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Category: United States

  • Texas for Breakfast

    I know it’s hard to fathom, but there really was a time when “Don’t Mess with Texas” actually meant something and not just in terms of litter.

    It forewarned the uninitiated of bona fide badasses, legendary contrarians, daring dreamers, and serious politicians who had no qualms about taking fatuous pretenders out behind the proverbial woodshed and beating the living or figurative shite out of them.

    Sam Houston once drubbed a U.S. congressman half to death with his cane in Washington, D.C., and practically walked away scot-free. (His lawyer was Francis Scott Key!) Then, three decades later, during his second stint as governor of Texas, he jeered the Texas secession convention, refusing to swear loyalty to the Confederacy. A century later, Denison native Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during WWII and became a two-term U.S. president, would very bluntly throw staggering shade at the then-budding but insatiably greedy American Military Industrial Complex. JFK didn’t heed Ike’s remarks, and, though Lyndon Baines Johnson played along (to his discredit and, I think, regret), he also became the most progressive American president in history, enacting dozens of eye-popping rights, privileges, and freedoms that most Americans today take for granted. Then we traded longhorns for lambs, allowing our last real lion, Ann Richards (she had more brains and balls than Poppy or Sonny Boy Bush combined), to be ousted by Dubya’s personal “turd blossom,” Karl Rove.

    Since this act of nasty debasement, a gaggle of Republican oaf-keepers have spent the last three decades reducing our great state to what we are now — an international laughingstock.

    Cattle manure. Openly deranged.

    Semiautomatic rifle-packing asshats.

    And this was well before the dog and Ken Paxton pony fiasco.

    We’re no longer seen as a great state. We’re viewed more like a Third-World banana republic (emphasis on “banana”). Texas is now a joke, an adjectival term of derision, as in “those idiots went all Texas on us” or “that stupidity is Texas-level, yo!”

    For educated Americans and most of the rest of the world, Texans are synonymous with shameless cretins, imbeciles, morons, or losers. The slow, Republican-led domestic intellectual plummet and resulting international perception shift have reduced us to a superficial, xenophobic, conformist dystopia. Which sincerely sucks, because we used to be the exception, not fascist fools.

    Texas produced the first female sheriff, the first all-women state Supreme Court, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor), the first Black woman in the U.S. House of Representatives (Barbara Jordan), and the first Chicano G.I. Joe (legendary Medal of Honor recipient Roy Benavidez). Texas was the home turf for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first Bilingual Education Act, Roe v. Wade, and dozens of landmarks that define the Great Society. Texas was even the base of operations for Madalyn Murray O’Hair and the American Atheists association and Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill.

    Texas produced Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Beyonce, Selena, Freddy Fender, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Rauschenberg, Erykah Badu, John Graves, Doug Sahm, the Butthole Surfers … hell, even Black Panther Bobby Seale is a native Texan!

    The Lone Star state also produced icons of the Third Estate, including Walter Cronkite, Molly Ivins, Dan Rather, and Jim Leher.

    Today, Texas politics has descended into an ignorant crescendo of conformist, party-line blowhards like Greg Abbott, John “Cornholio” Cornyn, and Ted Cooz. And Texas’ national contributions to cultural and intellectual development rise to little more than lukewarm, rustic slop jars like Chip and Joanna Gaines, Jenna Bush Hager, Kelly Clarkson, Pascal High School’s own Sheridan Taylor Gibler, Jr. (also known as Taylor Sheridan), and clueless, third-rate sophists like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan.

    Lone Star icon Willie Nelson once said, “I’m from Texas, and one of the reasons I like Texas is because there’s no one in control.” And back when he said it, it was probably true. We used to be more open-minded. We were practical and believed in common sense. But Texas is no longer governed by pragmatism, assertive wit, or human decency. Texas has been reduced to a big, red, Republican Porta-Potty, where backwards wastrels launch excrement on the shithouse walls just to see what will stick under the graying, mustachioed upper lips of their, yes, deplorable constituencies and pass their hypocritical smell tests.

    In 2021, the Texas Lege made abortions illegal and sexual assault rewarding, because raped women were no longer permitted to abort their vicious fecundators’ offspring. On Sep. 1, 2023, the Lege made it legal for God-bothering chaplains to serve as guidance counselors in public schools without certification or experience in classroom instruction — but, hey, they’re at least qualified to explain to prepubescent female students how Mary was made preggers without her consent and how hallowed by thy shame that turned out!

    And this immaculate transgression was followed by several other lapses into priggish asininity. The feckless Lege’s new “death star” bill eliminates local civil ordinances around the state, including workplace protections and common-sense environmental regulations. Senate Bill 17 bans diversity and inclusion programs at public universities (because what’s wrong with gubernatorial incumbents gathering boner mounts at places called “Niggerhead Ranch”?). Senate Bill 19 gives the checkless Lege the power to proclaim that only college instructors who obstruct diversity and inclusion can receive tenure. House Bill 900 gives the reckless Lege expanded parameters to ban books in Texas libraries—except the Bible, of course, the reading of which will soon be required by force and policed by the new armed hall monitors the Lege is encouraging to reduce the scourge of intellectual discourse.

    Don’t mess with Texas?

    Heck, it’s getting so that any half-conscious dunderhead with a pulse can eat Texas for breakfast. We’re mindless buffoons walking around with Texas Lege-ratified “Kick Me” notes on our backs, wondering why everyone else is bent on making us butt-sore.

    At one time, Texas may have been Willie’s sublime free-for-all. Now, it’s clearly not. One party has been running the show for too long, and its leaders and their rabid base refuse to think constructively, thrive on cultural impracticalities and historic inanity, and seem bent on making sure any semblance of conscience or enlightenment is fenced in.

    Even some Texas Aggies are appalled.

    The slow, anti-intellectual deluge of Red State Kool-Aid has left Jim Bob Q. Public Yellowstoned (thanks, Gibler) and the party behind everything we used to rue seems to revel in seeing the rights of anyone who isn’t straight, white, and a man’s man trod upon with impunity.

    So please mess with Texas, friends.

    Let’s get rid of the real trash.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Mission to Free Assange: Australian Parliamentarians in Washington

    It was a short stint, involving a six-member delegation of Australian parliamentarians lobbying members of the US Congress and various relevant officials on one issue: the release of Julian Assange.  If extradited to the US from the United Kingdom to face 18 charges, 17 framed with reference to the oppressive, extinguishing Espionage Act of 1917, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks risks a 175-year prison term.

    Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Greens Senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson, Liberal Senator Alex Antic and the independent member for Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan, are to be viewed with respect, their pluckiness admired.  They came cresting on the wave of a letter published on page 9 of the Washington Post, expressing the views of over 60 Australian parliamentarians.  “As Australian Parliamentarians, we are resolutely of the view that the prosecution and incarceration of the Australian citizen Julian Assange must end.”

    This is a good if presumptuous start.  Australia remains the prized forward base of US ambitions in the Indo-Pacific, the spear pointed against China and any other rival who dares challenge its stubborn hegemony.  The AUKUS pact, featuring the futile, decorative nuclear submarines that will be rich scrapping for the Royal Australian Navy whenever they arrive, also makes that point all too clear.  For the US strategist, Australia is fiefdom, property, real estate, terrain, its citizenry best treated as docile subjects represented by even more docile governments.  Assange, and his publishing agenda, act as savage critiques of such assumptions.

    The following views in Washington DC have been expressed by the delegates in what might be described as a mission to educate.  From Senator Shoebridge, the continued detention of Assange proved to be “an ongoing irritant in the bilateral relationship” between Canberra and Washington. “If this matter is not resolved and Julian is not brought home, it will be damaging to the bilateral relationship”.

    Senator Whish-Wilson focused on the activities of Assange himself.  “The extradition of Julian Assange as a foreign journalist conducting activities on foreign soil is unprecedented.”  To create such a “dangerous precedent” laid “a very slippery slope for any democracy to go down.”

    Liberal Senator Alex Antic emphasised the spike in concern in the Australian population about wishing for Assange’s return to Australia (some nine out of 10 wishing for such an outcome). “We’ve seen 67 members of the Australian parliament share that message in a joint letter, which we’ve delivered across the spectrum”.  An impressed Antic remarked that this had “never happened before.  I think we’re seeing an incredible groundswell, and we want to see Julian at home as soon as possible.”

    On September 20, in front of the Department of Justice, Zappia told reporters that, “we’ve had several meetings and we’re not going to go into details of those meetings.  But I can say that they’ve all been useful meetings.”  Not much to go on, though the Labor MP went on to state that the delegation, as representatives of the Australian people had “put our case very clearly about the fact that Julian Assange pursuit and detention and charges should be dropped and should come to an end.”

    A point where the delegates feel that a rich quarry can be mined and trundled away for political consumption is the value of the US-Australian alliance.  As Ryan reasoned, “This side of the AUKUS partnership feels really strongly about this and so what we expect the prime minister [Anthony Albanese] to do is that he will carry the same message to President Biden when he comes to Washington.”

    The publisher’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, also suggests that the indictment is “a wedge in the Australia-US relationship, which is a very important relationship at the moment, particularly with everything that’s going on with the US and China and the sort of strategic pivot that is happening.” Assange, for his part, is bound to find this excruciatingly ironic, given his lengthy battles against the US imperium and the numbing servility of its client states.

    Various members of Congress have granted an audience to the six parliamentarians.  Enthusiasm was in abundance from two Kentucky Congressmen: Republican Senator Rand Paul and Republican House Representative Thomas Massie.  After meeting the Australian delegation, Massie declared that it was his “strong belief [Assange] should be free to return home.”

    Georgian Republican House member Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed her sense of honour at having met the delegates “to discuss the inhumane detention” of Assange “for the crime of committing journalism,” insisting that the charges be dropped and a pardon granted.  “America should be a beacon of free speech and shouldn’t be following in an authoritarian regime’s footsteps.”  Greene has shown herself to be a conspiracy devotee of the most pungent type, but there was little to fault her regarding these sentiments.

    Minnesota Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also met the parliamentarians, discussing, according to a press release from her office, “the Assange prosecution and its significance as an issue in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Australia, as well as the implications for freedom of the press both at home and abroad.”  She also reiterated her view, one expressed in an April 2023 letter to the Department of Justice co-signed with six other members of Congress, that the charges against Assange be dropped.

    These opinions, consistent and venerably solid, have rarely swayed the mad hatters at the Justice Department who continue to operate within the same church consensus regarding Assange as an aberration and threat to US security.  And they can rely, ultimately, on the calculus of attrition that assumes allies of Washington will eventually belt up, even if they grumble.  There will always be those who pretend to question, such as the passive, meek Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong.  “We have raised this many times,” Wong responded to a query while in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly.  “Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken and I both spoke about the fact that we had a discussion about the views that the United States has and the views that Australia has.”

    Not that this mattered a jot.  In July, Blinken stomped on Wong’s views in a disingenuous, libellous assessment about Assange, reminding his counterpart that the publisher had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.”  The libel duly followed, with the claim that Assange “risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention”.  That gross falsification of history went unaddressed by Wong.

    Thus far, Blinken has waived away the concerns of the Albanese government on Assange’s fate as passing irritants at a spring garden party.  However small their purchase, six Australian parliamentarians have chosen to press the issue further.  At the very least, they have gone to the centre of the imperium to add a bit of ballast to the effort.

  • When China’s Safety Concerns Meet US Hegemony in South, East China Seas

    Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    The South and East China Seas are among China’s major security concerns in its neighborhood. Despite this, the US still hypes up competition with China in these regions to cover up the tendency of its hegemonic expansion.

    The US Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently published a report which pointed out that the South China Sea in the past 10 to 15 years has become the arena of US-China strategic competition, while actions by China’s maritime forces at the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea are another concern for US observers. “Chinese domination of China’s near-seas region… could substantially affect US strategic, political, and economic interests in the Indo-Pacific region and elsewhere,” said the CRS report.

    The South and East China Seas hold different strategic positions for China and the US. On one hand, as China’s military strength has rapidly progressed, the Chinese navy no longer prioritizes near-shore defense. Instead, it actively and comprehensively seeks to safeguard China’s sovereignty and security in these waters. China’s activities in the South and East China Seas are among the first indications of its rise as a global power.

    On the other hand, the South and East China Seas are at the forefront of US hegemonic power. Despite being geographically distant from these waters, the US still perceives China’s near-seas region as a place to show off its military presence and political influence due to the pervasive nature of the US global hegemony. This situation is unlikely to change unless the US hegemonic strategy collapses.

    It is evident that the situation in the South and East China Seas has become complicated over the years. Experts told the Global Times that Washington is the biggest driver of the intensifying China-US competition in these regions, noting the US deliberately creates problems in these regions for its own interests. In other words, the US aims to showcase the strength of its hegemony, while simultaneously containing China’s development through its Indo-Pacific Strategy.

    Managing the China-US competition in those regions has become an urgent yet difficult task. When China’s growing determination to protect its national security encounters the US’ pursuit for global hegemony in the South and East China Seas, a collision can easily occur. The US will do anything to make sure its needs override China’s, leading to the emergence of more confrontations and future deterioration of bilateral relations.

    The intense strategic competition between Beijing and Washington in China’s near-seas region may also affect policymaking in the US. The CRS is a major congressional think tank under the Library of Congress that serves members of Congress and their committees. Its recent report is obviously intended to clarify congressional responsibilities in the China-US strategic competition in the South and East China Seas, so that Congress can better help Washington gain an advantage over Beijing.

    The US Congress has passed bills to institutionalize anti-China activities, which in itself will lead to further tensions in the bilateral relationship. This year, the South China Sea and East China Sea Sanctions Act of 2023 has already been introduced in the Senate; we cannot rule out the possibility that Congress may use more legislative resources against China’s development.

    But from a strategic point of view, the US actually hopes China’s neighbors in the South and East China Seas to fight Beijing at the forefront, while the US provides strategic support from behind. The question is, as Washington’s sinister intentions of exploiting its allies and partners become increasingly prominent, how many countries will be willing to pay for US hegemonic strategy?

    In the face of the US’ intense competition with China in China’s neighboring waters, China should, on one hand, strive for a more favorable international environment through diplomatic means to ensure a long-term peaceful and stable surrounding environment conducive to its development.

    On the other hand, the country should not neglect the development of its hard power, including military capabilities. During critical moments, China must demonstrate its determination through action to safeguard national sovereignty, security, and interests, making it clear to those who provoke that there is no room for maneuver when it comes to issues involving China’s red line.

  • NATO Destroyed Libya in 2011; Storm Daniel Came to Sweep Up the Remains

    Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Drown on Dry Land, 2019.

    Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has been ‘exposed to whipping and bombing, and then it was enclosed by a wall that had no door, leaving it shrouded in fear and depression’. Then, Storm Daniel picked up off the Mediterranean coast, dragged itself into Libya, and broke the dams. CCTV camera footage in the city’s Maghar neighbourhood showed the rapid advance of the floodwaters, powerful enough to destroy buildings and crush lives. A reported 70% of infrastructure and 95% of educational institutions have been damaged in the flood-affected areas. As of Wednesday 20 September, an estimated 4,000 to 11,000 people have died in the flood – among them the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, whose warnings over the years went unheeded – and another 10,000 are missing.

    Hisham Chkiouat, the aviation minister of Libya’s Government of National Stability (based in Sirte), visited Derna in the wake of the flood and told the BBC, ‘I was shocked by what I saw. It’s like a tsunami. A massive neighbourhood has been destroyed. There is a large number of victims, which is increasing each hour’. The Mediterranean Sea ate up this ancient city with roots in the Hellenistic period (326 BCE to 30 BCE). Hussein Swaydan, head of Derna’s Roads and Bridges Authority, said that the total area with ‘severe damage’ amounts to three million square metres. ‘The situation in this city’, he said, ‘is more than catastrophic’. Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that the flood was of ‘epic proportions’. ‘There’s not been a storm like this in the region in living memory’, she said, ‘so it’s a great shock’.

    Howls of anguish across Libya morphed into anger at the devastation, which are now developing into demands for an investigation. But who will conduct this investigation: the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and officially recognised by the United Nations (UN), or the Government of National Stability, headed by Prime Minister Osama Hamada in Sirte? These two rival governments – which have been at war with each other for many years – have paralysed the politics of the country, whose state institutions were fatally damaged by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombardment in 2011.

    Soad Abdel Rassoul (Egypt), My Last Meal, 2019.

    The divided state and its damaged institutions have been unable to properly provide for Libya’s population of nearly seven million in the oil-rich but now totally devastated country. Before the recent tragedy, the UN was already providing humanitarian aid for at least 300,000 Libyans, but, as a consequence of the floods, they estimate that at least 884,000 more people will require assistance. This number is certain to rise to at least 1.8 million. The WHO’s Dr Harris reports that some hospitals have been ‘wiped out’ and that vital medical supplies, including trauma kits and body bags, are needed. ‘The humanitarian needs are huge and much more beyond the abilities of the Libyan Red Crescent, and even beyond the abilities of the Government’, said Tamar Ramadan, head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya.

    The emphasis on the state’s limitations is not to be minimised. Similarly, the World Meteorological Organisation’s Secretary-General Petteri Taalas pointed out that although there was an unprecedented level of rainfall (414.1 mm in 24 hours, as recorded by one station), the collapse of state institutions contributed to the catastrophe. Taalas observed that Libya’s National Meteorological Centre has ‘major gaps in its observing systems. Its IT systems are not functioning well and there are chronic staff shortages. The National Meteorological Centre is trying to function, but its ability to do so is limited. The entire chain of disaster management and governance is disrupted’. Furthermore, he said, ‘[t]he fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk’.

    Faiza Ramadan (Libya), The Meeting, 2011.

    Abdel Moneim al-Arfi, a member of the Libyan Parliament (in the eastern section), joined his fellow lawmakers to call for an investigation into the causes of the disaster. In his statement, al-Arfi pointed to underlying problems with the post-2011 Libyan political class. In 2010, the year before the NATO war, the Libyan government had allocated money towards restoring the Wadi Derna dams (both built between 1973 and 1977). This project was supposed to be completed by a Turkish company, but the company left the country during the war. The project was never completed, and the money allocated for it vanished. According to al-Arfi, in 2020 engineers recommended that the dams be restored since they were no longer able to manage normal rainfall, but these recommendations were shelved. Money continued to disappear, and the work was simply not carried out.

    Impunity has defined Libya since the overthrow of the regime led by Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011). In February–March 2011, newspapers from Gulf Arab states began to claim that the Libyan government’s forces were committing genocide against the people of Libya. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions: resolution 1970 (February 2011) to condemn the violence and establish an arms embargo on the country and resolution 1973 (March 2011) to allow member states to act ‘under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter’, which would enable armed forces to establish a ceasefire and find a solution to the crisis. Led by France and the United States, NATO prevented an African Union delegation from following up on these resolutions and holding peace talks with all the parties in Libya. Western countries also ignored the meeting with five African heads of state in Addis Ababa in March 2011 where al-Gaddafi agreed to the ceasefire, a proposal he repeated during an African Union delegation to Tripoli in April. This was an unnecessary war that Western and Gulf Arab states used to wreak vengeance upon al-Gaddafi. The ghastly conflict turned Libya, which was ranked 53rd out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index (the highest ranking on the African continent), into a country marked by poor indicators of human development that is now significantly lower on any such list.

    Tewa Barnosa (Libya), War Love, 2016.

    Instead of allowing an African Union-led peace plan to take place, NATO began a bombardment of 9,600 strikes on Libyan targets, with special emphasis on state institutions. Later, when the UN asked NATO to account for the damage it had done, NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote that there was no need for an investigation, since ‘NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya’. There was no interest in the wilful destruction of crucial Libyan state infrastructure, which has never been rebuilt and whose absence is key to understanding the carnage in Derna.

    NATO’s destruction of Libya set in motion a chain of events: the collapse of the Libyan state; the civil war, which continues to this day; the dispersal of Islamic radicals across northern Africa and into the Sahel region, whose decade-long destabilisation has resulted in a series of coups from Burkina Faso to Niger. This has subsequently created new migration routes toward Europe and led to the deaths of migrants in both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea as well as an unprecedented scale of human trafficking operations in the region. Add to this list of dangers not only the deaths in Derna, and certainly the deaths from Storm Daniel, but also casualties of a war from which the Libyan people have never recovered.

    Najla Shawkat Fitouri (Libya), Sea Wounded, 2021.

    Just before the flood in Libya, an earthquake struck neighbouring Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, wiping out villages such as Tenzirt and killing about 3,000 people. ‘I won’t help the earthquake’, wrote the Moroccan poet Ahmad Barakat (1960–1994); ‘I will always carry in my mouth the dust that destroyed the world’. It is as if tragedy decided to take titanic steps along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea last week.

    A tragic mood settled deep within the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi. On 10 September, before being swept away by the flood waves, he wrote, ‘[w]e have only one another in this difficult situation. Let’s stand together until we drown’. But that mood was intercut with other feelings: frustration with the ‘twin Libyan fabric’, in his words, with one government in Tripoli and the other in Sirte; the divided populace; and the political detritus of an ongoing war over the broken body of the Libyan state. ‘Who said that Libya is not one?’, Al-Trabelsi lamented. Writing as the waters rose, Al-Trabelsi left behind a poem that is being read by refugees from his city and Libyans across the country, reminding them that the tragedy is not everything, that the goodness of people who come to each other’s aid is the ‘promise of help’, the hope of the future.

    The rain
    Exposes the drenched streets,
    the cheating contractor,
    and the failed state.
    It washes everything,
    bird wings
    and cats’ fur.
    Reminds the poor
    of their fragile roofs
    and ragged clothes.
    It awakens the valleys,
    shakes off their yawning dust
    and dry crusts.
    The rain
    a sign of goodness,
    a promise of help,
    an alarm bell.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why the Media Aren’t Telling the Whole Story of Libya’s Floods

    The reality of the West’s trademark current foreign policy – marketed for the past two decades under the principle of a “Responsibility to Protect” – is all too visible amid Libya’s flood wreckage.

    Many thousands are dead or missing in the port of Derna after two dams protecting the city burst this week as they were battered by Storm Daniel. Vast swaths of housing in the region, including in Benghazi, west of Derna, lie in ruins.

    The storm itself is seen as further proof of a mounting climate crisis, rapidly changing weather patterns across the globe and making disasters like Derna’s flooding more likely.

    But the extent of the calamity cannot simply be ascribed to climate change. Though the media coverage studiously obscures this point, Britain’s actions 12 years ago – when it trumpeted its humanitarian concern for Libya – are intimately tied to Derna’s current suffering.

    The failing dams and faltering relief efforts, observers correctly point out, are the result of a power vacuum in Libya. There is no central authority capable of governing the country.

    But there are reasons Libya is so ill-equipped to deal with a catastrophe. And the West is deeply implicated.

    Avoiding mention of those reasons, as Western coverage is doing, leaves audiences with a false and dangerous impression: that something lacking in Libyans, or maybe Arabs and Africans, makes them inherently incapable of properly running their own affairs.

    ‘Dysfunctional politics’

    Libya is indeed a mess, overrun by feuding militias, with two rival governments vying for power amid a general air of lawlessness. Even before this latest disaster, the country’s rival rulers struggled to cope with the day-to-day management of their citizens’ lives.

    Or as Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, observed of the crisis, it has been “compounded by Libya’s dysfunctional politics, a country so rich in natural resources and yet so desperately lacking the security and stability that its people crave.”

    Meanwhile, Quentin Sommerville, the corporation’s Middle East correspondent, opined that “there are many countries that could have handled flooding on this scale, but not one as troubled as Libya. It has had a long and painful decade: civil wars, local conflicts, and Derna itself was taken over by the Islamic State group – the city was bombed to remove them from there.”

    According to Sommerville, experts had previously warned that the dams were in poor shape, adding: “Amid Libya’s chaos, those warnings went unheeded.”

    “Dysfunction”, “chaos”, “troubled”, “unstable”, “fractured”. The BBC and the rest of Britain’s establishment media have been firing out these terms like bullets from a machine gun.

    Libya is what analysts like to term a failed state. But what the BBC and the rest of the Western media have carefully avoided mentioning is why.

    Regime change

    More than decade ago, Libya had a strong, competent, if highly repressive, central government under dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The country’s oil revenues were used to provide free public education and health care. As a result, Libya had one of the highest literacy rates and average per capita incomes in Africa.

    That all changed in 2011, when Nato sought to exploit the “Responsibility to Protect” principle, or R2P for short, to justify carrying out what amounted to an illegal regime-change operation off the back of an insurgency.

    The supposed “humanitarian intervention” in Libya was a more sophisticated version of the West’s similarly illegal, “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq, eight years earlier.

    Then, the US and Britain launched a war of aggression without United Nations authorisation, based on an entirely bogus story that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed hidden stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

    In Libya’s case, by contrast, Britain and France, backed by the United States, were more successful in winning a UN security resolution, with a narrow remit to protect civilian populations from the threat of attack and impose a no-fly zone.

    Armed with the resolution, the West manufactured a pretext to meddle directly in Libya. They claimed that Gaddafi was preparing a massacre of civilians in the rebel-stronghold of Benghazi. The lurid story even suggested that Gaddafi was arming troops with Viagra to encourage them to commit mass rape.

    As with Iraq’s WMD, the claims were entirely unsubstantiated, as a report by the British parliament’s foreign affairs committee concluded five years later, in 2016. Its investigation found: “The proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.”

    The report added: “Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.”

    Bombing campaigns

    That, however, was not a view prime minister David Cameron or the media shared with the public when British MPs voted to back a war on Libya in March 2011. Only 13 legislators dissented.

    Among them, notably, was Jeremy Corbyn, then a backbencher who four years later would be elected Labour opposition leader, triggering an extended smear campaign against him by the British establishment.

    When Nato launched its “humanitarian intervention”, the death toll from Libya’s fighting was estimated by the UN at no more than 2,000. Six months later, it was assessed at nearer 50,000, with civilians comprising a significant proportion of the casualties.

    Citing its R2P mission, Nato flagrantly exceeded the terms of the UN resolution, which specifically excluded “a foreign occupation force of any form”. Western troops, including British special forces, operated on the ground, coordinating the actions of rebel militias opposed to Gaddafi.

    Meanwhile, Nato planes ran bombing campaigns that often killed the very civilians Nato claimed it was there to protect.

    It was another illegal Western regime-overthrow operation – this one ending with the filming of Gaddafi being butchered on the street.

    Slave markets

    The self-congratulatory mood among Britain’s political and media class, burnishing the West’s “humanitarian” credentials, was evident across the media.

    An Observer editorial declared: “An honourable intervention. A hopeful future.” In the Daily Telegraph, David Owen, a former British foreign secretary, wrote: “We have proved in Libya that intervention can still work.”

    But had it worked?

    Two years ago, even the arch-neoconservative Atlantic Council, the ultimate Washington insider think-tank, admitted: “Libyans are poorer, in greater peril, and experience as much or more political repression in parts of the country compared to Gaddafi’s rule.”

    It added: “Libya remains divided politically and in a state of festering civil war. Frequent oil production halts while lack of oil fields maintenance has cost the country billions of dollars in lost revenues.”

    The idea that Nato was ever really concerned about the welfare of Libyans was given the lie the moment Gaddafi was slaughtered. The West immediately abandoned Libya to its ensuing civil war, what President Obama colourfully called a “shitshow”, and the media that had been so insistent on the humanitarian goals behind the “intervention” lost all interest in post-Gaddafi developments.

    Libya was soon overrun with warlords, becoming a country in which, as human rights groups warned, slave markets were once again flourishing.

    As the BBC’s Sommerville noted in passing, the vacuum left behind in places like Derna soon sucked in more violent and extremist groups like the head-choppers of Islamic State.

    Unreliable allies

    But parallel to the void of authority in Libya that has exposed its citizens to such suffering is the remarkable void at the heart of the West’s media coverage of the current flooding.

    No one wants to explain why Libya is so ill-prepared to deal with the disaster, why the country is so fractured and chaotic.

    Just as no one wants to explain why the West’s invasion of Iraq on “humanitarian” grounds, and the disbanding of its army and police forces, led to more than a million Iraqis dead and millions more homeless and displaced.

    Or why the West allied with its erstwhile opponents – the jihadists of Islamic State and al-Qaeda – against the Syrian government, again causing millions to be displaced and dividing the country.

    Syria was as unprepared as Libya now is to deal with a large earthquake that hit its northern regions, along with southern Turkey, last February.

    This pattern repeats because it serves a useful end for a West led from Washington that seeks complete global hegemony and control of resources, or what its policymakers call full-spectrum dominance.

    Humanitarianism is the cover story – to keep Western publics docile – as the US and Nato allies target leaders of oil-rich states in the Middle East and North Africa that are viewed as unreliable or unpredictable, such as Libya’s Gadaffi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

    A wayward leader

    WikiLeaks’ release of US diplomatic cables in late 2010 reveals a picture of Washington’s mercurial relationship with Gaddafi – a trait paradoxically the US ambassador to Tripoli is recorded attributing to the Libyan leader.

    Publicly, US officials were keen to cosy up to Gaddafi, offering him close security coordination against the very rebel forces they would soon be assisting in their regime-overthrow operation.

    But other cables reveal deeper concerns at Gaddafi’s waywardness, including his ambitions to build a United States of Africa to control the continent’s resources and develop an independent foreign policy.

    Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa. And who has control over them, and profits from them, is centrally important to Western states.

    The WikiLeaks cables recounted US, French, Spanish and Canadian oil firms being forced to renegotiate contracts on significantly less favourable terms, costing them many billions of dollars, while Russia and China were awarded new oil exploration options.

    Still more worrying for US officials was the precedent Gaddafi had been setting, creating a “new paradigm for Libya that is playing out worldwide in a growing number of oil producing countries”.

    That precedent has been decisively overturned since Gaddafi’s demise. As Declassified reported, after biding their time British oil giants BP and Shell returned to Libya’s oilfields last year.

    In 2018, Britain’s then ambassador to Libya, Frank Baker, wrote enthusiastically about how the UK was “helping to create a more permissible environment for trade and investment, and to uncover opportunities for British expertise to help Libya’s reconstruction”.

    That contrasts with Gaddafi’s earlier moves to cultivate closer military and economic ties with Russia and China, including granting access to the port of Benghazi for the Russian fleet. In one cable from 2008, he is noted to have “voiced his satisfaction that Russia’s increased strength can serve as a necessary counterbalance to US power”.

    Submit or pay

    It was these factors that tipped the balance in Washington against Gaddafi’s continuing rule and encouraged the US to seize the opportunity to oust him by backing rebel forces.

    The claim that Washington or Britain cared about the welfare of ordinary Libyans is disproved by a decade of indifference to their plight – culminating in the current suffering in Derna.

    The West’s approach to Libya, as with Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, has been to prefer that it be sunk into a quagmire of division and instability than allow a strong leader to act defiantly, demand control over resources and establish alliances with enemy states – creating a precedent other states might follow.

    Small states are left with a stark choice: submit or pay a heavy price.

    Gaddafi was butchered in the street, the bloody images shared around the world. The suffering of ordinary Libyans over the past decade, in contrast, has taken place out of view.

    Now with the disaster in Derna, their plight is in the spotlight. But with the help of Western media like the BBC, the reasons for their misery remain as murky as the flood waters.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

  • Depleted Uranium Added to Toxic Mess in Ukraine

     Following on from its decision to donate widely banned cluster munitions to Ukraine the US is sending armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) munitions to fight Russia. Indifferent to the poisonous effect of these weapons, the Justin Trudeau government has remained mum on Washington’s escalatory move.

    Depleted uranium (DU) is a by-product from the production of fuel used in atomic power stations. A heavy metal, DU is good for armor-piercing rounds.

    But it’s also toxic. Studies have linked DU munitions to cancer and birth defects. The US DU munitions will add to the growing health and ecological damage of the war.

    As the world’s second biggest producer of uranium, Canada is the source of a significant share of US uranium. Over the past two decades Canada has abstained on a series of UN resolutions concerning DU munitions. Backed by the vast majority of General Assembly members, the resolutions don’t even call for the abolition of DU, but only for transparency in their use to enable clean up.

    Canadian forces have supported the use of DU munitions. In the first Gulf War 4,000 Canadians fought alongside US forces that fired shells with DU, which probably increased the incidence of cancer and congenital disease for those nearby. Similarly, the Canadian air force was a major participant in the 1999 bombing of Serbia in which NATO jets dropped bombs containing DU, causing long term ecological damage.

    Alongside health and ecological concerns, the DU munitions donation escalates the conflict. Russian officials labelled the new US donations a “criminal act” and “indicator of inhumanity”. When the UK gave Ukraine DU-laced arms to use in Challenger 2 tanks, Russia cited the move to justify stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

    Ottawa has been a staunch proponent of NATO’s proxy war. At the recent G20 meeting in India Prime Minister Trudeau complained there wasn’t a stronger condemnation of Russia. Over the past year and a half Canada has given $2 billion in arms, promoted former Canadian soldiers fighting, trained thousands of Ukrainian troops and dispatched special forces to Ukraine. Ottawa has also provided significant intelligence assistance with the Communications Security Establishment even extending its cyber defence umbrella to Ukraine.

    While rarely raising peace negotiations, Trudeau has repeatedly said “Canada will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes”. Combined with NATO prodding Ukraine into a horrific counteroffensive, this effectively means prolonging the death and destruction, which could have been avoided if the US/NATO agreed not to expand to Ukraine. In a recent speech NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg all but said as much, noting “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that… So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

    Notwithstanding Trudeau’s statements about “as long as it takes”, the government appears to be slowing down new arms announcements. The last one seems to have been five months ago on April 11. Maybe Canadian weapons stocks are running low or the government understands the public is souring on arms deliveries.

    On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion the National Post reported on a poll that found “only 33 per cent believe Canada should provide more personnel to train Ukrainian soldiers and just 32 per cent believe more military equipment should be provided.” The numbers are remarkable considering that no one in the dominant media or Parliament is articulating this position. With Ukraine’s counteroffensive failing, opposition to arms donations has likely grown. And Kyiv’s increasingly desperate response to the failure is troubling even if understandable amidst Russian violence [the violence is not one-sided — DV ed]. Sending drones to hit targets in Moscow will have limited military benefit but is sure to harden Russian resolve, making compromise more difficult.

    Two columns in the Financial Times this month highlight the prevailing madness. “Ukraine cannot win against Russia now, but victory by 2025 is possible”, noted one headline while another stated “Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine would be a moral defeat.”

    Nineteen months into this horrendous war the usually sober minded establishment paper seems to believe a “moral” victory is sending depleted uranium, ensuring ever more immediate and long-term death and destruction.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “A Good Investment”: The Ukraine War and the US Arms Racket

    It all tallies.  War, investments and returns.  The dividends, solid, though the effort expended – at least by others – awful and bloody.  While a certain narrative in US politics continues in the vein of traditional cant and hustling ceremony regarding the Ukraine War – “noble freedom fighters, we salute you!” twinned with “Russian aggressors will be defeated” – there are the inadvertently honest ones let things slip.  A subsidised war pays, especially when it is fought by others.

    The latter narrative has been something of a retort, an attempt to deter a growing wobbling sentiment in the US about continuing support for Ukraine.  In a Brookings study published in April, evidence of wearying was detected. “A plurality of Americans, 46%, said the United States should stay the course in supporting Ukraine for only one to two years, compared with 38% who said the United States should stay the course for as long as it takes.”

    In early August, a CNN survey found that 51% of respondents believed that Washington had done enough to halt Russian military aggression in Ukraine, with 45% approving of additional funding to the war effort.  A breakdown of the figures on ideological grounds revealed that additional funding is supported by 69% of liberals, 44% of moderates and 31% of conservatives.  In Congress, opposition to greater, ongoing spending is growing among the Republicans, reflecting increasing concern among GOP voters that too much is being done to prop up Kyiv.

    Such a mood has been anticipated by number crunching types keen to reduce human life to an adjustable unit on a spreadsheet.  The Centre for European Policy Analysis, for example, suggested that a “cost-benefit analysis” would be useful regarding US support for Ukraine.  “It’s producing wins at almost every level,” came the confident assessment.  In spectacularly vulgar language, the centre notes that, “from numerous perspectives, when viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, US and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.”

    War-intoxicated Democrats would do well to remind their Republican colleagues about such wins, notably to those great patriots known as the US Arms Industry.  Aid packages to Ukraine, while dressed up as noble, democratic efforts to ameliorate a suffering country’s position vis-à-vis Russia, are much more than that.

    In May 2022, for instance, President Joe Biden signed a bill providing Kyiv $40.1 billion in emergency funding, split between $24.6 for military programs, and $15.5 billion for non-military objects.  Even then, it was clear that one group would prove the greatest beneficiary.  Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute was unequivocal: US military contractors.

    Of the package, rich rewards amounting to $17.3 billion would flow to such contractors, comprising goods, be they in terms of weapons and equipment, or services in the form of training, logistics and intelligence.  “It allows the Biden administration,” writes Semler, “to continue escalating the United States’ military involvement in the war as the administration appears increasingly disinterested in bringing it to an end through diplomacy.”

    Broadly speaking, the US military-industrial complex continues to gorge and merely getting larger.  Whatever the outcome of this war – talk of absolute victory or defeat being the stuff of dangerous fantasy –   it remains the true beneficiary, the sole victor fed by new markets and opportunities.  Former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, now vice president of the Toledo Center for Peace, had to concede that the  US arms industry was the “one clear winner” in this bloody tangle.

    The addition of new member states to NATO, in this case Finland and Sweden, will, Ben Ami suggests, “open up a big new market for US defence contractors, because the alliance’s interoperability rule would bind them to American-made defence systems.”  The evidence is already there, with Finland’s order of 64 new F-35 strike fighters developed by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems.  The Ukraine War has been nothing short of lucrative in that regard.

    Such expansion also comes with another benefit.  The interoperability requirement in the NATO scheme acts as a bar to any alternatives.  “The market for their goods is expanding,” writes Jon Markman for Forbes, “and they will face no competition for the foreseeable future.”

    It should come as little surprise that the US defence contractors have been banging the drum for NATO enlargement from the late 1990s on.  While a good number of those in the US diplomatic stable feared the consequences of an aggressive membership drive, those in the business of making and selling arms would have none of it.  The end of the Cold War necessitated a search for new horizons in selling instruments of death. And with each new NATO member – Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic – the contracts came.  Washington and the defence contractors, twinned with purpose, pursued the agenda with gusto.

    In 1997, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin was awake to that fact in hearings of the Senate Appropriations Committee on the cost of NATO enlargement.  He was particularly concerned by a fatuous remark by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright comparing NATO’s expansion with the economic Marshall plan implemented in the aftermath of the Second World War.  “My fear is that NATO expansion will not be a Marshall plan to bring stability and democracy to the newly freed European nations but, rather, a Marshall plan for defense contractors who are chomping [sic] at the bit to sell weapons and make profits.”

    The moral here from the US military-industrial complex is: stay the course.  The returns are worth it.  And in such a calculus, concepts such as freedom and democracy can be commodified and budgeted.  As for Ukrainian suffering?  Well, let it continue.

    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

  • The West’s blueprint for goading China was laid out in Ukraine

    The West is writing a script about its relations with China as stuffed full of misdirection as an Agatha Christie novel.

    In recent months, US and European officials have scurried to Beijing for so-called talks, as if the year were 1972 and Richard Nixon were in the White House.

    But there will be no dramatic, era-defining US-China pact this time. If relations are to change, it will be decisively for the worse.

    The West’s two-faced policy towards China was starkly illustrated last week by the visit to Beijing of Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly – the first by a senior UK official for five years.

    While Cleverly talked vaguely afterwards about the importance of not “disengaging” from China and avoiding “mistrust and errors”, the British parliament did its best to undermine his message.

    The foreign affairs committee issued a report on UK policy in the Indo-Pacific that provocatively described the Chinese leadership as “a threat to the UK and its interests”.

    In terminology that broke with past diplomacy, the committee referred to Taiwan – a breakaway island that Beijing insists must one day be “reunified” with China – as an “independent country”. Only 13 states recognise Taiwan’s independence.

    The committee urged the British government to pressure its Nato allies into imposing sanctions on China.

    Upping the stakes

    The UK parliament is meddling recklessly in a far-off zone of confrontation with the potential for incendiary escalation against a nuclear power, a situation unrivalled outside of Ukraine.

    But Britain is far from alone. Last year, for the first time, Nato moved well out of its supposed sphere of influence – the North Atlantic – to declare Beijing a challenge to its “interests, security and values”.

    There can be little doubt that Washington is the moving force behind this escalation against China, a state posing no obvious military threat to the West.

    It has upped the stakes significantly by making its military presence felt ever more firmly in and around the Straits of Taiwan – the 100-mile wide waterway separating China from Taiwan that Beijing views as its doorstep.

    Senior US officials have been making noisy visits to Taiwan – not least, Nancy Pelosi last summer, when she was house speaker. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is showering Taiwan with weapons systems.

    If this weren’t enough to inflame China, Washington is drawing Beijing’s neighbours deeper into military alliances – such as Aukus and the Quad – to isolate China and leave it feeling threatened. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, describes this as a policy of “comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against us”.

    Last month, President Biden hosted Japan and South Korea at Camp David, forging a trilateral security arrangement directed at what they called China’s “dangerous and aggressive behavior”.

    Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s “Pacific Defence Initiative” budget – chiefly intended to contain and encircle China – just keeps rising.

    In the latest move, revealed last week, the US is in talks with Manila to build a naval port in the northernmost Philippine islands, 125 miles from Taiwan, boosting “American access to strategically located islands facing Taiwan”.

    That will become the ninth Philippine base used by the US military, part of a network of some 450 operating in the South Pacific.

    Dirty double game

    So what’s going on? Is Britain – along with its Nato allies – interested in building greater trust with Beijing, as Cleverly argues, or backing Washington’s escalatory manoeuvres against a nuclear-armed China over a small territory on the other side of the globe, as the British parliament indicates?

    Inadvertently, the foreign affairs committee’s chair, Alicia Kearns, got to the heart of the matter. She accused the British government of having a “confidential, elusive China strategy”, one “buried deep in Whitehall, kept hidden even from senior ministers”.

    And not by accident.

    European leaders are torn. They fear losing access to Chinese goods and markets, plunging their economies deeper into recession after a cost-of-living crisis precipitated by the Ukraine war. But most are even more afraid of angering Washington, which is determined to isolate and contain China.

    That divide was highlighted by French President Emmanuel Macron following a visit to China in April, when he urged “strategic autonomy” for Europe towards Beijing.

    “Is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.

    Macron soon found himself roundly rebuked in Washington and European capitals.

    Instead, a dirty double game is being played. The West makes conciliatory noises towards Beijing, while its actions turn ever more belligerent.

    Cleverly himself alluded to this deceit, observing of relations with China: “If there is ever a situation where our security concerns are at odds with our economic concerns, our security concerns win out.”

    After Ukraine, we are told, Taiwan must be the locus of the West’s all-consuming security interest.

    Cleverly’s meaning is barely veiled: Europe’s clear economic interests in maintaining good relations with Beijing must be suborned to Washington’s more malevolent agenda, masquerading as Nato security interests.

    Forget Macron’s “autonomy”.

    Notably, this game of misdirection draws on the same blueprint that shaped the long build-up to the Ukraine war.

    Moscow cornered

    Western politicians and media repeat the preposterous claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” only because they created a cover story beforehand, as they now do with China.

    I have set out in detail before how these provocations unfolded. Bit by bit, US administrations eroded Ukrainian neutrality and incorporated Russia’s large neighbour into the Nato fold. The intention was to covertly turn it into a forward base, capable of positioning nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow.

    Washington ignored warnings from its most senior officials and Russia experts that cornering Moscow would eventually provoke it into a pre-emptive strike against Ukraine. Why? Because, it seems, that was the goal all along.

    The invasion provided the pretext for the US to impose sanctions and wage its current proxy war, using Ukrainians as foot soldiers, to neutralise Russia militarily and economically – or “weaken” it, as the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin explicitly terms Washington’s key aim in the Ukraine war.

    Moscow is seen as an obstacle, alongside China, to the US maintaining “full-spectrum global dominance” – a doctrine that came to the fore after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago.

    Using Nato as sidekick, Washington is determined to keep the world unipolar at all costs. It is desperate to preserve its global, imperial military and economic might, even as its star wanes. In such circumstances, Europe’s options for Macron-style autonomy are non-existent.

    Peace talks charade

    The public’s continuing ignorance of Nato’s countless provocations against Russia is hardly surprising. Reference to them is all but taboo in Western media.

    Instead, the West’s belligerent manoeuvrings – as with those now against China – are overshadowed by a script that trumpets its faux-diplomacy, supposedly rebuffed by “madman” Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    This disingenuous narrative was typified by western double-dealing over accords signed in 2014 and 2015 in the Belarussian capital Minsk – after negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to stop a bloody civil war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbass.

    There, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and separatist Ukrainians of Russian origin began facing off in 2014, immediately after yet more covert meddling. Washington assisted in the overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow. In response, ethnic Russians demanded greater autonomy from Kyiv.

    The official story is that, far from inflaming conflict, the West sought to foster peace, with Germany and France brokering the Minsk accords.

    One can argue about why those agreements failed. But following Russia’s invasion, a disturbing new light was shed on their context by Angela Merkel, German chancellor at the time.

    She told Die Ziet newspaper last December that the 2014 Minsk agreement was less about achieving peace than “an attempt to give Ukraine time. It also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today… In early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them [areas in Donbas] at the time. And I very much doubt that the Nato countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”

    If Russia could have overrun Ukraine at any time from 2014 onwards, why did it wait eight years, while its neighbour grew much stronger, assisted by the West?

    Assuming Merkel is being honest, Germany, it seems, never really believed the peace process it oversaw stood a chance. That suggests one of two possibilities.

    Either the initiative was a charade, brokered to buy more time for Ukraine to be integrated into Nato, a path that was bound to lead to Russia’s invasion – as Merkel herself acknowledges. Indeed, she accepts that Ukraine’s accession process into Nato launched in 2008 was “wrong”.

    Or Merkel knew that the US would work with Kyiv’s new pro-Washington government to disrupt the process. Europe could do little more than delay an inevitable war for as long as possible.

    Neither alternative fits the “unprovoked” narrative. Both suggest Merkel understood Moscow’s patience would eventually run out.

    The theatre of the Minsk accords was directed at Moscow, which delayed invading on the assumption the talks were in good faith, but also at western publics. When Russia did finally invade, they could be easily persuaded Putin never planned to embrace western “peace” overtures.

    Economic chokehold

    As with Ukraine, the cover story concealing the West’s provocations towards China has been carefully directed from Washington.

    Europeans like Cleverly are parading around Beijing to make it look like the West desires peaceful engagement. But the only real engagement is the crafting of a military noose around China’s neck, just as a noose was crafted earlier for Russia.

    The security rationale this time – of protecting far-off Taiwan – obscures Washington’s less palatable aim: to enforce US global dominance by smashing any economic or technological threat from China and Russia.

    Washington can’t remain military top dog if it doesn’t also maintain a chokehold on the global economy to fund its inflated Pentagon budget, equivalent to the combined spending of the next 10 nations.

    The dangers to Washington are only underscored by the rapid expansion of Brics, a bloc of emerging economic powers headed by China and Russia. Six new members will join the current five in January, with many more waiting in the wings.

    An expanded Brics offers new security and economic axes on which these emerging powers can organise, profoundly weakening US influence.

    The new entrants are Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. China already brokered an unexpected reconciliation between historic foes Iran and Saudia Arabia in March, in preparation for their accession.

    Brics+ will only strengthen their mutual interests.

    That will be no comfort in Washington. The US has long favoured keeping the two at loggerheads, in a divide-and-rule policy that rationalised its continuous meddling to control the oil-rich Middle East and favoured Washington’s key regional military ally, Israel.

    But Brics+ won’t just end the US role in dictating global security arrangements. It will gradually loosen Washington’s stranglehold on the global economy, ending the dollar’s dominance as the world reserve currency.

    Brics+ now controls a majority of the world’s energy supplies, and some 37 percent of global GDP, more than the US-led G7. Opportunities to trade in currencies other than the dollar become much easier.

    As Paul Craig Roberts, a former official in Ronald Reagan’s treasury, observed: “Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.”

    In short, a weak dollar is going to make bullying the rest of the world a considerably more difficult prospect.

    The US isn’t likely to go down without a fight. Which is why Ukrainians and Russians are currently dying on the battlefield. And why China and the rest of us have good reason to fear who may be next.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Prioritizing Human Rights in Relations with Saudi Arabia

    The Saudis picked us up from the detention center in Daer and put us in a minibus going back to the Yemen border. When they released us, they created a kind of chaos; they screamed at us to “get out of the car and get away.” … this is when they started to fire mortars – to keep us into the mountain line, they fired the mortar from left and right. When we were one kilometer away, … We were resting together after running a lot…and that’s when they fired mortars on our group. Directly at us. There were 20 in our group and only ten survived. Some of the mortars hit the rocks and then the [fragments of the] rock hit us… They fired on us like rain.

    — Munira, 20 years old

    “Rather than assist people afflicted by droughts, impoverishment and intensifying wars, the United States is acting in its own perceived self-interests and entertaining Saudi demands for even more military power.”

    There’s a refugee trail from the Sahel drought region in Africa, into war-ravaged Yemen, and up through Saudi Arabia towards Iraq and Turkey. It’s known as “the Eastern route,” or sometimes “the Yemeni route.”  The Saudi monarchy, already leading an eight-year starvation and bombardment campaign against Iran-aligned, rebel-governed Yemen, has been massacring Ethiopian (and other African) refugees, allegedly in the thousands, to send a message that drought-stricken Africans should choose to die at home and not risk their lives to die in Yemen. It’s a chilling, cruel message.

    U.S. imperial policies in the region, which have propped up the brutal Saudi monarchy, ensure continued bloodshed, hunger, division and destabilization. These degenerate policies undermine desperately needed collaboration in the face of ecological collapse. Rather than assist people afflicted by droughts, impoverishment and intensifying wars, the United States is acting in its own perceived self-interests and entertaining Saudi demands for even more military power. The purpose of wooing Saudi Arabia with military contracts is, apparently, to head off a further economic integration of Saudi Arabia with China and Russia, global rivals of the United States.

    Sometime during the week of September 3, two U.S. State department representatives will arrive in Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh, to resume negotiations with the Saudi royals. A recent report suggests that the meetings will discuss a NATO-like agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United States, a measure which might then move Saudi Arabia closer toward normalizing relations with Israel. What does Riyadh seek in return? “Riyadh has been seeking a NATO-like mutual security treaty that would obligate the US to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense if the latter is attacked,” according to The Times of Israel. The Saudis also seek to strengthen a US-backed civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia and they want assurance about acquiring more advanced weaponry from U.S. military contractors.

    At the recent summit of the BRICS+ coalition led by U.S. rival, China, Saudi Arabia was announced as a new member to join in January 2024. Earlier this year China had brokered a resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and its (and the U.S.’) chief regional rival, Iran, which has also been invited to join BRICS+ early next year.  The U.S. State Department’s Brett McGurk and Barbara Leaf, in their Riyadh  trip, will be working to counter integration of the oil-rich Saudi nation into a coalition of nations the U.S. fears as threats to U.S. unipolar hegemony. Routinely, the United States condemns China and Russia for human rights abuses,  – abuses paling beside the worst of Saudi Arabia’s.

    Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has bombed, starved, blockaded and tortured Yemeni civilians. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to persecute and execute its own civilians for speaking out about cruel wrongdoings.

    Human Rights Watch, in their 73-page report, “‘They Fired on Us Like Rain’: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border,” alleges that Saudi Arabian border guards have fired machine guns and launched mortars at Ethiopians trying to cross into the kingdom from Yemen, likely killing hundreds of the unarmed migrants in recent years. This widespread and systematic pattern of attacks featured incidents, the report states, when “Saudi border guards asked migrants what limb to shoot, and then shot them at close range. Saudi border guards also fired explosive weapons at migrants who were attempting to flee back to Yemen.” The rights group cited eyewitness reports of attacks by troops and images that showed dead bodies and burial sites on migrant routes, saying the death toll could amount to “possibly thousands”.

    Also of interest to the two U.S. envoys should be a report from the Guardian which says the U.S. and German militaries have trained and equipped Saudi border guards.

    There is a reason for the massive migrant flight from the Sahel into the killing zone that Saudi Arabia, with its international partners, has made of Yemen: The planet is boiling.

    Collaboration is surely needed among all peoples in order to cope with and solve the tragic problems, including horrific human rights abuses, certain to escalate because of intensifying climate catastrophes. But military agreements with Saudi Arabia will increase the readiness of Saudi Arabia to attack weaker countries and persecute its own citizenry. Green lighting development of nuclear technology will exacerbate the environmental assaults caused by war. The United States’ policy of confrontation to beat down economic rivals can only worsen these crises.

    During years when the United States collaborated with and armed dictators, militaries and paramilitaries in Central and South America, several notable leaders demanded an end to the violence. El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, now canonized as a saint, spoke up:

    I would like to appeal in a special way to the men of the army, and in particular to the troops of the National Guard, the police, and the garrisons. Brothers, you belong to our own people. You kill your own brother peasants; and in the face of an order to kill that is given by a man, the law of God that says ‘Do not kill!’ should prevail.

    No soldier is obliged to obey an order counter to the law of God. No one has to comply with an immoral law. It is the time now that you recover your conscience and obey its dictates rather than the command of sin. . . . Therefore, in the name of God, and in the name of this long-suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven every day more tumultuous, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you! In the name of God: ‘Cease the repression!’

    In a sense, he signed his own death warrant when he signed this statement. On March 24, 1980, Romero was assassinated for his courageous words and deeds.

    President Joe Biden would do well to heed this Catholic saint, revise the mandate he gives to diplomats working in Saudi Arabia, and rely on Archbishop Romero’s words: Recover your conscience! Stop the repression, stop the killing.

    Rather than normalize militarism and human rights abuses, the United States should seek, always and everywhere, to salvage the planet and respect human rights.

    The Bombing of a Neighborhood in Yemen, December 28, 2017 (Photo Credit:  Aida Fallace)

    • This article first appeared in The Progressive

  • The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973

    In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the 11 September coup against Chile’s Popular Unity government, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Instituto de Ciencias Alejandro Lipschutz Centro de Pensamiento e Investigación Social y Política release a new dossier analysing the coup and its effects on the Third World and non-aligned countries.

    On 11 September 1973, reactionary sections of the Chilean army, led by General Augusto Pinochet, left the barracks and overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity coalition. The military and other security forces began an assault on the organised sectors of society, making mass arrests and setting in place a regime of repression. The socialist programmes and policies of the Popular Unity government were dismantled. Chile entered a phase of twilight, a laboratory for neoliberalism.

    Why did the soldiers leave the barracks on the morning of 11 September? Arguments made by General Pinochet and those around him about law and order have no basis in fact. The truth is that the coup – conceived, prepared, and executed by the US, as numerous declassified documents show – did not take place merely on that day in 1973.

    It was the Allende government’s policies to nationalise copper that spurred the coup. But the policy to nationalise copper – which was approved in Congress in July 1971 – was part of a broader conversation in the Third World to create a New International Economic Order that would restructure the neocolonial international economic system along democratic lines and give weight to the ideas and peoples of the Third World.

    The coup against Allende’s government took place not only against its own policy of the nationalisation of copper, but also because Allende had offered leadership and an example to other developing countries that sought to implement the NIEO principles. In that sense, the US-driven coup against Chile was precisely a coup against the Third World.

    • See:  Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s dossier no. 68, The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Educating the US Imperium: Australia’s Mission for Assange

    An odder political bunch you could not find, at least when it comes to pursuing a single goal.  Given that the goal is the release of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange makes it all the more striking.  Six Australian parliamentarians of various stripes will be heading to Washington ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s October visit to test the ground of empire, maybe even plant a few seeds of doubt, about why the indictment against their countryman should be dropped.

    That indictment, an outrageous, piffling shambles of a document comprising 18 charges, 17 based on that nasty, brutish statute, the Espionage Act of 1917, risks earning Assange a prison sentence in the order of 175 years.  But in any instrumental sense, his incarceration remains ongoing, with the United Kingdom currently acting as prison warden and custodian.

    In the politics of his homeland, the icy polarisation that came with Assange’s initial publishing exploits (former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was convinced Cablegate was a crime) has shifted to something almost amounting to a consensus.  The cynic will say that votes are in the offing, if not at risk if nothing is done; the principled will argue that enlightenment has finally dawned.

    The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, agree on almost nothing else but the fact that Assange has suffered enough.  In Parliament, the tireless work of the independent MP from Tasmania, Andrew Wilkie, has bloomed into the garrulous Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group.

    The Washington mission, which will arrive in the US on September 20, comprises former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, the scattergun former Nationals leader, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Greens Senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson, Liberal Senator Alex Antic and the competent independent member for Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan.

    What will be said will hardly be pleasing to the ears of the Washington establishment.  Senator Shoebridge, for instance, promises to make the case that Assange was merely telling the truth about US war crimes, hardly music for guardians from Freedom’s Land.  Sounding like an impassioned pastor, he will tell his unsuspecting flock “the truth about this prosecution”.

    Joyce, however, tried to pour some oil over troubled waters by insisting on ABC News that the delegates were not there “to pick a fight”.  He did not necessarily want to give the impression that his views aligned with WikiLeaks.  The principles, soundly, were that Assange had not committed any of the alleged offences as a US national, let alone in the United States itself.  The material Assange had published had not been appropriated by himself. He had received it from Chelsea Manning, a US military source, “who is now walking the streets as a free person”.

    To pursue the indictment to its logical conclusion would mean that Assange, or any journalist for that matter, could be extradited to the US from, say, Australia, for the activities in question.  This extraterritorial eccentricity set a “very, very bad precedent”, and it was a “duty” to defend his status as an Australian citizen.

    The Nationals MP also noted, rather saliently, that Beijing was currently interested in pursuing four Chinese nationals on Australian soil for a number of alleged offences that did not, necessarily, have a nexus to Chinese territory.  Should Australia now extradite them as a matter of course?  (The same observation has been made by an adviser to the Assange campaign, Greg Barns SC: “You’ve got China using the Assange case as a sort of moral equivalence argument.”)

    Broadly speaking, the delegation is hoping to draw attention to the nature of publishing itself and the risks posed to free speech and the journalistic craft by the indictment.  But there is another catch.  In Shoebridge’s words, the delegates will also remind US lawmakers “that one of their closest allies sees the treatment of Julian Assange as a key indicator on the health of the bilateral relationship.”

    Ryan expressed much the same view.  “Australia is an excellent friend of the US and it’s not unreasonable to request to ask the US to cease this extradition attempt on Mr Assange.”  The WikiLeaks founder was “a journalist; he should not be prosecuted for crimes against journalism.”

    While these efforts are laudable, they are also revealing.  The first is that the clout of the Albanese government in Washington, on this point, has been minimal.  Meekly, the government awaits the legal process in the UK to exhaust itself, possibly leading to a plea deal with all its attendant dangers to Assange.  (The recent floating of that idea, based on remarks made by US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, was scotched by former British diplomat and Assange confidante Craig Murray in an interview with WBAI radio last week.)  Best, then, to leave it to a diverse set of politicians representative of the “Australian voice” to convey the message across the pond.

    Then there is the issue of whether the delegation’s urgings will have any purchase beyond being a performing flea act.  US State Department officials remain glacial in their dismissal of Canberra’s “enough is enough” concerns and defer matters to the US Department of Justice.  The unimpressive ambassador Kennedy has been the perfect barometer of this sentiment: host Australian MPs for lunch, keep up appearances, listen politely and ignore their views.  Such is the relationship between lord and vassal.

    In Washington, the perspective remains ossified, retributive and wrongheaded.  Assange is myth and monster, the hacker who pilfered state secrets and compromised US national security; the man who revealed confidential sources and endangered informants; a propagandist who harmed the sweet sombre warriors of freedom by encouraging a new army of whistleblowers and transparency advocates.

    Whatever the outcome from this trip, some stirring of hope is at least possible.  The recent political movement down under shows that Assange is increasingly being seen less in the narrow context of personality than high principle.  Forget whether you know the man, his habits, his inclinations.  Remember him as the principle, or even a set of principles: the publisher who, with audacity, exposed the crimes and misdeeds of power; that, in doing so, he is now being hounded and persecuted in a way that will chill global efforts to do something similar.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Niger Military Coup: More than Meets the Eye

    There were several military coups in West Africa lately. Mostly in former French colonies, and in many ways “neo-colonies” of France, that do arguably more harm to the Sahel countries than the more than 300 years of French “on-the-ground” colonies, or enslavement. Though, this latter crime is not to be discarded at all. It has been an across-Africa genocide of unimaginable proportions, that, so far went unpunished.

    But the new crime, the financial and military strategic econo-political colonization, needs to be brought to the fore now.

    Among the coup countries are Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, but also Nigeria – a former British colony.

    Of all these “coups”, Niger gets by far the most attention, and seems to be at the center of the controversy.

    At the outset it looked like the military staged a coup to get the France-friendly President Mohamed Bazoum, out of the way and to move away from the French monetary hegemony, the Franc CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine, or African Financial Community). See also this pm+

    On second thought, however, another image emerged, especially after Madame Victoria Nuland’s, US Deputy Secretary of State, personal visit to Niamey, Niger, where she was purportedly denied access to the deposed President, and was apparently snubbed by the new military leader, General Abdourahmane Tchiani.

    The latter is not very plausible, but is once more a “media coup” against the truth. Ever more evidence emerges that Niger’s coup was supported by the US. Washington has three military bases in Niger and at least between 3,000 and 4,000 military personnel stationed in Niger.

    One of the US bases is a strategically important drone base, in the Agadez region, known as Niger Air Base 201. Following its permanent base in Djibouti, Niger Air Base 201 stands as the second-largest US base in Africa.

    France still has at least 1,500 military stationed in Niger. This, even though French President Macron had promised to withdraw them, as soon as General Tchiani “requested” him to do so. Everything must be questioned now. Did Tchiani really request a withdrawal of French troops?

    What appears (almost) sure is that the US were supporting the military coup, if not helping General Tchiani – who served as the chief of the Nigerien presidential guard (2011-2023) – to the military take-over. See also this important analysis by Professor Chossudovsky.

    What’s at stake?

    The deposed President Mohamed Bazoum had Macron’s support, not only because he allowed France’s shameless exploitation of Niger through the CFA Franc (for more details see here), but also because France exploits Niger’s rich uranium and high-purity petrol – and has access to Niger’s other mineral riches.

    Besides, and maybe most importantly, Niger is a landlocked Sahel country, strategically located in the center of North Africa, between Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, Chad and Libya (see Google map, left).

    Being in control of Niger is, in a way, like being in control of Kosovo, the US engineered cut-out piece of land from Serbia, in the middle of former Yugoslavia, bombed to rubble by President Clinton, to divide and conquer – conquer the area.

    That is what Niger may become if the US has its say. Washington does not want France involved anymore. Being in control of Niger is like being in control of at least northern West Africa, a resources-rich, but an extreme poverty-stricken territory – which Washington suspects may also interest Russia and possibly China.

    It is not a well-kept secret that the private Russian Wagner army has had a foothold in this part of Africa of several thousand mercenaries for at least a couple of years, maybe longer – in Chad, Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, and maybe even Nigeria.

    Now the plot – a purely speculative plot – goes even further. The leader of the Wagner private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was supposedly killed in a plane crash last Wednesday, on 23 August 2023, between Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, rumors go that he may not have been on the same plane with all his other military brass, a custom he had followed in the past. Therefore he may have escaped the crash.

    Rumors say he had been seen after the plane “accident”, in the Central African Republic, where he has his African headquarters, and where he is a hero.

    He had been “killed” before and reappeared. So, who knows, this may be his final death. But there is apparently a super-modern clinic with three German plastic surgeons, near his Central African headquarters.

    A Russian mercenary army in North Africa that may still be fighting for Russia would be most uncomfortable for Madame Nuland and her hegemonic ilk in Washington.

    What to do about it? – An immediate question posed by Washington.

    The US attempt is to make sure that Niger, the country of strategy, a member of the US / NATO France supported ECOWAS, will not slip out into liberty from “independence” some 60 years ago.

    Shortly after the Niger military coup, Mr. Putin has cautioned not to interfere in Niger’s internal affairs. He was referring precisely to ECOWAS which has “warned” of an ECOWAS military intervention, if the French aligned deposed President Bazoum, would not be returned immediately to the Presidency. In hindsight, and knowing what we know now, the ECOWAS warning too, was a media manufactured untruth by “design”.

    ECOWAS is The Economic Community of West African States. It is one of 8 African regional political and economic unions. ECOWAS has 15 member countries located in Central and West Africa. But ECOWAS is divided within. Without the support of the US / NATO and France, it may fall apart. Therefore, a warning from ECOWAS has only meaning when an “arrangement” has been reached before.

    Niger’s main party, represented by General Tchiani, the Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP), roughly translated as “National Movement for the Defense of the Homeland”, has had Pentagon support, including military training, since its creation.

    This means the US is well-established within Niger, and by association within central and West Africa – and they do not want to lose out on this highly strategic – and resources-rich – African position; not to the French, not to the Russians – and not to China.

    But, then there is still the unconfirmed suspicion of a mercenary army roaming through Western Africa – and who knows – just in case – what their plans might be, and for whom they might fight.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Whitewashing Down Under: The Vietnam War Fifty Years On

    The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it.  It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious.  And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching.  Five decades on, the political classes in the United States and Australia are still seeking to find reasons for intervening in a country they scant understood, with a fanatic’s persuasion, and ideologue’s conviction, a moralist’s certainty.  Old errors die hard.

    Leaders are left the legacy of having to re-scent the candle, hoping that no one notices the malodorous stench left by history.  Errors can be ignored in the aromatic haze.  Broadcasters and producers of celluloid scutter about to provide softening programs explaining why soldiers who had no valid reason fighting a conflict, could find themselves in it.  The ABC in Australia, for instance, released their series called Our Vietnam War, narrated by Kate Mulvany, whose bridge to the war was via her father.  The very title is personal, exclusive, and seemingly excludes the Vietnamese who found themselves pawns, rebels, collaborators and insurgents.

    The production also received the approval of the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs.  “The series provides a unique opportunity for viewers to gain insights into the personal stories of veterans and the broader impact of conflict on Australia’s history and identity.”

    The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has made 2023 a calendar year for reminding Australians about the Vietnam experience, albeit in a most slanted way.  On March 29, he acknowledged veterans visiting Canberra in an address to parliament.  The words “courage”, “sacrifice” and “bonds of camaraderie forged under fire, and cruel realities of loss”, were noted.  Adversaries are not mentioned, nor was, curiously enough, opposition to the war that was expressed at the time from a number of brave Labor Party stalwarts, Arthur Calwell being foremost among them.

    The speech continued in a more plangent tone.  “Let us stand in this place, in this Parliament, and speak – loudly and clearly – about those who were sent to war in our name, who did their duty in our name, but whose names we did not hold up as proudly as we should have.”

    On Vietnam Veterans’ Day (August 18), Albanese gave another speech, this time in Ipswich, Queensland, where he again apologised to the veterans.  “We should have acknowledged you better as a nation then. But the truth is, as a nation we didn’t.”  The platitudes are piled up, and merely serve to blunt the nature of Australia’s involvement in a brutal, rapacious conflict.  “You upheld Australia’s name.  You showed the Australian character at its finest.”

    This distraction serves to cover the tracks of those who erred and bungled, not merely in committing the troops, but in ignoring the consequences of that deployment.  The mistreatment dished out to the returnees was as much a product of civilian protest as it was a conscious effort on the part of veterans from previous conflicts to ignore it.  It was a war never formally declared, conducted in conditions of gross deception.

    A half-century on, it is striking to see the apologetics gather at the podium.  The New South Wales branch of the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL), for instance, went out of its way to issue one for the way thousands of defence personnel were treated in the aftermath of the conflict. “RSL NSW acknowledges a generation of veterans who are still healing and we publicly recognise our charity’s past mistakes this Vietnam Veterans Day,” came the statement the organisation’s president Ray James.

    In the making of war, those behind the policies for waging it tend to escape culpability.  The Australians in this affair were, to put it politely, compliant, featherbrained creatures upset by the Yellow Peril north of Papua New Guinea and easily won over through invocations of the “Red Under the Bed”.

    Canberra went out of its way to send material and aid to South Vietnam not merely to fight Asiatic atheists of a red hue, but to impress their increasingly bogged-down US allies.  To aid the enterprise, the Menzies government introduced national service conscription in November 1964, a policy that became the source of much parliamentary acrimony, notably from the Labor Party.

    In July 1966, on an official visit to Washington, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt emetically appropriated the Democratic Party’s own campaign slogan by declaring that Australia was “All the way with LBJ”.  At the National Press Gallery that same month, Holt declared that, “When it comes to American participation and resolution to see the war in south Vietnam through, Australia is undoubtedly all the way”.  Spinelessness and crawling in a military alliance became political virtues, or what Albanese might like to call “values”.

    Australia’s commitment was marred by problems of strategic worth, something which officials were well aware of as early as April 1967.  As a government paper titled “Australia’s military commitment to Vietnam” documents, requests for a larger Australian commitment by US military sources in Saigon and Washington were made despite the open-ended nature of the conflict.  The planners lacked certitude on basic objectives, not least on the issue of victory itself.  The views of US Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara, as expressed in meetings with his Australian counterparts, are expressly mentioned in all their obliqueness.  The secretary “had no doubt that America could no longer lose the war, but they still had the problem of winning and that could be long and hard and there was no easy way which could point directly to victory.”

    Add to this the fantastic delusion that the Vietnamese communist movement was a Peking-directed affair rather than an indigenous movement keen to remove foreign influence, and we have a conflict not merely futile on the part of Canberra and Washington, but wasteful and criminal.  Fifty years later, and officials from both countries have the chance to make another round of potentially graver, more calamitous decisions.

  • The People of Niger Want to Shatter Resignation

    Leslie Amine (Benin), Swamp, 2022

    In 1958, the poet and trade union leader Abdoulaye Mamani of Zinder (Niger) won an election in his home region against Hamani Diori, one of the founders of the Nigerien Progressive Party. This election result posed a problem for French colonial authorities, who wanted Diori to lead the new Niger. Mamani stood as a candidate for Niger’s left-wing Sawaba party, which was one of the leading forces in the independence movement against France. Sawaba was the party of the talakawa, the ‘commoners’, or the petit peuple (‘little folk’), the party of peasants and workers who wanted Niger to realise their hopes. The word ‘sawaba’ is related to the Hausa word ‘sawki’, meaning to be relieved or to be delivered from misery.

    The election result was ultimately annulled, and Mamani decided not to run again because he knew that the die was cast against him. Diori won the re-election and became Niger’s first president in 1960.

    Sawaba was banned by authorities in 1959, and Mamani went into exile in Ghana, Mali, and then Algeria. ‘Let us shatter resignation’, he wrote in his poem Espoir (‘Hope’). Mamani came home following Niger’s return to democracy in 1991. In 1993, Niger held its first multi-party election since 1960. The recently re-founded Sawaba won only two seats. That same year, Mamani died in a car accident. The hope of a generation that wanted to break free from France’s neocolonial grip on the country is expressed in Mamani’s stunning line let us shatter resignation.

    Yancouba Badji (Niger), Départ pour la route clandestine d’Agadez (Niger) vers la Libye (‘Departure for the Clandestine Route From Agadez (Niger) to Libya’), n.d.

    Niger is at the centre of Africa’s Sahel, the region at the south of the Sahara Desert. Most countries of the Sahel had been under French rule for almost a century before they emerged from direct colonialism in 1960, only to slip into a neocolonial structure that largely remains in place today. Around the time when Mamani returned home from Algeria, Alpha Oumar Konaré, a Marxist and former student leader, won the presidency in Mali. Like Niger, Mali was burdened with criminal debt ($3 billion), much of it driven up during military rule. Sixty percent of Mali’s fiscal receipts went toward debt servicing, meaning that Konaré had no chance to build an alternative agenda. When Konaré asked the United States to help Mali with this permanent debt crisis, George Moose, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs during President Bill Clinton’s administration, replied by saying ‘virtue is its own reward’. In other words, Mali had to pay the debt. Konaré left office in 2002 bewildered. The entire Sahel was submerged in unpayable debt while multinational corporations reaped profits from its precious raw materials.

    Each time the people of the Sahel rise, they have been struck down. This was the fate of Mali’s President Modibo Keïta, overthrown and jailed until his death in 1977, and the great president of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara, assassinated in 1987. It is the sentence that has been levied against the people of the entire region. Now, Niger is once again moving in a direction that France and other Western countries do not like. They want neighbouring African countries to send in their militaries to bring ‘order’ to Niger. To explain what is happening in Niger and across the Sahel region, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International Peoples’ Assembly present red alert no. 17, No Military Intervention against Niger, which makes up the remainder of this newsletter and can be downloaded here.

    Why is there an increase in anti-French and anti-Western feeling in the Sahel?

    From the mid-nineteenth century, French colonialism has galloped across North, West, and Central Africa. By 1960, France controlled almost five million square kilometres (eight times the size of France itself) in West Africa alone. Though national liberation movements from Senegal to Chad won independence from France that year, the French government maintained financial and monetary control through the African Financial Community or CFA (formerly the colonial French Community of Africa), maintaining the French CFA franc currency in the former West African colonies and forcing the newly independent countries to keep at least half of their foreign exchange reserves in the Banque de France. Sovereignty was not only restricted by these monetary chains: when new projects emerged in the area, they were met by French intervention (spectacularly with the assassination of Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara in 1987). France maintained the neocolonial structures that have allowed French companies to leech the natural resources of the region (such as the uranium from Niger, which powers a third of French light bulbs) and have forced these countries to crush their hopes through an International Monetary Fund-driven debt-austerity agenda.

    The simmering resentment against France escalated after the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) destroyed Libya in 2011 and exported instability across Africa’s Sahel region. A combination of secessionist groups, trans-Saharan smugglers, and al-Qaeda offshoots joined together and marched south of the Sahara to capture nearly two-thirds of Mali, large parts of Burkina Faso, and sections of Niger. French military intervention in the Sahel through Operation Barkhane (2013) and through the creation of the neocolonial G-5 Sahel Project led to an increase in violence by French troops, including against civilians. The IMF debt-austerity project, the Western wars in West Asia, and the destruction of Libya led to a rise in migration across the region. Rather than tackle the roots of the migration, Europe tried to build its southern border in the Sahel through military and foreign policy measures, including by exporting illegal surveillance technologies to the neocolonial governments in this belt of Africa. The cry ‘La France, dégage!’ (‘France, get out!’) defines the attitude of mass unrest in the region against the neocolonial structures that try to strangle the Sahel.

    Wilfried Balima (Burkina Faso), Les trois camarades (‘The Three Comrades’), 2018

    Why are there so many coups in the Sahel?

    Over the course of the past thirty years, politics in the Sahel countries have seriously desiccated. Many parties with a history that traces back to the national liberation movements and even the socialist movements (such as Niger’s Parti Nigérien pour la Démocratie et le Socialisme-Tarayya) have collapsed into being representatives of their elites, who, in turn, are conduits of a Western agenda. The entry of the al-Qaeda-smuggler forces gave the local elites and the West the justification to further squeeze the political environment, reducing already limited trade union freedoms and excising the left from the ranks of established political parties. The issue is not so much that the leaders of the mainstream political parties are ardently right-wing or centre-right, but that whatever their orientation, they have no real independence from the will of Paris and Washington. They have become – to use a word often voiced on the ground – ‘stooges’ of the West.

    Absent any reliable political or democratic instruments, the discarded rural and petty-bourgeois sections of the Sahel countries turn to their urbanised children in the armed forces for leadership. People like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré (born in 1988), who was raised in the rural province of Mouhoun and studied geology in Ouagadougou, and Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goïta (born in 1983), who comes from the cattle market town and military redoubt of Kati, represent these broad class fractions. Their communities have been utterly marginalised by the hard austerity programmes of the IMF, the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded with no real political platform to speak for them, large sections of the country have rallied behind the patriotic intentions of these young military men, who have themselves been pushed by mass movements – such as trade unions and peasant organisations – in their countries. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from the capital city of Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. These young leaders do not come to power with a well-worked agenda. However, they have a level of admiration for people like Thomas Sankara: Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, for instance, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction.

    Pathy Tshindele (Democratic Republic of Congo), Sans Titre (‘Untitled’) from the series Power, 2016

    Will there be a pro-Western military intervention to remove the government of Niger?

    Condemnations of the coup in Niger came quickly from the West (particularly France). The new government of Niger, led by a civilian (former finance minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine), told French troops to leave the country and decided to cut uranium exports to France. Neither France nor the United States – which has built the largest drone base in the world in Agadez (Niger) – are keen to directly intervene with their own military forces. In 2021, France and the United States protected their private companies, TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, in Mozambique by asking the Rwandan army to intervene militarily. In Niger, the West first wanted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to invade on their behalf, but mass unrest in the ECOWAS member states, including condemnations from trade unions and people’s organisations, stayed the hands of the regional organisation’s ‘peacekeeping forces’. On 19 August of this year, ECOWAS sent a delegation to meet with Niger’s deposed president and with the new government. It has kept its troops on stand-by, warning that it has chosen an undisclosed ‘D-day’ for a military intervention.

    The African Union, which had initially condemned the coup and suspended Niger from all union activity, recently stated that a military intervention should not take place. This statement has not stopped rumours from flying about, such as that Ghana might send its troops into Niger (despite the Presbyterian Church of Ghana’s warning not to intervene and the trade unions’ condemnation of a potential invasion). Neighbouring countries have closed their borders with Niger.

    Meanwhile, the governments of Burkina Faso and Mali, which have sent troops to Niger, have said that any military intervention against the government of Niger will be taken as an invasion of their own countries. There is a serious conversation afoot about the creation of a new federation in the Sahel that includes Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger, which have a combined population of over 85 million. Rumblings amongst the populations from Senegal to Chad suggest that these might not be the last coups in this important belt of the African continent. The growth of platforms such as the West African Peoples Organisation is key to the political advancement in the region.

    Seynihimap (Niger), Untitled, 2006

    On 11 August, Philippe Toyo Noudjènoumè, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Benin, wrote a letter to the president of his country and asked a precise and simple question: whose interests have driven Benin to go to war with Niger to starve its ‘sister’ population? ‘You want to commit the people of Benin to go suffocate the people of Niger for the strategic interests of France’, he continued; ‘I demand that… you refuse to involve our country in any aggressive operation against the sister population of Niger… [and] listen to the voice of our people… for peace, harmony, and the development of the African people’. This is the mood in the region: a boldness to confront the neocolonial structures that have prevented hope. The people want to shatter resignation.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Criminal Insanity of Climate Change

    Climate change – climate change – climate change – the world is burning. The Global North with the CO2 emission is the culprit. Weather maps in Southern Europe and Australia are deep red. Add an invented degree or two, and they are going to be black.

    News are talking about 48 to 50 and more degrees C in Spain, Southern Italy, Sicily, Greece. Scary. Hardly anybody notices and reports that the temperatures are largely exaggerated by the media, to cause a fear and guilt effect. Possibly a precursor to heat-lockdowns.

    Meteorologists are part of the lie-game. Often, for fear and shock effect, they are reporting ground temperatures instead of air temperatures which are usually measured 2 meters above the ground and are typically 10 or more degrees C lower than ground temps.

    It is like MK-Ultra has been socialized: When people see the deep-red-colored weather map and are being told that temperatures are at record heights, in the upper forties into the fifties, they feel the burning heat, they feel it is much hotter than other years, when, in fact, it is not.

    This is the map that climate researchers themselves use.

    TEMPERATURE DEVIATIONS FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 relative to the temperature normal, the average for the years 1991–2020. In this map, which uses a clearly indicated and color-coded temperature scale that the scientists themselves use, the temperature deviations we reported about over the last few months from North and South America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, with hard-hit Mongolia, India, and Australia, are confirmed. This is despite the fact that critics argue it consistently shows higher temperatures due to non-representative and then tampered with measurement data. Source and map: NOAA

    This is a list of heatwaves going back 500 years, demonstrating that worldwide temps vary widely and that there were much “hotter” years even in the past 20 to 30 years, than 2023. See this.

    Since 2020, with the onset of the infamous UN Agenda 2030, the news and fake news about the heat, the man-made CO2-provoked “climate-change” reaches new heights. To press that point, forest fires are not just made by paid arsonists, but by military grade Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) and other means of Environmental Modifications (ENMOD) technologies.

    It is called geoengineering – and what we are witnessing today, in the last three years and even way before, is an outright war with highly sophisticated weaponized laser-directed electromagnetic energy. The energy is so strong, it blows up entire buildings on impact, with towers of flames, but it spares trees, blows up and burns cars, but not tires – and also boats on the sea, far from burning forests.

    This is how the beautiful Hawaiian island, Maui, and her major city Lahaina was destroyed. For more on this – see further down.

    Directed Energy Weapons are defined as electromagnetic systems capable of converting chemical or electrical energy to radiated energy, then these energies are fired by laser beams with the speed of light on specific targets. DEWs can produce forces that range from deterrent, to damaging, to destructive.

    In parallel with these horrendous heat waves come typhoons, hurricanes and tsunami-like floodings around the world, especially but not exclusively, in the northern hemisphere. Most of them are also the result of geoengineering. Scandinavia was hit by deluge-like rains, causing floods throughout Norway and Denmark.

    Extreme floodings were also experienced in Japan and northeastern China. Beijing registered almost simultaneously record heat waves, closely followed by extreme typhoon-caused torrential rains and consequential flooding. Natural? You bet.

    Just a thought: The self-styled masters of the universe think linear. That is what their minds have been trained for. What if these weather and climate modifications they now carry out on specific – always more diverse – targets, develop their own dynamic, since they are not linear, but, yes, dynamic – and have long-lasting effects much different from those intended by the Globalist Cult? – Just saying.

    Now while everybody screams “climate-change, climate-change, climate-change”, always referring to man-made CO2 emissions, on July 6, 2023, the Aviation Tracking System, “Flightradar 24”, registered a record number ever of civilian airplanes in the air – some 134,384 airplanes. This does not include military airplanes and other non-civilian flights.

    See this.

    Have you noticed, airlines put on your ticket or your flight reservation how many kilograms of CO2 your flight produces – and so far, mostly on a voluntary basis they suggest you pay for the global warming or climate change “damage” you cause. Nobody has been able to provide a clear answer what happens with this money.

    Maybe the money helps compensating for the airlines’ losses during the covid hoax, or it flows into budgets of governments. The same way traffic fines do. Speeding infractions are not reduced by the fines, nor are the numbers of civilian flights reduced by the CO2-emission charge.

    Have you noticed, the media must have a restraining order not to speak about military CO2 emission, let alone war-emissions. Just imagine, CO2 emissions of the Ukraine war and other armed conflicts around the globe, dwarfs all civilian car and industrial CO2 emissions worldwide. But nobody talks about it. Very strange.

    Back to DEWs and other ENMOD technologies. This science has been developed since the 1940s and in the last 80 years has become highly sophisticated, resulting in a myriad of technologies, capable of causing unspeakable damage, destroying infrastructure, housing, forests – and lives of all sentient beings, including animals and humans.

    These technologies are very diverse and range from DEW, to the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, a US Airforce program, as well as Scalar electromagnetic wave weaponry, similar to DEW – and more.

    There is a vast literature on the subject but virtually no media coverage.

    HAARP array of antennas. Gakona, Alaska

    It is worth noting that the HAARP program was acknowledged by a CBC Program as early as 1996

    Video HAARP CBC. Weather Control

    Why Is It So Massively Used?

    People are spellbound – have no idea what is going on and why. They cannot understand that such all-destructive and killing disasters are actually man-made, by technologies intent of simulating “climate change”. These people, the Globalist Cabal, who have sold their soul to the devil cannot be called humans anymore.

    Maybe part of the answer provides the case of Australia – which is committed to the UN Agenda 2030. It supports the implementation of radical changes in the central role of land ownership and natural resources over the next decade.

    In this context, Aussi authorities are developing a series of smart city initiatives, promising locations full of “sustainable” programs.

    Could it be that the current forest fires across Australia – and across the world for that matter – are part of this plan? What is the hidden agenda? The link below provides more details of Australia’s bushfire ‘crisis’, including weather / climate geoengineering, the proposed CLARA high-speed rail network and the connection to the smart city agenda led by the fully compromised United Nations. See this and this: Australia under Fire – Environmental Warfare and the Climate Change Deception.

    See also this by Jeff Philips and this.

    A similar question, why and how is Lahaina of Maui and much of this paradisical Hawaiian island destroyed, with so far officially close to 100 deaths – and thousand missing?  The unofficial but closer-to-the-truth figure, is up to thousand and more deaths. And the devastation and the count goes on.

    The rumor mill about the destruction of Maui is diverse. One of the more consistent gossips has it that the Lahaina and Maui fires are meant to depopulate Maui and pave the way for a buyout of all property owners – for a penny on the dollar – by the multi-multi billionaires. It is living in paradise when the shit storm hits.

    Here are terrifying images on how “paradise” became hell and this.

    Maui, a paradise island, might be bought for pennies on the dollar… privatized paradise for the powerful financial interests.

    And for more on Maui you may also want to see this (video of more than an hour).

    Apparently some 90% of the people of Maui know what is going on, that it has nothing to do with the climate change hoax, but was a direct assault on their paradise island. See this.

    Who are actors behind the DEW attacks? Were the US and State governments involved?

    There are several, speculative answers, but they are food for reflection for those who are somewhat familiar with UN Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset — and with Klaus Schwab’s (WEF) dream of the all digitized Fourth Industrial Revolution.

    The government of Hawaii states as goal of the destruction is the rebuilding to make the entire island of Maui the first Smart Island. They want the entire island governed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), as outlined in the Hawaii Digital government summit of 2023 that they have planned to host on September 25, 2023 on Maui.

    Plans to Implement a Digital AI Government over Hawaii

    See this and this and this, Maui Island of Hawaii, a case study.

    Dr. Rosalie Bertell, author of Planet Earth: Latest Weapon of War, says:

    While the earth’s human civic community has been trying to rid itself of nuclear weapons over the last 65 years, some economically developed nations have quietly moved into the realm of geo-warfare. Geo-weaponry has recently been introduced to the public as a ‘new’ high tech way to mitigate the effects of ‘global warming’, and it is being called ‘geo-engineering’…defined as planetary-scale environmental engineering of our atmosphere: that is, manipulating our weather, our oceans, and our home planet itself.

    What is planned now are climate and weather wars, wars in which earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and droughts, hurricanes and monsoon rains will play a role. (See this.)

    Does this make living today on Mother Earth scarier? Is it fear-mongering for pushing the Agenda 2030? – or is it real?

    In any case, Do Not Fear, But Stand UP – as We, the People, against this unhuman atrocity, in unison and solidarity and in a mind of PEACE – not anger, not aggression, but PEACE. This is the only way we can defeat the drive to the abyss – and start afresh. But the time is NOW.

    • First published in Global Research

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Oppenheimer Imperative: Normalising Atomic Terror

    The atomic bomb created the conditions of contingent catastrophe, forever placing the world on the precipice of existential doom.  But in doing so, it created a philosophy of acceptable cruelty, worthy extinction, legitimate extermination.  The scenarios for such programs of existential realisation proved endless.  Entire departments, schools of thought, and think tanks were dedicated to the absurdly criminal notion that atomic warfare could be tenable for the mere reason that someone (or some people) might survive.  Despite the relentless march of civil society against nuclear weapons, such insidious thinking persists with a certain obstinate lunacy.

    It only takes a brief sojourn into the previous literature of the nuke nutters to realise how appealing such thinking has proven to be.  But it had its challenges.  John Hersey proved threatening with his 1946 New Yorker spectacular “Hiroshima”, vivifying the horrors arising from the atomic bombing of the Japanese city through the eyes of a number of survivors.  In February 1947, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson shot a countering proposition in Harper’s, thereby attempting to normalise a spectacularly vicious weapon in terms of necessity and function; the use of the bombs against Japan saved lives, as any invasion would have cost “over a million casualties, to American forces alone.”  The Allies, he surmised, “would be faced with the enormous task of destroying an armed force of five million men and five thousand suicide aircraft, belonging to a race which had already amply demonstrated its ability to fight literally to the death.”

    Inadvertent as it was, the Stimson rationale for justifying theatrical never-to-be-repeated mass murder to prevent mass murder fell into the bloodstream of popular strategic thinking.  Albert Wohlstetter’s The Delicate Balance of Terror chews over the grim details of acceptable extermination, wondering about the meaning of extinction and whether the word means what it’s meant to, notably in the context of nuclear war.  “Would not a general thermonuclear war mean ‘extinction; for the aggressor as well as the defender?  ‘Extinction’ is a state that badly needs analysis.”  Wohlstetter goes on to make a false comparison, citing 20 million Soviet deaths in non-atomic conflict during the Second World War as an example of astonishing resilience: the country, in short, recovered “extremely well from the catastrophe.”

    Resilience becomes part of the semantics of contemplated, and acceptable mass homicide.  Emphasis is placed on the bounce-back factor, the ability to recover, even in the face of such weapons.  These were themes that continued to feature.  The 1958 report of the National Security Council’s Net Evaluation Subcommittee pondered what might arise from a Soviet attack in 1961 involving 553 nuclear weapons with a total yield exceeding 2,000 megatons.  The conclusion: 50 million Americans would perish in the conflagration, with nine million left sick or injured.  The Sino-Soviet bloc would duly receive retaliatory attacks that would kill 71 million people.  A month later, a further 196 million would die.  In such macabre calculations, the authors of the report could still breezily conclude that “[t]he balance of strength would be on the side of the United States.”

    Modern nuclear strategy, in terms of such normalised, clinical lunacy, continues to find form in the tolerance of tactical weapons and modernised arsenals.  To be tactical is to be somehow bijou, cute, and contained, accepting mass murder under the guise of moderation and variation.  One can be bad, but bad within limits.  Such lethal wonders are described, according to a number of views assembled in The New York Times, as “much less destructive” in nature, with “variable explosive yields that could be dialed up or down depending on the military situation.”

    The journal Nature prefers a grimmer assessment, suggesting the ultimate calamity of firestorms, excessive soot in the atmosphere, disruption of food production systems, the contamination of soil and water supplies, nuclear winter, and broader climatic catastrophe.

    Some of these views are teasingly touched on in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a three-hour cross narrative jumble boisterously expansive and noisy (the music refuses to leave you alone, bruising the senses).  While the idea of harnessing an exceptional, exterminating power haunts the scientific community, the Manhattan Project is ultimately functional: developing the atom for military purposes before Hitler does.  Once developed, the German side of the equation becomes irrelevant.  The urgent quest for creating the atomic weapon becomes the basis for using it.  Once left to politics and military strategy, such weapons are normalised, even relativised as simply other instruments in inflicting destruction.  Oppenheimer leaves much room to that lunatic creed, though somehow grants the chief scientist moral absolution.

    This is a tough proposition, given Oppenheimer’s membership of the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee that would, eventually, convince President Harry Truman to use the bombs.  In their June 16, 1945 recommendations, Oppenheimer, along with Enrico Fermi, Arthur H. Compton and Ernest O. Lawrence, acknowledged dissenting scientific opinions preferring “a purely technical demonstration to that of a purely military application best designed to induce surrender.”  The scientific panel proved unequivocal: it could “propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”

    In the film, those showing preference for a purely technical demonstration are given the briefest of airings.  Leo Szilard’s petition arguing against a military use “at least not until the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender” makes a short and sharp appearance, only to vanish.  As Seiji Yamada writes, that petition led a short, charmed life, first circulated in the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, only to make its way to Edward Teller at Los Alamos, who then turned it over to Oppenheimer.  The petition was, in turn, surrendered to the Manhattan Project’s chief overseer, General Leslie Groves, who “stamped it ‘classified’ and put it in a safe.  It therefore never reached Truman.”

    Nolan depicts the relativisation argument in some detail – one that justifies mass death in the name of technical prowess – during an interrogation by US circuit judge Roger Robb, appointed as special counsel during the 1954 security hearing against Oppenheimer.  In the relevant scene, Robb wishes to trap the hapless scientist for his opposition to creating a weapon of even greater murderous power than the fission devices used against Japan.  Why oppose the thermonuclear option, prods the special counsel, given your support for the atomic one?  And why did he not oppose the remorseless firebombing raids of Tokyo, conducted by conventional weapons?

    Nolan also has the vengeful Lewis Strauss, the two-term chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, moan that Oppenheimer is the less than saintly figure who managed to get away, ethically, with his atomic exploits while moralising about the relentless march about ever more destructive creations.  In that sentiment, the Machiavellian ambition monger has a point: the genie, once out, was never going to be put back in.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “US-Backed Roll of the Dice Leaves Ukraine in Worse Crisis”

    President Biden speaks to General Mark Milley after his 2023 State of the Union speech.
    (Photo credit: Francis Chung/Politico)

    President Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022 that the United States was arming Ukraine to “fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

    Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive left it in a stronger position, yet Biden and his NATO allies still chose the battlefield over the negotiating table. Now the failure of Ukraine’s long-delayed “Spring Counteroffensive” has left Ukraine in a weaker position, both on the battlefield and at the still empty negotiating table.

    So, based on Biden’s own definition of U.S. war aims, his policy is failing, and it is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, not Americans, who are paying the price, with their limbs and their lives.

    But this result was not unexpected. It was predicted in leaked Pentagon documents that were widely published in April, and in President Zelenskyy’s postponement of the offensive in May to avoid what he called “unacceptable” losses.

    The delay allowed more Ukrainian troops to complete NATO training on Western tanks and armored vehicles, but it also gave Russia more time to reinforce its anti-tank defenses and prepare lethal kill-zones along the 700-mile front line.

    Now, after two months, Ukraine’s new armored divisions have advanced only 12 miles or less in two small areas, at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties. Twenty percent of newly deployed Western armored vehicles and equipment were reportedly destroyed in the first few weeks of the new offensive, as British-trained armored divisions tried to advance through Russian minefields and kill-zones without demining operations or air cover.

    Meanwhile, Russia has made similar small advances toward Kupyansk in eastern Kharkiv province, where land around the town of Dvorichna has changed hands for the third time since the invasion. These tit-for-tat exchanges of small pieces of territory, with massive use of heavy artillery and appalling losses, typify a brutal war of attrition not unlike the First World War.

    Ukraine’s more successful counteroffensives last fall provoked serious debate within NATO over whether that was the moment for Ukraine to return to the negotiating table it had abandoned at British and U.S. urging in April 2022. As Ukrainian forces advanced on Kherson in early November, La Republicca in Italy reported that NATO leaders had agreed that the fall of Kherson would put Ukraine in the position of strength they had been waiting for to relaunch peace talks.

    On November 9, 2022, the very day that Russia ordered its withdrawal from Kherson, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where the interviewer asked him whether the time was now ripe for negotiations.

    General Milley compared the situation to the First World War, explaining that leaders on all sides understood by Christmas 1914 that that war was not winnable, yet they fought on for another four years, multiplying the million lives lost in 1914 into 20 million by 1918, destroying five empires and setting the stage for the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

    Milley concluded his cautionary tale by noting that, as in 1914, “… there has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably in the true sense of the word, is maybe not achievable through military means. And therefore, you need to turn to other means… So things can get worse. So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it, seize the moment.”

    But Milley and other voices of experience were ignored. At Biden’s February State of the Union speech in Congress, General Milley’s face was a study in gravity, a rock in a sea of misplaced self-congratulation and ignorance of the real world beyond the circus tent, where the West’s incoherent war strategy was not only sacrificing Ukrainian lives every day but flirting with nuclear war. Milley didn’t crack a smile all night, even when Biden came over to glad-hand after his speech.

    No U.S., NATO or Ukrainian leaders have been held accountable for failing to seize that moment last winter, nor the previous missed chance for peace in April 2022, when the U.S. and UK blocked theTurkish and Israeli mediation that came so close to bringing peace, based on the simple principle of a Russian withdrawal in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality. Nobody has demanded a serious account of why Western leaders let these chances for peace slip through their fingers.

    Whatever their reasoning, the result is that Ukraine is caught in a war with no exit. When Ukraine seemed to have the upper hand in the war, NATO leaders were determined to press their advantage and launch another offensive, regardless of the shocking human cost. But now that the new offensive and weapons shipments have only succeeded in laying bare the weakness of Western strategy and returning the initiative to Russia, the architects of failure reject negotiating from a position of weakness.

    So the conflict has fallen into an intractable pattern common to many wars, in which all parties to the fighting—Russia, Ukraine and the leading members of the NATO military alliance—have been encouraged, or we might say deluded, by limited successes at different times, into prolonging the war and rejecting diplomacy, despite appalling human costs, the rising danger of a wider war and the existential danger of a nuclear confrontation.

    But the reality of war is laying bare the contradictions of Western policy. If Ukraine is not allowed to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength, nor from a position of weakness, what stands in the way of its total destruction?

    And how can Ukraine and its allies defeat Russia, a country whose nuclear weapons policy explicitly states that it will use nuclear weapons before it will accept an existential defeat?

    If, as Biden has warned, any war between the United States and Russia, or any use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, would most likely escalate into full-scale nuclear war, where else is the current policy of incremental escalation and ever-increasing U.S. and NATO involvement intended to lead?

    Are they simply praying that Russia will implode, or give up? Or are they determined to call Russia’s bluff and push it into an inescapable choice between total defeat and nuclear war? Hoping, or pretending, that Ukraine and its allies can defeat Russia without triggering a nuclear war is not a strategy.

    In place of a strategy to resolve the conflict, the United States and its allies harnessed the natural impulse to resist Russian aggression onto a U.S. and British plan to prolong the war indefinitely. The results of that decision are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties and the gradual destruction of Ukraine by millions of artillery shells fired by both sides.

    Since the end of the First Cold War, successive U.S. governments, Democratic and Republican, have made catastrophic miscalculations regarding the United States’ ability to impose its will on other countries and peoples. Their wrong assumptions about American power and military superiority have led us to this fateful, historic crisis in U.S. foreign policy.

    Now Congress is being asked for another $24 billion to keep fueling this war. They should instead listen to the majority of Americans, who, according to the latest CNN poll, oppose more funding for an unwinnable war. They should heed the words of the declaration by civil society groups in 32 countries calling for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations to end the war before it destroys Ukraine and endangers all of humanity.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia signs CleanTech agreement with California

    Australia has signed a new agreement with the US state of California to advance clean energy technology development and collaboration. The memorandum of understanding, signed on Wednesday, creates a framework for cooperation on innovative measures to tackle climate change and develop ecosystem protections. Clean transportation, clean energy supply chains and technologies, and the circular economy, are…

    The post Australia signs CleanTech agreement with California appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • “Divide and Rule”: Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni Is Biden’s “Political Asset”. U.S. Behind Niger Coup d’Etat. America’s Hegemonic Wars Against Europe and Africa

    A year prior to Italy’s 2022 elections, Giorgia Meloni was invited to join the Aspen Institute, a Washington based strategic think tank with close relations to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Atlantic Council and the military industrial complex: 

    “The Aspen institute is also involved in the arms industry, with links to arms manufacturing giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It has typically supported the US’s ‘democracy-defending’ or ‘democracy-propagating, humane and civilized’ wars.”

    Prominent US politicians including Madeleine Albright, Condolezza Rice as well as Victoria Nuland have actively collaborated with the Aspen Institute.

    The Aspen Institute is  generously funded by the Gates Foundation, the Rockefellers, Carnegie and the Ford Foundation, not to mention Goldman Sachs, which over the years has played a key role in the “selection” of Italian politicians.

    It is worth noting that on February 20, 2023, Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kiev, meeting up with President Zelensky. And on the following day Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni promptly followed suit, traveling to Kiev to meet up with the corrupt Ukrainian president.

    “She affirmed Italian support for Ukraine and said that her government intends to supply Spada and Skyguard air defence systems to the Ukrainian army”.

    Is Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni an “Instrument”, Political Asset of Washington? The answer is obvious.

    Timeline
    PM Giorgia Meloni Arrives in Washington, July 26, 2023
    PM Meloni had arrived in Washington prior to the Coup d’Etat in Niger (26th of July), i.e. a day prior to the Biden-Meloni meeting in the Oval Office.

    There was no White House record of a discussion or exchange pertaining to the crisis in Niger.

    Bloomberg in a July 26, 2023 report confirmed that private conversations had already been scheduled:

    One suspects that in addition to China, the Niger Coup d’Etat was also discussed behind closed doors, –e.g. with Victoria Nuland and Christina Segal Knowles.

    27 July 2023: PM Meloni meets President Biden in the Oval Office.

    Rome aligns with Washington implying an almost unconditional stance with respect to the war in Ukraine: 

    “Ukraine (and Italy’s new voice). PM Meloni and President Biden reiterated their support for Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression and vowed to “provide political, military, financial, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine for as long as it takes, with the aim to reach a just and lasting peace.” Later, at the presser, the Italian leader noted that Rome’s posture on the conflict “is extremely respected and held in high regard” by the US.

    Oval Office 

    PRESIDENT BIDEN: “And as NATO Allies, the transatlantic partnership is the cornerstone of our shared security. And the Italian troops are playing a critical role in Europe, in the Mediterranean, and beyond.

    Italy and the United States are also standing strong with Ukraine. And I compliment you on your very strong support in defending against Russian atrocities. …

    PM MELONI: Thank you. I am very pleased to be here today to testify the deep friendship that bonds the United States and Italy.

    … Moreover, after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, for all together we decided to defend the international law. And I’m proud that Italy, from the beginning, played its part in it. We did it simply because supporting Ukraine means defending the peaceful coexistence of people and states everywhere in the world.”

    PM Meloni also (unconditionally) endorsed Washington’s stance pertaining to Africa, which broadly consists in “dollarizing” the entire continent (including francophone Africa) while concurrently imposing IMF-World Bank “strong economic medicine”.

    PM MELONI: … And on the other hand, we also need to be fair with nations that feel they have been exploited of their resources and that they show distrust towards the West. President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us, building with them a new relation based on a new approach, which is a peer-to-peer approach. Also to fight illegal migration and all the problems that we face. It’s all things that we will discuss in the G7 presidency of Italy next year.

    Among those present in the Oval Office on July 27, 2023 were: Victoria Nuland, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, and National Security Council Director for International Economics, Christina Segal-Knowles.

    Victoria Nuland Travels to Niamey, August 7, 2023

    Victoria Nuland arrived in Niger on August 7, 2023 on an unannounced visit in the immediate wake of the coup d’Etat.

    Nuland did not meet General Abdourahamane Tiani who had been declared head of the ruling military Junta on July 28, 2023.

    It is worth noting that Tiani studied in Washington D.C at the National Defense University’s (NDU) College of International Security Affairs (CISA). CISA is the U.S. Department of Defense’s  “flagship for education and building of partner capacity in combating terrorism, irregular warfare, and integrated deterrence at the strategic level.”

    Nuland’s meetings were with a team led by General Barmou.

    “The Secretary asked me to make this trip – as you may know, I was in the neighborhood last week and then in Jeddah – because we wanted to speak frankly to the people responsible to this challenge to the democratic order to see if we could try to resolve these issues diplomatically, if we could get some negotiations going, …

    And then we met with the self-proclaimed chief of defense of this operation, General Barmou, and three of the colonels supporting him.  I will say that these conversations were extremely frank and at times quite difficult because, again, we were pushing for a negotiated solution.”  (emphasis added)

    Tacitly acknowledged by Nuland, both General Abdourahamane Tiani and General Barmou in terms of their military profile and background are “friends of America”. Barmou also undertook his military training in the U.S. at Fort Moore, Columbus, Georgia and at the National Defense University (ND) which operates under the Guidance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Barmou also collaborated with U.S. Special Forces. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

    “At Center of Niger’s Coup Is One of America’s Favorite Generals: Brig. Gen. Moussa Salaou Barmou, long courted by Washington as a partner against Islamist extremism, has emerged as the main diplomatic channel between the U.S. and the junta (emphasis added)

    “Speaking during a question and answer session [August 8 report],  Victoria Nuland, confirmed in so many words that the Coup d’Etat was undertaken on behalf of the U.S.: 

    “With regard to the – to us, interestingly, General Barmou, former Colonel Barmou, is somebody who has worked very closely with U.S. Special Forces over many, many years.”

    Ms Nuland stated this following a crucial first meeting of U.S. officials with members of the military junta in Niger in a significant diplomatic push to restore democratic rule to the country.

    Ms Nuland said the U.S. was pushing for a negotiated solution in Niger and went “through in considerable detail the risks to aspects of our cooperation that he has historically cared about a lot.”

    “So we are hopeful that that will sink in,” added the U.S. undersecretary.

    While noting several regional meetings are going on to negotiate with coupists to release President Mohamed Bazoum and step aside, Ms Nuland said the U.S. would continue to watch closely with allies and partners needed to make the negotiations successful.

    “If there is a desire on the part of the people who are responsible for this to return to constitutional order, we are prepared to help with that. We are prepared to help address concerns on all sides,” Ms Nuland stated. (emphasis added)

    Let us be under no illusions, The architects of the coup “against the democratically elected government of Mr Bazoum” were acting on behalf and in coordination with Washington.

    According to a carefully researched article by Nick Nurse, “At Least Five Members of Niger Junta Were Trained by the US”.

    The unspoken objective is “Paris out of Africa.”

    Our Message to the People of Africa:

    While “France never stopped looting Africa, now the tables are turning”, in favor of the most oppressive and tyrannical form of US. neocolonialism, which must be forcefully opposed. 

    Niger “Regime Change” on Behalf of Uncle Sam. “Paris Out of Africa”

    Washington’s unspoken foreign policy objective is to remove France from Africa.

    Niger is strategic. It produces 5% of the global supply of uranium, which is in part exported to France for use in its nuclear energy facilities.

     

    USAFRICOM has a military base in Niger. The US military has been routinely collaborating with their Nigerien counterparts

    The unspoken objective of Victoria Nuland’s mission was to ultimately to “negotiate”, of course unofficially Niamey’s “alignment” with Washington against Paris:

    “The United States flies drones out of a base in the country’s arid heartland. French peacekeepers, effectively chased out of Mali, withdrew to outposts in Niger last year. Now, their status [France] and role in a country run by the junta’s transitional regime remains up in the air.” (WP, August 9, 2023, emphasis added)

    “Divide and Rule”: Propaganda Against France’s President François Macron

    Amply documented, Wall Street and the Financial Establishment, in liaison with the White House controls several (corrupt) European heads of State and heads of government, including Germany’s Chancellor Scholz, France’s President Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, among others.

    The US is at war with both Europe and Africa. It’s an act of economic warfare. Washington is also quite deliberately creating political divisions within the European Union.

    With regard to both Ukraine and Africa, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is aligned with Washington. Despite her fake humanitarian rhetoric, she has casually endorsed America’s hegemonic agenda in Africa, including the dollarization of the entire continent:

    PM Meloni: “President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us.”

    Washington is currently involved in a “soft coup” against French colonialism, coupled with a smear campaign (with the support of PM Meloni) against France’s president Macron. 

    In the video below, which was recently released, Italy’s PM Meloni rightfully focusses on the exploitation of child labourers in Burkina Faso’ gold industry, while casually placing the blame on France’s President Macron for the payments system in CFA francs coordinated by the French Treasury.

    What she fails to mention is that the gold industry in Burkina Faso is “dollarized” and controlled primarily by Canadian mining companies. See also here. There is not a single French colonial company involved in gold mining.

    Video: “You Messed Up Macron”

    Annex
    A Brief Note on the History of U.S.- France Relations 

    There is a long history of US-France relations going back the Louisiana purchase (1803), The Monroe Doctrine (1823),  the  Berlin Conference (1884-1885) organized by Germany’s Chancellor Otto van Bismarck. The U.S was politely excluded from participating in the colonial scramble for Africa. (Most of those former colonial powers have been progressively shoved out of Africa, starting in the 1970s).

    The Wars against Indochina and Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos (1946-1975), Charles de Gaulle “Pulls the Plug on NATO” (1966-67), NATO Headquarters move from Paris to Brussels (1967).

    Since the early 1990s, Washington has extended its sphere of influence: the entire African continent is currently in the stranglehold of a dollar denominated debt which has led to mass poverty, not to mention the imposition of “strong economic medicine”  by the IMF-World Bank. The U.S has numerous military bases throughout the continent.

    There are many other dimensions. Washington’s current objective is to eventually eliminate “francophone countries” and exclude France from the African Continent.

    Rwanda in 1990 is the model. The president of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana dies in an air crash. A former Belgian colony largely within the political sphere of influence of France was from one year to the next  transformed into a de facto English speaking colony dominated by the U.S, French was eventually scrapped as an official language. Major General Kagame –(who subsequently became Vice-President and then President) was instrumental in leading the military invasion from Uganda. He does not speak a word of French.

    The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.

    Major General Paul Kagame had been head of military intelligence in the Ugandan Armed Forces; he had been trained at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in Leavenworth, Kansas which focuses on warfighting and military strategy. Kagame returned from Leavenworth to lead the RPA, shortly after the 1990 invasion.

    Prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, the RPA was part of the Ugandan Armed Forces. Shortly prior to the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, military labels were switched. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, Chapter 7)

    *****

    On a personal note

    In a United Nations mission to Rwanda in 1996-97, the author together with Pierre Galand submitted the following report to the Government of Rwanda:

    • Michel Chossudovsky and Pierre Galand, L’usage de la dette exterieure du Rwanda, la responsabilité des créanciers, mission report, United Nations Development Program and Government of Rwanda, Kigali, 1997.

    We were subsequently advised by Vice President Paul Kagame that the report had to be submitted in English. My  response to Vice President Paul Kagame: “You should have told us that, and we would have drafted the report in English, We suggest that you get it translated”.

  • The original source of this article is Global Research.

    • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Assange Be Wary: The Dangers of a US Plea Deal

    At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses.  The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay.  Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of 1917, any sentence is bound to be hefty.  Were he to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the US, Assange will disappear into a carceral, life-ending dystopia.

    In this saga of relentless mugging and persecution, the country that has featured regularly in commentary, yet done the least, is Australia.  Assange may well be an Australian national, but this has generally counted for naught.  Successive governments have tended to cower before the bullying disposition of Washington’s power. With the signing of the AUKUS pact and the inexorable surrender of Canberra’s military and diplomatic functions to Washington, any exertion of independent counsel and fair advice will be treated with sneering qualification.

    The Albanese government has claimed, at various stages, to be pursuing the matter with its US counterparts with firm insistence.  Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has even publicly expressed his frustration at the lack of progress in finding a “diplomatic solution” to Assange’s plight.  But such frustrations have been tempered by an acceptance that legal processes must first run their course.

    The substance of any such diplomatic solution remains vague.  But on August 14, the Sydney Morning Herald, citing US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy as its chief source, reported that a “resolution” to Assange’s plight might be in the offing.  “There is a way to resolve it,” the ambassador told the paper.  This could involve a reduction of any charges in favour of a guilty plea, with the details sketched out by the US Department of Justice.  In making her remarks, Kennedy clarified that this was more a matter for the DOJ than the State Department or any other department.  “So it’s not really a diplomatic issue, but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.”

    In May, Kennedy met members of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange Group to hear their concerns.  The previous month, 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, wrote an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, warning that the prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.  It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

    In a discussion with The Intercept, Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, had his own analysis of the latest developments. “The [Biden] administration appears to be searching for an off-ramp ahead of [Albanese’s] first state visit to DC in October.”  In the event one wasn’t found, “we could see a repeat of a very public rebuff delivered by [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken to the Australian Foreign Minister two weeks ago in Brisbane.”

    That rebuff was particularly brutal, taking place on the occasion of the AUSMIN talks between the foreign and defence ministers of both Australia and the United States.  On that occasion, Foreign Minister Penny Wong remarked that Australia had made its position clear to their US counterparts “that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.”

    In his response, Secretary of State Blinken claimed to “understand” such views and admitted that the matter had been raised with himself and various offices of the US.  With such polite formalities acknowledged, Blinken proceeded to tell “our friends” what, exactly, Washington wished to do.  Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.  The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

    Such an assessment, lazily assumed, repeatedly rebutted, and persistently disproved, went unchallenged by all the parties present, including the Australian ministers.  Nor did any members of the press deem it appropriate to challenge the account.  The unstated assumption here is that Assange is already guilty for absurd charges, a man condemned.

    At this stage, such deals are the stuff of manipulation and fantasy.  The espionage charges have been drafted to inflate, rather than diminish any sentence.  Suggestions that the DOJ will somehow go soft must be treated with abundant scepticism.  The pursuit of Assange is laced by sentiments of revenge, intended to both inflict harm upon the publisher while deterring those wishing to publish US national security information.  As the Australian international law academic Don Rothwell observes, the plea deal may well take into account the four years spent in UK captivity, but is unlikely to either feature a complete scrapping of the charges, or exempt Assange from travelling to the US to admit his guilt.  “It’s not possible to strike a plea deal outside the relevant jurisdiction except in the most exceptional circumstances.”

    Should any plea deal be successfully reached and implemented, thereby making Assange admit guilt, the terms of his return to Australia, assuming he survives any stint on US soil, will be onerous.  In effect, the US would merely be changing the prison warden while adjusting the terms of observation.  In place of British prison wardens will be Australian overseers unlikely to ever take kindly to the publication of national security information.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Behind Khan’s Ouster

    An American writer and political commentator says there was never any serious doubt that the United States was behind the toppling of the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Imran Khan in Pakistan in April 2022.

    Daniel Patrick Welch added the United States will stop at nothing to maintain its global hegemony, as actions in other theaters show.

    Welch made the remarks in an exclusive interview with the Press TV website on Thursday, a day after a US publication published a classified document, revealing Washington pushed for the removal of Khan from office over his neutrality on the Ukraine war.

    According to the document published by The Intercept, US State Department officials used threats and promises to encourage Khan’s removal as the prime minister.

    The US State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Khan as prime minister over his independent foreign policy regarding Russia, according to the text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the Pakistani ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan.

    The classified cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not, The Intercept reported.

    Welch said, “So this recent discovery of the secret cable that was leaked to The Intercept and published by them is big news today, or for the moment, at least.”

    “But it’s interesting how The Intercept goes into great detail on how they can’t really verify it because they can’t get the corroboration from someone inside the Pakistani military, and on and on,” he added.

    “But the funny part is that in many ways it’s not really news at all. For Pakistani citizens and anyone with a conscience in the rest of the world, this is like getting the foreign language subtitles to a great home movie that everyone has been watching for over a year,” he stated.

    “There was never any serious doubt that the US was behind this ouster of Imran Khan. Look, I’m not in court. We are not required to prove this beyond the shadow of a doubt. They create doubt! They even have a phrase for it—it’s called plausible deniability. So they can come out at every turn and say ‘Well this is all false. This has always been false,’” Welch emphasized.

    “So why do I say ‘At every turn…?’ Because it’s the same thing! Ukraine isn’t about Ukraine. West Africa isn’t about West Africa. And this isn’t about Imran Khan. This is about the West—specifically, the US—and its desire to flex its muscle and keep its hold on the world, and nothing can get in their way,” he added.

    “The interesting part for me is that the analysis seems to be vetting the US vs. Russia, that it’s about Imran Khan’s statements about Ukraine—a position that most of the world’s population firmly believes, and not what the West is trying to sell as ‘isolation,’” Welch said.

    “That is the reason that Russian flags show up at protests in Haiti, In Senegal, in Mali, in Niger, in Burkina Faso—everywhere—is that they stood up and said No ‘Way! Get out of here!’ To the West. And that is as much symbolic as it is ideological and political,” he said.

    “I mean, this is Lula! This is Brazil. They have another popular politician who is saddled with some ridiculous, made-up crap about corruption. They put him in jail and give him this fake, trumped-up sentence that is going to prevent him from running. Like they did—they, meaning the US, the CIA—for Bolsonaro. And, now, for…whoever they appoint to run Pakistan,” he explained.

    ‘It’s about China, not Russia’

    Welch said that the problem is that the Pakistani military is being “shortsighted if they are thinking that they are taking the US side against Russia. Because it’s not.”

    “It’s about China. Why is China a threat? The US ruling class is right—they are! Because the US, it’s death merchants and billionaires, have spent—what, SIX TRILLION dollars in the last twenty years, to destroy everything, to murder millions and line the pockets of their already rich billionaires and the politicians they also own,” he noted.

    “They are the only ones who have profited from this. Most of the world is in shambles because of it. And at the same time, the Chinese have spent trillions as well. Building up—not destroying. Building up railroads from Laos to China,” he said.

    “The Belt and Road Initiative is unbelievable. Just incredible. Raising people out of poverty—their own 800 million or whatever it was. And starting to teach and help the rest of the world that they don’t need to live in this yoke of oppression that the West imposes,” Welch added.

    “And China is also much more savvy and slower on the trigger. They’re very close to Pakistan. They don’t have to do this tomorrow. But they will. Those economic levers. Those diplomatic levers. That the West uses to dissociate from any popular politician or movement. Or any sort of progress—anything, really outside that political sphere,” he observed.

    “They [China] do much more quietly and much more aptly, I think. And whether or not they [West] are successful in stopping the populist impulse—the right side of history—at this time, Lula eventually became president of Brazil. Not Bolsonaro. So we’ll see. We. Shall. See,” he concluded.

    Daniel Patrick Welch is a writer of political commentary and analysis. He lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, US, with his wife. Together they run The Greenhouse School. He has traveled widely, speaks five languages and studied Russian History and Literature at Harvard University.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Unscrupulous Attacks on China Make US Nastier and Nastier

    US President Joe Biden speaks at the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center on August 10, 2023 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Photo: AFP

    US President Joe Biden speaks at the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center on August 10, 2023 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Photo: AFP

    At a political fundraising event in Park City, Utah on Thursday, US President Joe Biden said China was “in trouble” because of economic and population issues and slammed China’s economic situation as “a ticking time bomb” in many cases. He also said, “When bad folks have problems, they do bad things.” The remarks have been splashed across the American media. Bloomberg described the comments as “some of his most direct criticisms yet about the US’s top geopolitical and economic rival.”

    As well-known American writer Mark Twain revealed in his book Running for Governor, American elections are full of shameless tricks such as lies, fraud, smears and slander. As some activities related to the US general election are kicking off, multiple candidates are not offering good strategies in terms of national governance, but focusing a lot on attacking each other and attacking China.

    As the atmosphere in American society toward China has been severely poisoned by Washington, speaking harshly about China has become one of the cheapest ways for politicians to quickly attract attention, and Biden is no exception. We need to view Biden’s shocking remarks in this context, which are of the same nature as the more intense remarks on China by Republican candidates such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Based on past experience, as the election campaign progresses, Washington’s bottom line will sink lower and lower, and more sensational claims are likely to come out. The unscrupulous smearing and attacking of China has made the US nastier and nastier.

    But it must be said that Biden is not only a candidate, but also the incumbent president of the US and the head of state of a superpower. It is highly inappropriate for him to make inflammatory statements that go against basic facts and do not match his identity. It is not difficult for us to understand that Biden’s purpose in saying these words is nothing more than to score points for his campaign, to show his tough stance toward China, and to boast about his ability to deal with “threats and challenges” from China.

    From Donald Trump to the current President Biden, the US presidents, like many politicians in Washington, keep talking tough about China. But what is interesting is that Trump and Biden, who are at odds with each other on many issues, have similar tones and arguments when it comes to China, and they talk more about what China is doing better than the US and in what aspects China is about to surpass the US, so as to stimulate the sense of crisis and urgency in the US to support the White House’s strategic competition against China.

    As a result, the sum of Biden’s remarks on China contain obvious contradictions. Washington just issued an “unprecedented” administrative order to curb and suppress the development momentum of China’s high-tech, then it turned around and insisted that “China is in trouble.” A stronger China is a threat in the eyes of the Americans, while a “weaker” China has become a “ticking time bomb.” What then should China do so the US can have a healthy mentality toward China? The reality is that China not only has to be blamed for the frustration of US’ development, but also bear the belittling when Washington boasts of its achievements, and finally has to be responsible for the mental disorder of the US.

    Unlike the US, China never threatens other countries with force, does not form military alliances, does not export ideology, does not go to other countries’ doorsteps to provoke troubles, does not infringe on other countries’ territories, does not initiate trade wars, and does not suppress the companies of other countries for no reason. China insists on putting the development of the country and the nation on the basis of its own strength. In the face of a turbulent and changing world, China has always stood in the right direction of historical progress and has always been a positive force for world peace and development. If there are “ticking time bombs,” they are planted by the US around the world.

    Some people summed up the seven laws of American diplomacy, one of which is, “If the US suspects that you have done something bad, the US must have done it itself.” This can explain the strange logic of the US that no matter if China is strong or weak, it is a threat. When the US became strong, it launched the Iraq War and the Afghan War; when it declined relatively, it began to engage in unilateralism and camp confrontation. The inner world of Washington’s politicians may be dirty, but they should not think that everyone else is like them.

  • JFK’s World Peace Speech and National Security State Takedowns of US Presidents  

    President Kennedy’s World Peace speech on June 10, 1963,where he championed nuclear disarmament and lasting peace with the Soviet Union, is given renewed attention with a Kennedy now running for president and by the present war with Russia. JFK supposedly underwent a transformation after the near mutual nuclear annihilation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. It is claimed JFK had decided to withdraw from Vietnam, break up the CIA and the power of the Pentagon chiefs, and end the Cold War.

    In his World Peace speech President Kennedy states,

    I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

    Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament–and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude–as individuals and as a Nation–for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward–by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

    World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

    We [the US and Soviet Union] are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.

    So far so good. But then he adds:

    To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.

    And again:

    The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.

    In other words, the US that stands for peace, the Communist bloc instigates conflict. Not exactly putting into action his words, “every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward.” This has similarity to President Eisenhower’s farewell address warning us of the military-industrial complex after he spent eight years building it up.

    Coming to his final words, Kennedy says, just six months after almost precipitating a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war.”

    This World Peace speech is heralded by many progressive and libertarian people.

    However, if “America’s weapons are nonprovocative…  designed to deter”; if “Our military forces are committed to peace”; if “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” then Kennedy is saying US has been for peace and he is continuing that policy. His speech did not proclaim major policy change, but signaled a preservation of the present one.

    We are told this speech, like the claim he planned to pull the troops out of Vietnam, posed a threat to the Pentagon chiefs. And we are told after the defeat at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (April 1961), JFK vowed, “I will splinter the CIA up into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.” This statement, said in private (contradicted by later Kennedy statements), is said to have made the CIA, like the Pentagon, seek revenge. This supposedly led, less than six months after his June 10 speech, to his murder on November 22.

    Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 Speeches

    His speeches he was to give that evening show the actual “peace” policy he was carrying out was really one of military escalation. From the first speech he was to give in Dallas:

    In the past 3 years we have increased our defense budget by over 20 percent; increased the program for acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than 75 percent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by 60 percent; added 5 combat ready divisions and 5 tactical fighter wings to our Armed Forces; increased our strategic airlift capabilities by 75 percent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces by 600 percent.

    From his second speech on November 22:

    We have radically improved the readiness of our conventional forces – increased by 45 percent the number of combat ready Army divisions, increased by 100 percent the procurement of modern Army weapons and equipment, increased by 100 percent our ship construction, conversion, and modernization program, increased by 100 percent our procurement of tactical aircraft, increased by 30 percent the number of tactical air squadrons, and increased the strength of the Marines. As last month’s “Operation Big Lift” – which originated here in Texas – showed so clearly, this Nation is prepared as never before to move substantial numbers of men in surprisingly little time to advanced positions anywhere in the world. We have increased by 175 percent the procurement of airlift aircraft, and we have already achieved a 75 percent increase in our existing strategic airlift capability. Finally, moving beyond the traditional roles of our military forces, we have achieved an increase of nearly 600 percent in our special forces – those forces that are prepared to work with our allies and friends against the guerrillas, saboteurs, insurgents and assassins who threaten freedom in a less direct but equally dangerous manner.

    Do these actions by JFK show the Soviet leaders his desire for “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”?

    With good reason few believe the government’s story that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Since thousands of documents the government still conceals from us, we are left with unanswered questions. Maybe it was the CIA and FBI and Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans, or a sub-grouping in them.

    The National Security State Campaign to Remove Trump

    But we do have evidence the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA and other secret national police agencies have targeted a president – in the unsubstantiated stories of Russian election interference and Trump collusion with Russian President Putin. This national security police state hoax is reminiscent of the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie they fed us to start a war on Iraq. They conjured up this Russia collusion story to sway a US presidential election and continued it during Trump’s presidency. And in 2020, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop case to sway a second election. They now attempt to imprison him for treason.

    Regardless your opinion of Trump, this is a documented case of the US national security state seeking to neutralize a president. Those who assert a US police state operation against Kennedy do not attempt to bolster this with the proven operation against Trump. It would make sense for them to argue that while evidence of the CIA plot to kill Kennedy remains a state secret, in Trump’s case their plots are now out in the open.

    Moreover, Trump, though a racist and sexist bully, did advocate for the issues that are said to make JFK a target: to bring US troops home, have peaceful relations with Russia, and reign in national security state agencies.

    For instance, Trump said at a press conference (October 21, 2019):

    I got elected on bringing our soldiers back home.  Now, it’s not very popular within the Beltway, because, you know, Lockheed doesn’t like it, and these great military companies don’t like it. It’s not very popular.

    As we defend American lives, we are working to end American wars in the Middle East …. It is also not our function to serve other nations as law enforcement agencies. (February 28, 2019).

    I want to bring our troops back from the endless war. They’ve been going on for 19 years in the area. But I’m going to bring them home from Syria. (Watch How Progressives Respond When Trump Isn’t Wrong) There is more here.

    Concerning the security state police agencies, Trump condemned the collusion of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, and FBI when asked if he would publicly criticize President Putin for Russia’s interference when they met. In response former CIA head John Brennan declared, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance [with President Putin] in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous.” This sounds the same as the CIA’s alleged attitude towards JFK.

    President Trump wrote (Mar 15, 2019):

    New evidence that the Obama era team of the FBI, DOJ & CIA were working together to spy on (and take out) President Trump, all the way back in 2015.

    Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself. (September 6, 2018).

    This does not mean Trump was any more serious about “draining the swamp” than JFK in carrying out his World Peace speech – and in the end, the president is not in control of the national security state, but the reverse.

    While President Trump did advocate US ruling class interests around the world and prioritized business interests above our welfare, the national security state did not forgive him for repudiating its endless war agenda. He wanted to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

    He befriended DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, an anathema to Washington, later explaining, “We have a good relationship with North Korea, we’re not in a war. Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.” (October 22, 2020).

    Even worse, he said, “Some people hate the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia. They would rather go to war than see this” (July 18, 2018). He was gotten out of office, and then they instigated a war.

    Of course, liberals would never uphold Trump, like they did Kennedy, Obama (in 2007-2008), Bernie, Jesse Jackson (1984), among others, as a leader who could move the US towards the dream of being a model for the world and make the US government actually represent the people.

    Kennedy embodied progressives’ hope that a genuinely progressive democrat could become president and redeem the country, fulfill the promise of its ennobling principles and supposed exceptional nature. To MAGA people, Trump personifies the conservative realization of this same chauvinist dream.

    Trump brought about a redirection in the US no more than Kennedy.  But the popularity of both presidents in different sectors of the population does signify the common yearning of US people across the board for curtailing the immense power of the national security state. Now this national security state is using lawfare to intervene in the 2024 election process to disqualify and imprison Biden’s main challenger. That issue should be determined by the voters.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Taiwan to get unprecedented military aid package from US

    The United States has announced a historic US$345 million military aid package for Taiwan which will for the first time be drawn from existing US military stockpiles instead of purchases through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) mechanism, the White House announced on 28 July. The package is being provisioned under the US Presidential Drawdown Authority […]

    The post Taiwan to get unprecedented military aid package from US appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Fitch Downgrades US Debt Rating

    On Tuesday, Fitch Ratings, one of the leading three US credit rating agencies, announced: US’ long-term foreign-currency issuer defaulting rating would be downgraded. Among other factors pushing this downgrading, Fitch cited issues with governance, rising deficits and a looming recession.

    Fitch, on an earlier occasion, put the US on watch for a potential downgrade. At that time, it warned: The US could soon lose its AAA score due to an inability to pay its bills, within a matter of days.

    Reports by CNN and other leading parts of the US media said:

    Fitch downgraded its US debt rating on Tuesday afternoon from the highest AAA rating to AA+, citing “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.”

    The downgrade follows lawmakers negotiated up until the last minute on a debt ceiling deal earlier this year, risking US’ first default.

    The January 6 insurrection in the Capitol centering presidential election result was also a major contributing factor in the downslide.

    January 6th incident

    In a meeting with Biden administration officials, the US media reports said, representatives from Fitch repeatedly highlighted the January 6 incident as a significant concern as it relates to US governance, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

    However, Fitch did not mention the incident in their full report on the downgrade; and Fitch did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    US debt’s luster lost

    According to the reports, the rating cut suggests US debt has lost some of its luster, with potential reverberations on a lot – from the mortgage rates US citizens pay on their homes to contracts carried out all across the world. The move could cause investors to sell US Treasuries, leading to a spike in yields that serve as references for interest rates on a variety of loans.

    High, growing government debt burden

    Explaining its rationale for the downgrade, the US media reports said:

    Fitch pointed to “the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’ rated peers over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.”

    Deterioration in governance

    Fitch said the decision was not just prompted by the latest debt ceiling standoff but rather “a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years” regarding “fiscal and debt matters.”

    Fitch predicted a growing government deficit, noting that the US debt-to-GDP ratio was currently at 100.1%, two and a half times higher than the AAA-rated countries’ median of 39.3%. Fitch also cited the US Fed’s recent credit rate hikes, “weakening business investment, and a slowdown in in consumption” to predict a “mild recession” in the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.

    Fitch’s Version

    Fitch Ratings said on August 1, 2023):

    Fitch Ratings has downgraded the United States of America’s Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’. The Rating Watch Negative was removed and a Stable Outlook assigned. The Country Ceiling has been affirmed at ‘AAA’.

    For the second time, international credit rating agency Fitch has downgraded the US federal government’s credit rating, citing dismal economic expectations.

    Fitch said the downgrading is based on “expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years.”

    Fitch mentions following key rating drivers:

    Ratings downgrade: The rating downgrade of the US reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’ rated peers over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.

    Erosion of governance: In Fitch’s view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters, notwithstanding the June bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt limit until January 2025. The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management. In addition, the government lacks a medium-term fiscal framework, unlike most peers, and has a complex budgeting process. These factors, along with several economic shocks as well as tax cuts and new spending initiatives, have contributed to successive debt increases over the last decade. Additionally, there has been only limited progress in tackling medium-term challenges related to rising social security and Medicare costs due to an aging population.

    Rising GG deficits: We expect the general government (GG) deficit to rise to 6.3% of GDP in 2023, from 3.7% in 2022, reflecting cyclically weaker federal revenues, new spending initiatives and a higher interest burden. Additionally, state and local governments are expected to run an overall deficit of 0.6% of GDP this year after running a small surplus of 0.2% of GDP in 2022. Cuts to non-defense discretionary spending (15% of total federal spending) as agreed in the Fiscal Responsibility Act offer only a modest improvement to the medium-term fiscal outlook, with cumulative savings of US$1.5 trillion (3.9% of GDP) by 2033 according to the Congressional Budget Office. The near-term impact of the Act is estimated at US$70 billion (0.3% of GDP) in 2024 and US$112 billion (0.4% of GDP) in 2025. Fitch does not expect any further substantive fiscal consolidation measures ahead of the November 2024 elections.

    Fitch forecasts a GG deficit of 6.6% of GDP in 2024 and a further widening to 6.9% of GDP in 2025. The larger deficits will be driven by weak 2024 GDP growth, a higher interest burden and wider state and local government deficits of 1.2% of GDP in 2024-2025 (in line with the historical 20-year average). The interest-to-revenue ratio is expected to reach 10% by 2025 (compared to 2.8% for the ‘AA’ median and 1% for the ‘AAA’ median) due to the higher debt level as well as sustained higher interest rates compared with pre-pandemic levels.

    GG Debt to Rise: Lower deficits and high nominal GDP growth reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio over the last two years from the pandemic high of 122.3% in 2020; however, at 112.9% this year it is still well above the pre-pandemic 2019 level of 100.1%. The GG debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to rise over the forecast period, reaching 118.4% by 2025. The debt ratio is over two-and-a-half times higher than the ‘AAA’ median of 39.3% of GDP and ‘AA’ median of 44.7% of GDP. Fitch’s longer-term projections forecast additional debt/GDP rises, increasing the vulnerability of the U.S. fiscal position to future economic shocks.

    Medium-term fiscal challenges unaddressed 

    Fitch said:

    Over the next decade, higher interest rates and the rising debt stock will increase the interest service burden, while an aging population and rising healthcare costs will raise spending on the elderly absent fiscal policy reforms. The CBO projects that interest costs will double by 2033 to 3.6% of GDP. The CBO also estimates a rise in mandatory spending on Medicare and social security by 1.5% of GDP over the same period. The CBO projects that the Social Security fund will be depleted by 2033 and the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund (used to pay for benefits under Medicare Part A) will be depleted by 2035 under current laws, posing additional challenges for the fiscal trajectory unless timely corrective measures are implemented. Additionally, the 2017 tax cuts are set to expire in 2025, but there is likely to be political pressure to make these permanent as has been the case in the past, resulting in higher deficit projections.

    Exceptional Strengths Support Ratings: Several structural strengths underpin the US’ ratings. These include its large, advanced, well-diversified and high-income economy, supported by a dynamic business environment. Critically, the US dollar is the world’s preeminent reserve currency, which gives the government extraordinary financing flexibility.

    Economy to slip into recession: Tighter credit conditions, weakening business investment, and a slowdown in consumption will push the US economy into a mild recession in 4Q23 and 1Q24, according to Fitch projections. The agency sees U.S. annual real GDP growth slowing to 1.2% this year from 2.1% in 2022 and overall growth of just 0.5% in 2024. Job vacancies remain higher and the labor participation rate is still lower (by 1 pp) than pre-pandemic levels, which could negatively affect medium-term potential growth.

    Fed tightening: The Fed raised interest rates by 25bp in March, May and July 2023. Fitch expects one further hike to 5.5% to 5.75% by September. The resilience of the economy and the labor market are complicating the Fed’s goal of bringing inflation towards its 2% target. While headline inflation fell to 3% in June, core PCE inflation, the Fed’s key price index, remained stubbornly high at 4.1% yoy. This will likely preclude cuts in the Federal Funds Rate until March 2024. Additionally, the Fed is continuing to reduce its holdings of mortgage backed-securities and US Treasuries, which is further tightening financial conditions. Since January, these assets on the Fed balance sheet have fallen by over USD500 billion as of end-July 2023.

    ESG – Governance: The US has an ESG Relevance Score (RS) of ‘5’ for Political Stability and Rights and ‘5[+]’ for the Rule of Law, Institutional and Regulatory Quality and Control of Corruption. Theses scores reflect the high weight that the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI) have in Fitch’s proprietary Sovereign Rating Model. The U.S. has a high WBGI ranking at 79, reflecting its well-established rights for participation in the political process, strong institutional capacity, effective rule of law and a low level of corruption.

    Fitch mentions rating sensitivities:

    Factors that Could, Individually or Collectively, Lead to Negative Rating Action/Downgrade

    –Public Finances: A marked increase in general government debt, for example due to a failure to address medium-term public spending and revenue challenges;

    –Macroeconomic policy, performance and prospects: A decline in the coherence and credibility of policymaking that undermines the reserve currency status of the US dollar, thus diminishing the government’s financing flexibility.

    Fitch’s proprietary Sovereign Rating Model (SRM) assigns the US a score equivalent to a rating of ‘AA+’ on the Long-Term Foreign-Currency IDR scale.

    Fitch’s sovereign rating committee did not adjust the output from the SRM to arrive at the final Long-Term Foreign-Currency IDR.

    Macro: Fitch removed the + 1 notch to reflect the deterioration of the GDP volatility variable and sharp spike in inflation following the pandemic and its aftermath. The economic volatility and inflation impacts on the SRM have begun to revert towards historical levels and no longer warrant a positive Qualitative Overlay (QO) notch.

    US protests the downgrade

    The White House and the US Treasury Department raised objections on the decision by Fitch to downgrade US long-term rating from AAA to AA+.

    White House press secretary told reporters: “We strongly disagree with the decision.” She claimed: It “defies reality”, as President Joe Biden has led the US economy to a “robust recovery”.

    US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen “strongly disagreed” with Fitch’s decision. She said: It was “arbitrary and based on outdated data” and that US Treasury securities remained the world’s “preeminent safe and liquid asset.”

    Earlier, China’s credit rating agency downgraded US

    In the later part of May 2023, China’s leading credit rating agency Chengxin International Credit Rating (CCXI) downgraded its sovereign credit score for the US by one nick.

    The CCXI, US’ Moody-China’s Zhixiang Information Management Consulting joint venture, lowered the US to AAg+ from AAAg, having placed it on review for a further downgrade, according to a statement released on Thursday.

    At that time, the CCXI’s statement said:

    “The intensification of political divisions between the two parties in the United States has increased the difficulty of resolving the debt-ceiling issue. Even if a consensus is reached, the brinkmanship would pose uncertainty to the US government’s policy path and dampen economic confidence, which could trigger further volatility in the US politics and economy.”

    The US debt has already puffed up to more than $31 trillion.

    What would have happened – the way the imperialist media machine and its local-level orderlies started shouting – had the downgrading-declaration was in case of some other country, for example, China, Russia, Mexico, Bangladesh, or other similar state?

    What does it mean by the words: steady deterioration in governance, and which is going over the last 20 years, and how would have the imperialist media and imperialism’s proxy sepoys sold sounds in their market of politics based on that assessment?

    Doesn’t these say: Something is rotten in the state of the Empire, in politics, in economy, in democracy that it practices?

    Shouldn’t those faults there be welded before delivering democracy-sermons, one sort of interference, to others, as these conditions appearing tattered take away moral standing for delivering sermon to others?

    Note: All cited parts, direct or indirect, even if not with quotation marks, are from relevant reports.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Atomic Genie Escapes

    1945: Alamagordo

    Never have scientists so fervently prayed. Slumping against a wooden post, Robert Oppenheimer reminds himself not to weaken: “I must remain conscious!”

    The countdown proceeds: “five . . . . four . . . . three . . .  two . . . ” Afraid it may electrocute him, the normally unflappable Sam Allison drops the microphone at the last second. At 5:29 a.m. he shouts, “Zero!” 

    Interminable silence . . . then suddenly the horizon ignites and a reddish-orange fireball infinitely brighter and ten-thousand times hotter than the sun rises majestically over the desert, turning darkness to light for hundreds of miles around. On this day, even a blind woman reports that she has seen the dawn.

    A New York Times reporter is reminded of Genesis: “Let there be light!” Physicist Isidor Rabi fears the fire will burn forever. Colleague Dick Feynman, momentarily blinded, turns away in pain. Oppenheimer recalls a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds!”

    The boiling mushroom cloud swirls into the heavens, presaging catastrophe.

    Under a curtain of radioactive fallout, jubilant scientists break into a jig on the desert floor.

    — Michael K. Smith, Portraits of Empire, pps. 12-13

    1945: Hiroshima, A Sun Of Fire

    A violent light never before seen in the world, rises slowly, cracks the sky open, and collapses. Three days later a second sun of suns bursts over Japan. Beneath remain the cinders of two cities, a desert of rubble, tens of thousands dead and more thousands condemned to die little by little for years to come.

    The war was nearly over, Hitler and Mussolini gone, when President Harry Truman gave the order to drop atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the United States it is the culmination of a national clamor for the prompt annihilation of the Yellow Peril. It is high time to finish off once and for all the imperial conceits of this arrogant Asian country, never colonized by anyone. The only good one is a dead one, says the press of these treacherous little monkeys.

    Now all doubt is dispelled. There is one great conqueror among the conquerors. The United States emerges from the war intact and more powerful than ever. It acts as if the whole world were its trophy.

    — Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, p. 126

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Building for War: The US Imperium’s Top End Spend

    The AUSMIN 2023 talks held between the US Secretaries of State and Defense and their Australian counterparts, confirmed the increasing, unaccountable militarisation of the Australian north and its preparation for a future conflict with Beijing.  Details were skimpy, the rhetoric aspirational.  But the Australian performance from Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was crawling, lamentable, even outrageous.  State Secretary Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III could only look on with sheer wonder at their prostrate hosts.

    Money, much of it from the US military budget, is being poured into upgrading, expanding and redeveloping Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) bases in the Northern Territory city of Darwin, and Tindal, situated 320km south-east of Darwin, the intended to “address functional deficiencies and capacity constraints in existing facilities and infrastructure.”  Two new locations are also being proposed at RAAF Bases Scherger and RAAF Curtin, aided by site surveys.

    The AUSMIN joint statement, while revealing nothing in terms of operational details or costs, proved heavy with talk about “the ambitious trajectory of Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation across land, maritime, and air domains, as well as Combined Logistics, Sustainment and Maintenance Enterprise (CoLSME).”  Additionally, there would be “Enhanced Air Cooperation” with a rotating “US Navy Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft in Australia to enhance regional maritime domain awareness, with an ambition of inviting likeminded partners to participate in the future.”

    Further details have come to light about the money being spent by the Pentagon on facilities in Darwin.  The unromantically titled FY22 MCAF Project PAF160700 Squadron Operations Facility at the RAAF Darwin base “includes the construction (design-bid-build) of a United States Air Force squadron facility at the … (RAAF) in Darwin, Australia.”  The project is deemed necessary to add space “for aircrew flight equipment, maintenance and care, mission planning, intelligence, crew briefings, crew readiness, and incidental related work.”  Some of the systems are mundane but deemed important for an expanded facility, including ventilating and air conditioning, water heating, plumbing, utility energy meters and sub-meters and a building automation system (HVAC Control system).

    Correspondents from the Australian Broadcasting have gone further into the squadron operations facility, consulting US budget filings and tender documents to reveal cost assessments of $26 million (A$40 million).  A further parking apron at RAAF Darwin is also featured in the planning, estimated to cost somewhere in the order of $258 billion.  This will further supplement plans to establish the East Arm fuel storage facility for the US Air Force located 15 kilometres from Darwin that should be able to, on completion by September this year, store 300 million litres of military jet fuel intended to support US military activity in the Northern Territory and Indo-Pacific region.

    According to the tender documents, the squadron operations facility also had a broader, more strategic significance: “to support strategic operations and to run multiple 15-day training exercises during the NT dry season for deployed B-52 squadrons.”  The RAAF Tindal facility’s redevelopment, slated to conclude in 2026, is also intended to accommodate six B-52 bombers.  Given their nuclear capability, residents in the NT should feel a suitable degree of terror.

    Michael Shoebridge, founder and director of Strategic Analysis Australia, is none too pleased by this state of affairs.  He is unhappy by Canberra’s reticence on US-Australian military arrangements, and none too keen on a debate that is only being informed by US-based sources.  “A public debate needs to be enabled by information and you can’t have a complete picture without knowing where the money is being spent.”

    While it is hard to disagree with that tack, Shoebridge’s outfit, in line with such think tanks as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, is not against turning Australia into a frontline fortress state ready for war.  What he, and his colleagues take issue with, is the overwhelmingly dominant role the US is playing in the venture. Those in Washington, Shoebridge argues, seem to “understand the urgency we don’t seem to.”  Rather than questioning Australia’s need for a larger, more threatening military capability to fight phantoms and confected foreign adversaries, he accepts the premise, wholeheartedly.  Canberra, in short, should muck in more, pull its weight, and drum up Australian personnel for the killing.

    Anthony Bergin, a senior fellow of Strategic Analysis Australia, teases out the idea of such mucking in, suggesting a familiar formula.  He insists that, in order to improve “our national security, we should be looking at options short of conscription which wouldn’t be as hard to sell to the Australian people.”  He thought the timing perfect for such a move.  “There’s now a latent appetite for our political leaders to introduce measures to bolster national resilience.”

    This silly reading only makes sense on the assumption that the Australian public has been softened sufficiently by such hysterical affronts to sensibility as the Red Alert campaign waged in the Fairfax Press.

    Options to add padding to Australia’s military preparedness include doubling or tripling school cadets and cadet programs of the “outdoor bound” type based in the regions.  But more important would be the creation of a “national militia training scheme”.  Bergin is, however, displeased by the difficulty of finding “volunteers of any kind”, a strange comment given the huge, unpaid volunteer army that governs the delivery of numerous services in Australia, from charities to firefighting.

    Alison Broinowski, herself formerly of the Australian diplomatic corps, safely concludes that the current moves constitute “another step in the same direction – a step that the government has been taking a series of for years; accepting whatever the United States government wants to place on Australian soil.”  More’s the pity that most details are to come from Washington sources, indicating, with irrefutable finality, Canberra’s abject subordination to the US imperium and its refusal to admit that fact.

  • What Do “Soft Nails” the US Encountered in South Pacific Indicate?

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just wrapped up his visit to South Pacific island countries. During the visit, he tried to sow discord between China and these countries. In recent years, such practices have become the must-do and highlights of the visits by US officials such as Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Nonetheless, Tongan Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni said he was not concerned about the large amount of money his country had borrowed from China; Foreign Affairs Minister of New Zealand Nanaia Mahuta shut the door on joining the AUKUS alliance; Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea said his country welcomes cooperation with China and that “USA does not need PNG’s ground to be a launching pad for any offensive anywhere in the world.” All these remarks have embarrassed the US. It can be said that Blinken and Austin have met “soft nails” in the South Pacific.

    This is not accidental, because the US has encountered quite a lot of such “soft nails” in many other places across the world. For example, when the US went to Africa with a so-called aid plan to counter China, what it received was a vigilant response. When US Vice President Kamala Harris visited Africa earlier this year, President of Ghana Nana Akufo-Addo said, “There may be an obsession in America about Chinese activity on the continent, but there is no such obsession here.” In ASEAN, whether senior US officials go to ASEAN or Washington invites ASEAN to the US for a meeting, “not taking sides” is the basic principle repeatedly and publicly emphasized by ASEAN countries. In the Middle East and other places, the situation is the same. When the same situation occurs time and again, it is indeed necessary for the US to reflect on why this is the case.

    In fact, the reason is very simple. It is difficult for a person who is unwilling to listen and respect others to be welcomed. The signal received by the US has been strong enough, that is, the world is unwilling to fall into division and confrontation, and hopes for more peace and cooperation. This has become a trend. Washington seems to have noticed these signals, but it still doesn’t pay attention. On the surface, it holds the bait of “cooperation,” but its heart is full of how to use these “cooperation” to undermine China’s influence. The similar scenes that appeared repeatedly during Blinken’s visit this time are enough to illustrate the deep-seated problems of the current US diplomacy. To put it simply, the goals of US diplomacy have formed a huge dislocation, or even contradiction and antagonism, with the vital interests of quite a number of countries.

    Take the South Pacific countries as an example. These countries value a peaceful and stable environment and sustainable economic development. In addition, due to geographical factors, South Pacific countries also pay special attention to climate change and marine environmental issues, such as Japan’s reckless plan to dump nuclear-contaminated wastewater. In these respects, China has been their most reliable partner. Now the US came to tell these countries that the pair of shoes they are wearing does not fit, take that pair off off quickly, and put on the pair brought by the US. Whether the shoes fit or not, don’t the people who wear them know?

    After all, people in any country want to live a peaceful life, and what meets this need is positive energy, otherwise it is negative energy. As some scholars have said, Washington today must adapt to a new reality: developing countries are becoming more mature and more capable of independent decision-making. When American officials make a visit, their pockets are often full of rhetoric to smear China that no one needs. Creating uneasiness and distrust between a country and its largest and most reliable partner is a despicable act, which is a scourge to the country and its people, and is life-threatening.

    In recent years, in order to counter China, the US has launched various “grand” plans, but basically much is said but little is done. For example, the Build Back Better World in 2021 almost copied the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, but even the Americans called it a “Waterloo.” What’s more, even when the US invests in certain projects, most of them are either not feasible, or feed the pockets of those in charge.

    These practices make the US look like a malicious bidder in the international community. It disrupts the normal cooperation of others, but it takes no responsibility for cooperation at all, allowing those projects to remain unfinished. Ultimately, it’s a mixture of hegemony and rogue thinking. Perhaps the US feels that it has big fists and is not afraid of anyone coming to hold it accountable. But what is certain is that if the US does not change this behavior, it will encounter more and more “soft nails.”

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Day Australian Sovereignty Died

    If a date might be found when Australian sovereignty was extinguished by the emissaries of the US imperium, July 29, 2023 will be as good as any.  Not that they aren’t other candidates, foremost among them being the announcement of the AUKUS agreement between Australia, UK and the US in September 2021.  They all point to a surrender, a handing over, of a territory to another’s military and intelligence community, an abject, oily capitulation that would normally qualify as treasonous.

    The treason becomes all the more indigestible for its inevitable result: Australian territory is being shaped, readied, and purposed for war under the auspices of closer defence ties with an old ally.  The security rentiers, the servitors, the paid-up pundits all see this as a splendid thing.  War, or at least its preparations, can offer wonderful returns.

    The US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin III, was particularly delighted, though watchful of his hosts.  His remit was clear: detect any wobbliness, call out any indecision.  But there was nothing to be worried about.  His Australian hosts, for instance, proved accommodating and crawling.

    Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles, for instance, standing alongside Austin, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, declared that there was “a commitment to increase American force posture in respect of our northern bases, in respect to our maritime patrols and our reconnaissance aircraft; further force posture initiatives involving US Army watercraft; and in respect of logistics and stores, which have been very central to Exercise Talisman Sabre.”  To the untutored eye, Marles might have simply been another Pentagon spokesman of middle-rank.

    The acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines was a process that was well underway (Marles seemed untroubled by grumbling voices in the Republican Party that the US Navy was short-changing itself by transferring three Virginia-class boats to the Royal Australian Navy) and taking place “in terms of an increased force posture of America within Australia.”  Speaking with confidence, Marles was also looking forward to “an increased tempo of visits from American nuclear-powered submarines to our waters as we look towards the establishment of a US submarine rotation, HMS Sterling, later in this decade.”

    Australian real estate would be given over to greater “space cooperation”, alongside creating “a guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise in this country, and doing so in a way where we hope to see manufacturing of missiles commence in Australia in two years’ time as part of a collective industrial base between the two countries.”  Chillingly, Marles went on to reiterate what has become something of a favourite in his middle-management lexicon.  The efforts to fiddle the export-defense export control legislation by the Biden administration would create “a more seamless defence industrial base between our countries.”  Seamless, here, is the thick nail in the coffin of sovereignty.

    Moves are also underway to engage in redevelopment of bases in northern Australia, in anticipation of the increased, ongoing US military presence.  The RAAF Base Tindal, located 320km south-east of Darwin in the Northern Territory, is the subject of considerable investment “to address functional deficiencies and capacity constraints in existing facilities and infrastructure.”  The AUSMIN talks further revealed that scoping upgrades would take place at two new locations: RAAF Base Scherger and RAAF Curtin.

    Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation will also be colonised by what is being termed a “Combined Intelligence Centre – Australia” by 2024.  This is purportedly intended to “enhance long-standing intelligence cooperation” while essentially subordinating Australian intelligence operations to their US overlords.  Marles saw the arrangement as part of a drive towards “seamless” (that hideous word again) intelligence ties between Canberra and Washington.  “This is a unit which is going to produce intelligence for both of our defence forces … and I think that’s important.”

    In the pro-war press outlets such as The Australian, Greg Sheridan complained that AUSMIN talks had revealed “the appalling state of our defences”.  What bothered him was the expectation that Washington do everything in terms of addressing such inadequacies, while leaving the Australian defence base reliant and emaciated.  “Under the Albanese government we have reverted completely to our worst selves on defence.  We’re going to do almost nothing consequential over the next 10 years other than get the Americans to do more on our land.”  Well, Sheridan, don’t give up hope: Australia might be at war with China under US-direction before a decade is up, vassalized warriors eager to kill and be killed.

    From his vantage point as the Australian Financial Review’s international editor, historian James Curran glumly noted that, “The permanent American military presence on Australian soil is now at a scale unprecedented since the Second World War.”  While the US-Australian relationship had previously stressed the value of deterrence, the focus seemed increasingly on the “projection” of power.  “The change from the mid-1990s has been nothing short of staggering.”

    The most striking matter in this whole business was the utter absence of parliamentary outrage in Canberra.  There was no registered protest, no red mist rage in the streets, and no debate to speak off, nor even an eloquent funeral oration.  You might even say that AUSMIN 2023 was one of history’s most successful coups, implemented in plain sight by all too willing collaborators.  Its victim, Australian sovereignty, has been laid to rest.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • AUSMIN and Assange: The Great Vassal Smackdown

    It was there for all to see.  Embarrassing, cloying, and bound make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III stopped by one of the vassal states to make sure that the meal and military service was orderly, the troops well behaved, and the weapons working as they should.  On the occasion of 2023 AUSMIN meetings, the questions asked were mild and generally unprovocative; answers were naturally tailored.

    Seeing that Australia is now rapidly moving into the US orbit of client status – its minerals will be designated a US domestic resource in due course – and given that its land, sea and air are to be more available than ever for the US armed forces, nuclear and conventional, nothing will interrupt this inexorable extinguishing of sovereignty.

    One vestige of Australian sovereignty might have evinced itself, notably in how Canberra might push for the release, or at the very least better terms, for the Australian national and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.  The publisher faces 18 counts, all but one of them pertaining to the Espionage Act of 1917, an archaic, wartime act with a dark record of punishing free speech and contrarians.  The Albanese government, eschewing “the hailer” approach in favour of “quiet diplomacy” and not offending Washington, has conspicuously failed to make any impression.

    In April, an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, featuring 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, argued that the Assange prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.  It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

    Despite such concerns bubbling away in Parliament, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong was in no danger of upsetting their guests.  “[W]e have made clear our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.”  But, as ever, “there are limits until Mr. Assange’s legal processes have concluded.”  The assumption, laid bare, is that Australia will only push for terms once the US secures its treasured quarry.

    Blinken parroted staged, withered lines, politely dismissing Wong’s statements while pouring acid on the Assange plea.  “I really do understand and certainly confirm what Penny said about the fact that this matter was raised with us, as it has been in the past, and I understand the sensitivities, I understand the concerns and view of Australians.”  He thought it “important”, as if it mattered “that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter.”

    Those friends were made to understand that matter in no uncertain terms. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.  The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

    Such excremental, false reasoning was galling, and went unchallenged by the all too pliant Senator Wong and the Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles.  This, despite the cool findings by Blinken’s own colleagues at the Pentagon that the WikiLeaks disclosures never posed a risk to any valued source in the service of the US imperium, and the fact that other outlets have also published these purportedly “named sources” without having their collars fingered by the US Department of Justice. The double standard is gold in Washington.

    The same babbling nonsense was evident during the extradition trial proceedings of Assange that were held at London’s Central Criminal Court in 2020.  There, the prosecution, representing a number of clumsy, clownish and impressively ignorant representatives from Freedom Land, proved unable to produce a single instance of actual compromise or harm to a single informant of the US imperium.  They also showed, with idiotic facility, an ignorance of the court martial that the US military had subjected Chelsea Manning to when she faced charges for revealing classified national security information to WikiLeaks.

    Wong, as part of her buttoned-up brief dictated by Washington’s suits, either did not know nor care to correct Blinken who, for all we know, is equally ignorant of his brief on the subject.  If the prosecutors in London in 2020 had no idea, why should the US secretary of state, let alone the Australian foreign minister?

    As a terrible omen for the Australians, four defence personnel seem to have perished in waters near Hamilton Island through an accident with their MRH-90 Taipan helicopter as part of the Talisman Sabre war games.  The US overlords were paternal and benevolent; their Australian counterparts were grateful for the interest.  Blinken soppily suggested how the sacrifice was appreciated.  “They have been on our minds throughout today; they remain very much on our minds right now.”  But the message was clear: Australia, you are now less a state than a protectorate, territory to exploit, a resource basket to appropriate.  Why not just make it official?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.