Author William Briggs characterises the intensifying conflict between the United States and China as a rivalry between two capitalist powers, one growing in strength, the other long dominant but now declining, writes Chris Slee.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
“It’s never enough” said former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about military spending. “They always want more.” ((Jay Hill, in the House of Commons, quoting then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from an article by Stephanie Rubec in the Ottawa Sun, October 20, 2003.))
Canada shouldn’t spend huge sums on 88 new fighter jets incapable of protecting the population against pressing security threats. The warplanes will simply strengthen Canada’s powerful, offensive air force.
Amidst a pandemic and climate crisis the security argument for spending $19 billion – $77 billion over their life cycle – on fighter jets is extremely weak. New warplanes won’t protect against climate induced disasters or new viruses. Worse still, purchasing heavy carbon emitting fighter jets diverts resources away from dealing with these genuine security threats.
But we require these warplanes to protect Canada, say the militarists. In fact, many countries don’t have fighter jets. More than 30 nations, including Costa Rica, Iceland and Panama, don’t have an active military force at all while Ireland hasn’t had fighter jets for two decades. Nor has New Zealand, but the militarists who demand Canada follow its “Five Eyes” counterparts won’t mention that.
Nor do they discuss how Canada’s free trade partner Mexico has no operational fighter jets. Doesn’t that country face a similar menace from the Russians or Chinese? The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) is far better equipped than its counterpart in Mexico, a country with more than twice Canada’s population.
RCAF has about 90 operational CF-18s. It is one of the better warplanes and will remain a top-tier fighter jet for many years to come. RCAF is about the 16th best equipped air force in the world. But Canada is the 39th most populous state. Should Canadians spend lavishly to maintain an air force far better equipped than this country’s relative population size?
Considering the resources required to mitigate the climate crisis and pandemic why not simply maintain the CF-18s and when the RCAF’s standing approaches Canada’s share of the global population consider purchasing new fighter jets. If the RCAF were designed to defend Canada that would be the sensible approach. But that is not, in fact, its purpose. The RCAF is structured primarily to support the US war machine.
Canada’s air force says CF-18s intercept 6-7 aircraft each year in Canada’s Air Defence Identification Zone, which is 100-200 nautical miles from its coastline. (Canada’s territorial airspace is 12 nautical miles from the coastline.) By comparison, notes Brent Patterson, Canada’s CF-18s have conducted 1600 offensive bombing missions over the past 30 years in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria and Libya.
While the military tightly controls news during fighter jet missions, some information has trickled out about what happens when these planes drop bombs from the sky. Pentagon documents suggest CF-18s were responsible for a January 2015 air strike in Iraq that killed as many as 27 civilians. The RCAF claimed it had “no obligation”, reported the internal US documents, “to conduct an investigation” of the incident. In October 2015 the CBC also reported, “Canadian fighter planes have now been connected to a second airstrike in Iraq that has been reviewed by the Pentagon for possible civilian casualties.” In another incident, a CF-18 reportedly killed 10 and injured 20 Iraqi civilians on November 19, 2015.
In 2011 seven Canadian CF-18 fighter jets dropped at least 700 bombs on Libyan targets. Two months into the bombing United Press International reported that Ottawa “ordered 1,300 replacement laser-guided bombs to use in its NATO mission in Libya” and a month later they ordered another 1,000 bomb kits. A number of coalition members placed strict restrictions on their forces’ ability to strike ground targets. These and other countries’ militaries frequently “red carded” sorties, declaring that they would not contribute. “With a Canadian general in charge” of the NATO bombing campaign, explained the Globe and Mail, “Canada couldn’t have red-carded missions even if it wanted to, which is why Canadian CF-18 pilots often found themselves in the most dangerous skies” doing the dirtiest work.
CBC.ca reported that on March 29, 2011, two CF-18s launched strikes that directly aided the Jihadist rebels in Misrata and on May 19 Canadian jets participated in a mission that destroyed eight Libyan naval vessels. On their return to Canada, CBC.ca reported: “[pilot Maj. Yves] Leblanc’s crew carried out the final mission on the day Gaddafi was captured, and were flying 25,000 feet over when Gaddafi’s convoy was attacked.” Human Rights Watch found the remains of at least 95 people at the site where Muammar Gaddafi was captured. According to the human rights group, a sizable number “apparently died in the fighting and NATO strikes prior to Gaddafi’s capture” with multiple dozens were also executed by close range gunshot wounds. Some accused NATO forces of helping to murder Gaddafi.
In the spring of 1999 eighteen CF-18s dropped 532 bombs in 678 sorties during NATO’s bombing of Serbia. About two thousand died during NATO’s bombing. Hundreds of thousands were internally displaced and hundreds of thousands were made refugees in a war that contravened international law.
Two dozen CF-18s were deployed to Iraq in 1990. Among few other coalition members, Canadian fighter jets engaged in combat. They joined US and British counterparts in destroying most of Iraq’s hundred plus naval vessels in what was dubbed the “Bubiyan Turkey Shoot.” Coalition bombing destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. The country’s electricity production was largely demolished as were sewage treatment plants, telecommunications equipment, oil refineries, etc. Twenty thousand Iraqi troops and thousands of civilians were killed. The UN resolution allowed for attacks against Iraqi establishments in Kuwait while the US-led forces bombed across Iraq in what Mark Curtis described as the open “rehabilitation of colonialism and imperialism.”
Buying 88 new fighter jets has little to do with protecting Canadians. It’s about funneling public resources to arms firms and strengthening the Royal Canadian Air Force’s capacity to fight in offensive US and NATO wars. Is this really how we should be spending public resources? If the government was truly concerned about security, it would spend the money on public/co-op housing, cleaning up ecological devastation and preparing for the next pandemic.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Malik Miah pays tribute to radical feminist, scholar and activist bell hooks, who died on December 15.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
By Anneke Smith, RNZ News political reporter
New Zealand’s condemnation of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council elections reflects a “hardening stance” towards China, says a leading defence analyst.
Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta last week joined her Five Eyes counterparts to express “grave concern” over the erosion of democratic elements of the new electoral system.
“Actions that undermine Hong Kong’s rights, freedoms and high degree of autonomy are threatening our shared wish to see Hong Kong succeed,” the joint statement reads.
Pro-Beijing candidates swept the seats under the new “patriots-only” rules that saw a record-low voting turnout of 30.2 percent; almost half of the previous legislative poll in 2016.
New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States are now urging the People’s Republic of China to respect protected rights and fundamental freedoms of Hong Kong.
Director of 36th Parallel Assessments Dr Paul Buchanan said this reflected New Zealand’s cooling relationship with China as it increasingly aligned itself with its traditional partners.
“It’s very clear something has shifted in the logic of the security community and foreign policy community in Wellington. I tend to believe it is Chinese behaviour rather than pressure from our allies, but it may be a combination of both,” he said.
Increasing Chinese pressure
New Zealand’s relationship with China has come under increasing pressure this year after it raised concerns about Chinese state-funded hacking and the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
Mahuta has previously said New Zealand would be “uncomfortable” with the remit of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance being expanded to include diplomatic matters.
Dr Buchanan said it was not clear if last week’s joint statement on the Hong Kong elections was consistent with this stated independent foreign policy, or a sign New Zealand had abandoned this to better align itself with its traditional partners.
“That’s an open question to me, because I can see that the government can maintain independence and say, ‘simply on the issue of Hong Kong and China we side with our traditional partners, but on any range of other issues, we don’t necessarily fall in line with them’,” he said.
“On the other hand, maybe the government has made a decision that the threat from the Chinese is of such a magnitude it’s time to pick a side, get off straddling the fence and choose the side of our traditional partners because the Chinese values are inimical to the New Zealand way of life.”
Dr Buchanan said a “hardening stance” towards China was in line with the contents of a new defence report that recently identified ‘China’s rise’ and its power struggle with the United States as one of the pre-eminent security risks in the Indo-Pacific.
“This may be more reflective of the security officials’ concerns about China and that may not be shared by the entirety of the current government.
General consensus
“Although, the fact that the foreign minister signed off on this latest Five Eyes statement regarding Hong Kong would indicate that there is a general consensus within the New Zealand foreign policy and security establishment that China is a threat.”
In response to the joint Five Eyes statement on Hong Kong, the Chinese Embassy issued a statement telling the members to stop interfering with Hong Kong and China’s affairs.
Of particular concern, Dr Buchanan said, was China’s explicit assertion in this response it was led by China’s Constitution and the Basic Law, not the Sino-British Joint Declaration, in its administration of Hong Kong.
“The Chinese now have said that the joint declaration signed in 1997, no longer applies and all that applies in Hong Kong is Chinese law.
“So they’ve violated their commitment to that principle and that’s symptomatic of an increasingly-hardened approach to everything, quite frankly, of a policy matter under Xi Jinping.”
Dr Buchanan said New Zealand, whose biggest trading partner is China, was positioned as the most vulnerable of the Five Eyes partners to any potential economic retaliation from China.
“It would be pretty easy to see that if the Chinese are going to retaliate against anybody in the Anglophone world, it would more than likely be us because it’ll cost them very little, people have to change their dietary habits among the Chinese middle class, but it will have a dramatic effect on us because a third of our GDP is tied up with bilateral trade with China.
“But the government has clearly signalled that it’s seeking to diversify. It has now signalled that on the diplomatic and security front, it sees the Chinese increasingly as a malign actor, and so whatever is coming on the horizon, this government at least appears prepared to weather the storm.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
With Julian Assange now fighting the next stage of efforts to extradite him to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 of which are based on the brutal, archaic Espionage Act, some Australian politicians have found their voice. It might be said that a few have even found their conscience.
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was sufficiently exercised by the High Court judgment overturning the lower court ruling against extradition to demand an end to the matter. In his opinion piece for the Nine newspaper group on December 14, he argued that rights were “not created in some legal sonic boom at one undefined point of our existence nor switched off like the power to a fridge because of a fear or a confusion as to the worth of their contents.”
The deputy PM proved mature enough to admit that “whether you like him or despite him”, the importance of the case transcended his situation. “So we must hope for the British courts to do so, and we will judge its society accordingly.” (They have not and, accordingly, should be judged.)
The Nationals leader has little time for the role of whistleblowing or disclosing egregious misconduct by a State; less time for Assange as the publisher in history, the exposer of crimes by a great power. “They are a separate matter to the key issue: where was this individual when he was allegedly breaking US law for which the US is now seeking his extradition from London?”
Joyce’s reasoning, while jejune on the historical contributions of WikiLeaks, has the merit of unusual clarity. He argues that the UK “should try him there for any crime he is alleged to have committed on British soil or send him back to Australia, where he is a citizen.” Assange never pilfered any US secret files; did not breach Australian laws and was not in the US when “the event being deliberated in the court now in London occurred.” To extradite him to the US would not only be unjust but bizarre. “If he insulted the Koran, would he be extradited to Saudi Arabia?”
The move by the Nationals leader also brought a few voices of support from the woodwork. Liberal backbenchers Jason Falinski and Bridget Archer are encouraging diplomatic intervention. Falinski suggested that the Morrison government “do what it can to get an Australian citizen back to Australia as quickly as possible” though he refused to entertain “a public spat with America”. Archer believed that “he should be released and returned to Australia”.
The announcement that Caroline Kennedy would be heading Down Under as the new US ambassador to Australia was also seen as an opportunity. Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr suggested to that Prime Minister Scott Morrison take the chance to discuss the Assange case with Kennedy. (This, from a man who once claimed that Assange “has had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian” while admitting that he did not “know whether this is the case.”)
Morrison might, suggests Carr, point out that Australia had its own challenges in facing war crimes allegations, notably “war crimes trials pending for Australian troops in Afghanistan who might have done the very things Assange exposed in Iraq.” Washington’s treatment of the publisher could well “turn this guy into a martyr.”
Carr sees such advice as part of the capital of trust between allies. It was a “small transaction under the architecture of what each sees as a mutually beneficial relationship.” It might even show that Australia was capable of behaving “like a sovereign nation” in “one tiny corner of our alliance partnership”. If Canberra were unable to “take up the cause of an Australian passport holder, what scope for any independent action do we allow ourselves?”
The former foreign minister shows, at stages, flashes of ignorance about aspects of the proceedings (the US prosecution, for instance, made a special point in not mentioning the Collateral Murder video in its proceedings), he is at least cognisant of the monstrous defects in the case, not least the fact that a good deal of the indictment is based on falsified accounts from former WikiLeaks volunteer, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson.
The latest stirring of principled awareness in Australia should be treated warily. Australian governments tend to protect their citizens with a begrudging reluctance, except in the rarest of cases. They are notorious in playing the game of surrender and capitulation. In the context of the US-Australian alliance, one given an even more solid filling with the AUKUS security pact, the hope that Australia would ever be able to exercise sovereign choices on any issue that affects US security is almost inconceivable.
The lamentable behaviour from Canberra regarding Assange’s welfare has also been brought to light by the tireless exploits of lawyer Kellie Tranter. Using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Tranter developed a timeline revealing how Australian officials were updated on Assange’s condition (legal and physical) yet did little in the way of addressing it. Kit Klarenberg, making use of Tranter’s findings, also discusses the extent Australian officials knew about Assange’s plight.
In April 2019, for instance, the lawyer Gareth Pierce, acting for Assange, wrote to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) warning that the publisher’s possessions were being held by the Ecuadorian authorities. These included a stash of privileged legal documents. DFAT, while claiming it would chase the matter up, concluded in May 2019 that Assange’s possessions were “under the authority and jurisdiction of the Judicial System of the Republic of Ecuador”. Australian diplomats, it followed, were unable to intervene. The result: Assange’s documents, held by the Ecuadorians, were seized by the FBI.
As extradition proceedings were taking place, Peirce wrote to the Australian High Commission that consular representatives would have “undoubtedly noted what was clear for everyone present in court to observe” – that the publisher was “in shockingly poor condition … struggling not only to cope but to articulate what he wishes to articulate.” DFAT’s report of those proceedings, intentionally or otherwise, was stonily silent on the issue.
Throughout, DFAT maintained that Assange had refused consular assistance or support. This was a point the publisher took up in a meeting at Belmarsh prison with consular officials on November 1, 2019, claiming that to be misguided nonsense. He also noted concerns by the prison doctor about his state, being “so bad that his mind was shutting down”, the appalling state of isolation which made it impossible for him “to think or to prepare his defence.”
Little then, can be expected from the compliant minions in Canberra desperately keen not to soil or sour relations with Washington. But it is at least mildly heartening that a few members of the Morrison government have woken up to the fact that this grotesque act of persecution against a publisher should end.
The post Voices of Concern: Aussies for Assange’s Return first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows.
His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it published just over a decade ago hundreds of thousands of leaked materials – documents we were never supposed to see – detailing war crimes committed by the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These two western countries killed non-combatants and carried out torture not, as they claimed, in the pursuit of self-defence or in the promotion of democracy, but to impose control over a strategic, resource-rich region.
It is the ultimate, ugly paradox that Assange’s legal and physical fate rests in the hands of two states that have the most to lose by allowing him to regain his freedom and publish more of the truths they want to keep concealed. By redefining his journalism as “espionage” – the basis for the US extradition claim – they are determined to keep the genie stuffed in the bottle.
Eyes off the ball
Last week, in overturning a lower court decision that should have allowed Assange to walk free, the English High Court consented to effectively keep Assange locked up indefinitely. He is a remand prisoner – found guilty of no crime – and yet he will continue rotting in solitary confinement for the foreseeable future, barely seeing daylight or other human beings, in Belmarsh high-security prison alongside Britain’s most dangerous criminals.
The High Court decision forces our eyes off the ball once again. Assange and his supposed “crime” of seeking transparency and accountability has become the story rather than the crimes he exposed that were carried out by the US to lay waste to whole regions and devastate the lives of millions.
The goal is to stop the public conducting the debate Assange wanted to initiate through his journalism: about western state crimes. Instead the public is being deflected into a debate his persecutors want: whether Assange can ever safely be allowed out of his cell.
Assange’s lawyers are being diverted from the real issues too. They will now be tied up for years fighting endless rearguard actions, caught up in the search for legal technicalities, battling to win a hearing in any court they can, to prevent his extradition to the United States to stand trial.
The process itself has taken over. And while the legal minutiae are endlessly raked over, the substance of the case – that it is US and British officials who ought to be held responsible for committing war crimes – will be glossed over.
Permanently silenced
But it is worse than the legal injustice of Assange’s case. There may be no hack-saws needed this time, but this is as visceral a crime against journalism as the dismemberment of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials back in 2018.
And the outcome for Assange is only slightly less preordained than it was for Khashoggi when he entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The goal for US officials has always been about permanently disappearing Assange. They are indifferent about how that is achieved.
If the legal avenue is a success, he will eventually head to the US where he can be locked away for up to 175 years in severe solitary confinement in a super-max jail – that is, till long past his death from natural causes. But there is every chance he will not survive that long. Last January, a British judge rejected extraditing Julian Assange to the US over his “suicide risk“, and medical experts have warned that it will be only a matter of time before he succeeds.
That was why the district court blocked extradition – on humanitarian grounds. Those grounds were overturned by the High Court last week only because the US offered “assurances” that measures would be in place to ensure Assange did not commit suicide. But Assange’s lawyers pointed out: those assurances “were not enough to address concerns about his fragile mental health and high risk of suicide”. These concerns should have been apparent to the High Court justices.
Further, dozens of former officials in the Central Intelligence Agency and the previous US administration have confirmed that the agency planned to execute Assange in an extrajudicial operation in 2017. That was shortly before the US was forced by circumstance to switch to the current, formal extradition route. The arguments now made for his welfare by the same officials and institutions that came close to killing him should never have been accepted as made in good faith.
In fact, there is no need to speculate about the Americans’ bad faith. It is only too apparent in the myriad get-out clauses in the “assurances” they provided. Those assurances can be dropped, for example, if US officials decide Assange is not being cooperative. The promises can and will be disregarded the moment they become an encumbrance on Washington’s ability to keep Assange permanently silenced.
‘Trapped in a cage’
But if losing the extradition battle is high stakes, so is the legal process itself. That could finish Assange off long before a decision is reached, as his fiancee Stella Moris indicated at the weekend. She confirmed that Assange suffered a small stroke during a hearing in October in the endless extradition proceedings. There are indications he suffered neurological damage, and is now on anti-stroke medication to try to stop a recurrence.
Assange and his friends believe the stroke was brought on by the constant double strain of his solitary confinement in Belmarsh and a legal process being conducted over his head, in which he is barely allowed to participate.
Nils Melzer, the United Nations expert on torture, has repeatedly warned that Assange has been subjected to prolonged psychological torture in the nine years since he fled into Ecuador’s embassy in London seeking asylum from US efforts to persecute him.
That form of torture, Melzer has pointed out, was refined by the Nazis because it was found to be far more effective at breaking people than physical torture. Moris told the Daily Mail: “[The stroke] compounds our fears about [Assange’s] ability to survive the longer this long legal battle goes on. … Look at animals trapped in cages in a zoo. It cuts their life short. That’s what’s happening to Julian.”
And that indeed looks to be the prize for US officials that wanted him assassinated anyway. Whatever happens to Assange, the lawless US security state wins: it either gets him behind bars forever, or it kills him quietly and quite lawfully, while everyone is distracted, arguing about who Assange is rather what he exposed.
Political prisoner
In fact, with each twist and turn of the proceedings against Assange we move further from the realities at the heart of the case towards narrative distractions.
Who remembers now the first extradition hearings, nearly two years ago, at which the court was reminded that the very treaty signed by Britain and the US that is the basis for Assange’s extradition explicitly excludes political cases of the kind being pursued by the US against Assange?
It is a victory for state criminality that the discussion has devolved to Assange’s mental health rather than a substantive discussion of the treaty’s misapplication to serve political ends.
And similarly the focus on US assurances regarding Assange’s wellbeing is intended to obscure the fact that a journalist’s work is being criminalised as “espionage” for the first time under a hurriedly drafted, draconian and discredited piece of First World War legislation, the 1917 Espionage Act. Because Assange is a political prisoner suffering political persecution, legal arguments are apparently powerless to save him. It is only a political campaign that can keep underscoring the sham nature of the charges he faces.
The lies of power
What Assange bequeathed us through Wikileaks was a harsh light capable of cutting through the lies of power and power of lies. He showed that western governments claiming the moral high ground were actually committing crimes in our name out of sight in far-off lands. He tore the mask off their hypocrisy.
He showed that the many millions who took to the streets in cities around the world in 2003 because they knew the US and UK would commit war crimes in Iraq were right to march. But he also confirmed something worse: that their opposition to the war was treated with utter contempt.
The US and UK did not operate more carefully, they were not more respectful of human rights, they did not tread more lightly in Iraq because of those marches, because of the criticism beforehand. The western war machine carried on regardless, crushing the lives of anyone who got caught up in its maw.
Now with Assange locked up and silenced, western foreign policy can return comfortably to the era of zero accountability that existed before Assange shook up the whole system with his revelations. No journalist will dare to repeat what Assange did – not unless they are ready to spend the rest of their days behind bars.
The message his abuse sends to others could not be clearer or more chilling: what happened to Assange could happen to you too.
The truth is journalism is already reeling from the combined assaults against Khashoggi and Assange. But the hounding of Assange strikes the bigger blow. It leaves honest journalism with no refuge, no sanctuary anywhere in the world.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Ukrainian servicemen take part in a drill of the airborne troops taking place in Zhytomyr region on November 21, 2018. (photo: AFP)
Since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, US policy on Ukraine has been an ugly mix of inconsistency, quiet aggression, fear-mongering and stupidity. Now President Biden is recklessly intensifying the same failed tactics while expecting a different outcome and risking a confrontation of the world’s two major nuclear-armed states.
What could possibly go wrong?
What passes for conventional wisdom nowadays is expressed by the cover headline of the November 29 issue of The Nation magazine, of all places:
Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World
That is such hogwash. The Nation knows better. But the fear-mongering leads, even though the magazine’s sub-head is: “But there’s already a solution.” Author Anatol Lieven argues persuasively that the essence of a solution for Ukraine issues have already been outlined in the so-called “Minsk II” agreement of 2015, reached by leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. The agreement was endorsed unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. Despite their formal assent to Minsk II, three US administrations have supported Ukraine in refusing to implement the agreement. Nor have they proposed any better idea. This is an example of foreign policy guided by denial of reality.
Ukraine remains a “dangerous problem” only as long as the US and Ukraine insist on making it one. (It’s hardly “the most dangerous,” given climate change, or US provocation of China, or the US-led nuclear arms race, or the self-gutting of US democracy.)
With the Soviet Union gone in 1991, US President Bush assured Russian leaders that NATO would not expand to include former Soviet states. Whether this was a lie or a broken promise hardly matters. NATO expanded. Russia was confronted with the prospect of an avowedly hostile military alliance approaching its borders along the same invasion route followed by Napoleon and Hitler. As long as Ukraine remained unaligned, Russian historical memory could rest quietly. Ukraine puts almost 1,000 miles between Russia and NATO member Poland. Ukraine’s population of about 45 million ranges from very pro-western to virtually Russian. The country has long been deeply corrupt with a quasi-functional democracy (an opportunistic playground for the likes of Paul Manafort and Hunter Biden). All in all, from a geopolitical perspective, Ukraine was (and still is) a combustible potential best left undisturbed.
In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych put NATO and European Union membership in play, then reversed course under Russian pressure. In November 2013, he cancelled an EU association agreement just days before it was to take effect. With US connivance, pro-western Ukrainian forces launched the Maidan Revolution that lasted into the spring of 2014. Elected president Yanukovich was forced out of office (shades of Iran 1953) and the country entered a period of chaos. Russia took advantage of this to walk into Crimea unopposed and to annex it, as voted by the Crimean parliament, despite objections from the West. These objections have continued to the present, together with economic sanctions and military provocations from the Black Sea.
The US and NATO have justified their hostile actions by claiming Russia was also about to invade eastern Ukraine, which still hasn’t happened. Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, has been a war zone since March 2014 when separatist Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk started fighting for independence from the central government in Kiev. This is a civil war between the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk against the Ukraine government. The People’s Republics comprise about 6,200 square miles (bigger than Connecticut) with almost 4 million people, mostly Russian-speaking, whose currency is the ruble. Russia has supported the People’s Republics, but short of introducing its own troops. Likewise, the US and NATO have supported Kiev, but short of introducing their own troops into the Donbas. The fighting has been intense in the past, with some 10,000 killed on both sides, but the conflict in recent years has been limited to trench warfare along a 400-mile front, with most casualties coming from sniper fire. Neither side has made significant advances in years.
In 2014, Russia and Ukraine met under the auspices of the European Union and signed the first Minsk Protocol in an ultimately ineffective effort to reach a ceasefire. The following year, five parties signed a second Minsk Protocol – Ukraine, Ukraine Separatists, Russia, France, and Germany – which led to reduced fighting but no lasting solution. Through all of this, the US under President Obama, played no useful role in resolving the issues or assuring anything like a stable peace.
The US remains gripped, apparently, by a reflexive Cold War rigidity which requires that Russia be to blame for anything we don’t like, such as the results of the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014. The new Cold War is manifested by the expansion of NATO, needlessly threatening Russia on the basis of a paranoid Western sense of threat.
Another manifestation of Cold War thinking is Biden’s choice of Victoria Nuland as his current special ambassador to Russia to discuss Ukraine. Nuland was notoriously involved in efforts to manipulate the 2013 Madan uprising and supporting the coup against Yanukovich. When apprised of European desires to proceed cautiously, Nuland was recorded on cell phone saying, “Fuck the EU.” Such assertions of American exceptionalism continue to make the world a more dangerous place.
What could Biden do now to make the world a safer place?
Biden could ease sanctions over Crimea, acknowledging that its return to Russia is a done deal with strong historic and geo-political justifications. Biden could also stop US nuclear-capable bombers from probing Russia in the Black Sea region. It’s hard to see how continuing such provocative flights can have a calming effect.
Most importantly, Biden could assure Russia (as the US did once before in 1992) that NATO would not expand to include Ukraine. In his recent conversation with Putin, Biden did the opposite, making it all but non-negotiable. That has the obvious effect of continuing the conflict, asserting the right to hold a knife to another’s throat.
This particular knife was forced into NATO’s hands in April 2008 by the illegitimate President Bush against the will of the majority of NATO members. The issue came up at NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Bucharest. NATO members easily accepted the future membership of Albania and Croatia, but balked at approving Ukraine or Georgia. Instead, in the Bucharest Summit Declaration, members approved a compromise article drafted by the British with intentional imprecision, paragraph 23 of 50, that began:
NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for
membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become
members of NATO….
The paragraph continues with generalizations about the countries’ contributions to the war in Afghanistan, their promised democratic reforms, and so on. But there is no date for membership, no process for achieving membership (as distinct from Albania and Croatia), and actual approval is only anticipated at some unknown future date. This paragraph in the Bucharest Declaration is essentially a throwaway line, putting off to an indeterminate future the clearly divisive and dangerous issue of relating to Russian border states.
Elsewhere, the Bucharest Declaration discusses a variety of practical matters with consistent self-confidence and expressions of peaceful cooperation:
… we stand ready to continue working with Russia as equal partners in areas of common concern…. [paragraph 28]
We remain committed to substantive political discussions and effective cooperation…. [paragraph 32]
The Alliance will continue to support, as appropriate, these efforts as guided by regional priorities and based on transparency, complementarity and inclusiveness, in order to develop dialogue and cooperation among the Black Sea states and with the Alliance. [paragraph 36]
The Bucharest Declaration does not express an alliance seeking confrontation with Russia, for all that George W. Bush wanted it.
The Bucharest Declaration treats NATO’s war in Afghanistan as a success and expresses the need for possible future military actions against Iran and North Korea (but no mention of China). There is no hint of anyone wondering why something called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization thinks it has any legitimate business operating in landlocked Afghanistan.
More than a decade later, four American presidents have turned Afghanistan into a world class disaster. America has turned its back on mass starvation there. And still there is no sense of national responsibility or shame as Biden and the US governing elite stumble provocatively toward new looming catastrophes with Iran, China, climate change, public health, and functioning democracy itself.
Ukraine is a wholly American-made pseudo crisis in which the US national interest is close to zero. The US forced NATO to put Ukraine in play in 2008 by breaking the earlier US pledge not to put Ukraine in play. Now our obtuse leadership poses as acting on principle by refusing to break the pledge that broke the first pledge, even though that is the most obvious, effective de-escalation available: guarantee Russia a border with no more NATO threats and negotiate (as others have done) in good faith to defuse the rest of the Ukrainian mishmash.
When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says that “one country trying to tell another what its choices should be, including with whom it associates, that’s not an acceptable proposition,…” what we’re hearing is a US official ignoring reality and denying what the US does every day. And when former US ambassador Michael McFaul tweets: “Putin invented this ‘crisis’ single-handedly. Nothing changed in Ukraine. Nothing changed regarding NATO policy” – he’s just lying.
Worse, the blind rigidity of the likes of Blinken and McFaul serves to enable the truly mindless warmongers like US Senator Roger Wicker, R-MS, who doesn’t have the sense not to invite nuclear war when he tells Fox News:
Military action could mean that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea, and we rain destruction on Russian military capability. It could mean that. It could mean that we participate, and I would not rule that out, I would not rule out American troops on the ground. We don’t rule out first use nuclear action.
President Biden has the opportunity to re-direct US policy on Ukraine in a peaceful direction,
But it will take serious, steadfast courage. We don’t know how compromised he is by his previous dealing in Ukraine, or his son’s. We don’t know if he has the clarity of mind to see the obvious. And we don’t know if he has the strength to wage peace.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On Friday, the English High Court paved the way for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States and tried over the publication of hundreds of thousands of documents, some of which contained evidence of US and British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The decision reversed a ruling in January by a lower court that had blocked the extradition, but only on humanitarian grounds: that Assange would be put at severe risk of suicide by the oppressive conditions of his detention in the US.
The 50-year old Australian faces a sentence of up to 175 years in prison if found guilty.
Amnesty International described the ruling as a “travesty of justice”, while Rebecca Vincent of Reporters Without Borders tweeted that it was an “appalling” decision that “marks a bleak moment for journalists and journalism around the world”.
Assange’s lawyers said they will appeal the ruling at the supreme court. But the fight to free Assange – even if ultimately successful – is certain to drag on for many more years.
The WikiLeaks founder has already spent more than a decade in various forms of incarceration: house arrest, political asylum and, since early 2019, solitary confinement in Belmarsh high-security prison in London.
The toll this has taken is immense, according to Nils Melzer, a law professor and the United Nations’ expert on torture. He has repeatedly warned that Assange is suffering the effects of “prolonged exposure to psychological torture”.
Family and friends warn that he is regularly confused about basic facts. At one hearing, he visibly struggled even to recall his name and age.
War crimes
The reasons for Assange’s detention have shifted a number of times over the years: from an initial investigation of alleged sex crimes in Sweden, to a bail violation in the UK, and more recently espionage.
But the presence of the US national security state has never been far away. Assange’s supporters say Washington has been quietly influencing events, only showing its hand directly when it launched the extradition claim in 2019.
It was clear from the outset that the arguments made by the US could have huge implications for the future of journalism and its ability to hold powerful states to account. And yet the hearings have been given only cursory coverage, especially by the British media.
The case for extradition rests on a US claim that Assange carried out espionage in publishing hundreds of thousands of leaked materials in 2010 and 2011 with high-profile partners such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel. Called the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the documents show that the US army committed war crimes in those countries, killed non-combatants and carried out torture.
The United States clearly wanted to make sure there would be no recurrence of such a leak.
The problem was, if Assange could be jailed for doing journalism, why not also the editors of the papers he published with? Locking up the senior staff of the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel was never going to be a good look.
This very difficulty stayed the hand of officials in Barack Obama’s administration. They felt cornered by the First Amendment.
But under Donald Trump the reticence quickly lifted. His justice department officials argued that Assange was a hacker, not a journalist.
With this as their premise, they felt free to redefine the new, digitally based national security journalism Assange and WikiLeaks pioneered as “espionage”.
To do so, they turned to the 1917 Espionage Act, a draconian piece of First World War legislation that gave the government powers to jail critics.
It was a move with serious implications. Trump’s justice officials were effectively claiming a new kind of universal jurisdiction: the right to put Assange on trial, even though he was not a US citizen and was not accused of carrying out any of the acts in question on US soil.
The English courts have now attracted rancor by seemingly giving their assent to political persecution. Critics fear the precedent means any journalist in the UK could now be dragged to the US for prosecution should they cause Washington sufficient embarrassment.
Raising suspicions
Assange and his supporters say the legal arguments of the extradition process were never more than a facade. They say there were plenty of clues that the US was seeking vengeance against Assange, not justice.
A decade ago, long before the US was openly battling to get hold of Assange, he was facing another extradition battle – this time with a Swedish prosecutor – as part of an investigation into allegations of sexual assault. It was around that time that Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in London seeking political asylum.
The disappearance of email chains between Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Sweden from that time have raised suspicions that all was not as it seemed.
A few survive, and suggest that extra pressure was being applied.
A CPS lawyer wrote to a Swedish counterpart in 2011: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.” The following year, as Sweden appeared to be preparing to drop the investigation against Assange, the same UK lawyer replied: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”
Moves were afoot against Assange in the US too. In 2011, a grand jury was convened in the Eastern District of Virginia behind closed doors to draft an indictment. The location was no accident. That district of Virginia is where most of the US intelligence agencies are headquartered.
Pursued by Washington
But the gloves really came off after Trump entered the White House. The CIA stepped into the fray, with its then director Mike Pompeo characterising WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile intelligence service”.
In fact, in 2017 the CIA launched a “secret war” against Assange, according to an investigation by Yahoo News published in September. The agency variously plotted to poison Assange and kidnap him while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy. According to the report, the CIA proposed to seize the Australian and smuggle him to the US in an echo of the “extraordinary rendition” programmes the agency used in the “war on terror”.
The kidnap operation reportedly included plans for a potential gun battle on the streets of London.
Separately, it was reported that the CIA had also bugged the embassy while Assange was there through a Spanish firm hired by Ecuador to provide security. This was apparently done without Ecuador’s knowledge.
Such an operation violated Ecuador’s territorial sovereignty. But worse, by listening in to Assange’s privileged conversations with his lawyers, as he prepared for the highly politicised extradition battle he knew was coming, the CIA polluted the legality of that very process.
In fact, a strong argument can be made that the UK courts should have thrown out the extradition case on those grounds alone.
And yet despite all this, the English High Court ruled on Friday that it was satisfied with “assurances” that Assange’s wellbeing would be protected were he extradited to the US.
British judges may be persuaded by those assurances. Many others, including Assange, will not be.
• First published in Middle East Eye
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
President Biden, in full mood of marking “red lines” against Russia and Ukraine in a virtual meeting with Vladimir Putin, does not forget the importance of boycotting China’s Winter Olympic Games. It’s a diplomatic boycott only, so says Madame Jen Psaki, White House press secretary. Nevertheless, she and Biden are wishing the US sport-participants best of luck and they will support them throughout. So, they say. US athletes are allowed to part-take in the games. It’s the US diplomacy that is held back. It’s a hypocrisy that only Washington – and perhaps Brussels as EU and NATO headquarters – can muster. Now Australia has also joined the nefarious club.
Do they seriously hope the rest of the world will follow suit, because they want to be “with” the US and not be perceived as “against” the Big Empire? – Perhaps some will, indeed, be copy-cats. Fear is the name of the game, be it for covid or political sanctions. Western humanity is trembling from fear. So much fear, that the thought process has literally stopped functioning according to logic, even by the tyrants themselves.
Ms. Psaki explained the boycott as a response to “Beijing’s human rights violations”, adding what she calls “genocide and crimes against humanity”. She was, of course, referring to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a landlocked autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), by surface the largest single territory of China, located in the northwest of the country, close to Central Asia.
It is well possible that the Press Secretary doesn’t know what she is talking about, but is just repeating the current narrative. There is a set of standard accusations that are regularly being launched against China, with no substance at all. This is one of them. See “Xinjiang in My Eyes”: Debunking the Lies and Anti-China Propaganda Focusing on China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region“. Suffice it to say that the Xinjiang region is a pivotal point for the famous Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting China with Europe via Central Asia, as well as with the Indian Ocean.
Washington sees China, and especially the BRI, as an economic threat on their perceived supremacy, therefore does everything to denigrate China, and especially the Xinjiang region, where about 12 million Uyghurs live, mostly Muslims, out of a total population of 26 million. What is not said by Washington, is that the CIA and other US secret services recruit Uyghur Muslims, train them and send them to the Middle East to fight the Jihad, mostly in Syria, but also in Iraq. If, and when, they return, they were trained to create havoc and instability in Xinjiang. The Chinese Government is re-educating them for reintegration in the Uyghur society of the Xinjiang region.
The other area of China on which Washington and its western allies like to attack Beijing, is Taiwan, a Chinese territory. When the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, lost the civil war against Chairman Mao’s Communist Party in 1949, they fled to the island of Taiwan which they occupied ever since. However, Taiwan is part of China. In October 1971, the UN General Assembly passed a Resolution, that stopped recognizing Taiwan as China and, instead, decided the PRC would represent China, implying that Taiwan was part of the Peoples Republic of China. It looks like the US have stayed back in history, still looking at Taiwan as an independent country and their ally.
As President Chi has mentioned on several occasions, Taiwan will be integrated into the PRC in a peaceful way. Outside interferences, like by the United States and some of their European allies, have no place in these negotiations. It is a Chinese internal affair. Just imagine, China getting involved and taking sides in US internal affairs. Unimaginable!
What also seems to escape most western powers — still fond of the “freedom seeking” US of A — is the Unites States abysmal human rights record. It is so unabashed and shameful. The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as Guantanamo in Cuba, are well known as America’s torture chambers, where human rights do not exist. And these are just two out of some 100-plus US prison camps where human rights are not only trampled by military boots, but where in most cases they are openly abolished. Torture is the name of the game. Only an extreme hypocrite could accuse any other country of human rights abuse.
Earlier this week, Beijing announced stern counter measures, in case the US will indeed implement their “diplomatic” boycott of the Chinese Olympic Winter Games.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said that China would see such a move as outright political provocation. However, he did not offer any details as to how China might respond to the “diplomatic boycott”. He also said that after the virtual summit last month between Presidents Xi and Biden, no American diplomats, nor the President, were invited to the Olympic Games. This means, without saying so, the “boycott” is a mere US public relations farce.
Western supporters of the move hope to draw falsely negative attention to China’s human rights record. Even American athletes may be “trained” to openly accuse the Chinese human rights record, reproaching them of Uyghur tortures, although they have no clue what they are talking about, because they would simply parrot messages, without knowing what they are actually saying.
In fact, most countries expected to toe the line given by Biden, don’t know the truth, or they do know the truth, but are keen to stick to their hypocrite master’s lies.
So, Beijing has a number of avenues to “boycott” the US back – as in “Build Back Better”. For example, by trade sanctions. Mainland China and Taiwan are the largest producers of semi-conductors used in modern cars. If China holds back on producing and/or supplying semi-conductors, the entire western car industry comes to a halt. Supply shortages, due to covid-caused delivery-chain interruptions, are already affecting the Japanese and South Korean car industry. Currently, the Toyota car production is basically at a standstill.
The west also depends 70% to 90% on medical equipment (70%) and medication (up to 90%) on China. With a ferocious pandemic being sold to the people in the west, a pandemic that by reducing the human immune system will create all kinds of diseases that require regular medication, shortages of medication may be problematic. A supply chain interruption may trigger not only consternation, but outright disaster.
Is it possible that Biden and his top advisors do not understand what China’s counter-measures could mean to a US car industry that is already largely outsourced? Let alone to the health sector, plagued by a western manufactured disease that is currently “ravaging the west”, and is depending badly on Chinese made medication.
The post China Winter Olympics: US Boycott first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
© Sputnik / Sergey Guneev
As we enter the Christmas season that’s just pantomime on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The private video call which lasted two hours on Tuesday was eagerly anticipated around the world amid mounting tensions and fears of a military confrontation over Ukraine.
The next day headlines in Western media outlets were laden with dramatic “warnings” reportedly given by Biden to Putin, telling the Russian leader to abandon nefarious plans for a military invasion of Ukraine.
America’s NPR reported: “In a two-hour-long call with Putin, President Biden warned that the U.S. was prepared to make Moscow pay if an invasion should occur.”
ABC headlined: “Biden confronts Putin over Ukraine in high stakes meeting”.
The New York Times billed the big moment thus: “Biden delivers a warning to Putin over Ukraine”. While the US establishment’s favourite think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, briefed its readers: “Biden warns Putin of consequences if Russia invades Ukraine”.
So, just in case you didn’t get the message yet: Biden read the riot act to Putin about invading Ukraine, or so we are led to believe.
The thing is though it is only an assertion by the Biden administration that Russia is planning to launch an offensive against Ukraine. That assertion has been predictably and dubiously amplified by the Western media as well as by the NATO-backed Kiev regime. The 2014 CIA-installed Neo-fascist regime has been claiming for nearly seven years that Russia is threatening an invasion and that it is standing alone to defend the rest of Europe from being overrun by Russian tanks.
Over the past month, Moscow has repeatedly dismissed a deluge of Western media claims that Russian troops are building up near Ukraine’s border for an incursion. The U.S. and Ukrainian military intelligence can’t seem to agree on a figure for the alleged buildup. Some reports say 90,000, others say 175,000. In any case, whatever the number, the troops are on Russian soil. Where does the West want them to go? To Russia’s Far East and Vladivostok? Oh no, then Russia will be accused of plotting to invade Alaska?
Senior U.S. officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken even admit to their own absurd vacuity, saying, “We don’t know what Putin’s intentions really are.”
The optics of the Biden-Putin video call say a lot too. Biden was seated in the Situation Room at the White House for the meeting. That conjures an atmosphere of crisis and showdown reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban missile confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev.
For his part, Putin took the call while at his residence in Sochi on the Black Sea where he goes for relaxation.
It was notable too that Putin was photographed seated at a table on his own to engage with the U.S. president while Biden was accompanied in the Situation Room with four aides, including Antony Blinken, who were obviously present to support or prompt the titular commander-in-chief. The TV monitors appeared to show the two presidents in a face-to-face encounter, but out of the screen view were the four aides to Biden.
The main conversation was behind closed doors, but from the initial publicly broadcasted greetings, the atmosphere was civil, cordial and relaxed. Biden was not in the slightest reproaching his Russian counterpart, as media reports claimed.
Following the discussions, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan told media there was a lot of give and take between the two leaders but there was “no finger-wagging”.
Sullivan said Biden informed Putin that there would be serious economic consequences if Russia invaded Ukraine – again an invasion that Moscow has repeatedly dismissed as baseless hysteria. Sullivan indicated that the leverage could be exerted through the U.S. and European Union cancelling the Nord Stream 2 gas export pipeline from Russia.
Sullivan also suggested that Washington would cut off Russia from the U.S.-controlled international banking system known as SWIFT which would impact Russia’s export earnings. Sullivan said another leverage point would be for the U.S. to increase military aid to Ukraine, the Baltic states and other eastern European countries. But it is unlikely that the United States would become directly involved in a confrontation with Russia.
This all has a certain logical traction but it is divorced from reality. Russia is supposedly warned not to invade Ukraine. Putin is supposedly warned about severe economic consequences if he orders an invasion. Then there is no invasion, and it all looks as if Biden, the noble leader of the free world, bravely faced down the Russian “autocrat”.
But hold on a moment. That only holds if we believe in the dubious claims that Russia is planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine.
If there is no invasion that’s because there wasn’t a plan in the first place. It has nothing to do with purported warnings from Biden. It is due simply to the fact that, as Russia has maintained all along, it is not threatening anyone.
Biden’s threats of “consequences” are therefore empty and directed at a straw man of Western propaganda invention.
So what did take place? The White House readout of the conversation was brief and bereft of any detail. The Kremlin version of the conversation said that both sides agreed to discuss further Russia’s concerns about national security posed by the U.S.-led NATO military alliance building up on Russia’s borders.
Sullivan claimed that Biden laid out an “alternative path” for Putin involving diplomacy and peaceful negotiation. “I will say that formal agreements or formal treaties were not on the table in the conversation today,” the national security advisor said. He added: “But the straightforward notion that the United States flanked by our European allies and partners would be prepared to talk to Russia, about the strategic issues in the European theatre — that was on the table.”
In other words, after the American pretensions are discarded, this is the “alternative path” of diplomacy and negotiation that Russia has been consistently calling for but which the United States, NATO and their sponsored Russophobic Kiev regime have all been avoiding up to now. It wasn’t Putin that took an off-ramp. It was Biden.
Biden’s “warning” is just theatrics to conceal a crisis that Washington has created in the first place. Moscow wasn’t “told” anything. It is Washington that needs to stop playing geopolitical mind-games and get down to earnest dialogue – if, that is, it genuinely wants to avoid confrontation.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In 2020, when the global economy contracted over 3.1% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global arms trade recorded an increase of 1.3%, as per latest data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on Monday, December 6. The growth in arms trade, both domestic and international, reveals how governments worldwide chose to maintain or increase their spending on arms despite the economic hardships caused by the pandemic.
According to SIPRI, arms trade by the world’s top 100 companies in the sector touched USD 531 billion in 2020, making it the sixth consecutive year of growth since 2015.
According to Alexander Marksteiner, a researcher with SIPRI, the main reason for the growth in arms trade in spite of the global economic slump was “sustained government demand for military goods and services.”
The post Governments Buy More Weapons In First Year Of COVID-19 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Black people in the United States felt a great sense of relief when a jury of eleven white people and one Black person voted to convict three white men on November 24 in Brunswick, Georgia, writes Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The civil trial of the organisers of the racist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others seriously injured, resulted in a partial victory, writes Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Asia Pacific Report newsdesk
An editorial in the Chinese English-language mouthpiece Global Times has accused Australia — and the United States — of “conniv[ing] with and even encourag[ing] the unrest” in the Solomon Islands after three days of rioting last week destroyed much of Chinatown in the capital Honiara.
“Even though [100] Australian troops and police were sent to keep order in the Solomon Islands,” said the tabloid newspaper at the weekend.
“What is right and what is not is obvious. Hence, aren’t [Prime Minister Scott] Morrison’s remarks of ‘not indicat[ing] any position’ actually a support for the evil doings?“
The editorial was headlined “Australia has fomented riots in Solomon Island”.
The Global Times is published under the umbrella of the Chinese Communist Party’s official flagship publication People’s Daily and is viewed by critics as often publishing disinformation.
“Defending against China’s influence into the South Pacific has been an outstanding geopolitical consideration of the US and Australia, which has been welcomed and longed [for] by the Taiwan authorities, because four of the remaining 15 countries that keep ‘diplomatic ties’ with Taiwan are in the South Pacific — and the future to consolidate such ties is uncertain.”
The editorial said:
Rioters ‘stormed Parliament’
“The capital city of the Solomon Islands has been under riots for days. The rioters have stormed the Parliament, set fire to a police station, and attacked Chinatown and other businesses there.
“Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare on Friday blamed foreign interference for instigating the anti-government protests over his government’s decision to cut ‘diplomatic ties’ with the island of Taiwan and establish diplomatic ties with the Chinese mainland. Though, he didn’t specify who is among the ‘other powers’ that fomented the violence.
“Sogavare emphasised that the choice to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing conforms to the trend of the times and international laws.
“The Solomon Islands is a country with nearly 690,000 people in the South Pacific region. After Sogavare assumed office in 2019, his administration made a choice to set up diplomatic ties with Beijing. However, the island of Malaita [in] the country, where most of the rioters are reportedly from, has maintained its relations with the island of Taiwan.
“The New York Times said the Solomon Islands has been in a ‘heightened political tug of war’, citing a former Australian diplomat stationed in the Solomon Islands saying that the US has been providing Malaita with direct foreign aid. Such analysis is representative of the US and Australia.
“Defending against China’s influence into the South Pacific has been an outstanding geopolitical consideration of the US and Australia, which has been welcomed and longed by the Taiwan authorities, because four of the remaining 15 countries that keep ‘diplomatic ties’ with Taiwan are in the South Pacific — and the future to consolidate such ties is uncertain.
“The South Pacific countries and the Chinese mainland have a strong capacity to cooperate under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Over the years, many small nations have, on their own, chosen to have closer ties with Beijing.
‘Dollar diplomacy, coercion’
“The measures taken to prevent these small countries from establishing diplomatic ties with China have included ‘dollar diplomacy’, coercion, and inciting unrest within these countries to topple local governments.
“Australia has been offered a hand to maintain security in the Solomon Islands. Recently, Canberra has again deployed more than 100 police and defense force personnel to the country. Against this backdrop, it is not hard to imagine how easy it will be for an external force to wreak havoc there.
“Australia, the US, or the Taiwan authorities haven’t admitted to being behind the ‘foreign interference’ condemned by Sogavare. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted that Australia’s ‘presence there does not indicate any position on the internal issues of the Solomon Islands’. Canberra even alleged the move was in response to a request from Sogavare.
“Nonetheless, the Associated Press cited observers as saying that ‘Australia intervened quickly to avoid Chinese security forces moving in to restore order’. More importantly, neither Canberra nor Washington has condemned the riots in the Solomon Islands so far, despite the fact that the unrest has violated the basic spirit of democracy and the rule of law.
“Media coverage of the riots in the US and Australia was ‘matter-of-fact’ and highlighted the rioters’ political opposition to diplomatic relations with China.
“It is clear that Australia’s overall attitude, and that of the US, is to connive with and even encourage the unrest, even though the Australian troops and police were sent to keep order in the Solomon Islands. What is right and what is not is obvious. Hence, aren’t Morrison’s remarks of ‘not indicate any position’ actually a support for the evil doings?
“The government of the Solomon Islands and their people know what is really going on there. It is also not hard for the outside world to know. Prime Minister Sogavare noted there were other powers fomenting the riots, shouldn’t the international community believe the words of this legitimate leader of the Solomon Islands?”
And the PNG
Honiara
community out on the streets today for a cleanup session
Pictures by Rodney Arofasei pic.twitter.com/HnRS3Pji6o
— Georgina Kekea (@ginakekea) November 28, 2021
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
In the United States, John Deere workers began militant strike action in the country’s mid-west in October, reports Malik Miah. They stood up against a powerful employer — and, when necessary, their own national union leadership — and won.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
A federal judge exonerated Muhammad Aziz and fellow accused, Khalil Islam, for the assassination of revolutionary Black rights leader Malcolm X, reports Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
On October 21, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced the issuance of a military order designating six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as ‘terrorist organizations’. Gantz claimed that they are secretly linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a socialist political group that Israel considers, along with most Palestinian political parties, ‘a terrorist organization.’
The Palestinian organizations included in the Israeli order are Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights, Al-Haq, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.
Considering the significance of these organizations in Palestine and their global networks among like-minded civil society organizations, the Israeli decision provoked a public outcry. One of the many statements of condemnation was a joint statement by rights groups, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW), in which they called Gantz’s move an “appalling and unjust decision”, which represents “an attack by the Israeli government on the international human rights movement.”
Strong Words, but No Actions
AI and HRW, which have documented Israeli human rights violations of Palestinians for many years, fully understand that the ‘terrorist’ designation is consistent with a long trajectory of such unlawful moves:
“For decades, Israeli authorities have systematically sought to muzzle human rights monitoring and punish those who criticize its repressive rule over Palestinians. While staff members of our organizations have faced deportation and travel bans, Palestinian human rights defenders have always borne the brunt of the repression. This decision is an alarming escalation that threatens to shut down the work of Palestine’s most prominent civil society organizations.”
Equally important in the world’s leading rights groups’ statement is that it did not fail to highlight that the “decades-long failure of the international community to challenge grave Israeli human rights abuses and impose meaningful consequences for them has emboldened Israeli authorities to act in this brazen manner.”
True to form, the international community did react to Gantz’s decision, albeit it was the kind of ineffectual reaction, which persisted in the realm of rhetoric that is rarely followed by substantive action.
A joint statement by UN experts called the Israeli decision “a frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement, and on human rights everywhere”.
Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, criticized the “arbitrary” decision by Israel and warned of the “far-reaching consequences as a result,” in terms of work, funding and support for the targeted organizations.
Many governments around the world also condemned the Israeli move and echoed the sentiment conveyed by UN experts. Even the US expressed its ‘concern’, though, using the same typically cautious and non-committal language.
US State Department spokesman, Ned Price, told reporters on October 23, in Washington, that his country “believe(s) respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and a strong civil society are critically important to responsible and responsive governance.” Instead of an outright condemnation, however, Price said that the US will “be engaging our Israeli partners for more information regarding the basis for these designations.”
However, like other governments, and certainly unlike AI and HRW, Price made no link between the Israeli decision of October 21 and numerous other past practices targeting human rights and civil society groups in Palestine and, more recently, in Israel as well. Also worth noting is that the supposed link between such organizations and the socialist PFLP is not new.
The following are a few examples of how Israel has attempted to silence some of these organizations, which, eventually were declared to be ‘terrorist.’
Raids, Arrests and Death Threats
Addameer – In December 2012, the Israeli army raided the headquarters of Addamer in Ramallah, confiscating laptops and a video camera. The offices of the Union of Palestinian Women Committees were also raided by Israeli occupation forces on the same day. The organization is one of the six now designated by Israel as ‘terrorist.’
In September 2019, Addameer’s offices were raided, once again. The Israeli military raid at the time, however, did not generate as much attention or outrage, despite the accompanying violence, let alone the blatant violation of human rights. Then, Al-Haq – also one of the other six effectively banned Palestinian groups – issued a statement warning that “the private property of human rights organizations in occupied territory is especially protected under Article 46 of the Hague Regulations (1907).”
Expectedly, such legal constraints mattered little to Israel.
Al-Haq – Al-Haq’s staff have faced many restrictions throughout the years. Shawan Jabarin, the General Director of Al-Haq, has been banned from travel on various occasions, starting in 2006.
In March 2009, Jabarin was prevented by Israel from traveling to the Netherlands to receive an award on behalf of his organization. Again, in November 2011, this time, Jabarin was now allowed to travel to Denmark.
The Israeli obstacles began taking even more sinister turns when, in March 2016, Jabarin began receiving death threats over the phone. These anonymous calls began arriving “in the context of increasing harassment of Al-Haq and its members, amid their recent work at the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking justice for human rights violations being committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” the Front Line Defenders website reported.
Defense for Children International-Palestine – In July, and again August 2021, Israeli forces raided Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) offices in Al-Bireh, in the occupied West Bank. They seized computers, hard drives and other material, alleging a link between the organization and the PFLP.
This allegation had already been advanced in 2018, when UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) persuaded Citibank and the Arab Bank PLC to stop providing banking services to DCIP, providing what they defined as “evidence of the close ties” to the PFLP.
While it is true that the recent Israeli measures against Palestinian NGOs are a continuation of an old policy, there are fundamental differences between the growing perception of Israel, now, as an apartheid state and the misconstrued perception of the past, namely Israel as an oasis of democracy.
Even international entities and groups that are yet to brand Israel an apartheid state are becoming familiar with the Israeli government’s undemocratic nature.
A ‘Tectonic Shift’
In December 2019, and after years of haggling, the ICC resolved that “there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine, pursuant to Article 53(1) of the (Rome) Statute.” Despite intense Israeli and western pressure, the last hurdle in the way of the investigation was removed last February, as the ICC has finally approved the Prosecutor’s request to open legal proceedings regarding war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza.
This legal milestone was cemented by major declarations, one made by Israel’s own rights group, B’tselem, in January, and another by HRW in April, both slamming Israeli policies in Palestine – not just the occupied territories – as ‘apartheid’.
This critical change in the international legal position regarding Israel’s new, unflattering status, was boosted by Israel’s own violent actions in East Jerusalem, Gaza and throughout Palestine in May. Unlike previous wars, the May events have shifted sympathy mostly towards Palestinians, who are fighting for their freedom, homes and other basic human rights.
The change was also notable within the US government itself, which is unprecedented by any account. An increasing number of US lawmakers are now openly critical of the State of Israel, due to a radical change in the US public opinion and, again, unprecedently, they are not paying a heavy price for it as was often the case in the past due to the great influence of the Zionist lobby in Washington.
“The shift is dramatic; it’s tectonic,” the BBC, on May 21, quoted US pollster, John Zogby, as saying. “In particular, younger generations are considerably more sympathetic to the Palestinians – and that age gap has been on full display with the Democratic Party,” the BBC noted.
Israel’s losses are not just sentimental or political, but economic as well. Last July, the international ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop selling its products in illegal Jewish settlements while pinpointedly condemning Israeli occupation, a move that was described by Amnesty as “legitimate and necessary”. A few months later, the sports clothing manufacturer, Nike, followed suit, announcing that it will end the sale of its products in Israeli stores starting May 2022, although it did not justify its decision based on political reasoning.
While Israel continues to lash out at its critics, it no longer seems to behave according to a centralized strategy.
Lacking a strong leadership after the dethroning of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the formation of a diverse ‘unity government’, the new Israeli government does not seem capable of holding back international criticism of its conduct in occupied Palestine. The notion that everything that Israel does is justifiable as a form of ‘self-defense’ is simply no longer a strong selling point. The May war is the perfect example of this assertion.
In the case of the banned NGOs, for example, aside from sending a representative from the Israeli intelligence agency, Shin Bet, and another from the Israeli Foreign Ministry to Washington on October 25 with “relevant intelligence” to justify its decision, Tel Aviv continued to carry out the same policies that further exposes its apartheid in the eyes of the international community.
Indeed, on October 27, Israel announced the construction of thousands of new housing units in illegal Jewish settlements, in its first such move during the presidency of Joe Biden.
A perfect illustration of the frantic nature of the Israeli response came on October 29, when the Israeli envoy to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, during his speech at the General Assembly, tore into pieces a report issued by the UN Human Rights Council illustrating Israeli ongoing violations of international law.
“The Human Rights Council attacked and condemned Israel in 95 resolutions compared to 142 resolutions against the rest of the world,” Erdan said. “This distorted and one-sided report’s place is in the dustbin of anti-Semitism,” he ranted.
Branding Israeli Apartheid
We may be at the cusp of a fundamental change in terms of Israel’s relationship with the international community. While Tel Aviv continues to heavily invest in its apartheid infrastructure, the international community is slowly, but clearly, becoming aware that Israel’s apartheid status is a permanent one. The successive statements by B’Tselem, HRW, the joint HRW-Amnesty statement condemning the de facto outlawing of the Palestinian NGOs and, again, the ICC investigation are all indicative of this growing awareness.
The question remains – will Israel be able to use its power, influence and leverage in Western societies to force the world to accept and co-exist with a full-fledged apartheid regime in Palestine? And if yes, then, for how long?
The South African apartheid example showed that, despite decades of apartheid and initial acceptance, if not support, by western societies of legalized racial separation in South Africa, the pendulum eventually turned. Even before the formal end of apartheid in that country in 1994, it was becoming clear that the days of the racist regime of Pretoria were numbered. That realization was possible because of the growing international awareness, especially at grassroot, civil society level, of the evil of apartheid.
A similar scenario seems to be evolving in the case of Israeli apartheid in Palestine as well. A critical mass of support for Palestinian rights is being constructed around the world, thanks to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and hundreds of pro-Palestine civil society groups all around the globe.
For years, Israel seemed keen on countering the influence of Palestine’s solidarity around the world using a centralized strategy. Large sums of money were dedicated, or pledged, towards that end, and a partly government-controlled company was even established, in 2017, to guide the Israeli global campaign. Much of this has amounted to very little, however, as BDS continues to grow, and the conversation on Palestine and Israel is gradually changing from that of a political ‘conflict’ into recognition of Israeli racism, apartheid and utter disregard of international law.
Of course, it will take more time, more decided effort and, certainly, more sacrifices on the part of Palestinians and their supporters to expose Israeli apartheid to the rest of the world. Now that Israel seems to have accepted that there is little it can do to reverse this brand, it is accelerating its colonial efforts, while hunkering down for a long fight ahead.
The onus is now on the international community to force Israel into dismantling its apartheid regime. Though it is ultimately the people who liberate themselves, international solidarity is essential to the process of national liberation. This was the case in South Africa and will surely be the case in Palestine, as well.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Recently there has been much discussion about the teaching of US history. In the past and perhaps slightly less so in the present, the full story of our history and of the founding fathers hasn’t been presented. The founders’ inspirational and impressive accomplishments have been highlighted. The fact that many of the founders were slave owners was downplayed or ignored. In addition, the truly horrific evils of slavery and the mistreatment of Blacks under Jim Crow laws received very limited coverage. Moreover, the genocide of Native Americans received little mention. This biased presentation of US history set the stage for white supremacy ideas to grow and thrive and for the continued shameful abuse of minorities.
Of late, criticism of many founders over their being slave owners has attracted widespread attention and created controversy. Some believe that pointing out this fact is unfair to the founders. Many who believe this way think the founders are being judged by standards of today instead of those of their time.
I believe that the founding fathers, particularly Jefferson with his words in the Declaration of Independence, inspired people the world over and across time. Despite the founders establishing a new country where some people had a voice in government, they were human beings with their own failings. These failings, including continuing the practice of slavery and the slave trade, don’t mean that their accomplishments didn’t occur. However, the results of their failings must also be recognized and corrected.
I dispute that the founders are being held to the standards of today instead of those of their time. I believe that this claim is an insult to the founders’ intelligence. For example, this claim implies the founders and their society didn’t know that slavery was wrong. I think that the support for slavery was due to political expediency of keeping the colonies/states together and to putting profit over human rights. Slavery allowed the economy to grow and for the country to thrive economically while condemning about 18% of the population and their offspring to a brutal form of slavery and the killing of the nation’s soul.
The compromises necessary for the Constitution to be approved show that many opposed slavery. In addition, the opposition of many well known individuals during the 18th century is on record. This site is the source for most of the following material.
One of the most ardent opponents of slavery was Abigail Adams, supported by her husband, the second US President, John Adams. For example, in a 1774 letter to John she wrote: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me — to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” She considered slavery a sin and an evil. Although her husband privately agreed, he was more cautious politically as he feared the results of complete abolition would lead to a division of the new country. Sam Adams was another Adams who was also a staunch opponent of slavery.
Others who were against slavery included Benjamin Franklin who became a public abolitionist in 1787 and President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. John Jay, the first Chief Justice, and Marquis de Lafayette were also committed opponents of the brutal US form of slavery.
John Laurens, a close friend of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton, also was an ardent public advocate for ending slavery. In a letter to a friend in 1776 he wrote: “I think we Americans at least in the Southern Colonies, cannot contend with a good Grace, for Liberty, until we shall have enfranchised our Slaves. How can we whose Jealousy has been alarm’d more at the Name of Oppression sometimes than at the Reality, reconcile to our spirited Assertions of the Rights of Mankind, the galling abject Slavery of our negroes…If as some pretend, but I am persuaded more thro’ intrested, than from Conviction, the Culture of the Ground with us cannot be carried on without African Slaves, Let us fly it as a hateful Country, and say ubi Libertas ibi Patria [where Liberty is there is my Country].”
An outstanding article, “African Slavery in America”, was published in March, 1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal by a contributor signed Justice and Humanity. The article begins: “TO Americans: That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and humanity, and even good policy…”
This whitewashing of US history has downplayed the genocide of Native Americans and the brutal US form of slavery. As a result, it has created a badly misinformed population. Many of our population don’t understand the terrible crimes against humanity the US has committed that are part and parcel of our history. Many also don’t realize how much we owe to those we have horrifically mistreated. If we don’t begin teaching our real history, the idea of white supremacy will continue to strengthen and that does not bode well for our future.
The post US Past and Present first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The border between post-coup Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, based on the Minsk Agreements. Map credit: Wikipedia
The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.
The last time this area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia assembled thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border.
On that occasion, Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Will Russia once more deter an escalation of the war, or are Ukraine, the United States and NATO seriously preparing to press ahead at the risk of war with Russia?
Since April, the U.S. and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal patrol boats and radar equipment, the U.S. then gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar, communications and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force, bringing total military aid to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to $2.5 billion. This latest package appears to include deploying U.S. training personnel to Ukrainian air bases.
Turkey is supplying Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The ratcheting up of U.S. and NATO support for government forces in Ukraine’s civil war is having ever-worsening diplomatic consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of spying. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the manager of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October, ostensibly to calm tensions. Nuland failed so spectacularly that, only a week later, Russia ended 30 years of engagement with NATO, and ordered NATO’s office in Moscow closed.
Nuland reportedly tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords on Ukraine, which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. But her assurances were belied by Defense Secretary Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kiev on October 18, reiterating U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, promising further military support and blaming Russia for “perpetuating the war in Eastern Ukraine.”
More extraordinary, but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2nd and 3rd, during which he met with senior Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with President Putin.
A mission like this is not usually part of the CIA Director’s duties. But after Biden promised a new era of American diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to all-time lows.
Judging from the March meeting of Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan with Chinese officials in Alaska, Biden’s meeting with Putin in Vienna in June, and Under Secretary Nuland’s recent visit to Moscow, U.S. officials have reduced their encounters with Russian and Chinese officials to mutual recriminations designed for domestic consumption instead of seriously trying to resolve policy differences. In Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack of it, to the Minsk Accords. So who could Biden send to Moscow for a serious diplomatic dialogue with the Russians about Ukraine?
In 2002, as Under Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William Burns wrote a prescient but unheeded 10-page memo to Secretary of State Powell, warning him of the many ways that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for American interests. Burns is a career diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and may be the only member of this administration with the diplomatic skills and experience to actually listen to the Russians and engage seriously with them.
The Russians presumably told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian responses. Russia has long warned that one red line would be NATO membership for Ukraine and/or Georgia.
But there are clearly other red lines in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around Ukraine and in the increasing U.S. military support for the Ukrainian government forces assaulting Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin has warned against the build-up of NATO’s military infrastructure in Ukraine and has accused both Ukraine and NATO of destabilizing actions, including in the Black Sea.
With Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian offensive that threatens the existence of the DPR and LPR would surely cross another red line, while increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.
So did Burns come back from Moscow with a clearer picture of exactly what Russia’s red lines are? We had better hope so. Even U.S. military websites acknowledge that U.S. policy in Ukraine is “backfiring.”
Russia expert Andrew Weiss, who worked under William Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, acknowledged to Michael Crowley of The New York Times that Russia has “escalation dominance” in Ukraine and that, if push comes to shove, Ukraine is simply more important to Russia than to the United States. It therefore makes no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine, unless it actually wants to trigger World War III.
During the Cold War, both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Along with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the 1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned the bilateral nuclear treaties and vital diplomatic relationships that their grandparents forged to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one.
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, with the help of Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and others, conducted negotiations that spanned two administrations, between 1958 and 1963, to achieve a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was the first of a series of bilateral arms control treaties. By contrast, all that Trump, Biden and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland seem to have in common is a startling lack of imagination that blinds them to any possible future beyond a zero-sum, non-negotiable, and yet still unattainable “U.S. Uber Alles” global hegemony.
But Americans should beware of romanticizing the “old” Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust. U.S. Korean and Vietnam War veterans know better, as do the people in countries across the global South that became bloody battlefields in the ideological struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
Three decades after declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to more new challenges it is clearly not up for, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence and ridiculous expense of their ineffective but profitable war machine.
But the very nature of a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert, to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries across the world. In our relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” we should have no illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace.
Quite the contrary. What we are watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as futile, deadly and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United States.
A war with Russia or China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss told the Times on Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United States does.
So what would the United States do if it were losing a major war with Russia or China? U.S. nuclear weapons policy has always kept a “first strike” option open in case of precisely this scenario.
The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.
But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small creatures.
Neither Obama, Trump nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry.
So we had better hope that CIA DIrector Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at stake in Ukraine. They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.
The post The High Stakes of the U.S.-Russia Confrontation Over Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A recent report has listed the United States as a “backsliding” democracy, noting a “visible deterioration to democratic ideals that began back in 2019.”
The assessment was made by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). This is the first time the U.S. has been labeled a “backsliding” democracy since the organization’s founding in 1995.
Although a number of factors led to IDEA placing the U.S. in that classification, the report notes that a “historic turning point came in 2020-21” after former President Donald Trump refused to accept his election loss to now-President Joe Biden.
“The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarisation … is one of the most concerning developments,” the report added.
The report also referenced government crackdowns on uprisings in response to the police killing of George Floyd, citing a “decline in the quality of freedom of association and assembly during the summer of protests in 2020.”
The United States is not a member state of the Stockholm-based organization.
Overall, IDEA identified just 98 democracies around the world, the lowest number the group has counted in several years. Forty-seven governments were authoritarian regimes, while 20 governments were hybrids of the two categories.
The organization said that the pandemic played a role in eroding democracy around the world.
“Many democratic governments are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics, accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic, while autocratic regimes are consolidating their power,” the group said.
“The number of backsliding democracies has doubled in the past decade, now accounting for a quarter of the world’s population,” IDEA added. “This includes established democracies such as the United States, but also EU Member States such as Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. More than two-thirds of the world’s population now live in backsliding democracies or autocratic regimes.”
The organization also noted that the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction in 2020 outnumbered those going in a democratic direction.
Some Biden administration officials have also recognized that democracy around the world has taken backward steps in recent years. Just last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that there has been a “democratic recession,” candidly admitting to a group of human rights activists in Nairobi, Kenya, that the U.S. “is hardly immune from this challenge.”
“We’ve seen how fragile our own democracy can be,” Blinken said, referencing attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Twelve jurors found teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty for the deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and for wounding Gaige Grosskreutz at a Black Lives Matter protest last year, reports Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Alex Salmon reviews an inspiring memoir of the fight against union busting inside a North Carolina carpet mill.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
On Wednesday, October 20, I joined “Vrede Scheppen,” “Create Peace,” about 25 peace activists from the Netherlands, Germany and Austria at the airbase at Volkel, Netherlands, making a plea for an end to nuclear weapons. This base is home to two Dutch F16 fighter wings and the United States Air Force 703rd Munitions Support Squadron. In violation of international and Dutch law and part of a “sharing agreement,” the U.S. Air Force maintains 15-20 B61 nuclear bombs there and in violation of the same laws, the Dutch military stands ready for the order to deliver those bombs.
Besides our small multinational protest, on that same day the Dutch and U.S. militaries at Volkel were participating in another international collaboration, this one for a different purpose than ours, the annual NATO exercise “Steadfast Noon,” literally a rehearsal for the extinction of humanity.
As we gathered at a wayside near the base with F16 fighters roaring over us, a few of the local police watched from a distance. We greeted old and new friends, sang, prayed, shared food and distributed pink shovels and conspired to dig our way into the base, onto the runway and disrupt the practice. Hardly a clandestine plot, this “digging for peace” was organized openly and local authorities were informed. Our purpose was get into the base, “to advocate that the old nuclear bombs be removed and the CO2 emissions of the armed forces be counted in the climate targets and to protest against the arrival of new nuclear bombs,” but our expectation was to be stopped while trying.
As our shovels pierced the sod along the fence that was the first line of defense for some of the most deadly weapons on earth, we looked over our shoulders expecting any moment to have our good work interrupted by a warning, at least, if not by arrest. To our surprise, the police only passively looked on as we dug. Our apprehension turned to elation as it became clear that no one was going to stop us. We began to dig in earnest.
On the inside of the fence more police gathered along with a squad of soldiers but except for a carefully restrained dog snarling and pulling on a leash, none of them seemed upset by the scene they were witnessing. Our hole soon became a tunnel and it was not until eight of us, one at a time, crawled through under the fence and climbed up the other side that we were addressed by the authorities. A soldier spoke to me in Dutch and then in English, asking “do you understand that you are under arrest?”
Days before, home on our farm in Iowa, I had dug up our crop of sweet potatoes, enough to feed us through the winter and it was with similar satisfaction that I pulled myself out of the hole I had helped dig and approached the runway, so close to the bombs and the planes that could bring death to millions. At this time and place, nuclear destruction was not an abstraction, nor was our resistance to it. Coming up from that hole felt like coming up out of the grave.
“The Royal Netherlands Military Constabulary arrested eight people Wednesday afternoon when they entered unauthorized military grounds,” it was reported in the local news. “We already suspected that a number of people would try to get on the premises. They made a hole under the fence, and once at the airport we stopped them. They didn’t resist. It all went off peacefully,” said a police spokesperson.
The prosecutors interrogating us later seemed incredulous as we were that not one of the police or military ever warned that we might be trespassing or tried to stop us in the commission of what they interpreted as our crime. I was the only foreigner arrested along with seven others, ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s. Saved for last, I tried to redirect the questions asked by my interrogators about my previous involvement in such protest in other countries to the real crime, the B61 nuclear warheads that my government is hiding in plain sight in Volkel. I refused to answer questions about the several visas to Afghanistan in my passport, not fearful for myself, but recognizing at that moment the enormity of my privilege as a white man carrying a U.S. passport. After being shuttled for five hours or so between the base and the local police station, we were all released with a warning that criminal charges are pending.
After many such protests in many places, I never experienced so relaxed a response from the authorities as we were met with at Volkel. No one in uniform expressed anger or even mild impatience with us and our antics. At bases that house nuclear weapons in the Unites States, signs on the fences carry warnings of lethal force. Even touching such a fence can trigger an armed response. Break-ins like ours on October 20 when they happen in the U.S. almost always merit prosecution and sometimes years in prison. On several occasions, I have spent up to six months in U.S. prisons for even attempting to enter a military base through its public main gate with a petition.
Whether the level of security at a facility with nuclear weapons is as casual as it is at Volkel or the very highest, as at the fortress-like Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where in 2012, three Christian pacifists gained access to the world’s largest depot of plutonium, such actions prove that the concept of nuclear security is a myth. Far from keeping a nation secure, the weapons themselves need more protection than any nation can give them. There is no safety in nuclear weapons.
The context of our protest, “Steadfast Noon,” is explained in classical double-speak in a brief NATO press release on October 18: “The exercise is a routine, recurring training activity and it is not linked to any current world events,” but at the same time it cites the Allied Heads of State and Government, who at the NATO Summit in June, declared that “given the deteriorating security environment in Europe, a credible and united nuclear Alliance is essential.”
Along with the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, and Germany also have bases housing U.S. nuclear weapons under similar sharing agreements. These nuclear sharings are not agreements between the various civilian governments, but between the U.S. military and the militaries of those countries. Officially, these agreements are secrets kept even from the parliaments of the sharing states. These secrets are poorly kept, but the effect is that these five nations have nuclear bombs without the oversight or consent of their elected governments or their people. By foisting weapons of mass destructions on nations that don’t want them, the United States undermines the democracies of its own purported allies, just as its nuclear posture undermines democracy at home. Far from protecting the host countries from aggression, “given the deteriorating security environment in Europe,” the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons makes those bases potential targets for preemptive first strikes.
Along with the U.S., the five countries “sharing” U.S. nuclear bombs are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition to provisions that call for keeping nuclear weapons technology from spreading to other nations that all six governments violate, the United States also ignores Article VI of the treaty, which requires “all Parties undertake to pursue good-faith negotiations on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race, to nuclear disarmament, and to general and complete disarmament.”
Far from making good faith measures for general and complete disarmament, the United States is pursuing a trillion dollar program of modernizing and “life extension” of its ageing nuclear arsenal. As a part of this program, the B61 free-fall bombs currently at Volkel and the other nuclear sharing bases in Europe are scheduled over the next months to be replaced with a new model, the B61-12, with steerable tail fins intended to make them much more precise and deployable. The new bombs also have a facility with which the explosive force can be set from 1 to 50 kilotons, more than three times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
More “deployable” is another way of saying more likely to be used, and with these new, more flexible weapons on hand, U.S. war planners are thinking up more ways to use them. In a June, 2019, report by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Nuclear Operations,” it is suggested that “using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability…Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.” If the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the knowledge that the devastation wrought by a nuclear exchange would leave no winner, would be total and horrible beyond imagination is what helped prevent a nuclear war over the last decades, then the growing delusion among U.S. war planners that a nuclear war can be won puts the world at unprecedented peril.
NATO boasts of “Steadfast Noon,” betraying the arrogant conviction of the Allied Heads of State and Government that despite a “deteriorating security environment,” through annual displays of brute force and profligate waste of fossil fuel, the darkness can be held at bay forever and the exploiters of the earth and its people will bask in the everlasting light of noon. The scholars at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who have kept a “Doomsday Clock” since 1947, propose instead that the planet is actually closer to midnight, the hypothetical global catastrophe. The Bulletin’s Clock is now at 100 seconds before midnight and humanity is closer to its destruction than ever before, because “the dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder… Climate change just compounds the crisis.”
It was a pleasure and honor to dig with my European friends at Volkel in October, as it was to be at Buechel, the German nuclear sharing base in July. My first trip overseas was in 1983, joining with millions of Europeans in the streets protesting the deployment of Pershing II nuclear missiles, starting an insufficient but dramatic reduction of nuclear weapons that is tragically being reversed today. The new B61-12 bombs slated for Volkel and Buechel, like the B61s and Pershings, before them, are made and paid for in the United States and as U.S. citizens, we are responsible to be in solidarity with those in Europe who are resisting them.
I returned home to Iowa to find a letter waiting for me from the Kansas City Municipal Court, ordering me to appear on February 18th to answer to a charge of trespass last May at the National Security Campus there, where the nonnuclear parts of the new improved B61-12 bombs and the rest of the U.S. nuclear arsenal are produced. My conviction for cutting a fence at Buechel in 2019 is under appeal in a German court. I wait expectantly for a royal invitation to offer my defense to similar charges in the courts of the Netherlands.
Volkel, Netherlands, (Photo by BNNVARA)
The author, left, doing research for this article. (Photo by Susan van der Hijden)
“At this time and place, nuclear destruction was not an abstraction, nor was our resistance to it”. (Photo by Susan van der Hijden)
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.
And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.
At the weekend, the Pentagon exonerated itself again. It called a 2019 air strike on Baghuz in Syria that killed dozens of women and children “justified”. It did so even after an investigation by the New York Times showed that the group of civilians who were bombed had already been identified as fleeing fighting between US-backed militias and the Islamic State group.
A US military lawyer, Dean Korsak, flagged the incident at the time as a potential war crime but the Pentagon never carried out an investigation. It came to public attention only because Korsak sent details to a Senate oversight committee.
In announcing the conclusions of its Afghanistan inquiry, the Pentagon made clear what its true priorities are in the wake of its hurried, Saigon-style exit from Afghanistan following two decades of failed occupation. It cares about image management, not accountability.
Contrast its refusal to take action against the drone operators and commanders who fired on a civilian vehicle with the Pentagon’s immediate crackdown on one of its soldiers who criticised the handling of the withdrawal. Veteran marine Stuart Scheller was court-martialled last month after he used social media to publicly berate his bosses.
Which of the two – Scheller’s comment or the impunity of those who killed an innocent family – is likely to do more to discredit the role of the US military, in Afghanistan or in other theatres around the globe in which it operates?
Colonial narrative
The Pentagon is far from alone in expecting to be exempted from scrutiny for its war crimes.
The “honest mistake” is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands – and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way – it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.
This self-righteousness is the source of western indignation at any suggestion that the International Criminal Court at The Hague should investigate, let alone prosecute, US, European and Israeli commanders or politicians for carrying out or overseeing war crimes.
It is only African leaders or enemies of Nato who need to be dragged before tribunals and made to pay a price. But nothing in the latest Pentagon inquiry confirms the narrative of an “honest mistake”, despite indulgent coverage in western media referring to the drone strike as “botched”.
Even the establishment of the inquiry was not honest. How is it “independent” for a Pentagon general to investigate an incident involving US troops?
The drone operators who killed the family of Zemerai Ahmadi, an employee of a US aid organisation, were authorised to do so because his white Toyota Corolla was mistaken for a similar vehicle reported as belonging to the local franchise of Islamic State. But that make is one of the most common vehicles in Afghanistan.
The head of the aid organisation where he worked told reporters pointedly: “I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow [Mr Ahmadi], an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”
The decision was, at best, recklessly indifferent as to whether Ahmadi was a genuine target and whether children would die as a result. But more likely, when it attacked Ahmadi’s vehicle, the entire US military system was in the grip of a blinding thirst for revenge. Three days earlier, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians had been killed when a bomb exploded close to Kabul airport, as Afghans massed there in the hope of gaining a place on one of the last evacuation flights.
That airport explosion was the final military humiliation – this one inflicted by Islamic State – after the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of Afghanistan. Revenge – even when it is dressed up as restoring “deterrence” or “military honour” – is not an “honest mistake”.
Pattern of behaviour
But there is an even deeper reason to be sceptical of the Pentagon inquiry. There is no “honest mistake” defence when the same mistakes keep happening. “Honest mistakes” can’t be a pattern of behaviour.
And yet the long years of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and meddling in Syria, have been pockmarked with air strikes that obliterated families or slammed into wedding parties. That information rarely makes headlines, eclipsed by the Pentagon’s earlier, faulty claims of the successful “neutralisation of terrorists”.
But just such “mistakes” were the reason why the US occupation of Afghanistan ultimately imploded. The Pentagon’s scatter-gun killing of Afghans created so many enemies among the local population that US-backed local rulers lost all legitimacy.
Something similar happened during the US and UK’s occupation of Iraq. Anyone who believes the Pentagon commits “honest mistakes” when it kills civilians needs to watch the video, Collateral Murder, issued by WikiLeaks in 2012.
It shows the aerial view of helicopter pilots in 2007 as they discuss with a mix of technical indifference and gruesome glee their missile strikes on a crowd of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, moving about on the streets of Baghdad below.
When a passing van tries to come to the aid of one of wounded, the pilots fire again, even though a child is visible in the front seat. In fact, two children were found inside the van. US soldiers arriving at the scene made the decision to deny both treatment from US physicians.
As the pilots were told of the casualties, one commented: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other responded: “That’s right.”
Before the video was leaked, the military claimed that the civilians killed that day had been caught in the crossfire of a gun battle. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” a statement read.
The video, however, shows that there was nothing honest or mistaken about the way those Iraqis died, even if there was no specific intention to kill civilians. They were killed because US commanders were uninterested in the safety of those it occupied, because they were indifferent to whether Iraqis, even Iraqi children, lived or died.
Killing innocents
The states that cry loudest that they kill innocents “by accident” or “unintentionally” or because “the terrorists shield behind them” are also the ones that keep killing innocents.
Israel’s version of this is the “tragic mistake” – the excuse it used in 2014 when its navy fired two precision missiles at a beach in Gaza at exactly the spot where four boys were playing football. They were killed instantly. In seven weeks of pummelling Gaza in 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children and more than 850 adult civilians. And yet all were apparently “honest mistakes” because no soldiers, commanders or politicians were ever held to account for those deaths.
Palestinian civilians keep dying year after year, decade after decade, and yet they are always killed by an “honest mistake”. Israel’s excuses are entirely unconvincing for the same reason the Pentagon’s carry no weight.
Both have committed their crimes in another people’s territory to which they have not been invited. Both militaries rule over those people without good cause, treating the local population as “hostiles”. And both act in the knowledge that their soldiers enjoy absolute impunity.
In reaching its decision on the killing of the Afghan family this month, the Pentagon stated that it had not “broken the law“. That verdict too is not honest. What the US military means is that it did not break its own self-serving rules of engagement, rules that permit anything the US military decides it wants to do. It behaves as if no laws apply to it when it invades others’ lands, not even the laws of the territories it occupies.
That argument is dishonest too. There are the laws of war and the laws of occupation. There is international law. The US has broken those laws over and over again in Afghanistan and Iraq, as has Israel in ruling over the Palestinians for more than five decades and blockading parts of their territory.
The problem is that there is no appetite to enforce international law against the planet’s sole military superpower and its allies. Instead it is allowed to claim the role of benevolent global policeman.
No scrutiny
Both the US and Israel declined to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) that judges war crimes. That refusal was no “honest mistake” either. Each expected to avoid the court’s scrutiny.
US and Israeli leaders know their soldiers commit war crimes, and that they themselves commit war crimes by approving either the wars of aggression these soldiers are expected to wage or the messy, long-term belligerent occupations they are supposed to enforce. But whatever they hope, the failure to ratify the statute does not serve as a stay-out-of-jail card. US and Israeli leaders still risk falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction if the countries they invade or occupy have ratified the statute, as is the case with Afghanistan and Palestine.
The catch is that the Hague court can be used only as a last resort – in other words, it has to be shown first that any country accused of war crimes failed to seriously investigate those crimes itself.
The chorus from the US and Israel of “honest mistake” every time they kill civilians is just such proof. It demonstrates that the US and Israeli legal systems are entirely incapable of upholding the laws of war, or holding their own political and military officials to account. That must be the job of the ICC instead.
But the court is fearful. The Trump administration launched a mafia-style campaign against it last year to stop its officials investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. The assets of the court’s officials were blocked and they were denied the right to enter the US.
That is the reason why the court keeps failing to stand up for the victims of western war crimes like Zemerai Ahmadi and his children. The ICC had spent 15 years dragging its feet before it finally announced last year that it would investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan. That resolve quickly dissolved under the subsequent campaign of pressure.
In September, shortly after Ahmadi’s family was killed by US drone operators, the court’s chief prosecutor declared that investigations into US actions in Afghanistan, including widespread claims of torture of Afghans, would be “deprioritised.” The investigation would focus instead on the Taliban and Islamic State.
Once again, enemies of the US, but not the US itself, will be called to account. That too is no “honest mistake”.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Military carbon emissions have largely been exempted from international climate treaties, dating back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, reports Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The US Department of Commerce revealed on November 3 that it would be adding Israeli-based spyware developers NSO Group and Candiru to its blacklist “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics and embassy workers”, reports Binoy Kampmark.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist. On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be adding Israel-based companies NSO Group and Candiru to its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
Russian company Positive Technologies and the Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy also made the list “based on a determination that they traffic in cyber tools used to gain unauthorized access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.”
The move had a measure of approval in Congress. “The entity listing signals that the US government is ready to take strong action to stop US exports and investors from engaging with such companies,” came the approving remarks in a joint statement from Democrat House Representatives Tom Malinowski, Anna Eshoo and Joaquin Castro.
This offers mild comfort to students of the private surveillance industry, who have shown it to be governed by traditional capitalist incentive rather than firm political ideology. Steven Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program observes how such entities have actually thrived in liberal democratic states. “Relevant companies, such as Cellebrite, FinFisher, Blue Coat, Hacking Team, Cyberpoint, L3 Technologies, Verint, and NSO group, are headquartered in the most democratic countries in the world, including the United States, Italy, France, Germany, and Israel.”
The relationship between Digital China and Austin-based Oracle shows how talk about democracy and such ideals are fairly meaningless in such transactions. Digital China is credited with aiding the PRC develop a surveillance state; software and data analytics company Oracle, despite pledging to “uphold and respect human rights for all people” was still happy to count Digital China a global “partner of the year” in 2018. Its software products have been used to aid police in Liaoning province to do, among other things, gather details on financial records, travel information, social media and surveillance camera footage. What’s bad for human rights is very good for business.
In its indignant response to the Commerce Department’s blacklisting, NSO wished to point out to US authorities how its own “technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed.” Portraying itself as a card-carrying member of the human rights fraternity, the company claimed to have “the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based [on] the American values we deeply share”. Previous contracts with governments had been terminated because they had “misused our products.”
As NSO has shown on numerous previous occasions, such strident assertions rarely match the record. In July, an investigation known as the Pegasus Project, an initiative of 17 media organisations and groups, reported how 50,000 phone numbers had appeared on a list of hackable targets that had interested a number of governments. The spyware used in question was Pegasus, that most disturbingly appealing of creations by NSO designed to infect the phone in question and turn it into a surveillance tool for the relevant user.
The range of targets was skin crawlingly impressive: human rights activists, business executives, journalists, politicians and government officials. None of this was new to those who have kept an eye on the exploits of the Israeli concern. Its sale of Pegasus has seen it feature in lawsuits from private citizens and companies such as WhatsApp keen to rein in its insidious practices.
Despite denying any connection, the company will be forever associated with providing the tools to one of its clients, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to monitor calls made by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a fellow dissident scribbler, Omar Abdulaziz. In October 2018, Khashoggi was carved to oblivion on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit squad with prints stretching back to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In a legal suit against NSO, lawyers for Abdulaziz argue that the hacking of his phone “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr Khashoggi.” To date, the vicious, petulant modernist royal remains at large, feted by governments the world over as a reformer.
While NSO has hogged the rude limelight on the international spyware market, that other Israeli-based concern, Candiru, has been a rolling hit with government clients. Their products are also tailored to infecting and monitoring iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and, discomfortingly enough, cloud accounts.
Those behind this company evidently have a distasteful sense of humour; the original candiru of Amazon River fame is, goes one account in the Journal of Travel Medicine, “known as a little fish keen on entering the nether regions of people urinating in the Amazon River.” Equipped with spikes, the fish invades and fastens itself within penis, vagina or rectum, making it a gruesome challenge to remove. However colourful the imaginative accounts of the Candiru’s exploits are – William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is merely one – the Israeli version is far more sinister and deserves consternated worry.
In July this year, the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto identified over 750 websites that had been influenced by the use of Candiru spyware. “We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.” The company, founded in 2014, maintains an opaque operations and recruitment structure, reputedly drawing expertise from the Israeli Defence Forces Unit 8200, responsible for code encryption and gathering signals intelligence.
Within two years of its founding, the company had raked in $30 million in sales, establishing a slew of clients across Europe, states across the former Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Latin America. A labour dispute between a former senior employee and the company shed some light on the company’s activities, with one document, signed by an unnamed vice president, noting the offering of a “high-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets, by using explosions and disseminations operations.”
NSO Group’s reputation, and credentials, are now impossible to ignore. The Israeli government, which grants the export licenses that enable the likes of NSO and Candiru to operate, is splitting hairs. “NSO is a private company,” insists Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, “it is not a governmental project and therefore even if it is designated, it has nothing to do with the policies of the Israeli government.” In his view, no other country had “such strict rules according to cyber warfare” and “imposing those rules more than Israel and we will continue to do so.”
No Israeli government is likely to entirely abandon companies that make annual sales of $1 billion in the business of offensive cyber. The efforts by governments the world over to attack encrypted communications while trampling human rights on route have become unrelenting. In that quest, it matters little whether you are a citizen journalist, a master criminal, or a terrorist. Those deploying the spyware rarely make such distinctions.
The post Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist. On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be adding Israel-based companies NSO Group and Candiru to its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
Russian company Positive Technologies and the Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy also made the list “based on a determination that they traffic in cyber tools used to gain unauthorized access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.”
The move had a measure of approval in Congress. “The entity listing signals that the US government is ready to take strong action to stop US exports and investors from engaging with such companies,” came the approving remarks in a joint statement from Democrat House Representatives Tom Malinowski, Anna Eshoo and Joaquin Castro.
This offers mild comfort to students of the private surveillance industry, who have shown it to be governed by traditional capitalist incentive rather than firm political ideology. Steven Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program observes how such entities have actually thrived in liberal democratic states. “Relevant companies, such as Cellebrite, FinFisher, Blue Coat, Hacking Team, Cyberpoint, L3 Technologies, Verint, and NSO group, are headquartered in the most democratic countries in the world, including the United States, Italy, France, Germany, and Israel.”
The relationship between Digital China and Austin-based Oracle shows how talk about democracy and such ideals are fairly meaningless in such transactions. Digital China is credited with aiding the PRC develop a surveillance state; software and data analytics company Oracle, despite pledging to “uphold and respect human rights for all people” was still happy to count Digital China a global “partner of the year” in 2018. Its software products have been used to aid police in Liaoning province to do, among other things, gather details on financial records, travel information, social media and surveillance camera footage. What’s bad for human rights is very good for business.
In its indignant response to the Commerce Department’s blacklisting, NSO wished to point out to US authorities how its own “technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed.” Portraying itself as a card-carrying member of the human rights fraternity, the company claimed to have “the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based [on] the American values we deeply share”. Previous contracts with governments had been terminated because they had “misused our products.”
As NSO has shown on numerous previous occasions, such strident assertions rarely match the record. In July, an investigation known as the Pegasus Project, an initiative of 17 media organisations and groups, reported how 50,000 phone numbers had appeared on a list of hackable targets that had interested a number of governments. The spyware used in question was Pegasus, that most disturbingly appealing of creations by NSO designed to infect the phone in question and turn it into a surveillance tool for the relevant user.
The range of targets was skin crawlingly impressive: human rights activists, business executives, journalists, politicians and government officials. None of this was new to those who have kept an eye on the exploits of the Israeli concern. Its sale of Pegasus has seen it feature in lawsuits from private citizens and companies such as WhatsApp keen to rein in its insidious practices.
Despite denying any connection, the company will be forever associated with providing the tools to one of its clients, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to monitor calls made by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a fellow dissident scribbler, Omar Abdulaziz. In October 2018, Khashoggi was carved to oblivion on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit squad with prints stretching back to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In a legal suit against NSO, lawyers for Abdulaziz argue that the hacking of his phone “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr Khashoggi.” To date, the vicious, petulant modernist royal remains at large, feted by governments the world over as a reformer.
While NSO has hogged the rude limelight on the international spyware market, that other Israeli-based concern, Candiru, has been a rolling hit with government clients. Their products are also tailored to infecting and monitoring iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and, discomfortingly enough, cloud accounts.
Those behind this company evidently have a distasteful sense of humour; the original candiru of Amazon River fame is, goes one account in the Journal of Travel Medicine, “known as a little fish keen on entering the nether regions of people urinating in the Amazon River.” Equipped with spikes, the fish invades and fastens itself within penis, vagina or rectum, making it a gruesome challenge to remove. However colourful the imaginative accounts of the Candiru’s exploits are – William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is merely one – the Israeli version is far more sinister and deserves consternated worry.
In July this year, the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto identified over 750 websites that had been influenced by the use of Candiru spyware. “We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.” The company, founded in 2014, maintains an opaque operations and recruitment structure, reputedly drawing expertise from the Israeli Defence Forces Unit 8200, responsible for code encryption and gathering signals intelligence.
Within two years of its founding, the company had raked in $30 million in sales, establishing a slew of clients across Europe, states across the former Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Latin America. A labour dispute between a former senior employee and the company shed some light on the company’s activities, with one document, signed by an unnamed vice president, noting the offering of a “high-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets, by using explosions and disseminations operations.”
NSO Group’s reputation, and credentials, are now impossible to ignore. The Israeli government, which grants the export licenses that enable the likes of NSO and Candiru to operate, is splitting hairs. “NSO is a private company,” insists Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, “it is not a governmental project and therefore even if it is designated, it has nothing to do with the policies of the Israeli government.” In his view, no other country had “such strict rules according to cyber warfare” and “imposing those rules more than Israel and we will continue to do so.”
No Israeli government is likely to entirely abandon companies that make annual sales of $1 billion in the business of offensive cyber. The efforts by governments the world over to attack encrypted communications while trampling human rights on route have become unrelenting. In that quest, it matters little whether you are a citizen journalist, a master criminal, or a terrorist. Those deploying the spyware rarely make such distinctions.
The post Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
During his eventful time in office, US President Donald Trump took much delight in reflecting about the lethal toys of his country’s military, actual or hypothetical. These included a hypersonic capability which, his military advisors had warned, was being mastered by adversaries. Such devices, comprising hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, have been touted as opening a new arms race, given their ability not merely to travel at five times the speed of sound – as a general rule – but also show deft manoeuvrability to evade defences.
Undeterred by any rival capability, Trump claimed in May 2020 that the US military had come up with a “super duper” weapon that could travel at 17 times the speed of sound. “We are building, right now, incredible military equipment at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” Ever adolescent in poking fun at his rivals, Trump also claimed that the missile dwarfed Russian and Chinese equivalents. Russia, he claimed, had one travelling at five times the speed of sound; China was working on a device that could move at the same speed, if not at six times. Pentagon officials were not exactly forthcoming about the details, leaving the fantasists to speculate.
In 2019, Russia deployed its own intercontinental hypersonic missile, the Avangard strategic system, featuring a hypersonic glide vehicle astride an intercontinental ballistic missile. “It’s a weapon of the future, capable of penetrating both existing and prospective missile defence systems,” claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin at the time. The President claimed to have reason to crow. “Today, we have a unique situation in our new and recent history. They (other countries) are trying to catch up with us. Not a single country possesses hypersonic weapons, let alone continental-range hypersonic weapons.”
For all of this claimed prowess, nothing quite creased the brows of Pentagon officials quite as China’s July 27 hypersonic missile test. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint of Chief of Staff, said in a Bloomberg interview this October that it was “a very significant event” and was “very concerning”. The test was first reported by the Financial Times on October 16, which also noted, without additional detail, a second hypersonic systems test on August 13.
The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force had already caught the attention of US military planners in the last decade with advances in the field. The Dongfeng-17 (D-17) hypersonic boost-glide missile, for instance, made its appearance in 2014 and was found to be dismayingly accurate, striking their targets within metres.
The July test, however, was another matter, even if it missed its target by 19 miles and had been described by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian as a “routine test” of space vehicle technology. It had used, for instance, a variant of the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, a low-orbit missile delivery method pioneered by the Soviets to frustrate detection. It got the drummers from the military-industrial complex all riled up, despite the US having been actively involved in the development of hypersonic weapons since the early 2000s. In the imperial mindset, any seemingly successful experiment by the military of another power, notably an adversary, is bound to cause a titter of panic. Pin pricks can be treated as grave threats, even to a power that outspends the combined military budgets of the next seven states.
When it comes to the perceived advances of Beijing and Moscow, Alexander Fedorov of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology offers a mild corrective. Russia had “experience without money, China has money without much experience, and the United States has both, although it revived its efforts later than did Russia or China and is now playing catch-up.”
The US military establishment prefers a gloomier reading, a point they can then sell to Congress that Freedom’s Land is being somehow outpaced by upstarts and usurpers. George Hayes, chief executive at defence contractor Raytheon, spoke disapprovingly of the US as being a laggard in the hypersonic field, being “years behind” China. Michael Griffin, former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told NPR that “it is an arms race” which “we didn’t start”, thereby providing moral reassurance for future additions to it. Milley was also not averse to inflating the significance of the July test. “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. It has all of our attention.”
USA Today certainly wished its readers to give it all their attention. “That method of delivery also means the US could be attacked by flights over the South Pole. American defense systems concentrate on missile attacks from the north.”
The Biden administration has already requested $3.8 billion for hypersonic research for the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2022 budget. This is a sharp increase from the previous total of $3.2 billion, which was itself an inflation from the $2.6 billion figure the year before that. In June, Vice Admiral Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), warned the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces of current and impending risks, thereby making the case for more cash to be thrown at the enterprise. As things stood, “US aircraft carriers are already facing risks from hypersonic weapons that are now entering the inventory of American adversaries and the Navy has developed early defences for the threat.”
The prospect of yet another arms race (do they ever learn?) can only cause the sane to be worried. Zhao Tong, senior fellow with the nuclear policy program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes that such weapons “introduce more technological uncertainties and ambiguities compared with traditional ballistic missiles, which will increase the possibility of misjudgement and overreaction during military conflicts”. Just the sort of thing a planet troubled by climate change and pandemics needs.
Hypersonic panic is here to stay, and defence contractors are rubbing their hands and hoping to grease a few palms. Hayes is one of them, expecting that the US would “have weapons to challenge the adversaries but most importantly, I think our focus is how do we develop counter-hypersonics. That’s where the challenge will be.” The National Review is in full agreement, encouraging the US to “deploy missile-defense interceptors in Australia and more sensors in space, as well as work toward directed-energy weapons that would be the best counter to hypersonic missiles.” Yet another competitive front for military lunacy is in the offing, even before it has begun.
The post Hypersonic Panic and Competitive Terror first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.