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By Aaron Maté

Ukraine is the Obama-Biden team’s second major proxy war against Russia. The first was Syria, where US support for the insurgency helped create an Al Qaeda safe haven.

20 Apr 2022 – Hours after the Feb. 3 U.S. military raid in northern Syria that left the leader of ISIS and multiple family members dead, President Biden delivered a triumphant White House address.The late-night Special Forces operation in Syria’s Idlib province, Biden proclaimed, was a “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they hide around the world.”

Unmentioned by the president, and virtually all media accounts of the assassination, was the critical role that top members of his administration played during the Obama years in creating the Al Qaeda-controlled hideout where ISIS head Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, as well as his slain predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, found their final refuge.

In waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy establish the Idlib safe haven that it still controls today.

A concise articulation came from Jake Sullivan to his then-State Department boss Hillary Clinton in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

Sullivan, the current national security adviser, is one of many officials who oversaw the Syria proxy war under Obama to now occupy a senior post under Biden. This group includes Secretary of State Antony Blinken, climate envoy John Kerry, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, NSC Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, and State Department Counselor Derek Chollet.

Their efforts to remake the Middle East via regime change, not just in Syria but earlier in Libya, led to the deaths of Americans – including Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials in Benghazi in 2012; the slaughter of countless civilians; the creation of millions of refugees; and ultimately, Russia’s entry into the Syrian battlefield.

Contacted through their current U.S. government agencies, none of the Obama-Biden principals offered comment on their policy of supporting an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency in Syria.

The Obama-Biden team’s record in Syria resonates today as many of its members handle the unfolding crisis in Ukraine. As in Syria, the U.S. is flooding a chaotic war zone with weapons in a dangerous proxy conflict against Russia, raising the threat of military confrontation between the world’s top nuclear powers. “I deeply worry that what’s going to happen next is that we will see Ukraine turn into Syria,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons told CBS News on April 17.

Based on declassified documents, news reports, and scattered admissions of U.S. officials, this overlooked history of how the Obama-Biden team’s effort to oust the Assad regime – in concert with allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey – details the series of discrete decisions that ultimately led the U.S. to empower terror networks bent on its destruction.

Seizing Momentum – and Munitions – From Libya to Pursue Regime Change in Syria

The road to Al Qaeda’s control of the Syrian province of Idlib actually started hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean in Libya.

In March 2011, after heavy lobbying from senior officials including Secretary Hillary Clinton, President Obama authorized a bombing campaign in support of the jihadist insurgency fighting the government of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Backed by NATO firepower, the rebels toppled Gaddafi and gruesomely murdered him in October.

Buoyed by their quick success in Libya, the Obama administration set their sights on Damascus, by then a top regime change target in Washington. According to former NATO commander Wesley Clark, the Assad regime – a key ally of U.S. foes Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia – was marked for overthrow alongside Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A leaked 2006 U.S. Embassy in Damascus cable assessed that Assad’s “vulnerabilities” included “the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists,” and detailed how the U.S. could “improve the likelihood of such opportunities arising.”

The outbreak of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011, coupled with the fall of Gaddafi, offered the U.S. a historic opportunity to exploit Syria’s vulnerabilities. While the Arab Spring sparked peaceful Syrian protests against the ruling Ba’ath party’s cronyism and repression, it also triggered a largely Sunni, rural-based revolt that took a sectarian and violent turn. The U.S. and its allies, namely Qatar and Turkey, capitalized by tapping the massive arsenal of the newly ousted Libyan government.

“During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Gaddafi] regime in October 2011,” the Defense Intelligence Agency reported the following year, “…weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”

The redacted DIA document, obtained by the group Judicial Watch, does not clarify whether the U.S. was directly involved in these shipments. But it contains significant clues. With remarkable specificity, it detailed the size and contents of one such shipment in August 2012: 500 sniper rifles, 100 rocket-propelled grenade launchers with 300 rounds, and 400 howitzer missiles.

Most tellingly, the document noted that the weapons shipments were halted “in early September 2012.” This was a clear reference to the killing by militants that month of four Americans – Ambassador Christopher Stevens, another State Department official, and two CIA contractors – in Benghazi, the port city where the weapons to Syria were coming from. The Benghazi annex “was at its heart a CIA operation,” U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. At least two dozen CIA employees worked in Benghazi under diplomatic cover.

Although top intelligence officials obscured the Benghazi operation in sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, a Senate investigation eventually confirmed a direct CIA role in the movement of weapons from Libya to Syria. A classified version of a 2014 Senate report, not publicly released, documented an agreement between President Obama and Turkey to funnel weapons from Libya to insurgents in Syria. The operation, established in early 2012, was run by then-CIA Director David Petraeus.

“The [Benghazi] consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms” to Syria, a former U.S. intelligence official told journalist Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books. “It had no real political role.”

The Death of a U.S. Ambassador

Under diplomatic cover, Stevens appears to have been a significant figure in the CIA program. More than one year before he became ambassador in June 2012, Stevens was appointed the U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition. In this role, he worked with the Al Qaeda-tied Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and its leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj, a warlord who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. After Gaddafi’s ouster, Belhadj was named head of the Tripoli Military Council, which controlled security in the country’s capital.

Belhadj’s portfolio was not limited to post-coup Libya. In November 2011, the Al Qaeda ally traveled to Turkey to meet with leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the CIA-backed opposition military coalition. Belhadj’s trip came as part of the new Libyan government’s effort to provide “money and weapons to the growing insurgency against Bashar al-Assad,” the London Telegraph reported at the time. On September 14, 2012 – just three days after Stevens and his American colleagues were killed – the London Times revealed that a Libyan vessel “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria since the uprising began,” had recently docked in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. Once unloaded, “most of its cargo is making its way to rebels on the front lines.”

The known details of Stevens’ last hours on September 11 suggest that shipping weapons was at the top of his agenda. Although based in Tripoli and facing violent threats, he nonetheless made the dangerous trek to Benghazi around the charged anniversary of 9/11. According to a 2016 report from the House Intelligence Committee, one of Stevens’ last scheduled meetings was with the head of al-Marfa Shipping and Maritime Services Company, a Libyan firm involved in ferrying weapons to Syria. His final meeting of the day was with Consul General Ali Sait Akin of Turkey, where the weapons were shipped. Fox News later reported that “Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer.”

With the Libyan channel shut down by Stevens’ murder, the U.S. and its allies turned to other sources. One was Croatia, where Saudi Arabia financed a major weapons purchase in late 2012 that was arranged by the CIA. The CIA’s use of the Saudi kingdom’s vast coffers continued an arrangement from prior covert proxy wars, including the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and of the Contras in Nicaragua.

Although the Obama administration claimed that the weapons funneled to Syria were intended for “moderate rebels,” they ultimately ended up in the hands of a jihadi-dominated insurgency. Just one month after the Benghazi attack, the New York Times reported that “hard-line Islamic jihadists,” including groups “with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda,” have received “the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition.”

Covertly Arming An Al Qaeda-Dominated Insurgency

The Obama administration did not need media accounts to learn that jihadists dominated the Syrian insurgency on the receiving end of a CIA supply chain.

One month before the Benghazi attack, Pentagon intelligence analysts gave the White House a blunt appraisal. An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report, disseminated widely among U.S. officials, noted that “Salafi[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency.” Al Qaeda, the report stressed, “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning.” Their aim was to create a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” – an early warning of the ISIS caliphate that would be established two years later.

General Michael Flynn, who headed the DIA at the time, later recalled that his staff “got enormous pushback” from the Obama White House. “I felt that they did not want to hear the truth,” Flynn said. In 2015, one year after Flynn was forced out, dozens of Pentagon intelligence analysts signed on to a complaint alleging that top Pentagon intelligence officials were “cooking the books” to paint a rosier picture of the jihadi presence in Syria. (The Pentagon later cleared CENTCOM commanders of wrongdoing.)

The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main CIA-backed insurgent force, also informed Obama officials of the jihadi dominance in their ranks. “From the reports we get from the doctors,” FSA officials told the State Department in November 2012, “most of the injured and dead FSA are Jabhat al-Nusra, due to their courage and [the fact they are] always at the front line.”

Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front) is Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria. It emerged as a splinter group of Al Qaeda in Iraq after a falling out between AQI leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his then-deputy, Mohammed al-Jolani. In 2013, Baghdadi relaunched his organization under the name of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Jolani led his Syria-based Al Qaeda faction under the black flag of al-Nusra.

“[W]hile rarely acknowledged explicitly in public,” Charles Lister, a Gulf state-funded analyst in close contact with Syrian insurgent groups wrote in March 2015, “the vast majority of the Syrian insurgency has coordinated closely with Al-Qaeda since mid-2012 – and to great effect on the battlefield.” As one Free Syrian Army leader told the New York Times: “No FSA faction in the north can operate without al-Nusra’s approval.”

According to David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who covered Syria in the war’s early years, U.S. officials knew that “al-Qaeda affiliated groups and Salafi jihadist groups were the primary engine of the insurgency.” This, McCloskey says, was “a tremendously problematic aspect of the conflict.”

In his memoir, senior Obama aide Ben Rhodes acknowledged that al-Nusra “was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition.” It was also clear, he wrote, that U.S.-backed insurgent groups were “fighting side by side with al-Nusra.” For this reason, Rhodes recalled, he argued against the State Department’s December 2012 designation of al-Nusra as a foreign terrorist organization. This move “would alienate the same people we want to help.” (Asked about wanting to help an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency, Rhodes did not respond).

In fact, designating al-Nusra as a terror organization allowed the Obama administration to publicly claim that it opposed Al Qaeda’s Syria branch while continuing to covertly arm the insurgency that it dominated. Three months after adding al-Nusra to the terrorism list, the U.S. and its allies “dramatically stepped up weapons supplies to Syrian rebels” to help “rebels to try and seize Damascus,” the Associated Press reported in March 2013.

‘There Was No Moderate Middle’

Despite being privately aware of Nusra’s dominance, Obama administration officials continued to publicly insist that the U.S. was only supporting Syria’s “moderate opposition,” as then-Deputy National Security Adviser Antony Blinken described it in September 2014.

But speaking to a Harvard audience days later, then-Vice President Biden blurted out the concealed reality. In the Syrian insurgency, “there was no moderate middle,” Biden admitted. Instead, U.S. “allies” in Syria “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.” Those weapons were supplied, Biden said, to “al-Nusra, and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Biden quickly apologized for his comments, which appeared to fit the classic definition of the Kinsley gaffe: a politician inadvertently telling the truth. Biden’s only error was omitting his administration’s critical role in helping its allies arm the jihadis.

Rather than shut down a CIA program that was aiding the Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency, Obama expanded it. In April 2013, the president signed an order that amended the CIA’s covert war, codenamed Timber Sycamore, to allow direct U.S. arming and training. After tapping Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to fund its arms pipeline for insurgents inside Syria, Obama’s order allowed the CIA to directly furnish U.S.-made weapons. Just as with the regime change campaign in Libya, a key architect of this operation was Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s upgraded proxy war in Syria proved to be “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times reported in 2017. Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a budget of nearly $1 billion per year, or around $1 of every $15 in CIA spending. The CIA armed and trained nearly 10,000 insurgents, spending “roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program,” U.S. officials told the Washington Post in 2015. Two years later, one U.S. official estimated that CIA-funded militias “may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.”

But these militias were not just killing pro-Syrian government forces. As the New York Times reported in April 2017, US-backed insurgents carried out “sectarian mass murder.”

One such act of mass murder came in August 2013, when the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army joined an al-Nusra and ISIS offensive on Alawite areas of Latakia. A Human Rights Investigation found that the insurgents engaged in “the systematic killing of entire families,” slaughtering a documented 190 civilians, including 57 women, 18 children, and 14 elderly men. In a video from the field, former Syrian army general Salim Idriss, head of the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC), bragged that “we are cooperating to a great extent in this operation.”

The Latakia massacres came four months after the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, hailed Idriss and his fighters as “the moderate and responsible elements of the armed opposition.” The role of Idriss’s forces in the slaughter did not cancel the administration’s endorsement. In October, the Washington Post revealed that the “CIA is expanding a clandestine effort … aimed at shoring up the fighting power of units aligned with the Supreme Military Council, an umbrella organization led by [Idriss] that is the main recipient of U.S. support.”

[In an emailed response to questions about U.S. policy in Syria, Ford says that there was “no question” that Free Syrian Army engaged in war crimes but noted, “We denounced [them] publicly at the time and in private.” Ford said the administration’s official stance that moderates were engaged in the fight was accurate in light of the facts on the ground. “Our definition of moderates in the armed opposition,” he wrote, “were people willing to negotiate a peaceful end to the war.”]

Officially, the upgraded CIA program barred direct support to al-Nusra or its allies in Syria. But once U.S. weapons arrived in Syria, the Obama administration recognized that it had no way of controlling their use – an apparent motive for waging the program covertly. “We needed plausible deniability in case the arms got into the hands of al-Nusra,” a former senior administration official told the New York Times in 2013.

One area where U.S. arms got into al-Nusra’s hands was the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib.

‘Al-Qaeda’s Largest Safe Haven Since 9/11’

In May 2015, an array of insurgent groups, dubbed the Jaish al-Fatah (“Army of Conquest”) coalition, captured Idlib province from the Syrian government. The fight was led by al-Nusra, and showcased what Charles Lister, the D.C.-based analyst with contacts to insurgents in Syria, dubbed “a far improved level of coordination” between rival militants, including the U.S.-backed FSA and multiple “jihadist factions.”

For Lister, the conquest of Idlib also revealed that the U.S. and its allies “changed their tune regarding coordination with Islamists.” Citing multiple battlefield commanders, Lister reported that “the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey,” which coordinated support to U.S.-backed insurgent groups, “was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation” led by al-Nusra. While the insurgents’ U.S.-led command had previously opposed “any direct coordination” with jihadist groups, the Idlib offensive “demonstrated something different,” Lister concluded: To capture the province, U.S. officials “specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.”

The U.S.-approved battlefield cooperation in Idlib allowed al-Nusra fighters to directly benefit from U.S. weapons. Despite occasional flare-ups between them, al-Nusra was able to use U.S.-backed insurgent groups “as force multipliers,” the Institute for the Study of War, a prominent D.C. think tank, observed when the battle began. Insurgent military gains, Foreign Policy reported in April 2015, were achieved “thanks in large part to suicide bombers and American anti-tank TOW missiles.”

The jihadist-led victory in Idlib quickly subjected its residents to sectarian terror. In June 2015, al-Nusra fighters massacred at least 20 members of the Druze faith. Hundreds of villagers spared in the attack were forced to convert to Sunni Islam. Facing the same threats, nearly all of Idlib’s remaining 1,200 Christians fled the province, leaving a Christian population that reportedly totals just three people today.

In a 2017 post-mortem on the Obama administration’s covert war in Syria, the New York Times described the insurgents’ conquest of Idlib as among the CIA program’s “periods of success.” This was certainly the case for Al Qaeda.

“Idlib Province,” Brett McGurk, the anti-ISIS envoy under Obama and Trump, and now Biden’s top White House official for the Middle East, said in 2017, “is the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”

U.S. Allows ISIS Takeover

Al Qaeda is not the only sectarian death squad that managed to establish a safe haven in the chaos of the Syria proxy war. Starting in 2013, al-Nusra’s sister-turned-rival group, ISIS, seized considerable territory of its own. As with Al Qaeda, ISIS’ land-grab in Syria received a significant backdoor assist from Washington.

Before Al Qaeda captured Idlib, the first ISIS stronghold in Syria, Raqqa, grew out of a similar alliance between U.S.-backed “moderate rebels” and jihadis. After this coalition seized the city from the Syrian government in March 2013, ISIS took full control in November.

When ISIS declared its caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq in June 2014, the U.S. launched an air campaign against the group’s strongholds. But the Obama administration’s anti-ISIS offensive contained a significant exception. In key areas where ISIS’s advance could threaten the Assad regime, the U.S. watched it happen.

In April 2015, just as al-Nusra was conquering Idlib, ISIS seized major parts of the Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus, marking what the New York Times called the group’s “greatest inroads yet” into the Syrian capital.

In the ancient city of Palmyra, the U.S. allowed an outright ISIS takeover. “[A]s Islamic State closed in on Palmyra, the U.S.-led aerial coalition that has been pummeling Islamic State in Syria for the past 18 months took no action to prevent the extremists’ advance toward the historic town – which, until then, had remained in the hands of the sorely overstretched Syrian security forces,” the Los Angeles Times reported in March 2016.

In a leaked conversation with Syrian opposition activists months later, then-Secretary of State John Kerry explained the U.S. rationale for letting ISIS advance.

“Daesh [ISIS] was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus and so forth,” Kerry explained. “And we know that this was growing. We were watching. We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage, that Assad would then negotiate” his way out of power.

In short, the U.S. was leveraging ISIS’s growth to impose regime change on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The U.S. strategy of “watching” ISIS’s advance in Syria, Kerry also admitted, directly caused Russia’s 2015 entry into the conflict. The threat of an ISIS takeover, Kerry said, is “why Russia went in. Because they didn’t want a Daesh government.”

Russia’s military intervention in Syria prevented the ISIS government in Damascus that Kerry and fellow Obama administration principals had been willing to risk. Pulverizing Russian airstrikes also dealt a fatal blow to the Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency that the Obama team had spent billions of dollars to support.

From U.S. Enemy to ‘Asset’ in Syria

With U.S.-backed fighters vanquished and one of their main champions, Hillary Clinton, defeated in the November 2016 election, the CIA operation in Syria met what the New York Times called a “sudden death.” After criticizing the proxy war in Syria on the campaign trail, President Trump shut down the Timber Sycamore program for good in July 2017.

“It turns out it’s – a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal that month.

With the exit of the Obama-Biden team, the U.S. was no longer fighting on Al Qaeda’s side. But that did not mean that the U.S. was prepared to confront the enemy that it had helped install in Idlib.

While Trump put an end to the CIA proxy war, his efforts to further extricate the U.S. from Syria by withdrawing troops were thwarted by senior officials who shared the preceding administration’s regime change goals.

“When President Trump said ‘I want everybody out of Syria,’ the top brass at Pentagon and State had aneurysms,” Christopher Miller, the Acting Secretary of Defense during Trump’s last months in office, recalls.

Jim Jeffrey, Trump’s envoy for Syria, admitted to deceiving the president in order to keep in place “a lot more than” the 200 U.S. troops that Trump had reluctantly agreed to. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey told Defense One. Those “shell games” have put U.S. soldiers in harm’s way, including four servicemembers recently wounded in a rocket attack on their base in northeastern Syria.

While thwarting a full U.S. troop withdrawal, Jeffrey and other senior officials have also preserved the U.S. government’s tacit alliance with Idlib’s Al-Qaeda rulers. Officially, al-Nusra remains on the U.S. terrorism list. Despite several name changes, the State Department has dismissed its rebranding efforts as a “vehicle to advance its position in the Syrian uprising and to further its own goals as an al-Qa’ida affiliate.”

But in practice, as Jeffrey explained last year, the U.S. has treated Al-Nusra as “an asset” to U.S. strategy in Syria. “They are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” he said. Jeffrey also revealed that he had communicated with al-Nusra leader Mohammed al-Jolani via “indirect channels.”

Jeffrey’s comments underscore a profound shift in the U.S. government’s Middle East strategy as a result of the Syria proxy war: The Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, the terror group that attacked the U.S. on 9/11, and which then became the target of a global war on terror aimed at destroying it, is no longer seen by powerful officials in Washington as an enemy, but an “asset.”

Since retaking office under Biden, the Obama veterans who targeted Syria with one of the most expensive covert wars in history have deprioritized the war-torn nation. While pledging to maintain crippling sanctions and keep U.S. troops at multiple bases, as well as announcing sporadic airstrikes, the White House has otherwise said little publicly about its Syria policy. The U.S. military raid that ended ISIS leader al-Qurayshi’s life in February prompted the only Syria-focused speech of Biden’s presidency.

While Biden trumpeted the lethal operation, the fact that it occurred in Idlib underscores a contradiction that his administration has yet to address. By taking out an ISIS leader in Al Qaeda’s Syria stronghold, the president and his top officials are now confronting threats from a terror safe haven that they helped create.

Aaron Maté is a journalist with The Grayzone, where he hosts “Pushback.” He is also a contributor to Real Clear Investigations and the temporary co-host of “Useful Idiots.”

25 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

20 Apr 2022 – In what his lawyers have described as a “brief but significant moment in the case,” a British magistrates’ court has signed off on Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States, bringing the WikiLeaks founder one step closer to a US trial under the Espionage Act which threatens press freedoms worldwide.

The extradition case now goes to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel for approval, which will likely be forthcoming as Patel is a reliably loyal empire manager. After that point, Assange’s legal team will be able to launch an appeal.

This is happening at the same time the United States and the United Kingdom are loudly demanding accountability for alleged war crimes by the Russian military in Ukraine, which is interesting because attempting to bring accountability for war crimes is precisely why Julian Assange is in prison.

“He is a war criminal,” President Biden said of Vladimir Putin following allegations of war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine earlier this month. “I think it is a war crime. … He should be held accountable.”

And that’s all I’d like to say here today, really. That this discrepancy is very interesting.

I mean, can we take a moment to deeply appreciate the irony of this? Because it’s so obscene and outrageous it’s actually hard to take in unless you really let it absorb. The most powerful government in the world, which serves as the hub of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, is working to extradite a journalist for exposing its war crimes while simultaneously rending its garments over war crime allegations against another government.

I mean, damn. You would think a power structure that had recently been caught red-handed committing war crimes and is currently in the process of imprisoning a journalist for exposing those war crimes would at least have the sense not to yell too loudly about war crimes for a little while. But this is how confident the empire is in its ability to control the narrative.

Really take it in. Really digest it. The more you think about it, the freakier it gets. Not only is the empire persecuting a journalist for exposing its war crimes while at the same time demanding that others be held accountable for war crimes, it is also attacking the free press for reporting the truth about the powerful while at the very same time engaging in a massive propaganda operation which holds that it is involved in Ukraine to protect its freedom and democracy.

I mean, the gall. The absolute temerity. The balls on this empire, man.

I have said it before and I will say it again: Assange exposed many ugly realities about the powerful in his work with WikiLeaks, but everything that he has managed to expose thereafter simply by forcing them to prosecute him far surpasses the revelations in those publications.

If the highest form of journalism is exposing the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world, then Julian Assange is the highest form of journalist.

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

25 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By Ekaterina Blinova

There are only a handful of Western journalists on the ground in Donbass, while the Western mainstream press is rubber-stamping fake news about the Ukrainian crisis using the same templates it previously exploited in Iraq, Libya and Syria, says Dutch independent journalist Sonja van den Ende.

Sonja van den Ende, an independent journalist from Rotterdam, Netherlands, went to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as an embedded reporter with the Russian army to see how the special operation is unfolding with her own eyes.

The sound of shelling and explosion does not frighten her: she’s gotten used to it. Seven years ago, van den Ende worked in Syria, months before the Russians stepped in at the request of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and changed the tide. The parallels between the Western mainstream press’ coverage of the Syrian and the Ukrainian conflicts are striking, according to her.

“They lie continuously about everything just to implement their own agenda,” van den Ende. “Like in Syria, President Assad was ‘the murderer’ and now President Putin is ‘the butcher.’ They had used this script for many years in Iraq, Venezuela and [other] countries which don’t comply with their agenda; they need a bad “guy”. But they (media) are not even there on the ground, they can’t judge. Only a handful of journalists from the West are here: Graham Philips, Patrick Lancaster, Anne-Laure Bonnel and me.”

However, this is not the only parallel, according to the Dutch journalist. She has drawn attention to Kiev’s fake reports and “false flag” operations including the Snake Island hoax, hype over Russia’s alleged “attack” on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), the now-debunked story of Russia’s “strike” on a Mariupol hospital, and the most recent Bucha provocation, to name but a few. Van den Ende says that it resembles nothing so much as jihadists’ false flags and the White Helmet’s staged “gas attacks”. She specifically recalls the 4 April 2017 chemical provocation in Khan Sheikhun, Idlib, which was debunked by investigative reporters including Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh.

“The same happened in Bucha,” says the Dutch journalist. “Many witnesses are saying that the Russian army left on 30 March. Even the Ukrainian military who came in on 1 April didn’t report about corpses on the streets. This happened on 3 April, according to the Western media. Also, evidence is saying that the bodies had white armbands, the sign of the Russian army, the soldiers wear them. So the soldiers are killing the Russian Ukrainians? No way.”

Ukrainian Neo-Nazism is No Myth

Van den Ende talked to many Ukrainian civilians while travelling across Donbass. According to her, nearly everyone condemned the Kiev government for prohibiting the Russian language and depriving them of many cultural and domestic human rights.

“The majority of the people whom I spoke with were very happy that the [Russian special] operation has started,” the Dutch journalist says. “Of course, nobody wants violence and war, but they have been suffering already eight years from the war, carnage and destruction by the Ukrainian forces. The worst were the Nazi battalions, who were fighting along with the regular army.”

Ukrainian neo-Nazism is not a myth, emphasises van den Ende. When she visited the Ukrainian port city of Odessa in 2016 and 2017 she noticed the fascist sentiment which has been spreading across the nation for quite a while. Actually, Ukrainian Nazism has been there since the Second World War, says the Dutch journalist.

The ideological successors of Stepan Bandera, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the 14th SS-Volunteer Division “Galicia,” and the Nachtigall Battalion went underground during the Soviet period. However, after many years these forces are alive again with the US, the UK and EU using them to destabilise Ukraine, she says. Previously, these Western geopolitical actors much in the same vein used Islamists to unseat Assad, adds the journalist.

According to van den Ende, after carrying out a 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine, the minority of neo-Nazis grabbed power and have been terrorising mainly the eastern part of the country using very vicious and cruel Nazi-style methods for eight years.

Feeling Protected at Long Last

The West is continuously trying to blame Russia for all the damage inflicted on Ukrainian villages and towns. However, Eastern Ukrainian eye-witnesses say that most of destruction in the civilian areas was caused by the retreating Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi formations, including the notorious Azov Battalions, according to the Dutch journalist. In addition to using civilian facilities as shields, the Ukrainian military are reported to have indiscriminately shelled the positions they left and cede to the Russian forces.

To illustrate her point, van den Ende describes the shelling of a hospital in Volnovakha, in the Donetsk People’s Republic. The building was not bombed from the air, but attacked with grenades and rockets, she says, citing a Volnovakha resident.

“The West claims it was bombed by the Russians, but as a lady told me, that she worked there all her life, and that the Ukrainian [military] – who were quartered in the hospital – shelled and destroyed the facility and her house, which was next to the hospital.”
According to the Dutch journalist, Eastern Ukrainians are treated very well by the Russian army and regularly receive humanitarian aid in most locations. What’s more, the locals say that at long last they feel protected, she adds.

Fierce fight between the Ukrainian armed forces and neo-Nazi battalions on the one side and the Russia-backed DPR and LPR militias on the other side left many houses ruined. However, the people of Donbass have not given up, highlights the journalist.

“As a woman said: ‘We are strong, we can rebuild it, for our children and grandchildren, to have peace,’” notes van den Ende.

Is Russia Losing an Information War?

Some observers suggest that Russia is losing the information war with the West. The Western Big Media machine is working day and night with the backing of Big Tech, while most Russian news outlets have been either censored or completely silenced in the Western countries.

“No, Russia is not losing the information war completely,” argues van den Ende. “I think it’s up to us, the handful of Westerners, to awaken the majority of Westerners who are still asleep and getting bombarded with fake news and made-up stories day by day.”

One should bear in mind that this conflict is being fanned by the Western politicians in the first place, says the Dutch journalist. According to her, the West did completely the same in Syria but has largely lost that war.

The world is changing and the Western establishment has yet to reconcile itself with the emerging multipolar world order, according to van den Ende. She notes that Russian President Vladimir Putin outlined the beginning of this change in his 2007 Munich speech.

Although they opted to neglect his words at that time, it is becoming obvious that a unipolar world is gone for good, the journalist concludes.

8 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

Tariq Ali

Over the Pakistani airwaves, sports commentators frequently groan that the national cricket team – which most people follow with religious fervour – is ‘once again in trouble’. The same lament applies semi-permanently to Pakistan’s politics. This month has seen yet another crisis in the upper echelons of government. To avoid a no-confidence vote that his Party for Justice (PTI) would undoubtedly have lost, Prime Minister Imran Khan asked the President to dissolve parliament and call new elections. This unusual move was necessary, he explained, because the US, backed by the opposition parties, was engaged in a soft coup to topple him. The Opposition appealed to the Supreme Court, asking it to rule on the legality of the dissolution. On 7 April, the five judges unanimously agreed that the government had breached the constitution. They reconvened the Assembly and declared that the no-confidence motion must be brought by 9 April.

There are credible rumours that Khan tried unsuccessfully to sack his Chief of Staff, General Bajwa, and promote his old chum General Faiz Hamid (once head of the Inter-Services Intelligence), while planning to declare a state of emergency. The Army insists no such plan existed, but I have my doubts. Panicking politicians will do anything to retain power. (On the last such occasion in 1999, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attempted to kidnap his then Chief of Staff, General Musharraf, by keeping his plane in the air and not letting it land in Pakistan; he was soon out of a job and Musharraf seized power.) Ultimately, though, Khan’s efforts were futile. The Assembly met, the vote was held and the PTI defeated. The next morning, Shahbaz Sharif, president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, was sworn in as the new Prime Minister. Large, predominantly middle-class crowds gathered in the major cities to support the ousted leader. The main chants were anti-American.

Khan was once Pakistan’s most popular cricket captain, and a national idol after the team won the World Cup. This status helped to launch his political career. But unlike in cricket, where generational shifts have produced some fine new players, the country’s political parties rarely change with the times. Dynastic rule ensures that large reserves of capital, often illegally acquired, remain in the family. And the uniformed umpires at military GHQ in Rawalpindi, who make and break governments, are provided with huge grants of land and other perks. A retired senior general in India once complained to me: ‘If only I had been a general in Pakistan, I would not be spending my last years living on the tenth floor of this three-bedroomed apartment for retired officers in Delhi.’ And that was twenty-five years ago.

The basic structure of Pakistani politics can be briefly summarized as follows. There are essentially four political blocs in the country and one overwhelmingly dominant province – Punjab – whose votes decide each election result. Two of those blocs are dynastic parties: the Pakistan People’s Party, run by the Zardari-Bhutto clan, and the Muslim League-N, run by the Sharif family. The first was discredited by large-scale corruption during its reign. Asif Zardari, who served as President from 2008 to 2011, was a wizard on that front. No paper trail, no evidence and, hence, no one eager to betray him to the courts or the National Accountability Bureau in return for immunity. Nonetheless, the PPP was damaged by its shameless profiteering, and at the last general election it lost Punjab to the new kid on the block: Imran Khan and his PTI. Since then, the Zardari-Bhutto clan has been confined to the province of Sind. Its current leader is the young Bilawal Bhutto, who was given the role as a kind of heirloom after the tragic assassination of his mother Benazir. He and his cadre have been noisy but ineffective provincial politicians, who have turned Sind into little more than a despotic fiefdom.

Are the Sharifs any different? Alas not. During their heyday in power, looting public money was virtually institutionalized; Nawaz Sharif was ousted as Prime Minister in 2017 after the Panama Papers revealed that he had stashed millions of dollars offshore – a common practice among the younger Sharif family members. The clan has a power base in the cities, and enjoys support from commercial traders large and small, as well as big capital. As far as Pakistan’s oligarchs are concerned, the Sharifs are currently the safest pair of hands. They know how to run a business, so they can administer a modern state.

Then there is the bloc of Islamist parties, the largest of which is the JUI, led by Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman. It enjoys some support in the frontier provinces: 26 seats in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan provincial assemblies. Despite its supposed piety, the JUI is no less motivated by commercial interests. It struck a deal with a previous PPP government to offer parliamentary support on condition that its leader was given the diesel franchise in his province. Ever since, he has been affectionately known as Maulana Diesel, or just ‘Diesel’.

When the PTI came to power in 2018, the Z-Bs and Sharifs alleged that there had been widespread ballot-rigging facilitated by the Army, but they failed to produce evidence. Notwithstanding the trustworthiness of the final tally, Khan had run a powerful campaign. He promised a fresh start and gained the confidence of young city-dwellers from all social classes, desperate for an alternative to the corrupt dynastic parties and the interference of the military establishment. But to build his electoral vehicle, Khan sought out advisers and fixers who were deeply embedded in the system, having previously worked with every other political grouping. They constituted a core of bandwagon careerists, many close to the Army, whose loyalties were liable to shift the minute they smelled change in the air. Quite a few ran for national and provincial assemblies on the PTI ticket. Most of them won, although the PTI failed to secure an overall majority.

Khan rapidly squandered the goodwill that followed his election victory. Clientelism, a major cause of public discontent, has blighted Pakistan since its inception, and the PTI did nothing to confront it. The departure of traditional industrialists (most of them Hindu) from Lahore and Karachi after the partition of 1947 left a vacuum that was filled by the direct intervention of the state and the dominant political party, the Muslim League. Subsequently, the industrial boom of the early 1960s consolidated a layer of nouveau riche capitalists in Lahore with close ties to the political class (while also enriching the remaining industrialists, mainly non-Sindhi parsis and bohras in Karachi). Today, one of Pakistan’s top five oligarchs is a construction mogul who became a billionaire by leveraging his elite connections to secure contracts for military and civilian projects. Malik Riaz describes himself as ‘Pakistan’s leading real estate developer and philanthropist’. His modesty is deceptive. He bankrolls political parties, police officers and members of the armed forces – buying and building homes for those in power. A recent recording shows him handing over a briefcase containing gold jewellery to one of the ‘First Lady’s’ couriers. The police have, on occasion, assisted his children in intra-elite disputes and shielded him from scrutiny. (This kind of collusion is beautifully captured in Mohsin Hamid’s 2014 novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.)

Riaz embodies Pakistan’s iniquitous politics. Whether one classifies it as a military dictatorship or a managed democracy, its guiding principle is the reproduction of a filthy rich elite. The country lacks an education system or functioning health service; the poor, both in cities and outlying villages, are regularly evicted so that their land can be stolen and sold at exorbitant prices; the condition of women remains appalling, and on many social indicators Pakistan lags behind Bangladesh. Khan vowed to heal these ailments by ending corruption and building a proper social infrastructure. But in power he did no such thing. Accounts of wild corruption continued to circulate in PTI-controlled areas, with good reason. In lieu of a new social settlement, the government turned to the IMF, whose most recent impositions caused a massive rise in electricity and gas bills, crippling many middle-class households while contributing to rising malnutrition.

All of this was par for the course. But what annoyed leading members of Khan’s own party was the debacle in Punjab, where his wife insisted on handing the role of Chief Minister to the PTI parliamentarian Usman Buzdar: a man that even the most charitable observer would describe as a dim-witted and low-grade politician. The appointment divided Khan’s supporters, angered the Army and played into the opposition’s hands. The Z-Bs and Sharifs publicly accused Buzdar of being little more than a thieving cash-cow for the First Lady. They alleged that she, her first husband and her son were taking a cut from all the business deals he negotiated the province. Buzdar enflamed the situation through his own stupidity, arrogance and gangsterism, antagonizing many in the PTI. Two factional splits, both led by oligarchs, ensued.

As a result of this and other scandals, the opposition parties began to lay the groundwork for a no-confidence motion. Then came the US collapse in Afghanistan and Putin’s assault on Ukraine. After the Taliban’s triumph in Kabul, Khan declared that the Americans had ‘made a mess’: a common view in the region and elsewhere. The US expressed its displeasure at this remark, which was swiftly contradicted by a senior Pakistani military delegation participating in talks at the Pentagon. They reassured their American allies that Pakistan’s foreign and defence policies were decided by the Army, not the Prime Minister. That was that. Yet a few months later, Khan accidentally found himself in Moscow on the day Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine. He adopted the position taken by India and China, refusing to support either Putin’s invasion or the NATO-sponsored motion at the UN General Assembly. Again, this provoked the ire of the State Department, which published a communique singling out Khan for criticism.

At this point, the opposition campaign to eject the PTI mysteriously accelerated. The plotters thickened. Donald Lu, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, allegedly warned Khan that there would be consequences if he managed to survive the impending no-confidence motion. It is not uncommon for imperial envoys to issue such threats (though they are usually delivered to the Army, which can be relied upon to call recalcitrant politicians to heel). But Lu’s actions indicate that the UN vote seriously upset the White House, which perceived it as a direct challenge to American hegemony. Shortly afterward, the Biden Administration began to publicly and foolishly threaten China, and it no doubt reprimanded India’s leaders in private. Yet it also paid particular attention to Pakistan, given the country’s nuclear status, proximity to Afghanistan and close links to China. Now, in light of Khan’s insubordination, the hegemon has evidently swung behind the opposition, hoping to install one of its leaders as PM.

The effect of US diplomatic pressure following the UN vote was immediately visible. General Bajwa made a public statement on Ukraine to re-tilt Pakistan towards the US. The bandwagon careerists jumped ship and began negotiating deals with the opposition. Meanwhile, the minority parties that had helped to secure Khan’s majority deserted him. PTI parliamentarians were offered substantial dosh to do the same. Zardari, the wizard of Sind, who had been languishing in hospital, temporarily left his sickbed to join the party games. Well-versed in such political crises, he was trusted by the entire opposition to buy out weak-kneed PTI members, whatever the cost.

12 April 2022

Source: newleftreview.org

By Nauman Sadiq

In a speech to a meeting on socioeconomic support for the constituent entities of the Russian Federation on March 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin succinctly elucidated the salient reasons for pre-emptively mounting a military intervention in Ukraine in order to forestall NATO’s encroachment upon Russia’s security interests, and cited the genocide of ethnic Russians by ultra-nationalists as a principal reason for invading Ukraine.

“We are meeting in a complicated period as our Armed Forces are conducting a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would like to remind you that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions.

“It is to help our people in Donbass, who have been subjected to real genocide for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways, that is, through blockade, large-scale punitive operations, terrorist attacks and constant artillery raids. Their only guilt was that they demanded basic human rights: to live according to their forefathers’ laws and traditions, to speak their native Russian language, and to bring up their children as they want.

“Kiev was not just preparing for war, for aggression against Russia – it was conducting it … Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of peaceful residential areas have continued all these years. Almost 14,000 civilians, including children have been killed over this time … Clearly, Kiev’s Western patrons are just pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They incessantly supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.”

In the 2001 census, nearly a third of Ukraine’s over 40 million population registered Russian as their first language. In fact, Russian speakers constitute a majority in urban areas of industrialized eastern Ukraine and socio-culturally identify with Russia. Ukrainian speakers are mainly found in sparsely populated western Ukraine and in rural areas of east Ukraine.

Ethnic Russians constituted the social and political elite of Ukraine in the heyday of the Soviet Empire, but were reduced to second-class citizens following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the nineties. The state-sponsored persecution of ethnic Russians intensified across Ukraine following the colored revolution in January 2005, dubbed the Orange Revolution, orchestrated by the Western powers and their Ukrainian collaborators, subversively toppling the democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.

But the real ethnic cleansing of Russians in Ukraine began after the 2014 Maidan coup, once again ousting pro-Russia Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and NATO powers initiated an eight-year war of attrition against Russia in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region by nurturing the Ukraine’s infamous Azov Battalion, officially part of the National Guard of Ukraine, that has been widely acknowledged as a neo-Nazi volunteer paramilitary force connected with foreign white supremacist organizations.

Azov Battalion was initially formed as a volunteer group in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang, and the neo-Nazi Social National Assembly (SNA) group. As a battalion, the group fought on the frontlines against pro-Russia separatists in Donbas, the eastern region of Ukraine.

A few months after recapturing the strategic port city of Mariupol from the Russia-backed separatists, the unit was officially integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine on November 12, 2014, and exacted high praise from then-President Petro Poroshenko. “These are our best warriors,” he said at an awards ceremony in 2014. “Our best volunteers.”

The unit was led by Andriy Biletsky, who served as the leader of both the Patriot of Ukraine (founded in 2005) and the SNA (founded in 2008). In 2010, Biletsky said Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races].” Biletsky was elected to parliament in 2014. He left Azov as elected officials cannot be in the military or police force. He remained an MP until 2019.

These forces were privately funded by oligarchs – the most known being Igor Kolomoisky, an energy magnate billionaire and then-governor of the Dnipropetrovska region. In addition to Azov, Kolomoisky funded other volunteer battalions such as the Dnipro 1 and 2, Aidar and Donbas units.

The Mint Press News recently reported:

“Zelensky’s presidential bid in 2019, which saw him win 73% of the vote, was successful on the basis that he was running in order to combat corruption and create peace in the country but, as the leaked documents known as the Pandora Papers revealed, he himself was storing funds in offshore bank accounts. Zelenskyy’s campaign was at the time boosted and bankrolled by Israeli-Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky – who was himself accused of stealing $5.5 billion from his own bank.

“Muslims seem to be a major issue for the Azov Battalion. The Islamophobia present not only in Azov, but also in the National Guard of Ukraine, came through strongly on social media as the official National Guard site glorified the Azov Battalion as they dipped their bullets in pig fat. The video was directed at Muslim soldiers from Chechnya who are fighting on the side of Russia and were described as orcs by the National Guard on Twitter.”

In June 2015, both Canada and the United States announced they will not support or train the Azov regiment, citing its neo-Nazi connections. The following year, however, the US lifted the ban under pressure from the Pentagon, and the CIA initiated the clandestine program to nurture ultra-nationalist militias in east Ukraine. In October 2019, 40 members of the US Congress signed a letter unsuccessfully calling for the US State Department to designate Azov as a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO).

In Feb. 2019, the Nation Magazine published a detailed think piece: “Neo-Nazis and the Far Right are on the March in Ukraine,” elaborating Ukraine’s far-right militant groups’ xenophobic and white supremacist political ideology.

“Then-Speaker of Parliament Andriy Parubiy cofounded and led two neo-Nazi organizations: the Social-National Party of Ukraine (later renamed Svoboda), and Patriot of Ukraine, whose members would eventually form the core of Azov.

“Even more disturbing is the far right’s penetration of law enforcement. Shortly after the Maidan coup in 2014, the US equipped and trained the newly founded National Police, in what was intended to be a hallmark program buttressing Ukrainian democracy. The deputy minister of the Interior—which controls the National Police—is Vadim Troyan, a veteran of Azov and Patriot of Ukraine.

“In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation making two WWII paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes of Ukraine, and made it a criminal offense to deny their heroism. The OUN had collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, while the UPA slaughtered thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles on their own volition.”

Despite all the evidence of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Russians by the neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine to the contrary, the establishment media is abuzz with reports of alleged genocide of Ukrainians by the withdrawing Russian forces in the outskirts of the capital. Hundreds of dead bodies “buried in mass graves” were found in Bucha, a town 37 km (23 miles) northwest of Kyiv, allegedly massacred by the Chechen contingent of the Russian forces occupying the area.

Denying the spurious and unsubstantiated allegations of purported war crimes and genocide by Russian troops, Russia’s chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Russian Investigative Committee, ordered a probe be opened on the basis that Ukraine had insidiously spread “deliberately false information” in order to malign Russia’s month-long military campaign in Ukraine.

In addition, Russia has requested a United Nations Security Council meeting on April 4 over purported war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine’s Bucha, Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy said on Sunday.

“In light of the Ukrainian radicals’ provocation in Bucha, Russia has requested a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday, April 4,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “We will unmask Ukrainian provocateurs and their Western patrons.”

The Russian defense ministry said earlier on Sunday that all Russian troops had left the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region as far back as March 30, while the “evidence of crimes” surfaced four days later, when Ukrainian security forces and allied ultra-nationalist militias arrived in the city.

Baselessly leveling spurious accusations of alleged genocide and ethnic cleansing without a shred of evidence in order to vilify regional and global adversaries has become a preferred tool in the psyops’ arsenal of the corporate media in the recent years.

Following the rise of China as a major economic power in the 21st century, the mainstream media was similarly tasked by the security establishments to demonize the global rival by blowing out of proportions the sheer fabrication of alleged “genocide and ethnic cleansing” of Uyghur Muslim’s in China’s western Xinjiang province in order to drive a wedge between the rising industrial power and the energy-rich Islamic World.

Unlike several hapless Islamic countries in the Middle East, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, that went through US military occupation or interventions through regional proxies and where countless large-scale massacres have taken place creating millions of refugees, no such massacre or forced displacement of ethnic Uyghurs has ever been recorded in China’s Xinjiang, not even by the corporate media, the foremost purveyor of presumed Uyghur persecution in China.

After the deadly Urumqi riots in July 2009 between the Han and Uyghur ethnic groups in Xinjiang’s provincial capital in which scores of rioters on both sides were killed, China went through a series of violent terror attacks that rocked Xinjiang and the rest of China in the following years.

Dozens of civilians were hacked to death at a busy train station in China’s south. A Uyghur drove a car into crowds at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Forty-three died when militants threw bombs from two sports utility vehicles plowing through a busy market street in Urumqi. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang in 2014, bombs tore through an Urumqi train station, killing three and injuring 79.

After experiencing the spate of terror attacks, Chinese authorities initiated de-radicalization programs in Xinjiang in which Uyghurs were encouraged to participate, as in the Western countries where Muslim immigrants were kept under surveillance and suspects with history of violent crimes were asked to attend de-radicalization programs in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack when anti-Muslim paranoia was at the peak.

Most of the aforementioned terror attacks in China were claimed by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a fanatical transnational terrorist organization of Uyghurs that has taken part in jihadist insurgencies as far away as Afghanistan and Syria. The militant group has been declared a proscribed terrorist outfit by China, the United Nations and many regional countries, though the Trump administration removed its terrorist designation in 2020.

Much like the Uyghur diaspora in the Western countries being patronized by the security agencies and the corporate media to malign a global rival, there is another clandestine organization of Chinese dissidents based in the US that until the November 2020 presidential election enjoyed the protection of the US deep state and was used as a trump card to mount psychological warfare against the Chinese government.

Falun Gong was founded by its leader Li Hongzhi in China in the early 1990s. Today, Falun Gong maintains an informal headquarters, Dragon Springs, a 400-acre compound in upstate New York, located near the current residence of Li Hongzhi. Falun Gong’s performance arts extension, Shen Yun, and two closely connected schools, Fei Tian College and Fei Tian Academy of the Arts, also operate in and around Dragon Springs.

Since 1998, Li Hongzhi has settled as a permanent resident in the United States and maintains high-level contacts not only in the governments of the US and China but also enjoys immense political clout among Chinese diaspora across the world, thanks to the deep pockets of several billionaire Chinese oligarchs that Falun Gong boasts in its ranks, who generously contribute to finance the clandestine organization’s anti-China propaganda operations.

Forget about criticizing the secretive society, up until the elections it wasn’t even permitted to mention the name of Falun Gong on mainstream news outlets. It was simply described as “a religious and spiritual movement” that teaches “meditation techniques” to its members in all the information available in the public domain about the objectives and activities of the religio-political cult.

But in an explosive article for the New York Times in October 2020 to dispel a flurry of reports about the “Chinagate scandal” implicating the Biden campaign in the run-up to the US presidential election, Kevin Roose blew the lid off on the subversive organization and its media outlet, the Epoch Times, widely followed by Trump supporters, and alleged:

“For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.

“The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.

“First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party, which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan, with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his opponents.

“As the 2016 election neared, reporters noticed that the paper’s political coverage took on a more partisan tone. ‘They seemed to have this almost messianic way of viewing Trump as the anti-communist leader who would bring about the end of the Chinese Communist Party,’ Steve Klett, who covered the 2016 campaign for the paper, said.

“Where the paper’s money comes from is something of a mystery. Former employees said they had been told that The Epoch Times was financed by a combination of subscriptions, ads and donations from wealthy Falun Gong practitioners.

“Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist of the White House, is among those who have noticed The Epoch Times’s deep pockets. Last year, he produced a documentary about China with NTD. When he talked with the outlet about other projects, he said, money never seemed to be an issue. ‘I’d give them a number,’ Mr. Bannon said. ‘And they’d come back and say, We’re good for that number.’”

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions.

4 April 2022

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Evan Reif

Why was Nazi Butcher Botsun at Bucha?

6 Apr 2022 – This story raises an important challenge to the official storyline of the Bucha massacre promoted in the mainstream media. The U.S. military has admitted that it cannot independently verify Ukrainian accounts of the atrocity alleging that Russian troops were behind it. The Russian Defense Ministry reported that Russian troops had left Bucha on March 30, while “the evidence of crimes” emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had arrived in the town outside Kyiv. The Ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk had confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about civilians shot dead on the street with their hands tied behind their backs. Reif’s article points to the presence of a notorious neo-Nazi commander in Bucha at the time of the massacre, suggesting that he was a key figure implicated in it. — Editors

Sergey Korotkikh is a man with many names. Botsun, Malyuta. Bandit. Terrorist. Nazi. All of them are fitting.

Born in 1974 in Tolyatti, USSR, his early life is not well documented. It is known that, as a child, his family moved to Belarus, where he would live for several decades. He served in the Soviet Marines as a young man, and allegedly attended the KGB Academy in 1994 (Belarus retained the name KGB for its secret police but there is no relation other than the name to the Soviet-era KGB) and was expelled in 1996 for his involvement with center-right anti-Lukashenko groups. [Alexander Luakashenko is the socialist leader of Belarus since 1994 who is allied with Vladimir Putin].

In 1999, Korotkikh joined the Belarussian chapter of Russian National Unity (RNU), his first neo-Nazi organization. The gang mostly sustained itself through petty gangsterism and racketeering, at which Korotkikh excelled. His training and skills meant that he rose quickly up the ranks, becoming one of its most feared muscle men.

Later that year he was involved in a fight with two of his former comrades in the Belarussian Popular Front. While much has been made of this encounter that made him appear as a stooge of Lukashenko, this was his only altercation with BPF activists as far as anyone knows. It was brutal, however, with some accounts saying Sergey beat one of the BPF men to death, which Sergey denies.

In 2001 the leader and founder of the RNU, Gleb Samoilov, was murdered while standing at the entrance of his home. Sergey was a prime suspect, but he and all other RNU members refused to co-operate with the police so the case was dropped. The RNU fell apart soon after that and Sergey moved to Russia in 2001. In 2004, he founded the National Socialist Society (NSO), which quickly became one of the wealthiest and most dangerous neo-Nazi organizations in Russia.

Unlike most other groups at the time, the NSO had a rigid hierarchy and offered military-style training to its members. It was able to pay its members a generous salary thanks to the backing of gangster Maxim Gritsay, which made it far more attractive than other Nazi groups.

The group itself could be the subject of many articles, but under the leadership of Korotkikh it carried out countless murders, robberies, extortion schemes and even bombings. It would become so successful and wealthy that, when finally shut down in 2010, the Russian authorities would find over 200 million rubles in its accounts.

In 2007, Korotkikh had himself filmed murdering two innocent Caucasian immigrants against the backdrop of a swastika flag in a video entitled “The Execution of a Dag [Dagestani] and a Tajik.” This video was so vile that it was initially believed to be a fake, but was quickly found by Russian prosecutors to be legitimate. The footage spread like wildfire throughout the internet and caused an outrage, possibly provoking the previously reluctant Russian authorities to action.

Only a few months thereafter, Korotkikh was expelled from the NSO. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, with the official NSO statement accusing him of theft and “financial mismanagement” which were likely true, however, almost certainly not the whole story. Over the next few years, Russian authorities launched a comprehensive attack on the remainder of the organization, arresting nearly all its members for a combined 28 counts of murder.

Sergey, however was untouched by this crackdown. At this point, rumors of police and/or intelligence collaboration also began to emerge. While I do believe he collaborated with the police to save his own skin, his ties to the FSB are much less clear. Ukrainian hackers have released what they say are chats between Sergey and his FSB handlers (now scrubbed from the site, for reasons unknown); however, while Sergey’s participation is clear, we have only their word that the other party is FSB.

While the content is suspicious—discussing smuggling, payment for illicit activities and so on—it is not out of the ordinary for a gangster, which Sergey very much still is. At one point, Sergey says he does not trust FSB, and it is specifically denied that he will be working for them.

I should point out here that there are very few trustworthy sources regarding Botsun, his life and his activities until about 2014. He is a loudmouth who loves publicity, with active YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram channels. I will not link to them to avoid giving this thug any more fame or fortune.

He loves to sit down for long interviews with anyone who will have him. His stories seem to grow ever more fantastical with each telling, claiming to have been a mercenary in the Middle East, in South America, and the founder of a Private Military Contractor (there is a company registered in his name called X-Trident, but I have found no evidence of its activities and it is registered out of an MMA gym).

The only evidence ever provided is the word of a scumbag Nazi thug or his equally repugnant Nazi friends, and these are not exactly trustworthy people.

I do not believe that he is an FSB agent or informer currently. He probably was one previously, but there are a variety of reasons I believe he went rogue, or perhaps defected to the other side.

Chief among them is that, upon arriving in Ukraine in 2014, he quickly became one of Azov’s top soldiers and has spent his entire time in Ukraine brutally slaughtering the separatists the FSB is backing.

It seems rather counterintuitive for the FSB to hire someone to kill its other employees, and while many liberals claim he is a provocateur, Ukraine had plenty of home-grown provocateurs long before Botsun arrived. It would not have been necessary to import terrorists into post-Maidan Ukraine. As for the second reason, I will elaborate below.

Living in a Nazi’s Paradise

After the destruction of the NSO, Sergey kept a low profile for several years. Very little is known about his activities during 2010-2014. Uncharacteristically of him, he does not seem to want to talk about it.

It is likely that his betrayal of his former comrades ruined his reputation and earning potential among Russian Nazis, and his extensive criminal background meant legitimate work was not possible. If he became a mercenary as he claims, this would most likely have been when he did so.

When the Maidan coup occurred in 2014, however, Sergey saw an opportunity. The ground has rarely been more fertile for a bloodthirsty fascist thug to ply his trade than 2014 Ukraine.

In 2014, Sergey moved to Ukraine. He did not just join Azov: By his own admission he was one of its original members and has been a military leader since day one. While this should be taken with a grain of salt, I have yet to find any information to refute it. His skills and experience meant that he climbed the ranks very rapidly in the early days of Azov.

He would become its first intelligence leader, a leader of the civic corps and eventually leader of Azov special forces. Once Poroshenko legitimized Azov as part of Ukraine’s security apparatus, Sergey was given command of a Ukrainian federal police force.

Sergey was a busy boy in his new home. Beyond playing an important role in the daily atrocities carried out by Azov and Ukrainian forces, he was also incredibly active in Azov’s “business ventures,” including racketeering and extortion. Kharkov became his fiefdom, one which he ruled with an iron fist. Between this and generous funding from Ukrainian gangster Ihor Kholomoisky, Botsun became very wealthy, amassing a fortune of more than a million euros by 2015. He would even acquire a private jet, an L-39 Albatross. This advanced jet trainer can be configured for a variety of combat roles.

He would ruthlessly consolidate power, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, while also gaining friends in high places, including former Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, whose son Oleksandr trained at Botsun’s MMA gym, and even Petro Poroshenko himself.

Despite his incredibly sordid background, he was the first foreign fighter to receive Ukrainian citizenship, as a reward for his service (torturing, murdering and robbing) in the anti-terrorist operation zone (ATO). In response to widespread condemnation, the SBU carried out exhaustive background checks.

While I know the Ukrainian government of Poroshenko was incredibly corrupt and incompetent, it beggars belief that it would allow a man with so many red flags to walk in the door unless it was very sure he was not working for the enemy. Even Poroshenko is not THAT stupid. This also would have given Sergey a huge incentive to come into the Ukrainian camp and stay there.

All of this leads us to Bucha, Ukraine. What has been widely publicized is the massacre of civilians that took place there on the outskirts of Kyiv some time between March 31 and April 2, 2022.

What has not been so widely publicized is that the Nazi murderer and terrorist, a well-paid agent of the Ukrainian state, Sergey “Botsun” Korotkikh was not only among the first Ukrainian forces in the town along with his squad of terrorists, he was making jokes about shooting civilians as he entered. He would later happily post these videos on his official telegram channel.

At 6 seconds, you can hear the dialogue, a rough translation of which is:

“There are guys without blue armbands, can I shoot them?”

“Fuck yeah.”

The Ukrainian government clearly has a lot of explaining to do. Not just for allowing this bloodthirsty Nazi terrorist free reign in Donbas, not just for making him rich, not just for arming and supporting his death squads, not just for granting him citizenship, status, and power within its society, but for allowing this right-wing fanatic to breathe the same air as decent people.

I doubt we will ever receive satisfactory explanations.

Evan Reif was born in a small mining town in South Dakota as the son of a miner and a librarian.

11 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By George Eaton

The US professor, now 93, on the climate catastrophe and the threat of nuclear war.

6 Apr 2022 – It was as a ten-year-old that Noam Chomsky first confronted the perils of foreign aggression. “The first article that I wrote for the elementary school newspaper was on the fall of Barcelona [in 1939],” Chomsky recalled when we spoke recently via video call. It charted the advance of the “grim cloud of fascism” across the world. “I haven’t changed my opinion since, it’s just gotten worse,” he sardonically remarked. Due to the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear war, Chomsky told me, “we’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history… We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organised human life on Earth.”

At the age of 93, as perhaps the world’s most cited living scholar, Chomsky could be forgiven for retreating from the public sphere. But in an era of permanent crisis, he retains the moral fervour of a young radical – more preoccupied with the world’s mortality than his own. He is a walking advertisement for Dylan Thomas’s injunction – “Do not go gentle into that good night” – or for what Chomsky calls “the bicycle theory: if you keep going fast, you don’t fall off”.

The occasion for our conversation is the publication of Chronicles of Dissent, a collection of interviews between Chomsky and the radical journalist David Barsamian from 1984 to 1996. But the backdrop is the war in Ukraine – a subject about which Chomsky is unsurprisingly voluble.

“It’s monstrous for Ukraine,” he said. In common with many Jews, Chomsky has a family connection to the region: his father was born in present-day Ukraine and emigrated to the US in 1913 to avoid serving in the tsarist army; his mother was born in Belarus. Chomsky, who is often accused by critics of refusing to condemn any anti-Western government, unhesitatingly denounced Vladimir Putin’s “criminal aggression”.

But he added: “Why did he do it? There are two ways of looking at this question. One way, the fashionable way in the West, is to plumb the recesses of Putin’s twisted mind and try to determine what’s happening in his deep psyche.

“The other way would be to look at the facts: for example, that in September 2021 the United States came out with a strong policy statement, calling for enhanced military cooperation with Ukraine, further sending of advanced military weapons, all part of the enhancement programme of Ukraine joining Nato. You can take your choice, we don’t know which is right. What we do know is that Ukraine will be further devastated. And we may move on to terminal nuclear war if we do not pursue the opportunities that exist for a negotiated settlement.”

How does he respond to the argument that Putin’s greatest fear is not encirclement by Nato but the spread of liberal democracy in Ukraine and Russia’s “near abroad”?

“Putin is as concerned with democracy as we are. If it’s possible to break out of the propaganda bubble for a few minutes, the US has a long record of undermining and destroying democracy. Do I have to run through it? Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, on and on… But we are supposed to now honour and admire Washington’s enormous commitment to sovereignty and democracy. What happened in history doesn’t matter. That’s for other people.

“What about Nato expansion? There was an explicit, unambiguous promise by [US secretary of state] James Baker and president George HW Bush to Gorbachev that if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin Nato, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east. There’s a good deal of lying going on about this now.”

Chomsky, who observed in 1990 that “if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged”, spoke witheringly of Joe Biden.

“It’s certainly right to have moral outrage about Putin’s actions in Ukraine,” he said of Biden’s recent declaration that the Russian president “cannot remain in power”. “But it would be even more progress to have moral outrage about other horrible atrocities… In Afghanistan, literally millions of people are facing imminent starvation. Why? There’s food in the markets. But people who have little money have to watch their children starve because they can’t go to the market to buy food. Why? Because the United States, with the backing of Britain, has kept Afghanistan’s funds in New York banks and will not release them.”

Chomsky’s contempt for the hypocrisies and contradictions of US foreign policy will be familiar to anyone who has read one of his many books and pamphlets (his first political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, published in 1969, foretold the US’s defeat in Vietnam). But he is now perhaps most animated when discussing Donald Trump’s possible return and the climate crisis.

“I’m old enough to remember the early 1930s. And memories come to mind,” he said in a haunting recollection. “I can remember listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio. I didn’t understand the words, I was six years old. But I understood the mood. And it was frightening and terrifying. And when you watch one of Trump’s rallies that can’t fail to come to mind. That’s what we’re facing.”

Though he self-identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist, Chomsky revealed to me that he had voted for Republicans in the past (“like them or not, they were an authentic party”). But now he said, they were a truly dangerous insurgency.

“Because of Trump’s fanaticism, the worshipful base of the Republican Party barely regards climate change as a serious problem. That’s a death warrant to the species.”

Faced with such existential threats, it is perhaps unsurprising that Chomsky remains a dissident intellectual – in the manner of one of his heroes, Bertrand Russell (who lived to 97 and similarly straddled politics and philosophy). But he also still spends hours a day answering emails from admirers and critics, and teaches linguistics at the University of Arizona, the state where he lives with his second wife, Valeria Wasserman, a Brazilian translator.

Chomsky is also still engaged by British politics. “Brexit was a very serious error, it means that Britain will be compelled to drift even further into subordination to the US,” he told me. “I think it’s a disaster. What does it mean for the Conservative Party? I imagine they can lie their way out of it, they’re doing a good job of lying about a lot of things and getting away with it.”

Of Keir Starmer, he scornfully remarked: “He’s returning the Labour Party to a party that’s reliably obedient to power, that will be Thatcher-lite in the style of Tony Blair and that won’t ruffle the feathers of either the US or anyone who’s important in Britain.”

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci advised radicals to maintain “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. What, I asked Chomsky at the close of our conversation, gives him hope?

“A lot of young people; Extinction Rebellion in England, young people dedicated to trying to put an end to the catastrophe. Civil disobedience – it’s not a joke, I’ve been involved with it for much of my life. I’m too old for it now [Chomsky was first arrested in 1967 for protesting against the Vietnam War and shared a cell with Norman Mailer]… It’s not pleasant to be thrown in jail and beaten, but they’re willing to undertake it.

“There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behaviour of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that’s the hope for the future.”

George Eaton is senior editor of the New Statesman.

11 April 2022

Source: www.transcend.org

By William J Astore

What Would It Take for Military Spending in America to Go Down? A Thought Experiment on the Military-Industrial Complex

I have a question for you: What would it take in today’s world for America’s military spending to go down? Here’s one admittedly farfetched scenario: Vladimir Putin loses his grip on power and Russia retrenches militarily while reaching out to normalize relations with the West. At the same time, China prudently decides to spend less on its military, pursuing economic power while abandoning any pretense to a militarized superpower status. Assuming such an unlikely scenario, with a “new cold war” nipped in the bud and the U.S. as the world’s unchallenged global hegemon, Pentagon spending would surely shrink, right?

Well, I wouldn’t count on it. Based on developments after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago, here’s what I suspect would be far more likely to happen. The U.S. military, aided by various strap-hanging think tanks, intelligence agencies, and weapons manufacturers, would simply shift into overdrive. As its spokespeople would explain to anyone who’d listen (especially in Congress), the disappearance of the Russian and Chinese threats would carry its own awesome dangers, leaving this country prospectively even less safe than before.

You’d hear things like: we’ve suddenly been plunged into a more complex multipolar world, significantly more chaotic now that our “near-peer” rivals are no longer challenging us, with even more asymmetrical threats to U.S. military dominance. The key word, of course, would be “more” — linked, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, to omnipresent Pentagon demands for yet more military spending. When it comes to weapons, budgets, and war, the military-industrial complex’s philosophy is captured by an arch comment of the legendary actress Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Even without Russia and China as serious threats to American hegemony, you’d hear again about an “unbalanced” Kim Jong-un in North Korea and his deeply alarming ballistic missiles; you’d hear about Iran and its alleged urge to build nuclear weapons; and, if those two countries proved too little, perhaps the war on terror would be resuscitated. (Indeed, during the ongoing wall-to-wall coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea did test a ballistic missile, an event a distracted media greeted with a collective shrug.) My point is this: when you define the entire globe as your sphere of influence, as the U.S. government does, there will always be threats somewhere. It matters little, in budgetary terms, whether it’s terror, most often linked to radical Islam, or the struggle over resources linked to climate change, which the Pentagon has long recognized as a danger, even if it still burns carbon as if there were no tomorrow. And don’t discount a whole new set of dangers in space and cyberspace, the latest realms of combat.

Of course, this country is always allegedly falling behind in some vital realm of weapons research. Right now, it’s hypersonic missiles, just as in the early days of the Cold War bomber and missile “gaps” were falsely said to be endangering our security. Again, when national security is defined as full-spectrum dominance and America must reign supreme in all areas, you can always come up with realms where we’re allegedly lagging and where there’s a critical need for billions more of your taxpayer dollars. Consider the ongoing “modernization” of our nuclear arsenal, at a projected cost approaching $2 trillion over the coming decades. As a jobs program, as well as an advertisement of naked power, it may yet rival the Egyptian pyramids. (Of course, the pyramids became wonders of the world rather than threatening to end it.)

No Peace Dividends for You

While a young captain in the Air Force, I lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a romping, stomping performance by our military in the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. It felt great! I was teaching history at the Air Force Academy when President George H.W. Bush talked of a “new world order.” On a planet with no Soviet Union and no Cold War, we even briefly heard talk of “peace dividends” to come that echoed the historical response of Americans after prevailing in past wars. In the aftermath of the Civil War, as well as World Wars I and II, rapid demobilization and a dramatic downsizing of the military establishment had occurred.

And indeed, there was initially at least some modest shrinkage of our military after the Soviet collapse, though nothing like what most experts had expected. Personnel cuts came first. As a young officer, I well remember the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments (VSIP) and the Selective Early Retirement Board (SERB). VSIP offered money to entice officers like me to get out early, while SERB represented involuntary retirement for those judged to have overstayed their welcome. Then there was the dreaded RIF, or Reduction in Force, program, which involved involuntary separation without benefits.

Yet even as personnel were pruned from our military, the ambitions of the national security state only grew. As I wrote long ago, the U.S. didn’t just “contain” the Soviet empire during the Cold War; that empire also contained us. With its main enemy in tatters and facing virtually no restraint to its global ambitions, the military-industrial complex promptly began to search for new realms to dominate and new enemies to contain and defeat. Expansion, not shrinkage, soon became the byword, whether in Asia, Africa, or Europe, where, despite promises made to the last of the Soviet Union’s leaders, NATO’s growth took the lead.

So, let’s jump to 1998, just before the initial round of NATO expansion occurred. I’m a major in the Air Force now, on my second tour of teaching history to cadets and I’m attending a seminar on coalition warfare. Its concluding panel focused on the future of NATO and featured four generals who had served at the highest levels of that alliance. I was feverishly taking notes as one of them argued forcefully for NATO’s expansion despite Russian concerns. “Russia has nothing to fear,” he assured us and, far more important, could no longer prevent it. “If the Soviet Union was an anemic tiger, Russia is more like a circus tiger that may growl but won’t bite,” he concluded. Tell that to the people of Ukraine in 2022.

Retired Army General Andrew Goodpaster had a different view. He suggested that the U.S. could have fostered a peaceful “overarching relationship” with Russia after 1991 but chose antagonism and expansion instead. For him, NATO’s growth was only likely to antagonize a post-Soviet Russia further. Air Force General John Shaud largely agreed, suggesting that the U.S. should work to ensure that Russia didn’t become yet more isolated thanks to such a program of expansion.

In the end, three of those four retired generals urged varying degrees of caution. In an addendum to my notes, I scribbled this: “NATO expansion, from the perspective of many in the West, gathers the flock and unites them against an impending storm. From the Russian perspective, NATO expansion, beyond a certain point, is intolerable; it is the storm.” If three of four former senior NATO commanders and a young Air Force major could see that clearly almost 25 years ago, surely senior government officials of the day could, too.

Unfortunately, it turned out that they simply didn’t care. For the military-industrial complex, as journalist Andrew Cockburn noted in 2015, such expansion was simply too lucrative to pass up. It meant more money, profits, and jobs, as Eastern European militaries retooled with weaponry from the West, much of it made in the USA. It didn’t matter that Russia was prostrate and posed no threat; it didn’t matter that NATO’s main reason for being had disappeared. What mattered was more: more countries in NATO, meaning more weapons sold, more money made, more influence peddled. Who cared if expansion pissed off the Russians? What was a toothless “circus tiger” going to do about it anyway, gum us to death?

If there ever was a time for peace dividends and military demobilization, the 1990s were it. This country even had a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who was focused far more on domestic concerns than foreign policy. And there’s the rub. He simply had no desire to challenge the military-industrial complex. Few presidents do.

Early in his first term, he’d already lost big-time in arguing for gays to serve openly in the ranks, leading to his ignominious surrender and the institutionalization of “don’t ask, don’t tell” as military policy. As that complex then frog-marched Clinton through what remained of the twentieth century, hardheaded hawks like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were already hatching their plans for America’s triumphant return to a policy of complete unipolar dominance empowered by a kick-ass military. Their time came with George W. Bush’s less than legitimate election in 2000, accelerated by the September 11th tragedy the following year.

America’s New Normal Is War

Ever since 9/11, endless conflict has been this country’s new normal. If you’re an American 21 years of age or younger, you’ve never known a time when your country hasn’t been at war, even if, thanks to the end of the draft in the previous century, you stand no chance of being called to arms yourself. You’ve never known a time of “normal” defense budgets. You have no conception of what military demobilization, no less peacetime might actually be like. Your normal is only reflected in the Biden administration’s staggering $813 billion Pentagon budget proposal for the next fiscal year. Naturally, many congressional Republicans are already clamoring for even higher military spending. Remember that Mae West quip? What a “wonderful” world!

And you’re supposed to take pride in this. As President Biden recently told soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division now stationed in Poland, this country has the “finest fighting force in the history of the world.” Even with the mountains of cash we give to that military, the nation still “owes you big,” he assured them.

Well, I’m gobsmacked. During my 20-year career in the military, I never thought my nation owed me a thing, let alone owed me big. Now that I think of it, however, I can say that this nation owed me (and today’s troops as well) one very big thing: not to waste my life; not to send me to fight undeclared, arguably unconstitutional, wars; not to treat me like a foreign legionnaire or an imperial errand-boy. That’s what we, the people, really owe “our” troops. It should be our duty to treat their service, and potentially their deaths, with the utmost care, meaning that our leaders should wage war only as a last, not a first, resort and only in defense of our most cherished ideals.

This was anything but the case of the interminable Afghan and Iraq wars, reckless conflicts of choice that burned through trillions of dollars, with tens of thousands of U.S. troops killed and wounded, and millions of foreigners either dead or transformed into refugees, all for what turned out to be absolutely nothing. Small wonder today that a growing number of Americans want to see less military spending, not more. Citizen.org, representing 86 national and state organizations, has called on President Biden to decrease military spending. Joining that call was POGO, the Project on Government Oversight, as well as William Hartung at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. And they couldn’t be more on target, though they’re certain to be ignored in Washington.

Consider the recent disastrous end to the Afghan War. Viewing that conflict in the aggregate, what you see is widespread corruption and untold waste, all facilitated by generals who lied openly and consistently to the rest of us about “progress,” even as they spoke frankly in private about a lost war, a reality the Afghan War Papers all too tellingly revealed. That harsh story of abysmal failure, however, highlights something far worse: a devastating record of lying on a massive scale within the highest ranks of the military and government. And are those liars and deceivers being called to account? Perish the thought! Instead, they’ve generally been rewarded with yet more money, promotions, and praise.

So, what would it take for the Pentagon budget to shrink? Blowing the whistle on wasteful and underperforming weaponry hasn’t been enough. Witnessing murderous and disastrous wars hasn’t been enough. To my mind, at this point, only a full-scale collapse of the U.S. economy might truly shrink that budget and that would be a Pyrrhic victory for the American people.

In closing, let me return to President Biden’s remark that the nation owes our troops big. There’s an element of truth there, perhaps, if you’re referring to the soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, many of whom have served selflessly within its ranks. It sure as hell isn’t true, though, of the self-serving strivers and liars at or near the top, or the weapons-making corporations who profited off it all, or the politicians in Washington who kept crying out for more. They owe the rest of us and America big.

My fellow Americans, we have now reached the point in our collective history where we face three certainties: death, taxes, and ever-soaring spending on weaponry and war. In that sense, we have become George Orwell’s Oceania, where war is peace, surveillance is privacy, and censorship is free speech.

Such is the fate of a people who make war and empire their way of life.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals.

4 April 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh.

In a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly reminded Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army”, as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior.

Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane and intellectually superior Europeans.

The comment, though less obvious, reminds one of the racist remarks by CBS’ foreign correspondent, Charlie D’Agata, on February 26, when he shamelessly compared Middle Eastern cities with the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, stating that “Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, (…) this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city”.

The Russia-Ukraine war has been a stage of racist comments and behavior, some explicit and obvious, others implicit and indirect. Far from being implicit, however, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov, did not mince words when, last February, he addressed the issue of Ukrainian refugees. Europe can benefit from Ukrainian refugees, he said, because “these people are Europeans. (…) These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

One of many other telling episodes that highlight western racism, but also continued denial of its grim reality, was an interview conducted by the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, with the Ukrainian Azov Battalion Commander, Dmytro Kuharchuck. The latter’s militia is known for its far-right politics, outright racism and horrific acts of violence. Yet, the newspaper described Kuharchuck as “the kind of fighter you don’t expect. He reads Kant and he doesn’t only use his bazooka.” If this is not the very definition of denial, what is?

That said, our proud European friends must be careful before supplanting the word ‘European’ with ‘civilization’ and respect for human rights. They ought not to forget their past or rewrite their history because, after all, racially-based slavery is a European and western brand. The slave trade, as a result of which millions of slaves were shipped from Africa during the course of four centuries, was very much European. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, 1.8 million people “died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade”. Other estimations put the number much higher.

Colonialism is another European quality. Starting in the 15th century, and lasting for centuries afterward, colonialism ravaged the entire Global South. Unlike the slave trade, colonialism enslaved entire peoples and divided whole continents, like Africa, among European spheres of influence.

The nation of Congo was literally owned by one person, Belgian King Leopold II. India was effectively controlled and colonized by the British East India Company and, later, by the British government. The fate of South America was largely determined by the US-imposed Monroe Doctrines of 1823. For nearly 200 years, this continent has paid – and continues to pay – an extremely heavy price of US colonialism and neocolonialism. No numbers or figures can possibly express the destruction and death toll inflicted by Western-European colonialism on the rest of the world, simply because the victims are still being counted. But for the sake of illustration, according to American historian, Adam Hochschild, ten million people have died in Congo alone from 1885 to 1908.

And how can we forget that World War I and II are also entirely European, leaving behind around 40 million and 75 million dead, respectively. (Other estimations are significantly higher). The gruesomeness of these European wars can only be compared to the atrocities committed, also by Europeans, throughout the South, for hundreds of years prior.

Mere months after The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949, the eager western partners were quick to flex their muscles in Korea in 1950, instigating a war that lasted for three years, resulting in the death of nearly 5 million people. The Korean war, like many other NATO-instigated conflicts, remains an unhealed wound to this day.

The list goes on and on, from the disgraceful Opium Wars on China, starting in 1839, to the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945, to the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, in 1954, 1959 and 1970 respectively, to the political meddling, military interventions and regime change in numerous countries around the world. They are all the work of the West, of the US and its ever-willing ‘European partners’, all done in the name of spreading democracy, freedom and human rights.

If it were not for the Europeans, Palestine would have gained its independence decades ago, and its people, this writer included, would have not been made refugees, suffering under the yoke of Zionist Israel. If it were not for the US and the Europeans, Iraq would have remained a sovereign country and millions of lives would have been spared in one of the world’s oldest civilizations; and Afghanistan would have not endured this untold hardship. Even when the US and its European friends finally relented and left Afghanistan last year, they continue to hold the country hostage, by blocking the release of its funds, leading to actual starvation among the people of that war-torn country.

So before bragging about the virtues of Europe, and the demeaning of everyone else, the likes of Arestovych, D’Agata, and Petkov should take a look at themselves in the mirror and reconsider their unsubstantiated ethnocentric view of the world and of history. In fact, if anyone deserves bragging rights it is those colonized nations that resisted colonialism, the slaves that fought for their freedom, and the oppressed nations that resisted their European oppressors, despite the pain and suffering that such struggles entailed.

Sadly, for Europe, however, instead of using the Russia-Ukraine war as an opportunity to reflect on the future of the European project, whatever that is, it is being used as an opportunity to score cheap points against the very victims of Europe everywhere. Once more, valuable lessons remain unlearned.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

4 April 2022

Source: countercurrents.org