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By Edward Curtin

22 Apr 2023 – It has been fifty-five years since Senator Robert F. Kennedy stepped onto the presidential nominating stage to try to mend the massive breach that had opened in American society.  The country was torn asunder by the Vietnam War, racism, poverty, the assassination of President Kennedy and the soon-to-be assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Chaos reigned as Lyndon Johnson lied and Richard Nixon matched him in verbal and actual treachery.  A war between Middle America and the elites running the government was breaking out across the country.  A great divide between whites and blacks, rich and poor, the working class and the upper class was opening wide.  The Tet Offensive had just ripped the face off the official lies about the course of the war in Vietnam and the emperor, Lyndon Jonson, stood naked and would soon announce that he would not run again.

On March 16, 1968, Senator Kennedy declared his candidacy with these words:

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies – policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

By the end of 1968, a plague year if there ever were one, Richard Nixon, together with his goon squad, prepared to occupy the White House, Vietnam raged on, and everything King and Kennedy stood for seemed lost.  Ignorance, vituperation, and the divide-and-conquer technique long practiced by the power elites set into the body politic like a deadly cancer.  Something died, all hope seemed lost, and the perilous course RFK spoke of was never stopped.  Jackals with polished faces have sat in the White House ever since.

Today hope is resurrected.  Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. center stage who declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president on Wednesday, April 19, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The wheel of history has turned and 2023 resembles 1968 in many ways while getting worse in others. The divide in the country remains but has greatly widened.  The CIA and the intelligence agencies totally control the mainstream media now.  The Pentagon’s budget has increased exponentially.  The U.S. wages a savage war against Russia in Ukraine under the blatant lie of defending freedom while supporting Nazis and greatly risking nuclear war.  It provokes war with China.  Permanent war is government policy with military bases and CIA and special forces all over the world, waging semi-clandestine wars, or maybe just wars that people don’t want to know about.  The gap between the rich and the poor has widened while the elites mock working class people as moronic deplorables.  The Department of Defense controls the development, manufacturing, clinical testing, supply, production, and distribution of the mRNA vaccines, while the criminal pharmaceutical companies reap obscene profits.  Lies are piled upon lies in what amounts to an Orwellian nightmare.  And while LBJ and Nixon have been replaced by Joe Biden, the warfare state roll on.

Some things have changed, of course.  In 1968, liberals were turning against the U.S. war against Vietnam and were growing wary of the CIA.  Today they support all the Democratic-led wars and love the CIA.  They trust the obvious media lies and those of a proven liar such as Anthony Fauci.  Nowhere is this sadly truer than with the extended Kennedy family, who in their support for Biden, Fauci, the CIA, etc. have betrayed JFK and RFK.  Their smugness and support for Biden against their brother who is carrying on his uncle’s and father’s legacy is betrayal of the worst kind.

Despite a family actively opposed to his candidacy, despite all the media lies about him, and despite the oddsmakers giving him little chance, RFK, Jr. is entering the race.  It is an act of supreme moral courage.

Like his father in ’68, he is the only candidate who can heal this nation’s great divide.

That he is opposed by a huge array of people who will lie about him because he is a truth-teller does not deter him.  Those lies immediately started up again as soon as word got out that he might run.  It’s an old story.  Trash will be thrown at him.  Every blemish of his nearly seventy years will be dredged up to paint him as a villain, a flawed man, a hypocrite – name all the negative terms you can think of and the real hypocrites, in their self-righteous rage, will use them against him.  They will bounce off him.  He is ready.

When Bobby, Jr. was young, his father handed him a book and said with urgency, “I want you to read this.”  It was Albert Camus’s The Plague.  He read it and it has informed his life ever since.  Just as in 1968, we live in plague times, and the plague is US, it runs through all our institutions and, as in Camus’s books, the rats are running wild, devouring truth and the values that can redeem us.  As he has written in his beautiful and important book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, Camus’s analysis of Sisyphus and the ancient Greeks has taught him an important lesson:

It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, according to the Stoics, but our response to those circumstance; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and service can bring us peace and fulfillment. In applying our shoulder to the stone, we give order to a chaotic universe. Of the many wonderful things my father left me, this philosophical truth was perhaps the most useful. In many ways, it has defined my life, and has allowed me to find serenity and purpose even in the most trying and tragic circumstances. (p.287)

Despite its brilliance, American Values (see this) was completely ignored by the mainstream press.  Why?  Because it revolves around “Chapter 9, Senator Robert F. Kennedy” and the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of JFK and RFK.  In this chapter, RFK, Jr. brilliantly shows that he fully grasps the CIA’s evil history.  All the other chapters, while very interesting personal and family history, pale in importance.   No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK has dared to say what RFK, Jr. does in this book.  He indicts the CIA.  This is probably not a small part of his extended family’s animosity toward him.  Family taboos must be protected, as if they were state secrets.

But his indictment of the CIA is the fundamental reason why it and the media will at all costs try to prevent him from getting the nomination.  The character assassination will be intense.

Kennedy knows he faces an uphill battle for the presidency, but no matter what forces are aligned against him, political and familial, he will not back down.

He will surprise all the pundits, for his appeal crosses party lines.  He is tough and very smart.  He has been so hated and falsely maligned by the mainstream media for so long that he is skilled at keeping to his message, which I think will be positive and inspirational, something that this country is desperate for after so many years of lies and treachery.

Even Biden’s supporters in the Democratic party know he is a flawed candidate on his last legs, laboring to keep his words straight and his steps solid.  While he may have long served as the establishment’s war puppet, there are many nervous Democrats who want to finally cut their strings with him.  And the Republicans are a party in disarray, internally torn and tired of the Trump saga which will not end.

Two clowns don’t make for a pretty picture running the country and the world into the ground.  Biden and Trump and their predecessors are naked now and not just does one boy see it and shout it only to be ignored.  There is a growing feeling throughout the country that truth and goodness spoken clearly are desperately needed to unite the country through common values. Bob Dylan got it right back a few years:

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Every day Americans are bombarded with bad news: the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine, the lies about the “threats” from Russia and China, the collapsing economy, toxic spills, gun violence, corporate gangsters ripping off the average American and funneling those monies to the politicians who pimp for them, the egregious Covid-19 and “vaccine” lies that are daily being exposed as deadly frauds, the growing threat of nuclear war, etc.

Bad bad news, and with it a growing public sense of hopelessness.  A pall of unacknowledged depression smothers the country.  People are dying for hope, as they were in 1968.  In their inner hearts there is this desperate yearning for one brave soul to stand up and tell Americans the truth about what has happened to their country.  Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is the only one who can move Americans to hope again.

For years he has been telling harsh truths that many who profit from the lies do not want to hear. That our waters are polluted and the chemical companies are criminals; that the pharmaceutical companies are criminal enterprises polluting people’s bodies; that the CIA is organized crime polluting people’s minds and assassinating its anti-war leaders; that the Pentagon is a criminal enterprise not defending but risking American’s lives and their livelihood; that the U.S. government has joined with mega-corporations to run a Mob-like fleecing of the American people; that not one of Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets killed his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, who was shot from behind at close range by a CIA hit man; that the so-called Covid vaccines are very dangerous and have never been appropriately tested and many people are dying and being injured as a result; that Anthony Fauci is a liar and fraud who fronts for Big Pharma (see this) in the Covid-19 crisis that is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats; and that we are close to losing our country and any semblance of its democratic ideals.

These are not liberal or conservative positions.  They are self-evident conclusions of a patriot, as they should be for everyone.

And because they have become such to more and more Americans who can think without reacting, Kennedy’s voice and his candidacy will grow in strength across the great divide.

The media attacks will be intense and simply full of lies. They love to call him an “anti-vaxxer,” when he is not opposed to all vaccines.  But no matter how many times he has explained this, the media twist it to serve their masters.

For example, The New York Post recently published a slimy piece that could serve as a template for all the propaganda aimed at Kennedy.  Let me quote:

Robert has said Sirhan did not actually participate in the murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during a Los Angeles presidential campaign stop in 1968.

This of course is a lie.  RFK, Jr. has said that Sirhan fired a pistol but none of his bullets hit the Senator.  He has said a CIA hit man shot his father at close range from behind as the official autopsy clearly showed, while Sirhan was standing in front of the Senator.

Lie number two.  The Post writes:

In it [a speech], he implied that those who oppose vaccines are being persecuted more severely than Anne Frank, the German teen who hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam before being sent to her death at Auschwitz.

He never implied that.  His point was clear: that in the coming digital surveillance state there will be nowhere to hide, not even in an attic, because the surveillance technology will track everyone everywhere, day and night.

These are but a few examples.  Look and you will find them everywhere now and in the coming days.

The hyenas with polished faces will try like hell to dismiss Robert f. Kennedy, Jr. as a flake, a fraud, and a conspiracy nut on an ego-trip.  Too many people can now see through such propaganda.  He is the real thing, our best hope to bridge the great divide that has been created by the elites to divide the American people.

He will not back down, and all people of good will who believe the U.S. can still find its way out of the morass we find ourselves in, should back him up.  He has warned us, he has given us his voice, and his moral courage should be followed by all who hope to hope.

The pundits who dismiss his chances will then be shocked.

Edward Curtin, Ph.D. is a widely published author and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

1 May 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Scott Ritter

After the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, another diplomatic coup is unfolding in the Middle East. This one is orchestrated by the Russians.

24 Apr 2023 – While the world continues to come to grips with the reality — and consequences — of the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Araba and Iran, another diplomatic coup is unfolding in the Middle East.

This one is orchestrated by the Russians. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan flew to Damascus last week, where he met Syrian President Bashar Assad. This visit followed that of Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad earlier this month to Riyadh.

The two countries severed diplomatic relations in 2012 at the beginning of a Syrian civil conflict that saw Saudi Arabia throwing its money behind anti-regime fighters seeking to remove Assad from power.

The startling diplomatic about face is part of a new Saudi Arabian foreign policy, embodied in its historic new relationship with Iran, which seeks to engender regional stability through conflict resolution instead of military-brokered containment.

As the Saudi Foreign Ministry noted on bin Farhan’s visit to Damascus, the Saudi goal is “to reach a political solution to the Syrian crisis that would end all its repercussions and preserve Syria’s unity, security, stability, and Arab identity and restore it to its Arab surroundings.”

Dramatic Outbreak of Diplomacy

The dramatic outbreak of diplomacy between Riyadh and Damascus is the by-product of Russia’s growing influence in Middle Eastern affairs and is one of the clearest signals yet of the declining role of the United States, whose military and diplomatic posture in the region has greatly diminished over the course of the past few years.

Russia has long-standing ties with the Syrian government. In 2015, its intervention during Syria’s civil conflict upheld the Assad government, allowing it to regain the initiative against the U.S.-and Saudi-backed opposition.

Russia’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, however, was more complex, with the Saudis having strategically aligned themselves with U.S. foreign and national security objectives in the Middle East and in global energy policies.

But that dynamic changed after October 2018, when Saudi security agents, alleged to have been working under the direct orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, murdered Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The Saudis took umbrage at the U.S. outcry at the crime, especially when then-presidential candidate Joe Biden threatened the crown prince, popularly known as MbS, with isolation and punishment.

“We were going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are,” Biden said during a televised debate in November 2019, adding that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”

Biden was later to regret those words when, in July 2022, he was compelled to fly to Saudi Arabia and ask MbS to increase oil production to lower energy costs that had skyrocketed because of the consequences of U.S.-led efforts to sanction Russian oil and gas in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

While MbS received Biden, the U.S. did not get the results it wanted from the meeting for reasons that went beyond poor personal chemistry between MbS and Biden. By then, both Saudi Arabia and Russia recognized that, as major oil producers, their interests were not well served by competing in a market dominated by U.S.-driven angst.

This realization matured in the spring of 2020 in the aftermath of an “oil war” between the two nations which saw Saudi Arabia precipitously lower the price of oil by overproducing, only to be matched by Russia.

The Saudi-Russian oil war ended because of negotiations brokered by then-President Donald Trump and for a while the world was compelled to live in an environment where the top three oil producers — the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia — openly colluded on global production quotas.

But then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S.-led energy sanctions and the recognition by both Russia and Saudi Arabia that the U.S. was not a stable partner when it came to managing the most important economic resource of their nations — energy.

US-Saudi Relations Strained

As Russia-Saudi bonds grew stronger based upon shared goals and objectives, the strain between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. likewise grew, driven by the total disconnect that existed between the Biden administration and MbS over Middle East policy.

Saudi Arabia has embarked on an ambitious project, Vision 2030, which seeks to transition the oil-rich kingdom away from its current over-reliance on energy production to a more diversified economy based upon modern technologies and non-energy economic initiatives.

A key prerequisite for this vision is for Saudi Arabia to become a force of connectivity in the region and the world — something that U.S.-driven policies promoting regional instability and war made impossible. The Biden administration had doubled down on a policy in which Saudi Arabia served as the keystone in confronting Iran along an arc of crisis stretching from Lebanon, through Syria and Iraq; and into Yemen.

Saudi Arabia confronted the reality that it could not win its war in Yemen (ongoing since 2014), and that the U.S.-led destabilization efforts in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq were floundering. With its own economic diversification goal in mind, it opted to work with Russia to engender the kind of stability needed for energy-driven economies to flourish.

Russia quietly organized talks with both Saudi and Syrian officials and diplomats, culminating with the March 2023 visit of President Assad to Moscow, where the issue of a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia was finalized.

Work remains to be done, however, as Saudi Arabia’s effort to bring Syria back into the ranks of the Arab League faces resistance from staunch U.S. allies Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar. But the fact is that, thanks to Russian and Chinese diplomacy, peace, not war, is breaking out all over in the Middle East. Bringing Syria in from the cold is simply the most recent manifestation of the phenomena.

Scott Ritter was a US Marine Corps intelligence officer for 12 years. As a chief weapons inspector for the UN Special Commission in Iraq, he was labeled a hero by some, a maverick by others and a spy by the Iraqi government.

1 May 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Jonathan Cook

Seymour Hersh’s investigation is filled with details that could be checked ­— and verified or rebutted — if anyone wished to do so. 

26 Apr 2023 – No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.

Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.

In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.

Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas. It was an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.

If Washington had been able to pin the explosions on Russia, as it initially hoped, it would have done so with full vigor. There is nothing Western states would like more than to intensify world fury against Moscow, especially in the context of NATO’s express efforts to “weaken” Russia through a proxy war waged in Ukraine.

Who Blew Up Nord Stream Pipelines? | A Mystery!

But, after the claim made the rounds of front pages for a week or two, the story of Russia destroying its own pipelines was quietly shelved. That was partly because it seemed too difficult to maintain a narrative in which Moscow chose to destroy a critical part of its own energy infrastructure.

Not only did the explosions cause Russia great financial harm — the country’s gas and oil revenues regularly financed nearly half of its annual budget — but the blasts removed Moscow’s chief influence over Germany, which had been until then heavily dependent on Russian gas. The initial media story required the Western public to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin willingly shot himself in the foot, losing his only leverage over European resolve to impose economic sanctions on his country.

But even more than the complete lack of a Russian motive, Western states knew they would be unable to build a plausible forensic case against Moscow for the Nord Stream blasts.

Instead, with no chance to milk the explosions for propaganda value, official Western interest in explaining what had happened to the Nord Stream pipelines wilted, despite the enormity of the event.

That was reflected for months in an almost complete absence of media coverage.

When the matter was raised, it was to argue that separate investigations by Sweden, Germany and Denmark were all drawing a blank. Sweden even refused to share any of its findings with Germany and Denmark, arguing that to do so would harm its “national security.”

No one, again including the Western media, raised an eyebrow or showed a flicker of interest in what might be really going on behind the scenes. Western states and their compliant corporate media seemed quite ready to settle for the conclusion that this was a mystery cocooned in an enigma.

Isolated & Friendless

It might have stayed that way forever, except that in February, a journalist — one of the most acclaimed investigative reporters of the past half-century — produced an account that finally demystified the explosions. Drawing on at least one anonymous, highly placed informant, Seymour Hersh pointed the finger for the explosions directly at the U.S. administration and President Joe Biden himself.

Hersh’s detailed retelling of the planning and execution of the Nord Stream blasts had the advantage – at least for those interested in getting to the truth of what took place — that his account fitted the known circumstantial evidence.

Key Washington figures, from Biden to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his senior neoconservative official Victoria Nuland — a stalwart of the murky anti-Russian U.S.  meddling in Ukraine over the past decade — had either called for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines or celebrated the blasts shortly after they took place.

If anyone had a motive for blowing up the Russian pipelines — and a self-declared one at that — it was the Biden administration. They opposed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 projects from the outset – and for exactly the same reason that Moscow so richly prized them.

In particular, the second pair of pipelines, Nord Stream 2, which was completed in September 2021, would double the amount of cheap Russian gas available to Germany and Western Europe. The only obstacle in its path was the hesitancy of German regulators. They delayed approval in November 2021.

Nord Stream meant major European countries, most especially Germany, would be completely dependent for the bulk of their energy supplies on Russia. That deeply conflicted with U.S. interests. For two decades, Washington had been expanding NATO as an anti-Moscow military alliance embracing ever more of Europe, to the point of butting up aggressively against Russia’s borders.

The Ukrainian government’s covert efforts to become a NATO member — thereby destroying a long-standing mutual and fragile nuclear deterrence between Washington and Moscow — were among the stated reasons why Russia invaded its neighbor in February last year.

Washington wanted Moscow isolated and friendless in Europe. The goal was to turn Russia into Enemy No. 2 – after China – not leave Europeans looking to Moscow for energy salvation.

The Nord Stream explosions achieved precisely that outcome. They severed the main reason European states had for cozying up to Moscow. Instead, the U.S. started shipping its expensive liquified natural gas across the Atlantic to Europe, both forcing Europeans to become more energy dependent on Washington and, at the same time, fleecing them for the privilege.

But even if Hersh’s story fitted the circumstantial evidence, could his account stand up to further scrutiny?

Peculiarly Incurious

This is where the real story begins. Because one might have assumed that Western states would be queuing up to investigate the facts Hersh laid bare, if only to see if they stacked up or to find a more plausible alternative account of what happened.

Dennis Kucinich, a former chair of a U.S. congressional investigative subcommittee on government oversight, has noted that it is simply astonishing no one in Congress has been pushing to use its powers to subpoena senior American officials, such as the secretary of the Navy, to test Hersh’s version of events.

As Kucinich observes, such subpoenas could be issued under Congress’s Article One, Section 8, Clause 18, providing “constitutional powers to gather information, including to inquire on the administrative conduct of office.”

Similarly, and even more extraordinarily, when a vote was called by Russia at the United Nations Security Council late last month to set up an independent international commission to investigate the blasts, the proposal was roundly rejected.

If adopted, the U.N. secretary-general himself would have appointed expert investigators and aided their work with a large secretariat.

Three Security Council members, Russia, China and Brazil, voted in favor of the commission. The other 12 — the U.S. and its allies or small states it could easily pressure — abstained, the safest way to quietly foil the creation of such an investigative commission.

Excuses for rejecting an independent commission failed to pass the sniff test. The claim was that it would interfere with the existing investigations of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. And yet all three have demonstrated that they are in no hurry to reach a conclusion, arguing that they may need years to carry out their work. As previously noted, they have indicated great reluctance to cooperate. And last week, Sweden once again stated that it may never get to the bottom of the events in the Baltic Sea.

As one European diplomat reportedly observed of meetings between NATO policymakers, the motto is: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” The diplomat added: “It’s like a corpse at a family gathering. It’s better not to know.”

It may not be so surprising that Western states are devoted to ignorance about who carried out a major act of international terrorism in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, considering that the most likely culprit is the world’s only superpower and the one state that can make their lives a misery.

But what should be more peculiar is that Western media have shown precisely no interest in getting to the truth of the matter either. They have remained completely incurious to an event of enormous international significance and consequence.

It is not only that Hersh’s account has been ignored by the Western press as if it did not even exist. It is that none of the media appear to have made any effort to follow up with their own investigations to test his account for plausibility.

‘Act of War’

Hersh’s investigation is filled with details that could be checked ­— and verified or rebutted — if anyone wished to do so.

He set out a lengthy planning stage that began in the second half of 2021. He names the unit responsible for the attack on the pipeline: the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center, based in Panama City, Florida. And he explains why it was chosen for the task over the U.S. Special Operations Command: because any covert operation by the former would not need to be reported to Congress.

In December 2021, according to his highly placed informant, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan convened a task force of senior administration and Pentagon officials at the request of Biden himself. They agreed that the explosions must not be traceable back to Washington; otherwise, as the source noted: “It’s an act of war.”

The C.I.A. brought in the Norwegians, stalwarts of NATO and strongly hostile to Russia, to carry out the logistics of where and how to attack the pipelines. Oslo had its own additional commercial interests in play, as the blasts would make Germany more dependent on Norwegian gas, as well as American supplies, to make up the shortfall from Nord Stream.

By March last year, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the precise site for the attack had been selected: in the Baltic’s shallow waters off Denmark’s Bornholm Island, where the sea floor was only 260 feet below the surface, the four pipelines were close together and there were no strong tidal currents.

A small number of Swedish and Danish officials were given a general briefing about unusual diving activities to avoid the danger that their navies might raise the alarm.

The Norwegians also helped develop a way to disguise the U.S. explosive charges so that, after they were laid, they would not be detected by Russian surveillance in the area.

Next, the U.S. found the ideal cover. For more than two decades, Washington has sponsored an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic every June. The U.S. arranged that the 2022 event, Baltops 22, would take place close to Bornholm Island, allowing the divers to plant the charges unnoticed.

The explosives would be detonated through the use of a sonar buoy dropped by plane at the time of Biden’s choosing. Complex arrangements had to be taken to make sure the explosives would not be accidentally triggered by passing ships, underwater drilling, seismic events or sea creatures.

Three months later, on Sept. 26, the sonar buoy was dropped by a Norwegian plane, and a few hours later three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.

Disinformation Campaign

The Western media’s response to Hersh’s account has perhaps been the most revealing aspect of the entire saga.

It is not just that the establishment media have been so uniformly and remarkably reticent to dig deeper into making sense of this momentous crime — beyond making predictable, unevidenced accusations against Russia. It is that they have so obviously sought to dismiss Hersh’s account before making even cursory efforts to confirm or deny its specifics.

The knee-jerk pretext has been that Hersh has only one anonymous source for his claims. Hersh himself has noted that, as with other of his famous investigations, he cannot always refer to additional sources he uses to confirm details because those sources impose a condition of invisibility for agreeing to speak to him.

That should hardly be surprising when informants are drawn from a small, select group of Washington insiders and are at great risk of being identified — at great personal cost to themselves, given the U.S. administration’s proven track record of persecuting whistleblowers.

But the fact that this was indeed just a pretext from the establishment media becomes much clearer when we consider that those same journalists dismissive of Hersh’s account happily gave prominence to an alternative, highly implausible, semi-official version of events.

In what looked suspiciously like a coordinated publication in early March, The New York Times and Germany’s Die Zeit newspapers printed separate accounts promising to solve “one of the central mysteries of the war in Ukraine.” The Times headline asked a question it implied it was about to answer: “Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines?”

Instead, both papers offered an account of the Nord Stream attack that lacked much detail; and any detail that was supplied was completely implausible. This new version of events was vaguely attributed to anonymous American and German intelligence sources — the very actors, in Hersh’s account, responsible both for carrying out and covering up the Nord Stream blasts.

In fact, the story had all the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign to distract from Hersh’s investigation. It threw the establishment media a bone: the chief purpose was to lift any pressure from journalists to pursue Hersh’s leads. Now they could scurry around, looking like they were doing their job as a “free press” by chasing a complete red herring supplied by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Which is why the story was widely reported, notably far more widely than Hersh’s much more credible account.

So what did The New York Times’ account claim? That a mysterious group of six people had hired a 50-foot yacht and sailed off to Bornholm Island, where they had carried out a James Bond-style mission to blow up the pipelines. Those involved, it was suggested, were a group of “pro-Ukrainian saboteurs” — with no apparent ties to President Volodymyr Zelensky — who were keen to seek revenge on Russia for its invasion. They used fake passports.

The Times further muddied the waters, reporting sources that claimed some 45 “ghost ships” had passed close to the site of the explosion when their transponders were not working.

The crucial point was that the story shifted attention away from the sole plausible possibility, the one underscored by Hersh’s source: that only a state actor could have carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. The highly sophisticated, extremely difficult operation needed to be concealed from other states, including Russia that were closely surveilling the area.

Now the establishment media was heading off on a completely different tangent. They were looking not at states — and most especially not the one with the biggest motive, the greatest capability and the proven opportunity.

Instead, they had an excuse to play at being reporters, visiting Danish yachting communities to ask if anyone remembered the implicated yacht, the Andromeda, or suspicious characters aboard it, and trying to track down the Polish company that hired the sailing boat. The media had the story they preferred: one that Hollywood would have created, of a crack team of Jason Bournes giving Moscow a good slapping and then disappearing into the night.

Welcome Mystery

A month on, the media discussion is still exclusively about the mysterious yacht crew, though — after reaching a series of dead-ends in a story that was only ever meant to have dead-ends — establishment journalists are asking a few tentative questions. Though, let us note, most determinedly not questions about any possible U.S. involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper ran a story early this month in which a German “security expert” wondered whether a group of six sailors was really capable of carrying out a highly complex operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines. That is something that might have occurred to a less credulous newspaper a month earlier when the Guardian simply regurgitated the Times’ disinformation story.

But despite the security expert’s skepticism, the Guardian is still not eager to get to the bottom of the story. It conveniently concludes that the “investigation” conducted by the Swedish public prosecutor, Mats Ljungqvist, will be unlikely ever to “yield a conclusive answer.”

Or as Ljungqvist observes: “Our hope is to be able to confirm who has committed this crime, but it should be noted that it likely will be difficult given the circumstances.”

Hersh’s account continues to be ignored by the Guardian — beyond a dismissive reference to several “theories” and “speculation” other than the laughable yacht story. The Guardian does not name Hersh in its report or the fact that his highly placed source fingered the U.S. for the Nord Stream sabotage. Instead, it notes simply that one theory — Hersh’s — has been “zeroing on a Nato Baltops 22 wargame two months before” the attack. 

It’s all still a mystery for The Guardian — and a very welcome one by the tenor of its reports.

The Washington Post has been performing a similar service for the Biden administration on the other side of the Atlantic. A month on, it is using the yacht story to widen the enigma rather than narrow it down.

The paper reports that unnamed “law enforcement officials” now believe the Andromeda yacht was not the only vessel involved, adding: “The boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general.”

The Washington Post’s uncritical reporting surely proves a boon to Western “investigators.” It continues to build an ever more elaborate mystery, or “international whodunnit,” as the paper gleefully describes it. Its report argues that unnamed officials “wonder if the explosive traces — collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners — were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.”

The paper then quotes someone with “knowledge of the investigation”: “The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture.”

How does the paper respond? By ignoring that very warning and dutifully distracting itself across much of its own report by puzzling whether Poland might have been involved too in the blasts. Remember, a mysterious Polish company hired that red-herring yacht.

Poland, notes the paper, had a motive because it had long warned that the Nord Stream pipelines would make Europe more energy dependent on Russia. Exactly the same motive, we might note — though, of course, The Washington Post refuses to do so — that the Biden administration demonstrably had.

The paper does inadvertently offer one clue as to where the mystery yacht story most likely originated. The Washington Post quotes a German security official saying that Berlin “first became interested in the [Andromeda] vessel after the country’s domestic intelligence agency received a ‘very concrete tip’ from a Western intelligence service that the boat may have been involved in the sabotage.”

The German official “declined to name the country that shared the information” — information that helpfully draws attention away from any U.S. involvement in the pipeline blasts and redirects it to a group of untraceable, rogue Ukraine sympathizers.

The Washington Post concludes that Western leaders “would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.” And, it seems the Western media — our supposed watchdogs on power – feel exactly the same way.

‘Parody’ Intelligence

In a follow-up story in early April, Hersh revealed that Holger Stark, the journalist behind Die Zeit’s piece on the mystery yacht and someone Hersh knew when they worked together in Washington, had imparted to him an interesting additional piece of information divulged by his country’s intelligence services.

Hersh reports:

“Officials in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had decided shortly after the pipeline bombings to send teams to the site to recover the one mine that has not gone off. [Holger] said they were too late; an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials.”

Holger, Hersh says, was entirely uninterested in Washington’s haste and determination to have exclusive access to this critical piece of evidence: “He answered, with a wave of his hand, ‘You know what Americans are like. Always wanting to be first.’” Hersh points out: “There was another very obvious explanation.”

Hersh also spoke with an intelligence expert about the plausibility of the mystery yacht story being advanced by the New York Times and Die Zeit. He described it as a “parody” of intelligence that only fooled the media because it was exactly the kind of story they wanted to hear. He noted some of the most glaring flaws in the account:

“Any serious student of the event would know that you cannot anchor a sailboat in waters that are 260 feet deep’ – the depth at which the four pipelines were destroyed – ‘but the story was not aimed at him but at the press who would not know a parody when presented with one.”

Further:

“You cannot just walk off the street with a fake passport and lease a boat. You either need to accept a captain who was supplied by the leasing agent or owner of the yacht, or have a captain who comes with a certificate of competency as mandated by maritime law. Anyone who’s ever chartered a yacht would know that.’ Similar proof of expertise and competence for deep sea diving involving the use of a specialized mix of gases would be required by the divers and the doctor.”

And:

“How does a 49-foot sailboat find the pipelines in the Baltic Sea? The pipelines are not that big and they are not on the charts that come with the lease. Maybe the thought was to put the two divers into the water’– not very easy to do so from a small yacht – ‘and let the divers look for it. How long can a diver stay down in their suits? Maybe fifteen minutes. Which means it would take the diver four years to search one square mile.”

The truth is that the Western press has zero interest in determining who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines because, just like Western diplomats and politicians, media corporations don’t want to know the truth if it cannot be weaponized against an official enemy state.

The Western media are not there to help the public monitor the centers of power, keep our governments honest and transparent, or bring to book those who commit state crimes. They are there to keep us ignorant and willing accomplices when such crimes are seen as advancing on the global stage the interests of Western elites – including the very transnational corporations that run our media.

Which is precisely why the Nord Stream blasts took place. The Biden administration knew not only that its allies would be too fearful to expose its unprecedented act of industrial and environmental terrorism but that the media would dutifully line up behind their national governments in turning a blind eye.

The very ease with which Washington has been able to carry out an atrocity — one that has caused a surge in the cost of living for Europeans, leaving them cold and out of pocket during the winter, and added considerably to existing pressures that have been gradually de-industrializing Europe’s economies — will embolden the US to act in equally rogue ways in the future.

In the context of a Ukraine war in which there is the constant threat of a resort to nuclear weapons, where that could ultimately lead should be only too obvious.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

1 May 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Ben Norton

As Ukraine sells off public assets in a privatization spree, US fossil fuel corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Halliburton are in talks to run its oil and gas industry, and the IMF is imposing the Washington Consensus.

28 Apr 2023 – As the war in Ukraine drags on, the government is selling off state assets in a big privatization spree.

US fossil fuel corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Halliburton are participating in discussions to take over the Eastern European nation’s oil and gas industry, as Kiev pushes to increase production to replace Russian energy exports.

This comes soon after Ukraine’s Western-backed leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, sent a friendly video message to a US corporate lobby group, thanking companies like BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Starlink, and promising “big business” for others.

In September, Zelensky also symbolically opened the New York Stock Exchange, announcing that his country is “open for business”, offering more than $400 billion in “public-private partnerships, privatization, and private ventures” for US companies.

US corporations cash in on Ukraine’s oil and gas

The Ukrainian government has used the war as an excuse to ram through some of the most aggressive anti-worker laws on Earth.

The director of the Kiev-based workers’ rights NGO Labor Initiatives warned of a “full-scale attack on Ukraine’s labour rights”, writing in a German government-funded journal that the “war cannot be used to justify stripping workers of their rights”.

In an attempt to bring an end to this war, China has taken the lead in advocating peace talks. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva has backed Beijing’s efforts.

The West, on the other hand, has vociferously opposed all attempts at diplomatic negotiations and instead pushed to escalate the NATO proxy war on Russia, sending fighter jets and tanks to Kiev.

Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, are treating their country as a for-profit company, frequently travelling to the United States in search of lucrative business opportunities.

Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz woos US corporations, like Iraq War profiteer Halliburton

The CEO of Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Naftogaz, Oleksiy Chernyshov, flew to Washington, DC this April to meet with US political and corporate officials.

The Financial Times reported that Chernyshov sat down with representatives from ExxonMobil and Halliburton, following a similar meeting with Chevron in January.

“The negotiations with big US fossil fuel players are part of a strategic push to increase natural gas production that Ukrainian officials believe could help replace Russian supply to Europe in the years ahead”, the newspaper wrote.

Halliburton is notorious for its involvement in corruption schemes, involving fat government contracts. In 2017, it was fined $29.2 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with highly profitable oilfield services contracts in Angola.

Halliburton is also the world’s biggest provider of fracking services, or hydraulic fracturing, a controversial form of gas extraction that is so environmentally destructive it was banned in the United Kingdom.

Responding to the Financial Times report, economist Yanis Varoufakis, who previously served as Greece’s minister of finance, tweeted: “And there you have it. EXXON, HALLIBURTON & CHEVRON, after Iraq, are now taking over the Ukrainian oil and gas fields. Planning to introduce large scale fracking – a clear and present threat to poison U’s agriculture”.

Chernyshov, the CEO of Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz, told the newspaper, “We want them [Halliburton] to expand [their presence] dramatically. We want them there seriously — boots on the ground”.

“We will welcome them”, he added. “We can do joint production on gas together, PSA agreement — production sharing agreement — they can have a licence and produce by themselves, we will welcome it”.

In November, the president of Halliburton in the eastern hemisphere, Joe Rainey, travelled to Ukraine to meet with Chernyshov.

Naftogaz published a press release on its website boasting that it “is strengthening its strategic cooperation with American’s Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oilfield services providers, to unlock the new potential of Ukraine’s fields”.

“Your support and visit to Kyiv is a powerful signal for the entire market and the world”, Chernyshov said. “I am grateful to the US government, the American people and you personally for your comprehensive support of Ukraine. We really appreciate it. Our cooperation is extremely important and we are doing our best to improve and expand it”.

Halliburton was a household name in the United States in the 2000s, and was practically synonymous with corruption.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who served under former President George W. Bush, had worked for years as chairman and CEO of Halliburton.

Cheney, a hardline neoconservative, was a key architect of the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003. That same year, Halliburton was given what NPR described as a “‘sweetheart’ deal in Iraq”.

NPR wrote:

Oil services company Halliburton has come under intense scrutiny over its multi-billion-dollar contracts with the U.S. military in Iraq. Congressional critics want to know if the company is engaging in gold-plating contracts — inflating costs and pocketing the difference. Other critics charge that Halliburton has seemingly become another branch of the U.S. military, while the company’s former chief executive officer, Dick Cheney, is now the vice president.

In the first of a three-part series looking at the complex relationship between the defense contractor and the federal government, NPR’s John Burnett examines the scope of contracts in Iraq held by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, better known as KBR.

America’s war on terrorism has created a windfall for KBR. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the company has constructed base camps at more than 60 locations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Under its deal with the Pentagon — known as a “Logcap” contract — KBR is the go-to company to provide troops in Iraq with everything from portable toilets to Internet cafes.

A decade later, the International Business Times reported that Halliburton subsidiary KBR had received more Iraq-related contracts than any other private firm in the 10 years of the war.

The media outlet reported:

The company [KBR] was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks.

Ukraine Eyes Natural Gas Deposits off Crimea

Benjamin Norton is an investigative journalist, analyst, writer and filmmaker. He is the founder and editor of Multipolarista and is based in Latin America.

1 May 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Stephanie Hiller

“Senate Finance Chief: Nothing Unites GOP More Than Helping Rich People Cheat on Their Taxes” – headline, Common Dreams, 20 Apr 2023.

But actually that has been the strategy of both parties in US development programs for decades, according to John Perkins, who was a “hit man” for MAIN, an engineering company building infrastructure all over the world. His job consisted of persuading leaders of developing countries that his company could help their country modernize.

For a price.

The price, paid in the form of loans, enables the rich, in our country and theirs, to rake in enormous profits, while chaining the country to the U.S. by growing debt.

He calls it a four pillar strategy: fear, debt, anxiety, and divide and conquer.

John Perkins spoke to the members of Praxis Peace, a Sonoma-based organization, on April 17 via zoom. The third edition of his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, has just been published. It contains 12 new chapters about how China’s development policy is spreading Chinese influence throughout the world.

The job of the hit man is to identify countries that have resources the company wants, such as oil or lithium, and then to arrange a loan from American-dominated lenders like the World Bank to pay the cost of developing the resource.

“But the money didn’t actually go to the country. It never saw the money. Instead, the money went to corporations in the United States to build big infrastructure projects in those countries. Power plants, industrial parks, highways, ports, airports, things that help the very rich people because they own the businesses and the industries that benefited from big infrastructure.

“But in the long run it hurt just about everybody else, because money was diverted from healthcare, education and other social services to pay the interest on the debt, and in the end the debt couldn’t be repaid. So we’d go back and say, Hey, since you can’t pay your debt, we’ll help you restructure it.

“But you need to implement neoliberal economic policies, which essentially means reduce taxes on your rich, reduce just everything else on everybody else, and, you know, cut back on your regulations, privatize your utility companies, or water and sewage systems, and so forth to private investors.

“Vote with us at the United Nations on some issue. That’s important to us. Let us build a military base on your soil.

“What we were doing was creating a global empire.”

If leaders don’t accept this deal, they will be pursued by “jackals” and overthrown or perhaps assassinated.

If that sounds nasty, the book conveys in greater detail, country by country, chapter by chapter, how sleazy, corrupt and inhumane all this high-power money-making is. And there’s a lot of money involved. While Perkins does not spell out how much he made, the money and the perks – travel expenses, elegant restaurants and hotels, and so on – allowed him a very plush lifestyle and powerful sense of identity and purpose to which one easily becomes addicted. That’s essential because “once you’re in, you can never get out,” said Perkins’ mysterious mentor Claudine before he accepted the job.

Money and belief kept hit men in the game, as well as the threat of punishment mafia-style if they tried to quit. Couched in reassuring language and, for some, including Perkins at the beginning of his career, that was the dirty game that has been masquerading as “foreign aid” since the Cold War, its tactics employed because the existence of the nuclear bomb had made the prospect of war untenable. (Alas, that is no longer the case. The weapons trade has its own perverted modus operandi.)  But despite its attractions, Perkins became increasingly disturbed by his role, and eventually found a way to get out.

In the meantime, China has developed another way to conduct international business, offering a more alluring, superficially less damaging way to spread its influence throughout the world. Promising “peace and stability,” China has succeeded largely by reassuring developing countries that unlike the U.S., (whom many of these leaders have come to hate) it does not intend to take over their country but to help them connect with the rest of the world. Likely it is even more dangerous,” Perkins writes, “since it is controlled by an authoritarian government.” Also the Chinese are sloppy engineers, he adds.

The book is well worth reading, offering both memoir and political history as Perkin struggles to find the good and the noble amidst the shreds of corruption, extortion and deceit. It’s not an easy struggle, but a modern-style hero’s journey with which progressives can empathize. Significantly, Perkins does not believe this is all a conspiracy of some sort; rather he finds good people trapped in an evil system, a “death economy, an economic system that’s consuming and polluting itself into extinction and causing climate change”, that must become a “life economy” if people and planet are to survive. He describes what we can do to expedite that transformation in the last chapter of his book.

In the one-hour zoom format Georgia Kelly, Executive Director of Praxis Peace, selects three or four salient questions to guide the interview to its key points, with the second half reserved for questions from the audience. In that short time, Perkins addressed some of the central subjects of his book, including China’s dominance in the global marketplace, which appears to be very threatening to America’s hegemonic ambitions, as well as the features of a “life economy” which we must create if we are to survive. It was a lively discussion.

Regarding the life economy he said, “It’s something that has been happening. We’ve seen the idea of conscious capitalism. “B Corporations.”, benefit corporations, great new deal. The tremendous boom in technologies that are taking us toward a life economy.

“And I want to emphasize that this is not about stopping growth. This is about transforming growth from things that are ravaging the earth like much of the materialism that we currently advocate, and the idea that corporations need to maximize short-term profits. They need to make some profits, because that’s how they keep going, but the tremendous amounts of profits that hedge funds and other industries are looking at is outrageous.”

How to change it? That will have to be another discussion, based on the last chapter of the book. Suffice it to say that a life economy is one designed to help everybody thrive. Not just the rich people.

That change of intention could change everything.

Stephanie Hiller is a free lance writer who blogs at Particle Beams, Sonoma Sun and Medium.

1 May 2023

Source: www.transcend.org

By Tom Valovic

They are already richer than many countries, and the rise of AI looks set to increase their influence.

25 Apr 2023 – A few years ago, I was having dinner with a friend who worked at Google. As we were discussing the ins and outs of the tech world, he casually remarked: “Google is going to take over the world you know.” Driving home and reflecting on that remark I thought: “How curious.” But now, as I contemplate the shambles our democracy has become, I’m more inclined to think: “How prescient.”

By Rima Najjar

“We don’t feel desolate on a path because of the scarcity of travelers.”

When Sheikh Khader Adnan of Islamic Jihad first went on hunger strike in 2011, the term “administrative detention” entered the vocabulary of many people around the world for the first time. His action became the longest one-man strike in history. Administrative detention is when a state arrests and detains an individual without trial. Human rights groups rallied behind Sheikh Khader’s action. On the brink of death, he was finally freed as a result of local and international pressure and his own amazing will.

International law allows a state to use administrative detention “only in emergencies, and only if a fair hearing can be provided where the detainee can challenge the allegations against her or him.” Israel heeds neither injunction, claiming that it acts in this way for security. As a settler-colonial occupying state, Israel is perpetually in an emergency, because Palestinians continue to resist their dispossession. No peace for the wicked.

Today, Sheikh Khader Adnan is popularizing another term — “arbitrary arrest and detention” — i.e., ‘deprivation of liberty’ imposed inappropriately, unjustly and without predictability. In the Palestinian case, “arbitrarily” does not mean “against the law,” because the military law Israel imposes on Palestinians is unjust and an instrument of oppression. As independent journalist Jonathan Cook says in the documentary The Law and the Prophets, “The story here is an uncomfortable one for Western audiences to hear….” The discomfort comes from the realization that their conception of what Israel stands for is nothing but a staged smokescreen. Listening to what Sheikh Khader Adnan’s wife has to say about her husband, who was on his 79th day of hunger strike, is very uncomfortable but compelling.

On Monday, April 24, an online event in support of Sheikh Adnan’s current heroic hunger strike (it was his 79th day on strike) was organized by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which was established in 2011 as a response to Sheikh Adnan’s call during his hunger strike then. The event was titled “Khader Adnan: Free him now! With Randa Musa,” or Umm Abdel-Rahman, the Sheikh’s wife.

Randa spoke passionately about her husband’s ordeal and what he stands for. With occasional noises in the background coming from her children (she has nine, the oldest of whom is fourteen), and speaking from behind the niqāb, the face covering she wears as a religious obligation, she graphically detailed the horror her whole family was experiencing. Following are excerpts from her witness:

Randa Musa: Assalamu Alaikum; I am Randa Musa the wife of Sheikh Khader Musa. My husband has been on hunger strike for 79 days now. A short while ago we heard from the lawyer who had been visiting him. We were told that he had collapsed and was taken to Ramleh hospital. His medical condition is difficult. The prison administration refuses to send him to a civilian hospital, refuses to allow medical personnel from human rights organizations to check up on him. The Red Cross is allowed to visit and what they convey back to us are bromides like: “His medical condition is difficult,” or “We visited today, and he sends salaam to you.” — there is no effective action from the Red Cross. The organization comes across as collaborators with the Israeli regime.

We were scheduled to visit the Sheikh last Thursday, but we were denied visitation at the last moment on the grounds that the Sheikh is on hunger strike and is not allowed visitors as punishment for his action. When he was detained on May 2nd, he announced his hunger strike as a protest to his arbitrary arrest there and then before he even left the house. What is known about the Sheikh is that he was the one who had initiated the movement of individual resistance efforts through hunger strike against Israeli administrative detention, and he was followed in this action by a group of other prisoners. This time, the Sheikh knew that they would not be charging him again with administrative detention.

He was freed in 2018 and rearrested in 2023. That is four years of freedom by the grace of God as a result of the hunger strike. Before that each time administrative detention was deployed against him, he would be released for only a month or two before being rearrested. Today he is going on hunger strike against what is called arbitrary detention. He believes he is a free man and freedom suits him. We are a free people and prisons are not created for us.

Detention, as used by Israel against Palestinians, is a weapon. When a person is detained administratively, he or she is arrested or rearrested based on a secret file from Israel’s intelligence agencies. The Sheikh was arrested this time based on the confessions of others during interrogations and is charged with crimes on that basis. The Sheikh himself refuses to utter a single word from the moment they detain him to the moment he is freed. The charges are based on the confessions of others, something that is easy to come by in the West Bank, especially against an individual who is a leader, who is active and sociable in all fields. It’s easy for them to collect a bunch of confessions, which are turned into a sword against him.

The Sheikh’s battle with the occupation is possibly the first of its kind, and some might find it strange. Many journalists, activists, factions, public and national figures might wonder how one individual could stand up to a military occupation. They see the charges against him and surmise that, whereas he had been able to be victorious when he went on hunger strike as an administrative detainee, this is a different type of situation, and he should let go of the hunger strike. Because no one knows my husband as I do, I tell them this: If every individual in Palestine decides to resist this occupier based on the equation that one plus one equals two, then none of us would be able to resist, to counter oppression or wield a knife and stab at a check point, or strike a bullet at an armored tank, and no one would go down to Al Aqsa to quarrel with them in hand-to-hand combat.

That’s because the balance of power is too great in favor of the occupier, as we know. Technology and capabilities are on the side of the occupier; the EU and the great powers support it — all of them are on its side. So, if we consider resistance as an equation, then we wouldn’t resist at all. We have a deep and certain faith that we are the owners of this land and our right to resist is valid; that is to say, we don’t feel desolate on a path because of the scarcity of travelers. If no one has taken this step before us, that does not mean it’s incorrect. May he be victorious this time around just as he was in the previous rounds God willing.

Yesterday there was a court appearance, an appeal to release the Sheikh on bail. It was so very painful to see him in his pitiful state. We were in and out of the courtroom within minutes. Nevertheless, the Sheikh fainted four times during the proceeding. He wasn’t physically in the courtroom; he was on a video conference. When they revived him after the fourth time, he spoke only to say he would like to speak to Umm Abdel-Rahman. Frankly it was all I could do to control myself or even to stand on my legs from the horror of what I was seeing. First, there was the way he looked! His appearance was like that of the Companions of the Cave, as if a human being had been sitting in a cave for 79 days and had just emerged. His hair was long, as were his nails. He wore a moustache and a very long beard. His clothes were filthy. The Sheikh has not changed his clothes since the day he was detained. He hasn’t bathed for 79 days; the Sheikh has not seen the sun for 79 days. The Sheikh hasn’t been out of his prison cell for 79 days despite his dire physical condition; the cell is 1 by 8 meters.

According to human rights medics who managed to visit him yesterday, his bed in the cell is crawling with bedbugs that bite him and torture him. He is especially sensitive to them and sleeps on the floor to try to avoid them. After refusing bail, the female judge in the courtroom said to the Sheikh, “There is a buzzer in your room that you can press whenever you feel in danger.” I learned later that this buzzer is near the toilet and not handy. It’s as if one who falls or is about to faint or enter a coma would know in advance when that is going to happen and then take hours or days crawling to get to the buzzer for aid. This is a disregard of human souls. Even though the cells are watched on camera all the time, prison administrators don’t care if a prisoner dies or not.

To go back to the subject of the courtroom. The situation was very difficult. When I stood up to address the Sheikh, his legs cramped and he raised up his head, which toppled his chair backwards and him along with it. It was a horrifying scene. In my whole life I have never seen such a thing or bemoaned him like this; I never feared for the Sheikh as much as I did yesterday. His fall led to his fainting again and they wheeled him out and the trial ended like this. I remained in the courthouse for an hour and a half, as I was told, lying distraught on the floor with them trying to revive me with artificial respiration. They did not call an ambulance to take me to the hospital. They waited and coordinated with a Palestinian ambulance, and I was taken to hospital where I went through a battery of examinations. I was told that I had a nervous breakdown and a mild stroke. I don’t care what my medical state is like. Once I eat and drink, my health comes back. But I return to the fear and pain we live in. The Sheikh is being between martyrdom and martyrdom at any moment. Every ring of the phone is anxiety provoking; every piece of news is anxiety provoking.

What does the occupation want of Khader? I expect they want him dead. The Israeli intelligence officer who came to arrest him said to me, “Do you think I am happy to come here to arrest him? My devout wish is to shatter his head with a bullet, because he can move a country with one wag of his finger.” The officer referred to how much trouble Khader was giving them. To the children, he said, “The Sheikh declares openly that he deals with blood, and he inspires youth to commit acts of resistance within Israel.” He said this to the children who were present in the room where they arrested Khader. How do you imagine a mother feels that her children are hearing such things about their father? Do you expect an occupation to care for the medical condition of the Sheikh who is now in their hands, who has been on hunger strike for 79 days and who is now collapsing in fainting fits? They won’t. But they will never break our resolve and sumoud (steadfastness). The Sheikh believes the occupation can and will be defeated, despite the imbalance of power. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Note: First published on Medium
______________
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

27 April 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Manolo De Los Santos and Kate Gonzales

It’s a hot and crowded Tuesday morning in the Yoruba Cultural Center in Havana, and the air sticks to the skin. You can hear the fluttering of paper as people fan themselves, and a surprise blackout takes out the sound system with a flicker of the lights. And yet, 150 young organizers from the U.S. sit shoulder to shoulder, listening attentively to two leaders of the cultural movement in Cuba. They line up and down the hall with the hope of squeezing in their question—on climate change, on housing, on fighting racism, about hope in the future—before time is up.

This energy permeates through and drives the 2023 May Day Brigade: a sharp sense of curiosity honed by the responsibility of this historic undertaking. The International Peoples’ Assembly invited young grassroots activists from across the diversity of struggles in the U.S. to participate in a crucial exchange in Cuba, an experience deprived of them and their generation by the 60-year-old blockade. The largest group to travel in decades, this brigade is an intervention into the endless attempts of the United States to silence and strangle the successes of the Cuban socialist project. As Zuleica Romay, director of the Afro-American Studies program at Casa de las Américas, said in their morning panel, “Cuba is also a victim of its own success.”

And yet, these successes are contagious and hard-earned. On their very first day, these young people spoke to leaders pioneering the very sectors they fight to build back at home. Tenant organizers learned about the housing situation, as over 80 percent of Cubans are homeowners (the rest are on a path to ownership), but also the difficulty of building enough for a growing population burdened by the blockade. Black leaders asked about anti-racism efforts after 500 years of colonialism sowed the seeds of segregation and violence on the island. Those fighting for queer liberation in the U.S. learned about the historic Families Code, passed and edited by six million Cubans who proposed hundreds of thousands of changes. The breakthrough code spans all issues of the family unit from same-sex marriage to elder care, to surrogacy, to non-normative family structures. Abel Prieto, president of Casa de las Américas, told us: “There is something the U.S. government has never understood which is that something was planted here in Cuba, this principle of social justice, of people’s democracy, of equality, of people’s participation in the political process. And this has not been weakened.” Meanwhile, these young organizers repeatedly explain the current regression of trans rights in Florida as the state passes a broad ban on trans-affirming care—a ban that goes as far as stripping parental rights from those who support their trans children. Many in the crowd nod their heads in agreement.

Still, it is not lost on these young organizers that they have arrived in Cuba in a moment of profound economic crisis. As they admire the famous Cuban cars from the ’50s roll through Old Havana, they know how precious fuel is at this very moment, prevented by the blockade. Biden shows no sign of lifting the sanctions, nor taking the country off the State Sponsors of Terrorism list that prevents it from accessing the global financial system. It is this system of unilateral coercive measures that makes it almost impossible for young people to witness the achievements of a socialist process. It is U.S. foreign policy at its most irrational and its most deadly, as it continues its siege on Cuba. It has never been more urgent to lift the blockade, for the survival of the Cuban people, and for the future of the United States. These young organizers are fighting for a better world, and this first day is just a glimpse into a future with normal relations between the U.S. and this island just 90 miles away.

Manolo De Los Santos is the co-executive director of the People’s Forum and is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Kate Gonzales is the editorial coordinator at 1804 Books. Born and raised in New York City, she has worked in development and education for arts and political organizations, and organized with grassroots movements in Hungary and New Jersey.

27 April 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, have spoken over the phone, in their first official conversation since Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine more than a year ago.

Media reports said:

Xi told Zelensky that “dialogue and negotiations are only viable way out.”

“China will neither watch the fire from the other side, nor add fuel to the fire, let alone take advantage of the opportunity to make profits,” Xi said. The Chinese president urged all sides to remain “calm” and restrained” when dealing with the possibility of the conflict spiraling into a larger confrontation. “No one wins a nuclear war,” he said.

Zelensky tweeted that the dialogue was “long and meaningful.” He said the call, along with the appointment of an ambassador to China, will “give a powerful impetus to the development of our bilateral relations.”

Xi promised to dispatch “a special envoy” to Ukraine and other countries to “conduct in-depth communication” regarding a resolution of the conflict.

In February, Beijing unveiled a 12-point roadmap for peace between Moscow and Kiev, expressing willingness to take part in mediating an end to the hostilities. China, unlike many Western nations, has refused to condemn Russia, its strategic partner, and to impose sanctions on Moscow.

Xi traveled to Moscow last month, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The leaders vowed to work to increase trade and other areas of cooperation. Xi said that the ties between the two countries have “acquired critical importance for the global landscape and the future of humanity,” according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Moscow’s Reaction To Xi-Zelensky Call 

Media reports added:

Ukraine’s “unrealistic” demands are standing in the way of peace negotiations, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has stated. She made her comments in response to a question about the phone call between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Zakharova praised Beijing for its efforts to help restart meaningful negotiations. She said Russian and Chinese visions for a path to peace were “broadly in tune” with one another. “The problem lies not with the lack of good plans,” Zakharova said.

She said: The Kiev regime has so far not been receptive to any reasonable initiative of the Ukrainian crisis. Its occasional agreement to hold negotiations is being tied to ultimatums with obviously unrealistic demands.

The spokeswoman blamed Kiev for the eventual breakdown of negotiations last spring when Russian and Ukrainian teams held several rounds of meetings. Kiev, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that negotiations can resume only after Russia surrenders its recently incorporated territories. Moscow has called such demands unacceptable.

In October, Zelensky signed a decree that declared the “impossibility” of conducting negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Beijing, which unveiled a 12-point roadmap for peace in Ukraine in February, has maintained that the conflict can only end through dialogue. China, unlike many Western countries, has also refused to condemn Russia for its actions.

China’s Special Envoy To Ukraine

Another media report said:

China named diplomat Li Hui its special envoy to Ukraine and “other countries” on Wednesday.

Xi said that the envoy would be tasked with conducting “in-depth communication with all parties on political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,” Li was China’s ambassador to Moscow from 2009 to 2019.

Ukraine’s Ambassador To China

Zelensky, meanwhile, has appointed former strategic industries minister Pavel Ryabkin as the country’s new ambassador to China.

U.S. Annoyed By Macron’s Ukraine Push, Says Bloomberg

An earlier report by Bloomberg said:

The White House is “annoyed” by French President Emmanuel Macron’s unilateral attempt to initiate diplomatic negotiations on the Russia-Ukraine conflict with mediation by China.

According to people familiar with the U.S. government’s thinking on the issue, the recent move by the French leader has not gone down well in Washington,” the agency reported on Sunday.

The sources claimed that “the White House was annoyed by what they see as Macron freelancing on a delicate diplomatic issue without consulting with allies.”

The people quoted by Bloomberg also said they did not believe the French president’s initiative would be successful, pointing out that he had proposed other peace plans during the conflict, but later backtracked on them.

They claimed it was “clear” that Beijing had no intention of using its influence on Moscow regarding the situation in Ukraine, the report said.

Last week, Bloomberg cited anonymous sources as saying France has been looking to revive peace talks between Russia and Ukraine by this summer with Chinese help.

Macron was claimed to have asked his foreign policy adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, to work directly with Wang Yi, the top Chinese official in charge of foreign relations, on formulating a roadmap for settling the crisis.

Beijing has been saying for months that peace talks are needed in Ukraine, while stressing that any settlement should respect the interests of all parties. Chinese officials have also blamed the outbreak of the conflict on the actions of the US and its allies, including NATO’s eastward expansion.

Following his trip to Beijing, Macron tried to distance Paris from Washington’s aggressive line on China, saying “the Europeans cannot resolve the crisis in Ukraine,” so they must not allow themselves to be dragged into the confrontation between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Europe should look for “strategic autonomy,” he insisted.

Macron’s efforts to improve relations with China and get involved in the peace process in Ukraine have been criticized by other EU nations as premature and jeopardizing the bloc’s unity.

German And Polish Position

A media report said:

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who also visited China, has fully backed the US stance on Taiwan.

Her Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki said that the EU will be “shooting into our own knee” if it tries looking for “strategic autonomy” because it will only make the bloc dependent on Beijing.

China Backs Macron’s Ukraine Peace Efforts

Media report said:

Beijing supports European efforts to kick start peace talks on Ukraine and eventually create a balanced and sustainable security framework for the continent, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin has said.

Negotiations should be based on Europe’s “fundamental long-term interests” and should take into account the “legitimate concerns of all parties,” the Chinese official said during a daily media briefing on Wednesday.

Wang was commenting on a reported attempt by French President Emmanuel Macron to enlist Chinese assistance to de-escalate the conflict.

The spokesman noted the comments made by President Xi Jinping during Macron’s visit to Beijing earlier this month, when the Chinese leader stated there can be no panacea to the crisis. All parties must work to build mutual trust before progress can be made, Wang argued.

The French effort to revive peace talks by this summer with Chinese help was reported by Bloomberg.

France is among the nations to have supplied Ukraine with weapons, and has supported Washington’s claim that Moscow’s military operation against its neighbor was “unprovoked.”

Russia sees the hostilities as part of a wider proxy war against Russia waged by the U.S. and its allies.

It is unknown if Macron’s plan has received any support from Kiev or its allies, who have repeatedly dismissed any cease-fires or peace negotiations so long as Russian troops remain in territories Ukraine claims as its own. President Vladimir Zelensky has signed a law that makes it illegal to negotiate with Moscow so long as Russian President Vladimir Putin remains in office.

Macron’s office has confirmed that Bonne is expected to speak to Wang, who heads up foreign affairs for the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee, but has declined to provide any details on the planned talks.

China’s Foreign Ministry said it was unaware of the French peace plan disclosed by Bloomberg, while Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has told journalists that Moscow does not possess any information on Macron’s initiative.

The news comes shortly after Macron’s recent trip to China.

Following talk between the Chinese and French leaders at the Great Hall of the People, the Chinese leader reiterated that China continues to call for peace negotiations and urged respect for the “reasonable security concerns” of both Russia and Ukraine.

Zelensky’s Top Advisor Blames U.S. For Ukraine Conflict

Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky’s top adviser, Mikhail Podoliak, praised a ‘Ukrainian victory’ resolution proposed by  U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday. Washington, he said, seeks to make amends for a ‘historical mistake’ by admitting Kiev into NATO and endorsing its war aims.

“The House of Representative’s resolution is unequivocal: The United States, unfortunately, along with other Western countries, encouraged Ukraine to give up nuclear and other weapons to ensure security and stability in the region under safeguards. This was a wrong policy that was misinterpreted by the aggressor and led to a major war in Europe,” Podoliak tweeted.

Kiev has insisted for years that the U.S. was obligated to protect it from Moscow because Ukraine agreed to return atomic weapons to Moscow under in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity. Former US President Bill Clinton offered an “apology” for that in an interview with the Irish broadcaster RTE earlier this month.

Moscow has maintained that the arsenal was not Ukraine’s to begin with, but belonged to the Soviet Union, of which Russia was recognized as the sole heir. Russia has also pointed to Zelensky’s statements about re-acquiring nuclear weapons, made in January 2022, as justification for its current military operation.

Podoliak’s comments came in response to a resolution proposed by U.S. representatives Joe Wilson and Steve Cohen, a South Carolina Republican and a Tennessee Democrat. Though its text has not been made public, the Ukrainian government appears to be familiar with its contents. Kiev’s ambassador in Washington, Oksana Markarova, tweeted on Tuesday that it “includes important elements” of Zelensky’s “peace formula.”

From what anonymous congressional staffers told Yahoo News, the resolution practically echoes Zelensky’s talking points, declaring the U.S. policy to be restoring Ukraine’s 1991 borders and having Russia pay reparations and for its leadership to be put on trial for war crimes.

“Perhaps the most important feature of Western civilization culture is the ability to analyze past experience and acknowledge mistakes,” Podoliak told Yahoo when reached for comment about the resolution on Tuesday. This was presumably a reference to the resolution’s claim that the US had wrongly pressured Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons.

The U.S. continues to claim it is not a participant in the conflict, but has provided more than $100 billion in financial and military aid to Kiev over the past year.

Zelensky’s Right-hand Man Contradicts U.S. General

Other media reports said:

Ukraine still needs more weapons and equipment for the much-hyped spring “counteroffensive,” especially artillery ammunition, President Vladimir Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podoliak said on Wednesday.

He disagreed with the U.S. general commanding NATO forces in Europe, who told Congress earlier in the day that 98% of promised combat vehicles had already been delivered.

General Christopher Cavoli gave that statistic to the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday morning. “I am very confident that we have delivered the material that they need and we will continue a pipeline to sustain their operations as well,” Cavoli added, responding to questions about the expected Ukrainian attack.

Podoliak challenged that assessment later in the day, speaking during a telethon hosted by Ukrainian television. He said only the Ukrainian General Staff can offer accurate numbers, and that Cavoli’s statistics weren’t up to date.

“in my opinion, 98% is too much, too large a number. He proceeds from certain mathematical data, things he knows today,” the adviser said, referring to Cavoli. “There should be much more equipment, there is a real shortage of shells, especially of heavy calibers. We are trying to solve this problem.”

The current rate of supply allows the Ukrainian military to take “certain actions” at the frontline, Podoliak said, adding that there is “never enough” weapons and equipment when facing an enemy such as Russia.

The much-anticipated counteroffensive may have already begun, he suggested, urging the public not to regard it as a single event but a large number of engagements on various fronts

Multiple U.S. outlets have sought to temper expectations about the Ukrainian attack over the past week, citing anonymous government officials worried about the political fallout from its possible failure. Last Friday, the White House even warned of a possible Russian offensive taking place instead.

Ukraine Risks Losing Western Support If Counteroffensive Fails, Says New York Times

Ukraine has no guarantees of success with a counteroffensive against Russia, despite receiving Western weapons, training, and intelligence support, the New York Times has reported. An underwhelming outcome would likely prompt Kiev’s backers to press it to negotiate for peace, the newspaper predicted.

Kiev has long touted an upcoming push as the next decisive phase of the conflict with Russia. The New York Times claimed on Monday that the offensive could be launched as early as May, although Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmigal recently assessed that it might not get underway until the summer.

According to classified documents shared as part of the Pentagon leaks, Ukraine is planning to use 12 combat brigades of about 4,000 troops each in its renewed campaign against Russian forces. The U.S. and its allies have helped train nine of those units, with soldiers being taught to use Western-provided equipment and receiving tactical advice at American military facilities in Germany. Ukraine’s backers are also expected to provide it with intelligence for the proposed assault.

“Everything hinges on this counteroffensive,” Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and senior NATO official, said of the future operation. “Everybody is hopeful, may be over-optimistic. But it will determine whether there is going to be a decent outcome for the Ukrainians.”

Even with all Western help, “big gains are not guaranteed, or even necessarily likely,” the New York Times warned. The newspaper cited Ukrainian battlefield losses, heavy expenditure of munitions, and Russian troops digging in and preventing the enemy from using Western-taught warfare as working against Kiev.

After the push is over, “there is little chance that the West can recreate the buildup for the foreseeable future” the report argued. The U.S. and its allies have largely exhausted their military inventories after flooding Kiev with military aid, causing gaps that are unlikely to be filled until next year, experts assessed.

“The window to make significant gains may not remain open indefinitely,” the New York Times stated. With larger reserves at its disposal, Moscow could emerge victorious in the conflict, it acknowledged.

Politico previously reported that the White House was bracing itself to mitigate the fallout from a potentially poorly-executed Ukrainian counteroffensive. A temporary truce could give Kiev time for a military buildup before another offensive at a later point, U.S. officials claimed to the outlet.

27 April 2023

Source: countercurrents.org