reported on arms giant BAE System’s nefarious plans to turn post-war Ukraine into an arsenal.

    Then, we must consider that arms licences to Saudi Arabia and Israel since 2015, for example, come to £8.2bn and £472m respectively. This is despite serious human rights concerns about both countries. Interestingly, UK governments have also approved £103m in arms sales to Russia and £304m to China since 2008. This is despite the latter two being long-term power rivals of the UK and its allies.

    And we note that all the countries mentioned here (and many others the UK has licenced arms to) feature on the government’s own human rights priority list. You can use Campaign Against the Arms Trade’s (CAAT) export data tracker to compare.

    So, Wallace might not like the UK being seen as a sort of weaponry Amazon by Ukrainian leaders, but in reality, that’s what it is. This country is nothing more than a Supermarket Sweep for dictators, albeit with Ben Wallace rather than Dale Winton urging eager shoppers around dank aisles of exploding death.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/UK Government, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under CC BY 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Stephen Wertheim: The West Cannot Ignore Role NATO Expansion Played in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Stephen Wertheim: The West Cannot Ignore Role NATO Expansion Played in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

    Nato1

    After the closing of a major NATO summit in Lithuania, President Biden vowed to support Ukraine and warned the war may continue for a long time, before flying to Finland, the newest member of NATO, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia. The goal of this summit may have been to make Ukraine seem more aligned with NATO, but “they actually revealed that the alliance was split” when they did not offer a timeline for Ukraine’s membership, says Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Wertheim says the real result of this summit was Ukraine moving to an “armed neutrality” or “Israel model,” where international allies supply long-term economic and security assistance to the country. The NATO summit also resulted in a communiqué criticizing China’s growing military power, saying Beijing’s actions are threatening the security of NATO nations.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Cluster Bombs and Elliott Abrams?

    The Biden Administration’s recent decisions to send deadly cluster bombs to Ukraine and to appoint despicable imperialist Elliott Abrams to a State Department Commission on Public Diplomacy are the latest examples of how progressives just cannot trust them to do the right thing.

    Who is Elliott Abrams? Here is how he was described in an article distributed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation:

    Abrams was a defender in the 1980’s of the Guatemalan Montt government, a regime so brutal that its actions — mass murder, rape, and torture of the indigenous Ixil Mayan people — were later classified as genocide by the United Nations. Over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, under Abrams’ watch, 75,000 Salvadorians lost their lives. … Asked in 1994 about the U.S.’s record on El Salvador, Abrams called it a ‘fabulous achievement.’

    And cluster bombs? 120 countries have ratified an agreement prohibiting the production, use, stockpiling, and transfer of this weapon. Among those who haven’t signed it are the USA, Russia and Ukraine.

    Cluster bombs that explode spray out as many as several hundred so-called “bomblets” over an extensive area. They are explicitly “anti-personnel.” They’re not intended to damage buildings but to kill and maim people. In addition there’s what’s called a “dud rate” as high as 40%, bomblets that don’t explode upon ground contact and which can lie on the ground for as long as decades. These bomblets can blow up when picked up or stepped on. Children who have done this while exploring or playing have been badly injured or killed.

    Instead of a continual escalation in the amount and type of weaponry being sent to Ukraine, Biden and his people should acknowledge the reality that the war is stalemated, there is great risk that it could escalate into something much bigger, and they should move to advance a ceasefire and serious negotiations.

    These outrageous recent decisions, on top of major problems with the Biden Administration’s climate policies and weaknesses in a number of other areas, will unquestionably have the effect of depressing and demobilizing the turnout of voters next year. They are a boon to Trump or whoever gets the Republican Presidential nomination.

    All of this will also likely increase the number of votes the Green Party Presidential candidate will get, whether it’s strong progressive Cornell West or someone else.

    There is zero chance that the GP candidate will win, and very little chance he/she/they will get more than a low single-digit percentage of the votes nationally, but it is possible they could be a factor in battleground states where it’s always a close race—Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire and possibly others.

    This is assuming the Green Party does what it has done for every Presidential election it has taken part in since the Ralph Nader/Winona LaDuke campaign of 2000. Every four years they make major efforts to get on the ballot in every state and to campaign for votes in every state. In 2020 they nominated a Black woman, Angela Nicole Walker, to be Vice President from Wisconsin but because of mistakes made in submitting petition signatures to get on the ballot in Wisconsin, they were knocked off. If this hadn’t happened, it is possible, maybe likely, that Biden would have lost in Wisconsin.

    There is an alternative for the Green Party, and its leaders know it. For many, many years the idea of a “safe states strategy” has been supported by some GP members. Before I left the GP years ago, I was one of the proponents.

    The basic idea is simple. Instead of getting on the ballot and campaigning in battleground states, they should publicly declare that they are not doing that and will instead be focusing their campaign in the states where past voting history can predict whether it will be the Democrat or the Republican who wins. They can campaign hard in New York and California and Mississippi and Kentucky and Maryland and many other states. They can say to progressives in those states, don’t waste your vote, we know who is likely to win in this state; have an impact by voting Green and showing that there is mass support for what it stands for.

    The USA’s corporate-dominated, winner-take-all, electoral college electoral system are the primary reason why third parties of either the Left or the Right have had a major problem showing political strength, which is needed if we are serious about substantive progressive change. Those impediments to democracy have to be removed. Until that happens, we need to use tactics that are appropriate for our current reality that both defeat the ultra-rightists and strengthen the independent progressives who must grow in strength in the face of the fascist danger.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden sends banned cluster munitions to Ukraine


    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.