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By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies

Six months ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The United States, NATO and the European Union (EU) wrapped themselves in the Ukrainian flag, shelled out billions for arms shipments, and imposed draconian sanctions intended to severely punish Russia for its aggression.

Since then, the people of Ukraine have been paying a price for this war that few of their supporters in the West can possibly imagine. Wars do not follow scripts, and Russia, Ukraine, the United States, NATO and the European Union have all encountered unexpected setbacks.

Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the West’s response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across the Global South. As winter approaches, the prospect of another six months of war and sanctions threatens to plunge Europe into a serious energy crisis and poorer countries into famine. So it is in the interest of all involved to urgently reassess the possibilities of ending this protracted conflict.

For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey. Details still had to be worked out, but the framework and the political will were there.

Russia was ready to withdraw from all of Ukraine, except for Crimea and the self-declared republics in Donbas. Ukraine was ready to renounce future membership in NATO and adopt a position of neutrality between Russia and NATO.

The agreed framework provided for political transitions in Crimea and Donbas that both sides would accept and recognize, based on self-determination for the people of those regions. The future security of Ukraine was to be guaranteed by a group of other countries, but Ukraine would not host foreign military bases on its territory.

On March 27, President Zelenskyy told a national TV audience, “Our goal is obvious—peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible.” He laid out his “red lines” for the negotiations on TV to reassure his people he would not concede too much, and he promised them a referendum on the neutrality agreement before it would take effect.

Such early success for a peace initiative was no surprise to conflict resolution specialists. The best chance for a negotiated peace settlement is generally during the first months of a war. Each month that a war rages on offers reduced chances for peace, as each side highlights the atrocities of the other, hostility becomes entrenched and positions harden.

The abandonment of that early peace initiative stands as one of the great tragedies of this conflict, and the full scale of that tragedy will only become clear over time as the war rages on and its dreadful consequences accumulate.

Ukrainian and Turkish sources have revealed that the U.K. and U.S. governments played decisive roles in torpedoing those early prospects for peace. During U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “surprise visit” to Kyiv on April 9th, he reportedly told Prime Minister Zelenskyy that the U.K. was “in it for the long run,” that it would not be party to any agreement between Russia and Ukraine, and that the “collective West” saw a chance to “press” Russia and was determined to make the most of it.

The same message was reiterated by U.S. Defense Secretary Austin, who followed Johnson to Kyiv on April 25th and made it clear that the U.S. and NATO were no longer just trying to help Ukraine defend itself but were now committed to using the war to “weaken” Russia. Turkish diplomats told retired British diplomat Craig Murray that these messages from the United States and United Kingdom killed their otherwise promising efforts to mediate a ceasefire and a diplomatic resolution.

In response to the invasion, much of the public in Western countries accepted the moral imperative of supporting Ukraine as a victim of Russian aggression. But the decision by the U.S. and British governments to kill peace talks and prolong the war, with all the horror, pain and misery that entails for the people of Ukraine, has neither been explained to the public, nor endorsed by a consensus of NATO countries. Johnson claimed to be speaking for the “collective West,” but in May, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy all made public statements that contradicted his claim.

Addressing the European Parliament on May 9, French President Emmanuel Macron declared, “We are not at war with Russia,” and that Europe’s duty was “to stand with Ukraine to achieve the cease-fire, then build peace.”

Meeting with President Biden at the White House on May 10, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi told reporters, “People… want to think about the possibility of bringing a cease-fire and starting again some credible negotiations. That’s the situation right now. I think that we have to think deeply about how to address this.”

After speaking by phone with President Putin on May 13, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz tweeted that he told Putin, “There must be a cease-fire in Ukraine as quickly as possible.”

But American and British officials continued to pour cold water on talk of renewed peace negotiations. The policy shift in April appears to have involved a commitment by Zelenskyy that Ukraine, like the U.K. and U.S., was “in it for the long run” and would fight on, possibly for many years, in exchange for the promise of tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons shipments, military training, satellite intelligence and Western covert operations.

As the implications of this fateful agreement became clearer, dissent began to emerge, even within the U.S. business and media establishment. On May 19, the very day that Congress appropriated $40 billion for Ukraine, including $19 billion for new weapons shipments, with not a single dissenting Democratic vote, The New York Times editorial board penned a lead editorial titled, “The war in Ukraine is getting complicated, and America isn’t ready.”

The Times asked serious unanswered questions about U.S. goals in Ukraine, and tried to reel back unrealistic expectations built up by three months of one-sided Western propaganda, not least from its own pages. The board acknowledged, “A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal.… Unrealistic expectations could draw [the United States and NATO] ever deeper into a costly, drawn-out war.”

More recently, warhawk Henry Kissinger, of all people, publicly questioned the entire U.S. policy of reviving its Cold War with Russia and China and the absence of a clear purpose or endgame short of World War III. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” Kissinger told The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. leaders have inflated the danger that Russia poses to its neighbors and the West, deliberately treating it as an enemy with whom diplomacy or cooperation would be futile, rather than as a neighbor raising understandable defensive concerns over NATO expansion and its gradual encirclement by U.S. and allied military forces.

Far from aiming to deter Russia from dangerous or destabilizing actions, successive administrations of both parties have sought every means available to “overextend and unbalance” Russia, all the while misleading the American public into supporting an ever-escalating and unthinkably dangerous conflict between our two countries, which together possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.

After six months of a U.S. and NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, we are at a crossroads. Further escalation should be unthinkable, but so should a long war of endless crushing artillery barrages and brutal urban and trench warfare that slowly and agonizingly destroys Ukraine, killing hundreds of Ukrainians with each day that passes.

The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end, find reasonable political solutions to Ukraine’s political divisions, and seek a peaceful framework for the underlying geopolitical competition between the United States, Russia and China.

Campaigns to demonize, threaten and pressure our enemies can only serve to cement hostility and set the stage for war. People of good will can bridge even the most entrenched divisions and overcome existential dangers, as long as they are willing to talk – and listen – to their adversaries.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which will be available from OR Books in October/November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

6 September 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

29 Aug 2022 – None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

None are more hopelessly ignorant than those who falsely believe they’re informed.

None are more hopelessly propagandized than those who don’t know they are propagandized.

Living in a liberal western democracy means having the freedom to criticize the tyranny of your government, but instead spending your time criticizing the tyranny of foreign governments who your government doesn’t like.

Free speech in a liberal western democracy means you have the freedom to say whatever you want about the abuses of your government, and the press has the freedom to hammer you with propaganda to ensure that you never do.

In a liberal western democracy you are free to criticize your government, but instead you are propagandized into criticizing the impotent puppets who get rotated in and out of office while your government continues doing all the same evil things regardless of who gets elected.

In liberal western democracies you are free to call the president “Drumpf” or “Brandon”, but you are not free to know who’s actually calling the shots in your country underneath the official government.

In liberal western democracies people say, “I’m so glad I don’t live in a country like Russia or China where people are forbidden to criticize their government. I live in the west, where I’m free to criticize Russia and China all I want.”

It doesn’t matter if you have freedom of speech if those in power can control what you will say. And in liberal western democracies, this is exactly what happens.

We grow up saturated with US empire propaganda in the west. We marinate in it. It pervades our consciousness. But because it’s all we’ve ever known, most of us don’t even notice it.

We think it’s normal that we’re always told our government is on the good and righteous side of every international conflict. We think it’s normal that we hear constantly about the tyranny of foreign governments while only occasionally hearing about bad things our own government did years ago (but it was an innocent mistake and it’ll never happen again).

“If we were being propagandized, I’m sure we’d have heard about it in the news,” we tell ourselves.

But the news is the propaganda. And it will never report on that bombshell story.

Propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society. In controls how the public thinks, acts, votes and behaves, but hardly anyone ever talks about it. Because the sources they’ve been trained to look to for information never say anything about it.

So people say what’s on their mind, after what’s on their mind has been carefully curated by the imperial narrative managers who are responsible for controlling what information goes into their mind.

And they say it with complete freedom. Sure if what they’re saying goes against the interests of the western empire they won’t be allowed to speak on any large platforms where they might infect the mainstream herd with wrongthink, and sure if what they’re saying is really inconvenient they might get banned from even speaking on any of the major online platforms, but they still get to speak. Alone, where no one can hear them. Preferably into a hole in the ground.

And everyone else gets to ingest the mainstream swill. The authorized narratives that get amplified on traditional media and by the algorithms of Silicon Valley. The authorized narratives which mask the abuses of their own government — foreign and domestic — while magnifying and exaggerating the abuses of empire-targeted governments.

That’s why when some people hear my objections to the empire, they say “Well at least where I live we’re allowed to criticize our government!”

And that’s why I reply to them, “Okay. But you don’t.”

If speech wasn’t free people would realize they’re being oppressed, but if people started using their speech to voice real grievances about real power, they would swiftly discover that their speech is being ignored and power is doing as it likes. So inconvenient speech is curtailed by propaganda, by censorship, by algorithm manipulation and by media marginalization.

People are kept hopelessly enslaved by giving them the illusion that they are free, and any voice which interrupts that illusion is silenced by whatever means necessary.

That’s what free speech means in a liberal western democracy. You can say whatever you like, as long as it’s what they like.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium.

5 September 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Scott Ritter

Newsweek’s William Arkin is a prisoner of his sources, a problem that pervades Western reporting on the conflict in Ukraine.

1 Sep 2022 – Six months into Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” fact-challenged reporting that constitutes Western media’s approach to covering the conflict in Ukraine has become apparent to any discerning audience. Less understood is why anyone would sacrifice their integrity to participate in such a travesty. The story of William Arkin is a case in point.

On March 30 (a little more than a month into the war), Arkin penned an article which began with the following sentence: “Russia’s armed forces are reaching a state of exhaustion, stalemated on the battlefield and unable to make additional gains, while Ukraine is slowly pushing them back, continuing to inflict destruction on the invaders.”

Arkin went on to quote a “high-level officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” who spoke on condition of anonymity, who declared that “The war in Ukraine is over.”

A little less than three months later, on June 14, Arkin wrote a piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Russia Is Losing the Ukraine War. Don’t Be Fooled by What Happened in Severodonetsk.”

Apparently neither Arkin nor his editorial bosses at Newsweek felt any need to explain how Russia could be losing the war twice.

Anyone who has been following what I’ve been writing and saying since the beginning of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine knows I hold the exact opposite view. Russia, I maintain, is winning the Ukraine conflict, in decisive fashion.

But I don’t write for Newsweek.

William Arkin does.

Arkin proclaims that Russia is losing though it had, at the time the article was published, just taken the strategic city of Severdonetsk, killing and capturing thousands of Ukrainian forces, and rendering thousands more combat ineffective since they had to abandon their equipment to flee for their lives. (Russia has since captured all of the territory encompassing the Lugansk People’s Republic, including the city of Lysychansk, inflicting thousands of additional casualties on the Ukrainian military.)

“The Russian army’s so-called victory,” Arkin proclaimed at the time, “is the latest installment in its humiliating military display and comes with a crushing human cost.”

The humiliating display instead is Arkin’s lack of acumen in conducting an independent assessment of the military situation on the ground in Ukraine.

This was again reinforced last week when Arkin penned another article in which he helps disseminate the outlandish claims of his Pentagon sources.

“[F]rom late February through August, with only a moderate infusion of weapons from the West, some supportive declarations from Western leaders and a smattering of ‘We Stand with Ukraine’ signs on U.S. lawns,” Arkin writes, Ukraine has been able to “hold at bay the mighty Russian military,” something apparently none thought it could do.

Ignore the jaw-dropping contention by Arkin that the tens of billions of dollars in military assistance provided by the U.S. and its NATO and European allies constitutes but “a moderate infusion of weapons.” No, don’t ignore it — focus on it. This is the signature style of Arkin and his Pentagon handlers, a sort of Orwellian double-speak where one can rest assured whatever bold statement is made, the truth is the exact opposite.

Arkin quotes “U.S. intelligence officials who have been watching the war,” writing that “Russian troops have had to contend with bad battlefield leaders, inferior weapons and an unworkable supply chain.”

Anyone who has been tracking the events in Ukraine might have thought that this was the situation as it applies to the Ukrainian military. Not so, says Arkin and his source. Moreover, it is not Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky who has been interfering with his Ministry of Defense, but Russian President Vladimir Putin with his. These same Russian troops, Arkin declares, have “also been hobbled by Putin himself,” who has “ignored, overruled and fired his own generals.”

This is baseless fiction, written by a man who seems determined to cement himself in the annals of the Russian-Ukraine conflict as an unabashed Ukraine partisan and vehicle for Pentagon information warriors. Arkin’s narrative of the war to date is so far removed from the factual record it belongs in The Onion.

What Arkin writes cannot even be called propaganda, because for propaganda to be effective it needs to be both believable at the moment of consumption, and able to sustain a narrative over time. Arkin’s work fulfills neither criterion.

His Sources

Like most erstwhile journalists covering the conflict for western media outlets, Arkin appears to be a prisoner to his sources, which in this case are a combination of anonymous U.S. defense intelligence personnel and pro-Ukrainian propagandists.

I used the term “erstwhile” in describing Western journalists because normal journalistic standards dictate that one seeks to report a story — any story — from a position of dispassionate neutrality, drawing on sources which reflect all sides of the story.

There is nothing wrong about drawing conclusions from such reporting, even assigning weight when it comes to which aspects of the coverage are deemed more credible than others. But before such conclusions can be made, foundational reporting needs to take place. Simply parroting what you’re being told from sources exclusively drawn from one part of the story is stenography.

In the interests of full disclosure, Arkin and I were colleagues for a brief period in late 1998-early 1999, when we were both contracted to NBC News as “on air talent” to talk about the situation in Iraq. Arkin apparently did not hold my analysis in high regard then. I have no idea what he thinks today — Consortium News has reached out for an answer, but as of publication has not received a reply.

Arkin did not respond to an invitation to debate me on Ukraine on a weekly podcast I do with Jeff Norman.

I’ll let our respective track records speak for themselves, especially when it comes to Iraq and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. Arkin says he is “proud to say that I also was one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq and remember fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board.”

I’m pretty sure I was saying something similar to an equally incredulous Congress and to the entire mainstream U.S. media (NBC included), as well as the international press corps.

Congratulations, Bill — we once were on the same page.

But no more.

Arkin’s Achievements

Arkin is no run-of-the mill journalist. He’s a smart guy. He got accepted to New York University, although he dropped out to join the Army, claiming NYU “wasn’t for me.” While stationed in Berlin, he completed his undergraduate studies, getting a bachelor’s degree in government and politics. After leaving the Army he got a master’s degree in National Security Studies from Georgetown University.

For the next 40 years, Arkin worked for numerous employers, specializing in nuclear issues and military affairs, before landing his current gig as Newsweeks‘ senior editor for intelligence.

For The Washington Post in 2010, after a two-year investigation, he wrote a ground-breaking story with Dana Priest about the vast and until then little-understood explosive growth of the national security state post 9/11.

Arkin then showed integrity when he resigned from MSNBC and NBC News in 2019. His reasons for leaving, spelled out here, include how he was “especially disheartened to watch NBC and much of the rest of the news media somehow become a defender of Washington and the system.”

In March this year he wrote a startling story that questioned the dominant Western reporting that Russia was committing repeated war crimes by wantonly slaughtering huge numbers of civilians just for the hell of it.

“As destructive as the Ukraine war is, Russia is causing less damage and killing fewer civilians than it could, U.S. intelligence experts say. Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage,” he wrote.

The article corroborated what Russia had been saying all along, which until that point was dismissed in the West as propaganda.

So how does Arkin transition from debunking Ukrainian and Western propaganda about Moscow deliberately killing huge numbers of civilians, to embracing the fanciful notion that Russia is losing the war? (Further underscoring Arkin’s assessment of Russia’s battlefield performance is the uninterrupted string of battlefield successes by Russia in the Donbass since that June article was published, further undermining his argument.)

It’s not a lack of education that has led Arkin down the path so many of his colleagues in mainstream media have stumbled down; there is no doubting the man is not only well educated, but also innately intelligent, something that doesn’t necessarily follow the other.

Military ‘Expertise’

Arkin can be said to be a victim of his own CV, which is light on relevant military experience for someone selling himself as an expert in military affairs based on his time in the U.S. Army.

Arkin purports to be one of the foremost military analysts of our times, a man whose track record in military affairs dates to his time as a junior enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army where, from 1974 to 1978, he served in occupied West Berlin as an intelligence analyst working for the Deputy Chief of Staff Intelligence (DCSI), U.S. Commander Berlin (USCOB).

On his WordPress page, Arkin writes that in the army he “rose to be senior intelligence analyst for the Berlin military occupation authorities and served under civilian cover as part of a number of clandestine human and technical intelligence collection efforts.”

In Berlin, Arkin adds in his LinkIn bio, “I worked on a number of clandestine projects and was an analyst of Soviet and East German activities in East Germany.”

He was not just any military analyst, mind you, but someone who, according to himself, “was once one of the world’s leading experts on two military forces that don’t even exist anymore.” I worked closely with military officers who were in fact the foremost experts on both the Soviet and East German militaries during the time Arkin served. This Newsweek senior editor has engaged in more than a little self-promotion.

That someone of the rank of specialist or sergeant (I have no idea what rank Arkin achieved, but four years’ time in service is a self-limiting reality when it comes to advancement) being the “senior intelligence analyst” in all of Berlin on matters pertaining to the Soviet military is patently absurd; Berlin was home to numerous specialized intelligence units and organizations, any one of which would have been staffed with personnel far more senior and, as such, experienced, in intelligence analysis on the Soviet and East German target than Arkin. Simply put, Arkin was not, nor has he ever been, one of the world’s leading experts on the Soviet military.

Not even close.

Arkin was never involved in combat arms, nor did he serve in combat. Without that experience he cannot understand the military realities of war — logistics, communications, maneuvering, fire support, etc. Berlin was, from everything I’ve heard, a fascinating place to serve — but it wasn’t combat.

Not even close.

As Arkin has no combat experience, his military analysis is held hostage to his sources within the Defense Intelligence Agency who pass along such cutting-edge insights as the notion that Russia is suffering ten casualties for every Ukrainian soldier lost since the Donbass offensive began in April.

Arkin seemed unaware of documents alleged to have been leaked from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, dated April 21, which state that Ukraine had, as of the date, suffered 191,000 combined killed and wounded. According to Arkin’s math, this would mean Russia has suffered nearly 2 million casualties of its own.

Despite the absurdity, Arkin keeps parroting what his Defense Intelligence Agency sources tell him.

He repeats, without hesitation, his intelligence source’s assessment of Ukraine’s “greater morale and motivation, better training and leadership, superior knowledge and use of the terrain, better maintained and more reliable equipment, and even greater accuracy.”

It doesn’t matter that literally every assertion made by Arkin’s intelligence source is demonstrably false. If Arkin knew about artillery (the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine is primarily an extended artillery duel), he would understand the concepts of probability of hit and probability of kill, and how the volume of artillery fired increases both.

He might then understand how absurd it is to think that an artillery duel where one side fires 6,000 rounds and the other 60,000 rounds could produce an outcome where the side firing 10 times fewer rounds achieves a 10-fold advantage in lethality.

Any expert on Soviet/Russian military affairs would have known that artillery was going to be a major factor in any large-scale combat operation involving Russian forces. By way of example, three days before the Russian operation began, I tweeted (when I could still tweet):

“If you haven’t done a schedule of fires for at least three artillery battalions in the field using live rounds while maneuvering, I’m probably not interested in your military opinion about Ukraine.”

Arkin, to the best of my knowledge, has never done a schedule of fires for multiple battalions of artillery. His apparent lack of knowledge of artillery shows when he repeats verbatim the dreck fed him by his intelligence sources.

Arkin’s has to be aware that NBC News reported about the deliberate declassification and release by the U.S. intelligence community of intelligence information that intelligence officials knew was not true. And yet, Arkin still relies on these types of sources to provide the fodder for his headline-grabbing tales. The question of Arkin’s motives in writing such stories now remains.

That someone with Arkin’s background would allow a lifetime of diligent work to be squandered by serving as little more than a shill for U.S. intelligence is one thing. That media outlets like Newsweek keep printing it is another. Together, these twin phenomena represent what I call “The Arkin Effect,” which is nothing less than the total debasement of journalism in the U.S. when it comes to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Six months into Russia’s “Special Military Operation”, most military analysts admit that Russia enjoys the upper hand on the battlefield, despite the billions of dollars in military aid that has been sent to Ukraine by the U.S. and its European allies.

But not Bill Arkin and his employers at Newsweek. They seem to be content with serving as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s stenographers, putting out stories which have not, and will not, stand the test of time.

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.

5 September 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Richard Falk

A somewhat modified text originally published by CounterPunch on 2 Sep 2022. I recommend CP highly for anyone seeking to follow the best quality progressive commentary on global issues; also, follow Transcend Media Service (TMS) for a more global, academic, and cultural orientation heavily influenced by the pioneering work of Johan Galtung in the area of Peace Studies broadly conceived.

4 Sep 2022 – In the post below I call particular attention to the fact that the relevance of Israel’s nuclear weapons unregulated weapons capabilities and regional militarism has been totally overlooked in assessing the negotiations on whether the U.S. should rejoin the JCPOA, which Trump unilaterally withdrew from in 2018, reviving the agreement. Israel’s influence on the nature of the bargain reached for renewal and the side benefits that it will receive as ‘compensation’ for overriding its faux opposition to the agreement as articulated by its leading political figures. It illustrates the distortion of global policy debates whenever the domestic politics of the U.S. are entangled with the way an issue is resolved even sometimes, as here, at the cost of maximizing national interests.

**********************

To Renew or Not to Renew the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement, That Is the Question

The Road Not Taken

After two weeks in Iran during latter part of January 1979, the height of the revolutionary movement against the dynastic, autocratic rule of Mohammed Reza Ayatollah, I had the opportunity for an extended conversation with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his tent where he received foreign visitors and journalists during his final days in Paris. This was the individual who would serve as uncontested Iranian leader, officially the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran until his death in 1989.

I was accompanied at the meeting by Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General and major progressive personality at the time in the United States and Don Luce, a prominent and courageous anti-war religiously oriented activist who gained worldwide fame in 1970 by departing from a prescribed tour route to expose a visiting delegation of U.S. Congress members to the notorious ‘tiger cages’ in Con Son Prison in Saigon, a major facility in South Vietnam that had become a repeated focus of severe torture allegations. During our time together in Iran we met many religious leaders and secular supporters of the popular uprising, individuals who would soon be running the government. We witnessed extraordinary displays of mass popular excitement in the country and anxious sighs of disbelief that greeted the news that the Shah had abdicated the Peacock Throne, and as it turned out, leaving Iran never to return.

There are many aspects of this meeting that are worth recalling but one stands out for me as having current relevance more than 43 years later. Immediately after greetings were exchanged, Ayatollah Khomeini carefully posed a question to us that seemed uppermost in his mind, more so than any of the topics covered in the ensuing two hours or so of questions and answers, with the three of us raising most of the questions. But the Ayatollah’s question came first, and it turned out to be the one where our words of response earned the full attention of this religious leader: “Do we think that the U.S. Government will repeat its intervention of 1953 that overthrew a popularly elected government and restored the Shah as Iran’s dynastic leader?” Later Ayatollah Khomeini confided that he had “only entered politics because there was a river of blood between the ruler and the people of Iran.”

We each responded along these lines: “Of course, we could not know for sure how Washington will act, but we believed the U.S. had learned some lessons from the past, including the awkwardness of supporting coups that brought to power repressive leaders while professing to lead ‘the free world’ against Communism and Soviet expansionism. We also stressed the recent failure of intervention in Vietnam and the apparent strength and unity of the movement that overthrew the Shah, as well as our impressions of the Iranian military as beset by divided loyalties, as well as institutionally weakened by the Shah’s own distrust of the leadership of the armed forces.”

We also called to the attention of the Ayatollah, on the basis of our meeting a few days earlier in Tehran with the American Ambassador in Iran, William Sullivan, who told us that he had forwarded repeated similar assessments to the White House, and a supposedly liberal president, Jimmy Carter, that the movement against the Shah’s government enjoyed the overwhelming support of the Iranian people and that even the leadership of the Iranian armed force was resigned to the acceptance of the political outcome. On this basis, Sullivan recommended an immediate and urgent U.S. Government effort to reassure the leaders of the Iranian revolutionary movement that it sought normal and positive relations with whatever government emerged in Iran during the ensuing weeks.

Ayatollah Khomeini was a formidable presence, pondered our comments, and slowly responded in almost these exact words, “If what you are telling us is accurate, and comes to pass, then we have no objection to the Shah coming to the U.S. or elsewhere for medical treatment, and we can have normal relations with your country.” Of course, this road was not the path taken by either country, which has resulted in enormous adverse consequences for Iran and the Middle East as a whole, with distorting effects that have been playing out over the intervening decades, which are shamelessly generating skepticism and propaganda about the U.S. rejoining the JCPOA, thus setting the stage for another phase of dangerous outcomes whether the Iran Nuclear Agreement is restored or not in 2022.

There were already present some worrisome signs back in 1979 that made such an exploratory attempt to accept this dramatic internal display of the human rights of all peoples to self-determination unlikely to materialize without generating geopolitical friction. The U.S. National Security Advisor at the time, Zbigniew Brzezinski, strongly favored a commitment to once again restore the Shah to his throne, and had a strong influence on President Carter’s thinking, which was given priority over Sullivan’s strong advice based on his direct knowledge of the realities in Iran.

Meanwhile, in Iran there were some strong words being uttered by militants about the revolutionary intentions of Iran extending to the whole of the Islamic world, and especially the Gulf monarchies, which sent strategic chills down the backs of Western foreign policy elites extremely sensitive in those days to any further strategic threats to Gulf oil reserves. In the background was Israel aware of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist leadership emerging in Tehran, which set off loud alarms in reaction to some anti-Zionist rhetoric of the more militant leaders in the early period of the Islamic Republic. In any event, normalization between the two countries was not to be, however much sense it made with respect to peace, security, and self-determination back then and now.

Lines from a much quoted poem by Robert Frost are worth reflecting upon given this exchange of views more than 43 years ago.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Recontextualizing Nonproliferation for Some, Nuclearism for Others

Restoring JCPOA through Negotiations

It needs to be emphasized that Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 JCPOA and reimposed punitive sanctions (‘maximum pressure’) on Iran that inflicted many hardships on the civilian population despite the fact that Iran had been in full compliance with the terms of the agreement up through 2018 as confirmed by IAEA periodic inspections. It appears that Trump was induced by his ardent Zionist son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and leaders in Israel, especially the Prime Minister at the time, Bibi Netanyahu. Trump seemed thus persuaded to denounce the agreement as a terrible deal from a security perspective, providing a justification for U.S. withdrawal, but seemed no more than a pragmatic rationalization to cover a calculated political move. Not irrelevant, although further in the background is the powerful Iranian expatriate presence in the United States that has not given up on restoring secular rule in Iran, and views any kind of normalizing of relations with Iran to be ‘appeasement.’ Consider the recent shrill declaration to this effect by the eldest son of the autocratic Shah:

“This shift to appeasement was never going to solve any of the world’s issues with the Islamic Republic. The regime’s problem with the West is the West’s very existence, which obstructs its path to a global caliphate.”

— Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2022

In the drawn-out Vienna negotiations on restoring the agreement the U.S. has been under constant public pressure from Israel and the Gulf monarchies to extract concessions from Iran bearing on matters outside the scope of the nuclear agreement. It would seem more plausible for the U.S. Government to have been confronted by demands from Iran for reparations for the harm it experienced by restoring, and intensifying, the sanctions since 2018. This bad faith behavior of the U.S. sets a dreadful precedent for the reliability of non-treaty international commitments. The fact that Iran has been prepared to go along with such a one-sided negotiating format undoubtedly reflects their motivation to gain relief from sanctions, and may also reinforce the sincerity of Iran’s continuing declared intention never to acquire nuclear weapons. Building trust in international relations presupposes mutual good faith adherence to carefully negotiated arrangements. At the very least, Biden should have humbly apologized to Iran for the disruptive 2018 withdrawal, and despite his legal inability to bind future presidents, he might have regained some higher ground by pledging to respect the agreements for as long as he remains president, and more rapidly moved to end sanctions once the agreement was restored.

It is worth comparing the extravagant language of the August 14th Biden-Lapid Joint Jerusalem Declaration of Strategic Partnership in which Biden not only affirmed a long-term U.S. commitment, audaciously proclaiming it as ‘bipartisan’ even ‘sacrosanct.’ The following language deserves scrutiny in light of the Vienna impasse:

“Consistent with the longstanding security relationship between the United States and Israel and the unshakable U.S. commitment to Israel’s security, and especially to the maintenance of its qualitative military edge, the United States reiterates its steadfast commitment to preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter its enemies and to defend itself by itself against any threat or combination of threats. The United States further reiterates that these commitments are bipartisan and sacrosanct, and that they are not only moral commitments, but also strategic commitments that are vitally important to the national security of the United States itself.”

Confirming Israel’s Nuclear Hegemony in the Middle East

It has been completely ignored by the Western media that Iran has made a huge concession when it entered the Obama promoted Nuclear Agreement in 2015 (JCPOA) without an insistence that Israel simultaneously commit to destroying its arsenal of nuclear weapons. As the agreement was negotiated, at least in public, there were no assurances required of Israel, not even something as intangible as requiring Israel to issue a No First Use Declaration. It was to be expected that Israel and the United States would remain silent about solidifying Western control of the region, and especially the signature feature of the ‘strategic partnership,’ the. crux of which is retaining sole possession of the ultimate weapon of destructive violence. Yet Israel, in particular, seems empowered enough to insist on receiving firm assurances that the U.S. would prevent Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons by all means necessary (again without drawing into question Israel’s retention of such weapons without any disclosure of its intentions with respect to threat or use). The language of commitment in the Jerusalem Declaration puts the U.S. in the position of committing itself to a use of force without any hint of or apparent need for a further legal authorization. Again the language of the Jerusalem Declaration is important:

“The United States stresses that integral to this pledge is the commitment never to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, and that it is prepared to use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.”

Even this was apparently not enough for Israeli security hawks who wanted the pledge to pertain to any perceived steps toward acquisition.

Such an explicit bilateral strategic commitment as contained in the Jerusalem Declaration seems to overlook Iran’s completely valid legal and political option, if it wishes to rely upon it, to withdraw from the NPT, which it is entitled to do under Article X(1) of the treaty:

“1. Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.”

Given Israel’s threats, its nuclear capabilities, its strategic partnership with the U.S., withdrawal would seem an entirely reasonable course of action for Iran to take. If deterrence can serve as a security justification under the NPT, it would seem few states in the world could make as strong a case as Iran.

Taking Nonproliferation Seriously

There is a further consideration. If the United States were taking the ethos of nonproliferation seriously it would be concentrating on denuclearizing the Middle East as a region rather than acting to preserve Israel nuclear hegemony. The obvious way to achieve such a result would be to support the negotiation of a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone together with a non-aggression security framework. All states except for Israel have supported such an initiative, including Iran and Saudi Arabia. It would be a breakthrough for peace and security, besides freeing billions for more constructive uses.

The NPT regime is not the best path to non-use of the weaponry in a state-centric world. The NPT, however, it may be best path if the true geopolitical objective is to retain oligopolistic control over nuclear weapons. Phased disarmament within a treaty framework is the only promising path if the overriding objective is to achieve a world free from this infernal weaponry.

A start in this benevolent direction has been made in the Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) negotiated under UN auspices and coming into force in 2021. But to gain political traction sufficient to provide a post-nuclear security framework it require to receive the support of the current nine nuclear weapons states. None have so far become Parties to TPNW, and the three NATO nuclear weapons states, the U.S., France, and the UK, along with Russia have issued statements expressing their principled opposition and unconditional rejection of a disarmament approach, despite its promise of total nonproliferation.

A Concluding Remark

If we are destined to live with nuclear weapons, we may have to endure the nuclear hegemony of the P-5, but to use the NPT ethos to justify discriminatory treatment of a non-nuclear state such as Iran seem to be an extremely regressive geopolitical undertaking. For this reason alone, people of good will should hope for the unconditional renewal of the JCPOA. It is time for the morally attuned public to awake to the reality that a nuclear Israel has neither a security justification nor political grounds for its posture of continuing bullying of Iran. To complain about Iran’s political solidarity with some movements in the region as Israel does is gross hypocrisy. It pales in its gravity compared if fairly to the U.S. and Israel’s discretionary bombing, political assassinations, interventions, and violations of the basic sovereign rights of countries in the Middle East.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

5 September 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Mairead Maguire

31 Aug 2022 – I am sad to learn of the death of Mikhail Gorbachev on Tue, 30 Aug 2022.

I had the honour of meeting him on several occasions at the Gorbachev Nobel Peace Summits.

I never had the honour of meeting his beloved wife Raisa who died some years ago and who President Gorbachev missed and loved tenderly. I send my condolences to his daughter Irina, and family and friends and the Russian peoples, on the loss of Mikhail Gorbachev. President Gorbachev was a warmhearted and kind man with a vision of peace and nuclear disarmament and a belief that the cold war between the west and Russia could be changed by talking and friendship.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in building dialogue and encouraging America to sign important agreements to start dismantling nuclear weapons and end the arms race. Gorbachev took risks for peace and he gave hope to many of us when he met with President Regan and worked to end the cold war and the arms race.

It is to the shame of the West that the promises given to President Gorbachev were broken and US/NATO instead of keeping to its promises not to advance one inch towards Russia surrounded it with NATO bases and partners and continues to militarize and arm the world.

Gorbachev’s vision of an end to Cold war politics, a world built on peaceful solutions and an end to nuclear weapons and war is not a utopian dream, it is possible, and for those who had the honour of knowing Mikhail Gorbachev our best tribute to him is to begin again the quest for a disarmed peaceful world where our humanity comes first and ending poverty, the arms race, and war takes top priority for each of us.

May we all be inspired by the spirit of the late Mikhail Gorbachev for his courage, integrity and vision of Nuclear Disarmament and Peace for Russia, the West and the World.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

5 September 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Juan Cole

CNN reports that satellite photos show that the overflowing Indus has created a new body of water in southern Pakistan some 62 miles (100km) wide. It will take days or weeks for the water to recede, and in the meantime millions are left homeless and over all, 33 million people have been affected by the worst monsoon floods in recorded history. CNN quotes Pakistan’s Climate Minister Sherry Rahman as saying “That parts of the country ‘resemble a small ocean,’ and that ‘by the time this is over, we could well have one-quarter or one-third of Pakistan under water.’”

Because of our burning of fossil fuels to drive cars and heat and cool buildings, the world is heating up. But the Indian Ocean is heating up a third faster than the rest of the world. Very warm waters in the Bay of Bengal are helping create more destructive cyclones and flooding. The air over warming waters contains more moisture than the 20th century average. Warming waters also make the winds that blow over them more erratic, and wayward winds from the Arabian Sea helped push the heavy monsoon rains farther north than they usually extend.

We don’t have to look far for the culprits. J. Blunden, and T. Boyer, Eds., 2022: “State of the Climate in 2021” Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 103 (8), Si–S465, https://doi.org/10.1175/2022BAMSStateoftheClimate provides a state of the climate report for 2021.

It isn’t good news. The concentration in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide increased another 2.6 parts per million, to a year-long average of 414.7 parts per million of CO2. We should be trying to get to zero increases of carbon dioxide, not increasing it. Arctic snow cores show that there hasn’t been that much CO2 in the atmosphere for at least 800,000 years, i.e. nearly a million years. It turns out that if you go back to “1 million Years B.C.” you don’t find Raquel Welch, you find a steaming tropics of a world. The growth rate for methane was the highest on record. Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas, and CO2 isn’t any slouch itself. Methane, though, dissipates quickly if you don’t keep adding to it in the stratosphere, in as little as nine years. If you put carbon dioxide up there, though, it can last thousands and thousands of years. It is gradually absorbed by the oceans or igneous rocks, but he ocean may reach its capacity for absorption of CO2 in only 15 years, after which the stuff will just stay up there, making earth hot.

The report says that Death Valley, California, reached 54.4°C (130.46 F.) for the second time since records have been kept. Across the global ice concentrations or “cryosphere,” glaciers lost ice mass for the 34th consecutive year. Now the BBC is predicting that in the near future the glacier ice lost will become so great that it will threaten the water supplies of Switzerland and other European countries.

And in horrific news for Bangladesh and Egypt, the report says, “Across the world’s oceans, global mean sea level was record high for the 10th consecutive year, reaching 97.0 mm above the 1993 average when satellite measurements began, an increase of 4.9 mm over 2020.”

Seas rising, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere rising to best a million-year-old-record, super-monsoons. We can change all this, but we have to hurry to shut down CO2 emissions quickly.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan.

2 September 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ranjan Solomon

Israel and Germany are prolonging their fuss over Mahmoud Abbas’ comment on the ‘holocausts’ committed by Israel on the Palestinian people. Abbas cannot reverse facts even if he pulls back his statement. Abbas is no political saint. But he has on this occasion spoken out with courage and truthfully. Germany cannot stomach it because the term sticks on them because of what happened from 1941-45.

Paulo Friere, the widely known Brazilian educator and philosopher famously stated in his book ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ that the oppressed tend to ‘internalize the image of the oppressor’ and hence duplicate the behaviour of the latter when the opportunity arises. In his understanding post-trauma education must propel transformative values which reject replicating the ways of the oppressor. In the tearing hurry to rehabilitate the victims of what happened to the Jews in Europe, the world set out to wash their hands off the problem and dump it on the Palestinians. Balfour’s United Kingdom adopted their practiced colonial inanity of a political legacy where confusions and conflict reined. They left the Palestinians and Israelis at war that later led to ‘The Nakba’.

In his article The Holocaust and the Nakba: Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership, Alon Confino, an Israeli cultural historian and Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, wrote: “The link between the Holocaust and the Nakba is probably the most charged for both Jews and Palestinians. To Jews, the Holocaust is a foundational past, and some would say a unique one, and thus to discuss it in conjunction with any other event may appear to banalize the extermination of the Jews and even to present a moral and political threat. To Palestinians, the Nakba is a foundational past, and since the Jews invoke the Holocaust to justify Zionism and Israel’s actions, to many Palestinians recognition of the Holocaust is tantamount to legitimizing the injustices of the Nakba and the iniquities that Israel continues to wreak upon them. To Germans as well, the juxtaposition of these two events is a sensitive matter, since they feel particularly responsible for the memory of the Holocaust”.

Rather than dwell in polemics, Germany and Israel may want to indulge in solemn futuristic thinking and action by which a political blueprint can be arrived at with a sense of urgency and a new political practice restores a just and peaceful life for the Palestinians. That will happen to be a political space inside which a value-based mutual co-existence is forged and the asymmetry that now undergirds Israel’s colonialist-apartheid State are abandoned. There are no two ways about this option.

A recent statement on behalf of the European Commission affirms: “Past allegations of misuse of EU funds in relation to certain Palestinian Civil Society Organisations have not been substantiated.” The EU also reiterated its ongoing support for such organisations because “they play a crucial role in promoting international law, human rights and democratic values.”

But Ramona Wadi, independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger is scathing in her assessment of the double-speak by the EU. She disputes the EU’s ‘Pretty words’. In her appraisal, “the significance has greater impact in terms of allowing Israel to continue with its violations unchecked. Primarily, the EU’s praise of such organisations also highlights its own ineptitude. Undoubtedly, civil society and human rights organisations are indispensable, but they have also been made so due to governments’ reliance on violations of international law. The fact that the EU finances civil society organisations in Palestine and will continue to do so is only part of a bigger equation that sees the bloc in a duplicitous role of funding both the oppressor and, to a much lesser extent, the oppressed. Hence, the EU maintains the imbalance in favour of Israeli violence, while Palestinian civil society organisations are restricted in terms of lesser funding in comparison with the magnitude of violations that Israel commits”.

Ranjan Solomon is a human rights activist, political commentator who believes that peoples’ power is a non-negotiable instrument to further democracy and justice.

24 August 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

A group of Kenyan activists filed a case against the UK to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday.

Lawyers representing peoples forced off their land in Kenya’s Rift Valley argue the UK has violated the European Convention of Human Rights, to which it is a signatory, by consistently ignoring complaints lodged by the victims of colonial rule.

“The UK government has ducked and dived, and sadly avoided every possible avenue of redress,” Joel Kimutai Bosek, representing the Kipsigis and Talai peoples, has said. “We have no choice but to proceed to court for our clients so that history can be righted.”

The British Empire ruled Kenya between the late 19th century till 1962. The peoples living in the Rift Valley were forced off their lands in the early 20th century. Today, the area around Kericho, the biggest town in the Valley, is a major tea-growing region farmed by multinational majors.

“Today, some of the world’s most prosperous tea companies, like Unilever, Williamson Tea, Finlay’s, and Lipton occupy and farm these lands and continue to use them to generate considerable profits,” the plaintiffs said in a statement.

Previously, the Kipsigis and Talai took their cause to the UN, where a special investigative panel expressed “serious concern” last year over London’s failure to acknowledge its share of responsibility or issue an apology for colonial-era abuses. The complaint to the UN was signed by more than 100,000 people who suffered from colonial rule or their descendants, demanding an apology and reparations for their land being ceded to white settlers.

Filing the case with the ECHR has been praised by the outgoing governor of Kericho County, Paul Chepkwony, who said it was “a historic day” for the whole region.

“We have taken all reasonable and dignified steps. But the UK government has given us the cold shoulder. We hope for those who have suffered for too long that their dignity will be restored,” Chepkwony stated.

UK Waged ‘Dirty’ Propaganda Operation In Africa

An earlier report said:

A covert unit within the British Foreign Office targeted Kenya’s first vice president, Oginga Odinga, in the 1960s as part of a “black propaganda” campaign, The Guardian reported, citing newly declassified documents. After Kenyan independence from the UK in 1963, London perceived the left-wing politician as a threat to its interests, according to the papers.

Odinga is said to have been subjected to a three-year campaign by the Information Research Department (IRD), a clandestine unit initially established by the post-WWII Labour government to spread anti-Communist views. The effort was led by the Special Editorial Unit (SEU), a highly secretive “dirty tricks section” of the IRD, the report says.

After Kenya broke free from British rule in 1963, London apparently viewed President Jomo Kenyatta as the preferred leader of the country. However, the UK seemed to have been worried that the vice president, Odinga, a left-wing figure who was open to relations with the Soviet-led bloc and communist China, could somehow replace Kenyatta in the future. These apprehensions led the British ‘black ops’ units to scramble to undermine Odinga, despite British diplomats recognizing that he was not actually a communist, the report says.

The declassified files detail four campaigns to smear Odinga, according to The Guardian. In September 1965, the Daily Telegraph reported on a pamphlet issued by a fictitious organization called the ‘People’s Front of East Africa’ that branded Kenyatta’s government as “reactionary, fascist and dishonest” while touting Odinga as “a great revolutionary leader” who would ascend to power with the help of a new socialist party, the outlet says.

However, this was, apparently, a sophisticated propaganda ploy meant to arouse suspicion that Odinga was in league with communist China. The IRD is said to have distributed the pamphlet among “leading personalities and the press.” The story gained significant traction in Kenya and successfully convinced many of the country’s ministers that the pamphlet was genuine.

According to historian Dr. Poppy Cullen of Loughborough University, as quoted by The Guardian, all of this “clearly shows that Odinga was considered the main threat to British interests.” It also demonstrates the lengths to which the British were prepared to go to undermine him, he added.

However, the Kenyan vice president smelt trouble, the report says. In 1964, he accused the British press of a “a spate of vilification and facile criticism,” decrying the allegations in their reports that he was plotting against Kenyatta.

In another instance, the SEU reportedly created a leaflet from what was called the ‘Loyal African Brothers’ that castigated Odinga as “a tool of the Chinese” communists.

Although this organization never really existed and was merely the creation of British propagandists, over nearly ten years the fictitious group produced 37 leaflets claiming to want “to free Africa of all forms of foreign interference.”

In April 1964, Kenyatta voiced suspicions that Odinga might attempt to overthrow him, which, The Guardian says, prompted plans for British military intervention should a coup take place. In the aftermath of these propaganda efforts, the homes of Odinga and his supporters were raided, but no evidence that a coup was being prepared was found, and the vice president kept his post, at least for the time being.

In 1966, Odinga resigned and established his own leftist party, the Kenya People’s Union. In 1969, the party was banned, and Odinga was placed under detention and later jailed by Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi. Nonetheless, Odinga’s son, Raila Odinga, is set to take part in Kenya’s upcoming presidential election.

“The story of the British propaganda operations in Kenya is a reminder that the days of a declining empire were not as much pomp and circumstance as deception, disinformation and dirty tricks,” Professor Scott Lucas, a specialist in British foreign policy at the University of Birmingham, told The Guardian.

In May, The Guardian revealed how, from the 1950s to the 1970s, London sought to drive a wedge between Moscow, Beijing, the Arab world, and Africa through disinformation in an attempt to undermine their global influence.

Documents declassified back in 2021 and seen by the newspaper also showed that the British propaganda campaign had played a role in the mass slaughter of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s. Although the propaganda unit was officially disbanded in 1977, similar efforts allegedly continued for nearly another decade, according to the outlet.

24 August 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Charlie Campbell

Deaths From flooding in Pakistan Near 1,000: Officials

Imran Khan has been dialing up the invective since even before his ouster as Pakistan’s Prime Minister in a parliamentary no-confidence vote on Apr. 9. In the weeks prior to that, and seeing the end was near, Khan took to mass, highly-produced rallies for his centrist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party to rail against political opponents, whom he accused of hatching a U.S.-backed coup to unseat him. These demonstrations have only grown larger and more vitriolic in recent weeks as the cricketing icon turned his ire on the military establishment that aided his political rise before deserting him.

Things came to a head Sunday when police charged Khan under anti-terror legislation over a speech he gave in Islamabad on Saturday, in which he vowed to sue police officers and a female judge over the arrest and alleged torture of a close aide.

So far, Khan remains free and his supporters have threatened to stage mass demonstrations should he be taken into custody. “If Khan is actually arrested, all bets would be off and the country could see heightened risks of political violence in major cities,” says Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “Khan enjoys backing from a rabid support base that would not sit quietly.”

The controversy centers around Shahbaz Gill, a former Cabinet minister and special assistant to Khan, who earlier this month urged soldiers to disobey “illegal orders” from their military leaders in a televised address. Gill was charged with sedition—a crime which carries the death penalty—and claims he was tortured under interrogation. (One senior PTI figure provided photos of bruises Gill allegedly suffered during detention, though TIME was unable to independently verify the contents.)

Khan came to the defense of his friend by criticizing the inspector-general of Pakistan’s police force and the judge deemed responsible for Gill’s arrest. “You also get ready for it, we will also take action against you,” Khan reportedly said. “All of you must be ashamed.”

Pakistan’s judiciary subsequently deemed those comments—and threats to sue the police and the judge—an explicit threat and filed charges against him. However, the Islamabad High Court granted Khan “protective bail” until Thursday, which blocks his potential arrest for now.

In any case, Khan’s speeches have been banned from live satellite television broadcasts inside Pakistan after the national regulator accused him of leveling “baseless allegations” against the state and “spreading hate speech.” The order has been met with pushback from across the political divide. “Banishing completely a political leader from the media is not the best policy,” tweeted former Pakistani Senator Farhatullah Babar of the opposition center-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). “It risks making someone bigger than life unwittingly and undeservingly.”

It’s also not clear how effective such a ban would be. Khan has over 17 million followers on Twitter, which is higher than the ratings of many top nightly news shows in Pakistan. On Sunday, access to YouTube was reportedly disrupted across the country in an apparent attempt to restrict a live speech he was giving in the northern city of Rawalpindi.

Certainly, Khan’s predicament is only the latest salvo as nuclear-armed Pakistan lurches from crisis to crisis, with potentially grave implications for regional and global security. On top of a hyper-polarized political environment, the nation of 230 million people is blighted by runaway inflation that reached 24.9% in July and a government that has been unable to improve the economy and heavy-handed with opponents. On Aug. 29, the IMF is due to meet to negotiate yet another bailout. But the specter of political unrest risks wobbling an already precarious economic tightrope. “No matter how you slice it, it’s a very uneasy and volatile moment for Pakistan,” says Kugelman.

Is Pakistan’s military getting ready to act?

Despite an often tetchy relationship, Pakistan is an invaluable security partner for the U.S. regarding neighboring Afghanistan, where the Taliban have been back in power for a year.

Instability gripping Pakistan—including rumors of splits between pro- and anti-Khan factions in the military—undermines this invaluable security apparatus. On Aug. 10, the Pakistani Taliban claimed it had regained control of a part of Swat district in the country’s far north. It’s a precarious time for Pakistan’s military to be divided and distracted.

For Samina Yasmeen, director of the Centre for Muslim States and Societies at the University of Western Australia, the new government of Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif of the center-right PML-N party—brother of Khan’s longtime nemesis Nawaz Sharif—has made the mistake of allowing Khan to “whip up hysteria” but now faces “even more instability” by clumsily cracking down. “It’s not simply the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear state,” she says. “It’s that this state has a lot of people in it. If there are clashes, then you really don’t know where it’s going to go.”

Tellingly, Khan has toned down his anti-U.S. broadsides in recent weeks, presumably leaving the door open to mend relations with Washington should he engineer a miraculous return to power. Instead, he’s dialed up attacks against the military, which he sardonically dubbed “neutrals” in response to statements from brass hats insisting they don’t meddle in politics. Even the figures in the ruling PML-N have now adopted the quip, hammering home the fact that the generals who have ruled Pakistan for half its 75-year history remain kingmakers today.

The charges against Khan have in particular galvanized his supporters’ enmity against Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who they believe was a big driver of the 69-year-old Khan’s ouster. “Bajwa’s transformation in the eyes of Khan’s supporters from revered to reviled … is one of the most striking takeaways from this ongoing saga,” says Kugelman.

The reality is, of course, that Khan’s path to power was possible because the military backed him and then he lost power when they withdrew their support. Overall, the reputation of the generals has taken a hit across the political spectrum. When six senior army officers including a top general died in a helicopter crash in early August, the overwhelming reaction on social media was far from sympathetic, with many mockingly expressing condolences for the aircraft rather than the lives lost.

Pakistani society has rarely been so polarized, with half the country treating Khan as a savior and half as the devil incarnate. “Effectively, what he’s done is divided the country,” says Yasmeen. “It’s very much like Trump [in the U.S.]. And if the United States hasn’t fully recovered yet, how can a country like Pakistan recover?”

The question is whether the generals will sit back if widespread protests erupt amid a brewing economic catastrophe. Pakistan’s military has willingly seized power when they thought things were spiraling out of control, most recently in 1999. But the generals worked out that they preferred to pull the strings from the shadows. The question is whether this view has changed. “I can’t see the military taking over,” says Yasmeen, “But then part of me thinks, it’s gone so bad, could there be some [in the army] who think it would be the right thing?”

Charlie Campbell

East Asia Correspondent for TIME

22 August 2022

Source: time.com

By Ejaz Akram

Prominent defense analyst and former Pakistani military officer Haider Mehdi has vociferously claimed that Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa colluded with US authorities to topple the Imran Khan government on 9 April.

While much of the Pakistani masses and social media seem to think the same, the state’s mainstream media outlets have largely stayed mum on the biggest political scandal the country has witnessed in years.

Many who criticized the role of Pakistan’s military in the alleged coup – even without naming the collaborating officers specifically – have already fled the country. Some have been arrested, while others are facing legal charges.

One of the more notable and emotionally-charged cases has been that of Dr. Shahbaz Gill, a Pakistani-American academic and a close member of Imran Khan’s media team. Gill was charged with sedition against the state for making the argument on ARY News Network (a mainstream channel which was immediately shut down afterward) that military officers should not obey unlawful commands from their superiors.

Various senior military officers have already explained that Gill’s remarks are no serious offense because all military officers are already under oath to not obey unlawful commands by their superiors.

Gill was apprehended by authorities on 9 August and reportedly remained in federal government custody until his deteriorating medical condition forced his jailers to move him to a state hospital.

Khan said that he had been fooled by the very same state medical facility back in 2019 when courts were persuaded to allow former PM Nawaz Sharif to travel to the UK for urgent medical treatment, from which he never returned. Khan insisted on checking on Gill’s status himself, but was denied entry to the hospital.

According to the leadership of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, Gill was apprehended without an arrest warrant, tortured, and sexually assaulted.

Under Pakistan’s Code of Criminal Procedure (CrCP), the maximum period of detention is 14 days – which for Gill would be today, 23 August – except for “terrorism specific cases,” in which custody can be extended for up to 90 days.

“The disparity in the period of detention under the CrPC and the ATA [Anti-Terrorism Act] is one of the many contributory factors of the high number of superfluous cases in the anti-terrorism courts of Pakistan, since the ATA gives more time to the police to complete investigation while detaining the accused,” writes the Research Society of International Law in its report on Pakistan.

Is Imran Khan next?

Which brings us to news of the arrest warrant on “terrorism” charges issued against Imran Khan himself.

The highly controversial charge against Khan, under section 7 of Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act, followed Saturday’s mass rally in support of Gill. During his speech, Khan vowed to bring lawsuits against police and judicial authorities for their roles in Gill’s alleged torture: “We will not spare you … We will sue you,” he threatened.

The accusation appear frivolous to the extreme, especially when the prosecuting government’s cabinet is overwhelmingly composed of well-known indicted criminals and repeat offenders on charges that range from corruption to murder.

But government officials defended the “terrorism” charges against Khan, saying he “spread terror amongst the police and the judiciary” and hindered their work.

Pakistan’s ATA has come under fire by domestic lawyers as well as overseas organizations. It’s definitions are too broad, its powers too aggressive, its authorities too dangerous.

Pakistan’s abuse of terror laws

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says one of the “fundamental flaws” of the ATA “is the vague and overly broad definition of ‘terrorism’ under its provisions. This allows offenses bearing no nexus to militancy and proscribed terrorist networks to be tried.”

Up to 80 percent of those convicted of terrorism-related offenses under this act in Pakistan were accused of things that had nothing to do with “terrorism.”

Furthermore, the OHCHR cites observations from Pakistani lawyers that “political and economic influence serves as a primary determinant for whether an offense is tried under the ATA or under the ordinary criminal justice system.”

The report quotes lawyer Imran Asmat Chaudhry, a senior Advocate of the High Courts, saying:

“I have personally taken around 11 cases, which were sent to ATCs for trial. [The] motive behind all cases was personal enmity, political rivalry, or any other malignant intentions of the police themselves – even though the crime had no nexus to the ATA.”

The UN human rights group concludes: “The [ATA’s] broad definition under the law has often allowed it to be used as a tool of political victimization by ruling parties against opponents.”

Silencing media

Following the news of Khan’s arrest warrant, several Pakistani television channels were shut down and prominent journalist Jameel Farooqi was arrested and moved to an undisclosed location. According to analysts, such level of Praetorian politics and McCarthyism is unprecedented in Pakistan.

Pakistani social media activists have reported deployment of troops on high alert in major cities of Pakistan. The state has imposed a ban on Khan’s appearance on mainstream television networks, and Islamabad Police has announced that it will be no longer provide security services for Khan in the capital.

Sami Ibrahim, another prominent journalist from BOL TV that was struck off the air, says the next 48 hours will be crucial because actions for or against Khan’s arrest may take place. He believes some key decisions are likely to be made shortly, possibly including further restrictions, crackdowns, and persecution of social media platforms inside Pakistan.

In a potentially dangerous stand-off between state authorities and regular Pakistani citizens, most are wondering if the government has enough power to arrest the most popular leader in Pakistan’s recent history.

Khan’s PTI political party currently runs multiple governments in different Pakistani provinces. In stark contrast, the ruling party in the federal government – widely seen as a foreign installed government – is limited to the capital and is suffering from a major crisis in legitimacy, despite aggressive efforts to control the narrative.

Cracks form at the top

The current Pakistani government is in an impossible situation. It cannot call for early elections to help establish a public mandate of support, because all indications suggest an overwhelming win for Khan. And yet the very act of governing is a challenge without this mandate, especially given the ongoing public derision expressed in massive street protests and across social media.

In addition, the government of PM Shahbaz Sharif has its own internal divisions; these cracks are slowly becoming visible – and widening.

On 21 August, the PTI beat their opposing 13-party alliance with a decisive margin in Karachi’s by-election. Imran Khan has essentially already gone to the polls and won, because these massive election margins are taking place on the opposition’s own home ground.

Many of the ruling alliance members are fleeing provinces, where the PTI has formed provincial governments, in order to avoid potential legal charges. Some federal ministers have already escaped overseas.

According to prominent Pakistani analyst Nasir Ahmad: “General Bajwa and his senior generals have no idea how deeply the people of Pakistan, and indeed their own command, loathe them. The more insecure the generals feel, the more they dig their heels, and the closer they dig in their heels, and the closer they take their country, which they are oath-bound to defend, to its ultimate fall.”

Others, however, worry that if the state succeeds in arresting – or even assassinating Imran Khan – then nobody of similar stature and popularity will remain to lead Pakistan to safe shores. Mass movements require competent and legitimate leadership that can appropriately channel nations toward a politically constructive end, or else these numbers may just collapse upon themselves.

Since the alleged US-sponsored ousting of Imran Khan on 9 April, there hasn’t been a dull moment in Pakistani politics. It is as though the country grew a new head overnight:

Nobody could have imagined that the nation’s usually impartial military elite could be turned against the Pakistani masses and become the focus of widespread disdain. Nobody thought the military’s top brass would cozy up to New Delhi, all while when India amasses invasion-level troop build-ups in occupied Kashmir.

Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah stated on 22 August that Afghanistan is an ‘enemy country,’ signaling renewed Pakistani sycophancy in Washington’s latest war against the Taliban. Such decisions go diametrically against the will, interests, and decisions of the people of Pakistan.

A showdown between the majority – versus an increasingly unpopular and emboldened Pakistani elite – is inevitable in the near future.

Dr. Ejaz Akram is currently Professor of Religion & Politics in the Southwestern University of Politics and Law in Chongqing, China.

23 August 2022

Source: thecradle.co