We have to admit: after winning ‘Euromaidan’, the human rights situation in Ukraine has deteriorated significantly.
This trend became apparent already in 2014, evidenced by a number of laws approved during the post-Maidan wave. In particular, we are talking about the law allowing preventive detention of citizens for thirty days, despite the fact that under the Constitution a person may be detained only for 72 hours. Also, changes have been made to the Criminal Code to enable cases to open against a Ukrainian citizen for making critical comments about the military draft of citizens in the “Anti-Terrorist Operation zone”.
In 2015, this trend continued. A law was passed on “de-communization” which is in conflict with a number of fundamental rights and freedoms guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. These include freedom of assembly and association (Article 11 of the Convention), freedom of expression (Article 10) and freedom of speech.
As a consequence, in Ukraine there are a large number of political prisoners. In this regard, it should be emphasized that the people usually referred to as “political prisoners” in our media are typically representatives of right-wing organizations, arrested for the murder of a renowned journalist or involved in the grenade explosion near the Verkhovna Rada last August–in other words, people who are accused of committing serious criminal offenses.
The real political prisoners are journalists such as Ruslan Kotsaba, arrested and charged in early 2015 for expressing his views on the Internet, or communists such as Alexander Bondarchuk, who was distributing newspapers and leaflets containing oppositional texts. These are just two examples of many more that could be cited.
The situation of the right of peaceful assembly in Ukraine has also seriously deteriorated. On the one hand, courts in Ukraine do not make many decisions prohibiting public meetings. In some regions, including Kiev, local authorities generally do not make requests to the courts to restrict the freedom of peaceful assembly.
But on the other hand, the holding of peaceful assemblies on certain issues is today extremely dangerous. This is due to the threat of attack from the far right. Organizers often abandon planned assemblies due to the threats that they receive.
For these reasons, rallies against rising social service tariffs, the military draft or fascism, or rallies in favour of establishing civil peace, etc have been cancelled. On March 17, 2015 in Odessa, there was an attempt to organize a rally against tariff hikes in public transport, but the people who came out for it were surrounded by members of the right-wing groups, such as ‘Automaidan’ and ‘Oberig’ and only miraculously managed to avoid a serious clash.
And on January 19, the ultra-right disrupted a rally in Kyiv aimed to commemorate two Russian antifascists, the lawyers Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova who were killed in Russia in 2009.
It can be said that today in Ukraine, carrying out public actions advocating for social, political or economic rights is almost impossible. Actions in support of civil peace are immediately declared “separatist”. At the beginning of 2015 in Ukraine, there were large and frequent spontaneous demonstrations against military draft mobilizations. These were broad, grassroots initiatives by a dissatisfied population. But their organizers and participants have been hit with administrative penalties or, worse, have been tried in courts.
In general, it seems that the Parliament, the government and the president are able to offer the population nothing but usurious tariff increases, unemployment, anti-social reforms and further impoverishment. Dissatisfaction is increasingly punished by persecution. We are repeatedly told that that there is a war in our country, and the opposition should be imprisoned while “patriots” should be forgiven even for acts of murder because they kill so-called separatists. Never mind that members of the ‘Tornado’ and ‘Aidar’ battalions have tortured people – you must understand that they wanted to defend the rights and freedoms of Ukrainians!
Alas, this patriotic propaganda that dominates today in the Ukrainian society is, in fact, no different from the Russian variant. We have returned to the realities of the Soviet era, when it was impossible to freely express a point of view or watch this or that film. Ukraine has proscribed the Russian film ‘Irony of Fate’ and many other films. And the Institute of National Remembrance, a kind of ‘Ministry of Truth’, refused to give permission to register a newspaper called ‘Left March’ because the name is the same as the title of the well-known poem by the communist poet Vladimir Mayakovski.
So the human rights situation in Ukraine has deteriorated significantly and it is a real challenge for human rights activists to do their work. If similar things had happened during the regimes of Yanukovych (2010-14), Yushchenko (2005-09) and Kuchma (1994-2005), all human rights activists would unanimously have said that systemic violations of civil rights are taking place. If during the time of President Yanukovych, a journalist were placed on trial, an opposition political party were banned– as today the Communist Party is banned, or opposition parties were prevented from participating in local election, it would certainly have provoked a huge outcry among Ukrainian human rights activists.
Unfortunately, today, the powerful voices of human rights defenders are practically silent. This is due, first of all, to the fact that talking about such things is potentially dangerous. Critical voices run the risk of being labeled “agents of the Kremlin” or “separatists” by both the authorities and the members of ultra-right organizations.
Despite all this, there are human rights activists in Ukraine who are speaking out in favour of human rights, even if they face threats and harassment for doing so. Of note among such people is Tatiana Montyan.[1]
As a rule in such a situation, the loudest voices of human rights defenders are international human rights organizations, most notably, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. But in the case of the latter, its statements criticizing the Ukrainian government are coming mostly from the organization’s headquarters in London while its Ukrainian division maintains a certain politesse.
The Helsinki Union and Amnesty International in Ukraine issued statements in support of the aforementioned Ruslan Kotsaba. However, in comments to the published texts of the group, one reads many allegations that human rights defenders have “sold themselves to Putin” and so on, while in fact the same organizations – from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe –constantly report on systematic violations of civil rights in Russia, just the same as in Ukraine.
One cannot remain silent about what is going on now in our country.
Translator’s notes: [1] See a July 2015 interview with Tatiana Montyan translated and published here on Fort Russ.
[2] All Ukrainian passports list names in their Ukrainian and Russian literations. Hence, ‘ Volodymyr (Vladimir) Chemerys’.
From Wikipedia: Volodymyr Chemerys, b 1962, is a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, one of the first perestroika organizations in Ukraine advocating renaissance of national culture and independence. The Union is now a human rights advocacy group. Chemerys was a member of the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the second convocation (1994–1998), but he is mostly known as one of the informal leaders of the ‘Ukraine without Kuchma’ mass protest campaign of 2000-2001. He also took part in the legendary 1991 student protests in Kiev.
Beginning from a conservative outlook, Chemerys has moved to the political left since the disappointment of the Yushchenko presidency.
Original text in Ukrainian here, translated to English by Liva.com, Jan 21, 2016
France says the state of emergency put in place in Paris after last November’s deadly terror attacks by Daesh will be extended until the world could totally get rid of the Takfiri terror group.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview with BBC Europe that France would seek to keep the state of emergency in place until the end of what he called the “global war” against Daesh terrorists.
“As long as the threat is there, we must use all the means,” he said, adding the state of emergency should stay in place “until we can get rid of Daesh.”
The French premier also called for a “total, global and ruthless” war against Daesh, which has swathes of land under control in Iraq and Syria since June 2014.
The state of emergency was imposed assailants struck at least six different venues in and around Paris on November 13, 2015. The terrorist attacks, claimed by Daesh, left 130 people dead and over 350 others wounded.
The exceptional measures adopted under the state of emergency empower the French police to keep people in their homes without trial, searching houses without judicial approval and blocking suspicious websites.
The new measures also include a ban on public demonstrations and allow authorities to dissolve groups inciting any acts that seriously affect public order in France.
UN rights specialists have called on the French government not to extend the state of emergency beyond February 2016 and instead ensure protection against any abuse of power while combating terror.
A number of French nationals are fighting alongside terror groups in Syria.
Refugee crisis in Europe
Valls warned that the European Union faces a grave danger from the ongoing refugee crisis.
He said the EU could not take all refugees fleeing the “terrible wars in Iraq or Syria. otherwise,” he added, “our societies will be totally destabilized.”
Europe has been facing an unprecedented inflow of refugees fleeing wars and violence in Africa and the Middle East, particularly Syria.
According to Valls, Europe needed to take urgent action to control its external borders, emphasizing that “if Europe is not capable of protecting its own borders, it’s the very idea of Europe that will be questioned.”
“We cannot say or accept that all refugees … can be welcomed in Europe, “ Valls noted, criticizing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called for her European partners to take on quotas of refugees.
He also said the EU needs to say in the strongest terms “that we will not welcome all the refugees in Europe.”
Last year, more than one million asylum seekers – the most since World War II – arrived in the European continent after making dangerous journeys by land and sea.
Everyday, about 2,000 refugees arrive in the European Union, according to official numbers.
As German independent TV station K-TV has revealed, the current refugee crisis is most likely the brain child of the afore-mentioned US military grand strategist General Thomas PM Barnett. Barnett was a strategic advisor to former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and currently works with the Israeli military consultancy firm Wikistrat. Wikistrat are close collaborators with US Africa Command (Africom). Barnett’s books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action have had a major influence on US/Israeli global military geostrategies.
A former student of Vice-Admiral Andrew K. Cebrowski, former director of the Office of Transformations in the US Department of Defense, Barnett’s work focuses on integrating Cebrowski’s concepts of Network Centred Warfare, Colonel Boyd’s OODA loop theory, and Lind’s Fourth Generation Warfare, by ‘simultaneously seeking to relate their yin-and-yang interplay to the larger economic reality of globalization’s emergence as the dominant characteristic of today’s strategic environment’.1
Barnett divides the world into ‘functioning core’, ‘non-integrating gap’ countries and ‘seam states’. The first category of ‘functioning core’ countries includes Europe and North America, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. These are economies which are actively integrating into the global economy. This category is subdivided into ‘old core’ Europe, the USA and Japan and ‘new core’, Brazil, Russia, China and India.
The second major category is the ‘non-integrated gap’. This is made up of the Caribbean Rim, Andean South America, Africa, parts of the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The third category contains some members of the first two. This category is referred to as the ‘Seam States’, countries which surround the Gap — such as Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Turkey, Greece, Algeria, Morocco, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil.
The former Pentagon general has developed the theory of the ‘Five Flows of Globalisation’ — five flows which must come about if US Zionist imperialism is to dominate the world. These involve the free flow of money, security, food, energy and people. The ‘free flows’ theory means breaking down nation-state structures, thus freeing up resources for pillage by US multinational corporations. The inundation of Europe with immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere is a key feature of Barnett’s geo-strategic thinking. That is why it would be wrong to see the immigrant crisis from Libya and Syria as an unintended consequence of NATO policy as some form of unforeseen blowback.
Europe’s top demographers have known for some time that the Southern Hemisphere countries are experiencing a population boom and what that means for Europe’s relative population decline. German sociologist and demographer Gunnar Heihsohn published a major book on this topic, Söhne und Weltmacht:Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen (Sons and World Power: The Rise of Terror and the Fall of Nations). In his book Heinsohn argues that population youth bulges were the driving factor behind European colonialism and world conquest. From 1900 to 2000 the population of the Muslim World has grown from 150 million to 1,200 million, an increase of 800 percent. He argues that large families tend to produce ‘superfluous’ sons, who, unable to find work at home, emigrate.
Heinsohn contends that these youth bulges can lead to extreme violence as the young men, needing to carve out a place for themselves in the world, often tend to resort to violence in order to survive. This is one of the many factors driving the Islamic State. The youth bulge means boom time for imperialism’s merchants of death, who are harnessing youthful anger and hatred for the fomentation of proxy wars against geopolitical enemies. Heinsohn predicted that Europe would be overwhelmed with Southern Hemisphere youths by 2015.
The German sociologist notes that Islamism is more a tool which enables disaffected ‘superfluous’ sons to justify genocide, rather than an ideology which they necessarily believe in. In other words, once demographic balances have been restored, the Korans will be for sale in second-hand book shops. He gives the example of Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores in the 15th and 16th century who, needing to kill in order to carve out colonies in the New World, made convenient use of the Bible in order to absolve themselves from feelings of guilt.
Heinsohn notes that Europe’s immigration policy contrasts markedly with that of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Europe, there are no requirements that immigrants possess the qualifications needed by European economies, whereas in Canada and Australia those with the highest skills are given preference. The result of these policies is that 98 percent of immigrants in Canada have higher qualifications than the native population, whereas in Europe only 10 percent have higher qualifications. At the same time, the percentage of highly qualified Europeans leaving the continent for the Anglophone world is rising steadily every year. In this sense one can understand the logic behind Anglo-Saxon imperialism of flooding Europe with uneducated immigrants, while simultaneously siphoning off the continent’s brains and skills, thus ensuring Anglo-American/Zionist global hegemony. It is the ability to take into account these complex demographic realities which constitutes the importance of Thomas P.M. Barnett’s grand strategy of US globalisation.
In her book Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy Kelly M. Greenhill argues that one of the reasons for Europe’s rapprochement with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was the latter’s offer to stem the tide of African emigration to Europe. It would be erroneous, therefore, to suggest that the chaos wrought by the Arab Spring was unintentional. While many European politicians may have wanted to prevent a chaotic overflow of immigration into Europe, the imperial agencies behind the Arab Spring wanted just that.
The mass exodus of migrants/refugees is a central part of the globalisation of class war in accordance with the Pentagon’s long term objectives of global hegemony or “Full Spectrum Dominance”. What we are dealing with here is a well-planned strategy of chaos. To paraphrase Shakespeare, it is madness but there is method in it.
General Barnett’s Wikistrat are heavily involved in the development of ‘crowd sourcing’ and ‘crowd leveraging’ technologies. Investigative journalist Andrey Fomine, using the analyses of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has convincingly shown that most of the twitter entries encouraging refugees/migrants in Turkey to travel to Germany come from the UK, USA and Australia.
What we are witnessing here is a covert war being waged by the Anglo-Saxon Zionist elite against the German Federal Republic. The low-intensity war is using people as weapons to create conditions of social chaos in order to prevent Berlin’s inevitable rapprochement with Moscow. The migrants cannot possibly integrate in German society if the German economy does inot integrate with Eurasia, as Germany will have no viable market for its exports.
Barnett has predicted that Muslim immigrants in Europe will form their own Islamist political parties. In his book Blueprint for Action he quotes approvingly from Oliver Roy’s Globalized Islam, who claims that while in the past working class Muslims would have joined Marxist political movements: “There are now in the West only two movements of radical protest that claim to be ‘internationalist’: the antiglobalization movement and radical Islam. For a rebel, to convert is to find a cause”
Both of these movements, that of ‘human rights’ and ‘jihad’, represent petty bourgeois objections to the global order, but as they do not have a scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production, they cannot possibly change that order. That is why they are both backed by the forces they supposedly oppose. Hence Barnett welcomes this development:
By channeling their sense of economic and social disconnecteness into political action, Muslims in Europe achieve connectivitiy with governments there that allow for their integration into political life on a peaceful basis while preserving a sense of cultural identity. (p. 292)
In other words, these movements will help increase and further entrench globalization, imperialism and class warfare.
In Europe’s case, this isn’t just the political release valve for both sides but an economic one as well: Europe needs workers to balance its rapidly aging population, while the Middle East needs to be able to siphon off a portion of its huge youth bulge for emigration. (p. 292)
Barnett predicts that the mass migration of people from the Middle East into Europe will lead to a ‘revival of ethnicity’. He argues that their immigration into Europe will generate a paradoxical attitude that will marry Muslim identity politics at home with European human rights evangelism in their countries of origin. He writes:
So when Muslims emigrate from the Middle East and immigrate into Europe, both regions respond to this transaction by becoming, respectively, more Islamic and more European in the near term, until such time passes that new rule sets emerge to define these profound forms of social(family ties), economic( remittances), and ultimately political connectivity. While the movement of Core citizens into the Gap occasionally force Core powers to defend them through military means…. a far more potent form of political connectivity comes in expatriate populations living inside the Core and agitating for their adopted nations to intervene militarily or diplomatically in their countries of origin in response to instability or political repression there. A good example of this, of course, is the role of Iraqi expatriates in the US decision to lead a multinational coalition into that country in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. (p. 294)
This is imperialist grand strategy accounting for demographics, economics, religion and ethnicity. But its core function is similar to the imperialist ideologies of the past: divide and conquer the workers of the world on the basis of religious and ethnic sectarianism, as well as bourgeois values such as human rights, thereby making the world “safe for capitalism” and global imperialist domination.
A recent example of expats mobilising for imperialist intervention in their own country was provided by demonstrations by Eritreans in Germany against President Issias Afwerki in 2012, with the predictable US NGO inspired slogan “Down, down dictator”.
Barnett predicts that Europe and Russia will disintegrate in the 21st Century, leaving only India and China to rival the United States. The US strategist clearly believes that coercive engineered mass migration into Europe, coupled with American occupation of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, will prevent Eurasian integration, whilst securing the US/Israeli control of Europe and the conquest of Africa, thereby establishing US/Israeli global supremacy in the 21st century.
The choreography and mediatisation of the ‘Refugees Welcome’ campaign bears a striking resemblance to the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ campaign launched less than 30 minutes after the first reports of the Paris terrorist attack in January 7th were broadcast.
Many of the migrants are receiving welcome booklets packed with maps and information distributed by an NGO called w2eu,which stands for welcome to the EU.
One is reminded of the non-violent revolution rule book by Zionist ideologue Gene Sharp which was used to train activists in the US/Israeli fomented counter-revolutions in North Africa in 2011.
British Prime Minister David Cameron says he wants to stamp out what he called spurious legal claims against war veterans.
He said ministers had been asked to draw up plans to restrict claims, including by curbing financial incentives for “no win, no fee” cases.
The statements come as about 280 UK veterans are currently being investigated over alleged abuse by soldiers during the Iraq War.
Lawyers said no-one was above the law, and many abuse cases had been proven.
The Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) was established to investigate allegations of murder, abuse and torture against Iraqi civilians by UK military personnel between 2003 and 2009.
According to media reports, IHAT has considered at least 1,515 possible victims – of whom 280 are alleged to have been unlawfully killed – and lawyers are continuing to refer cases of alleged abuse. The head of the inquiry, Mark Warwick, has said there are “lots of significant cases” and that discussions would be held over whether they met a war crimes threshold.
Earlier, Cameron said he feared people were being “solicited by lawyers” enticing them into making accusations, and was concerned many of them were fabricated.
“Our armed forces are rightly held to the highest standards – but I want our troops to know that when they get home from action overseas this government will protect them from being hounded by lawyers over claims that are totally without foundation,” Cameron said, adding he had ordered the National Security Council to produce “a comprehensive plan to stamp out this industry.
“It is very important that all forces should be responsible within the law,” a London-based political analyst Rodney Shakespeare told Press TV.
He said the UK society needs to uphold the principals of decent behavior adding this is disgraceful that the government is now putting heavy efforts into stopping the trend.
Our government is guilty of the most egregious criminal acts as defined by Nuremberg Principles, and we are bona fide members of the State Sponsors of Terrorism club.
When our government bombs the sovereign state of Syria without the consent of President al-Assad and without United Nations Security Council approval, we are committing war crimes of the highest order.
When we support and fund foreign mercenary terrorists that are invading Syria, we are state sponsors of terrorism. There are no “moderate” terrorists. The mercenaries are all being paid and enabled by the West and its allies, including Turkey (a NATO member), Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan.
On all counts we are guilty. We are war criminals and state sponsors of terrorism.
The popular refrain that “Assad must go”, echoed by Canada’s Defense Minister, Harjit Sajjan, is in itself an endorsement of criminality. Regime change operations are criminal according to international law.
A soft power complex that disseminates lies and confusion is seemingly sufficient to make gullible western audiences accept criminality, even as the pretexts for previous illegal invasions invariably reveal themselves to be self-serving fabrications.
Hussein didn’t have WMD, but Western sanctions before the pre-meditated Iraq invasion willfully destroyed water treatment facilities and subsequently killed almost two million people, including about half a million children.
Gaddafi wasn’t “bombing his own people” or destroying Libya. The West and its proxies did the killing. The bombing in Libya – in support of al Qaeda ground troops – targeted and destroyed civilian infrastructure, including the Great Man-Made River Project. The bombs and the foreign terrorist ground troops killed Libyans, including Gadaffi, but Western propagandists and “confusion mongers” always portray an inverted version of reality to justify their atrocities.
Likewise for Assad – he is defending his country from foreign terrorists, not “killing his own people” – the Western invaders are killing Assad’s people.
Assad is not starving his own people either. Recently the discredited Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) fabricated a story alleging that Assad was starving people in Madaya. Evidence has recently emerged, however, that Western-supported rebels have been stockpiling food and selling it to civilians at exorbitant prices. Again, Western military forces target civilians – with a view to killing and/or demoralizing them—for “strategic” purposes. Vanessa Beeley decodes the intentional misrepresentation of the Madaya psy op. by listing investigative questions that should have been asked to find the truth, but were not.
War crimes perpetrated by the West are always dressed in mantles of respectability. MSM spokespeople, all of whom have conflicts of interest, paint civilian murders as “collateral damage”. Some commentators use the phrase “collateral murder”, but more accurately the military doctrine of slaughtering civilians is mass murder. The 9/11 wars are all pre-meditated, the false pretexts are carefully manufactured by State Departments, Public Relations agencies, and intelligence agencies, and the mass murder is intentional. The 9/11 wars generate unforeseen developments, but the invasions and occupations were not and are not “mistakes”, as some commentators would have us believe.
NATO destroys, loots, and creates chaos so that it can impose its hegemony. Again, it’s an inversion of the ridiculous lie of “spreading democracy”. The destruction also serves to create waves of refugees that serve to destabilize other countries — Europe is arguably being destabilized with a view to keeping the EU subservient to the U.S oligarch interests. Interestingly, countries not being “sacrificed” include Israel and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia – and neither country is accepting refugees/imperial crime victims either.
All of these pre-meditated invasions point to a larger picture. Humanity is being sacrificed for the illusory benefit of the criminal 1% transnational oligarch class. If Western populations were to awaken to the barbaric crimes being perpetrated in their names, they would rightly bow their heads in shame.
The shame would be a strong foundation for shaking off the shackles of lies and war propaganda, and for withdrawing our consent to these crimes against humanity.
‘Staggering’ is how the UN has described the depth and nature of civilian suffering in post-war Iraq; citing over 18,000 civilians having been killed in the space of just this last year-and-a-half.
According to the report, conducted by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, an approximate 3.2 million people have also been displaced internally over this same period of time.
The UN report confirms the brutality of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ group, with its unprecedented levels of gruesome, rampant violence and criminality. But contrary to popular portrayal, the violence in Iraq isn’t limited to ISIS/ISIL, but includes various crimes committed by Iraqi troops, militiamen and Kurdish forces, as recorded in the UN report.
The UN also acknowledges that the recorded 18,802 civilians killed (and 36,245 wounded) between the beginning of 2014 and the end of 2015 could be much higher; the figures will logically be higher, because there are multiple no-go areas for journalists and activists, where crimes can’t be investigated.
Among the most brutal of the many brutal crimes committed by the foreign-backed ‘ISIS/ISIL’ was an incident in Mosul where victims were forced to lay down in front of a crowd while a bulldozer was driven over them, and the militants executing 19 women for refusing to submit to sex with ISIL fighters. Up to 900 children have also been reported abducted in Mosul and subjected to forced indoctrination and military training. The report also highlights the extent to which women and children have been subjected to sexual violence, and highlights the plight of some 3,500 people, mostly women and children from the Yazidi community, currently being held as slaves.
Read also, the UN Report on the Protection on Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq, May – October 2015.
And yet for all the instability and horrors of Iraq, some 245,000 desperate Syrians have reportedly crossed into Iraq to escape the horrors of neighbouring Syria; Syrians too have been paying the price for the invasion of Iraq and the destabilisation of the entire region. These horrors are inter-related, as is what is happening in Libya.
All of the horrors highlighted in the report, however, are simply from the passed year or so. The suffering of the Iraqi people and the humiliation and destruction of Iraqi society had already been going on a long time before this and before even the rise of the horrendous, foreign-funded ISIS/ISIL proxy army.
The governments of the US/UK and NATO essentially already committed genocide against the Iraqi people between 1990 and 2012, killing an estimated3.3 million, including 750,000 Iraqi children through either sanctions or war.
The illegal invasion and occupation from 2003 is estimated to have led to approximately 189,000 direct war deaths, but this doesn’t also include the hundreds of thousands more who died over the course of the invasion and occupation in general. This includes victims of displacement, victims of terrorism, and the many, many Sunni victims of the US-backed Shia ‘Death Squads’, and of course the many subsequent victims of the Sunni ‘ISIS/ISIL’, which many regard as a direct response to those US-backed Shia militias.
In every respect, the so-called ‘Islamic State’ owes its existence to its foreign patrons and to the illegal invasion of Iraq. As mass graves continue to be discovered, the UN has outright accused ISIS/ISIL of ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ in Iraq. Whether that means scores of individual jihadists and European teenagers are going to eventually be tried in an international court (the leader or ‘caliph’ of ISIL – the elusive Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – will probably never be tried, as he probably doesn’t exist), it’s a fair bet that the real funders and enablers of this ultra-violent sectarian nightmare will never face charges and neither will the governments, officials and corporations whose illegal warfare has created all of this suffering and death.
Whichever way we look at it – either by American/Western incompetence or by deliberate design; and there’s a massive case to be made for both – what we now know as ‘ISIS/ISIL’ is the monster-child of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Watch this video of an Iraq War veteran, and now-activist, recounting some of the horrific behaviour of invading American troops during the war, as he openly admits “I Helped Create ISIS”. Or examine the reality of the ISIS/ISIL ‘leadership’ and see where the organisation came from.
Aside from the invasion having been entirely illegal and aside from the false pretexts under which it was carried out, at least $75 billion was made in profit by American subcontracting companies alone, including Blackwater, CACI and Titan. United States’ Vice-President Dick Cheney’s company, Haliburton, made an approximate $39.5 Billion from the Iraq War alone.
Concerning the current situation, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said the latest study “illustrates what Iraqi refugees are attempting to escape when they flee to Europe and other regions. This is the horror they face in their homelands”. Go back now and re-watch the old footage of Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest of the mafia of War Criminals/Profiteers talking about the need to invade Iraq; worse, go back and watch them smugly declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’.
Better yet, go re-watch this interview with former American ally and CIA asset, Saddam Hussein, on the eve of the invasion and listen to him talking passionately and proudly about the history, heritage, culture and unity of the Iraqi nation (no sectarian talk, no Sunni/Shia divide, no terrorism), and see if you can get through it without either goosebumps or feeling sick to the pit of your stomach for what was to follow. And for what is still following even now, all these years later.
The lead, Western warmaking/regime-change countries intervening in northern Iraq and Syria held a strategy conference of their ministers of war in Paris on January 20. The meeting made waves in Canada because Ottawa was not invited to attend.
The meeting of ministers of the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands discussed ongoing plans for intervention in Syria and Iraq. Canada is fully engaged in that intervention, more so than some of the other countries attending in Paris. For example, neither Italy or Germany have fighter aircraft engaged in bombings. But Canada was not invited to the party because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a promise during the national election campaign of October 19, 2015 that, if elected, his government would withdraw its six fighter-bomber jets from the U.S.-led warmaking alliance and instead focus on ground operations, including training of allied Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
The decision not to invite Canada was likely taken by U.S. Secretary of Defense (sic) Ashton Carter. Never mind that the new Trudeau government is not keeping its electoral promise or that, to the contrary, it has promised to step up its military presence in northern Iraq. No, for the U.S. government, any deviation from its lead in the imperialist war agenda is punishable by shunning.
The U.S. views the Canadian electoral promise as a weak-kneed sop. It cares not a whiff about the war-weary Canadian public, repelled by Canada’s failed military intervention in Afghanistan. That intervention goes back to late 2001. 158 Canadian soldiers died in combat in Afghanistan. At least 59 of those who served have killed themselves upon their return, while, shamefully, the previous Conservative government in Ottawa did all it could to reduce to a minimum disability payments to injured, returned soldiers.
The U.S. snub is intended as a warning to the Trudeau government just in case any of its members are actually considering keeping their election promise. It needn’t worry, there is no evidence that any are doing so. Also, importantly, the snub is serving as a rallying cry for pro-war ideologues in Canada who never liked the election promise in the first place and now want it definitively buried.
The enclosed opinion article in the Globe and Mail is exactly the kind of knee-jerk, pro-war backlash that the U.S. government wanted to foment. The writer, David Bercuson, is a well-known military academic in Canada. He directs his criticisms not at the United States government for snubbing its loyal ally but at the Trudeau government for giving the U.S. a reason to do so.
Bercuson wrote a commentary last month in the Globe saying that Prime Minister Trudeau was asking for trouble with his allies by making flaky election promises over war and intervention in the Middle East.
Columnist Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, provides a different view of the snub in a January 18 column. He calls it a “welcome snub”. He says, “Trudeau’s Liberals won power on a pledge to end Canada’s combat mission in Iraq and Syria — in the air and on the ground. If they are serious about this, why should we expect the Americans to include Ottawa in their combat deliberations?
“More to the point, why should we want to be included?”
Ottawa is lucky to have carte blanche, more or less, in working out the subtleties of its desired intervention in Iraq and Syria. The two large opposition parties in Parliament support military intervention in the Middle East, differing only on how that should be done. Meanwhile, antiwar forces are weak and marginalized. Years of confusion over the regime change agenda of the imperialist countries in the in Africa and the Middle East (Mali, Libya, Egypt, Syria) combined now with utter disarray in the face of the anti-Russia drive of NATO have left antiwar forces marginalized.
Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page editor who writes The Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Global View” column, is not really a bad prose stylist, and his logic is not always unsound. But his unexamined assumptions lead him astray.
His latest installment is typical. Entitled “Why the U.S. Should Stand by the Saudis Against Iran,” it begins with not one premise, but two. The first, as the title suggest, is that the U.S. should stand by Riyadh in its time of woes. The second is that if the kingdom stumbles, only one person is to blame – President Obama.
The article opens on a promising note: “There is so much to detest about Saudi Arabia,” Stephens writes. It bans women from driving, it shuts its doors to Syrian refugees, it promotes “a bigoted and brutal version of Sunni Islam,” and it has “increased tensions with Iran by executing … a prominent radical Shiite cleric,” i.e., Nimr al-Nimr.
So why continue siding with a kingdom “that Israeli diplomat Dore Gold once called ‘Hatred’s Kingdom,’” Stephens asks, “especially when the administration is also trying to pursue further opening [sic] with Tehran?”
It’s a question that a lot of people are asking especially now that the collapse in oil prices means that the Saudis are less economically important than they once were. But Stephens says it would be wrong to abandon the kingdom “especially when it is under increasing economic strain from falling oil prices.”
Get that? It would be wrong to abandon the kingdom when oil is scarce and prices are high — because that’s when we need the Saudis the most — and it’s wrong to abandon the monarchy when oil is plentiful and prices are low when we need them the least. Oil, in other words, has nothing to do with it. It’s wrong because it’s wrong.
But Stephens thinks it’s wrong for another reason as well: because Saudi Arabia “feels acutely threatened by a resurgent Iran.” Why is Iran resurgent? Because the nuclear deal that it recently concluded with the U.S. has set it free from punishing economic sanctions.
He then goes on to list all the bad things Iran has done thanks to the power that the Obama administration has just handed it on a silver platter. “Despite fond White House hopes that the nuclear deal would moderate Iran’s behavior,” Stephens says, “Tehran hard-liners wasted no time this week disqualifying thousands of moderate candidates from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, and an Iranian-backed militia appears to be responsible for the recent kidnapping of three Americans in Iraq.”
Loaded Dice
Scary, eh? Yes – until one considers how Stephens has loaded the dice. His statement about Iran’s hardliners is accurate as far as it goes. But he might have pointed out that while Iran’s theocratic rulers certainly hobble democracy, they at least allow some sort of parliamentary elections to take place whereas Saudi Arabia, the regime he is now leaping to defend, allows exactly none. (Sorry, but last month’s meaningless municipal-council elections don’t count.)
In the Saudi kingdom, political parties, protests, even seminars in which intellectuals get to sound off are all verboten. Since March 2014, Saudis have been expressly forbidden to do anything that might undermine the status quo, including advocating atheism, criticizing Islam, participating in any form of political protest, or even joining a political party.
Stephens’s statement about the three kidnapped Americans is equally misleading. While Iran does indeed back such militias, Reuterscited U.S. government sources saying that “Washington had no reason to believe Tehran was involved in the kidnapping and did not believe the trio were being held in Iran.”
Plus, to follow Stephens’s logic, if Iran is responsible for specific actions like these, then Saudi Arabia is responsible for specific actions of the Sunni Salafist forces that it funds in Syria, which include lopping off the heads of Shi‘ites and committing many other such atrocities.
Stephens says that the U.S.-Iranian accord “guarantees Iran a $100 billion sanctions windfall,” a figure that the Council on Foreign Relations, no slouch when it comes to Iran bashing, describes as roughly double the true amount. He says Iran now enjoys “the protection of a major nuclear power” thanks to Russia’s intervention in Syria and agreement to supply Tehran with high-tech weaponry.
As a result, “Iranian proxies are active in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, and dominate much of southern Iraq. Restive Shiite populations in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province and neighboring Bahrain provide further openings for Iranian subversion on the Arabian peninsula.”
Possibly so – except that Stephens might have noted that Saudi proxies, up to and including Al Qaeda, are active in the same countries and that Shi‘ites in Bahrain and the Eastern Province might be a little less restive if Saudi repression were a little less savage.
Obama’s Fault
Then Stephens gets to his main point, which is the nefarious role of Obama:
“Add to this an American president who is ambivalent about the House of Saud the way Jimmy Carter was about the Shah of Iran, and no wonder Riyadh is acting the way it is. If the administration is now unhappy about the Saudi war in Yemen or its execution of Shiite radicals, it has only itself to blame.
“All this means that the right U.S. policy toward the Saudis is to hold them close and demonstrate serious support, lest they be tempted to continue freelancing their foreign policy in ways we might not like. It won’t happen in this administration, but a serious commitment to overthrow the Assad regime would be the place to start.”
In other words, if the Saudi monarchy chops off the heads of dissident Shi‘ites and sentences liberal blogger Raif Badawi to a thousand lashes, it’s because Obama doesn’t show enough love. Ditto Yemen. If Saudi air raids have killed some 2,800 civilians according to the latest UN estimates, including more than 500 children, it’s because Obama has allowed his affections to flag for the Saudi royals. If only he would hug the Saudi princes a little closer, they wouldn’t feel so lonely and bereft and would therefore respond more gently to their neighbors in the south. No blame should be cast on the Saudi leaders. Their behavior can’t be blamed on the contradictions between their playboy lifestyles and the ascetic extremes of Wahhabism or the baleful effects of raking in untold oil riches while doing no work in return. No, everything’s the fault of Obama and his yuppie ways.
What can one say about reasoning like this? Only that it makes Donald Trump and Ted Cruz seem like paragons of mental stability. But given that The Wall Street Journal has long filled its editorial pages with such swamp gas, why dwell on the feverish exhalations of just one right-wing columnist?
The answer is that Stephens speaks not just for himself, but for an entire neocon establishment that is beside itself over the mess in the Persian Gulf and desperate to avoid blame for the chaos (which is now spreading into Europe). So, talking points must be developed to shift responsibility.
The Lost Saudi Cause
But the Saudis may be beyond saving. With Iran preparing to put a million more barrels on the world oil market per day, prices – down better than 75 percent since mid-2014 – can only go lower. The Saudis, hemorrhaging money at the rate of $100 billion a year, know that when the foreign currency runs out, their power runs out too. Hence, they fear winding up as yet another failed Middle Eastern state like Syria.
“Islamic State and other jihadist groups would flourish,” Stephens observes, this time correctly. “Iran would seek to extend its reach in the Arabian peninsula. The kingdom’s plentiful stores of advanced Western military equipment would also fall into dangerous hands.”
It’s not a pretty picture, which is why the neocons are pointing the fingers at others, Obama first and foremost. As Jim Lobe recently observed, all the usual suspects are pitching in in behalf of their Saudi friends – Elliott Abrams, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and so on. All are furious at what Obama administration has done to their beloved petro-sheiks.
As neocon theorist Max Book put it at the Commentary Magazine website: “The American policy should be clear: We should stand with the Saudis – and the Egyptians, and the Jordanians, and the Emiratis, and the Turks, and the Israels [sic], and all of our other allies – to stop the new Persian Empire. But the Obama administration, morally and strategically confused, is instead coddling Iran in the vain hope that it will somehow turn Tehran from enemy into friend.”
Something else is also at work, however – the I-word. As Lobe notes, neocons have done an about-face with regard to the Saudis. Where Richard Perle once called on the Bush administration to include Riyadh on his post-9/11 hit list, the neocons are now firmly on the Saudis’ side.
Why? The reason is Israel, which has decided since tangling with Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War that the Shi‘ites are its chief enemy and the Sunni petro-monarchies, comparatively speaking, its friend. Like Communists responding to the latest directive from Moscow, the neocons have turned on a dime as a consequence, churning out reams of propaganda in support of Arab countries they once loathed.
A Saudi Makeover
In the neocon domain, Saudi Arabia has undergone a wondrous makeover, transformed from a bastion of reaction and anti-Semitism to a country that is somehow peace-loving and progressive. Formerly an enemy of Washington – or at best a distasteful gang of business associates supplying lots of oil and buying lots of guns – Saudi Arabia has been re-invented as America’s dearest friend in the Arab world.
People like Bret Stephens have done their bit in behalf of the cause, turning out article after article whose real purpose is hidden from view. Where neocons formerly scorned anyone who spoke well of the Saudis, they now denounce anyone who speaks ill.
The funny thing is that Obama is to blame for the disaster in the Middle East, not because he disregarded the latest diktat from the Washington neocon-dominated foreign-policy establishment, but because he has accepted its priorities all too dutifully. He stood by as Qatar steered hundreds of millions of dollars to Salafist jihadis in Libya and while the Saudis, Qataris, and other Gulf states did the same to Sunni fundamentalists in Syria.
Obama’s response to Saudi Arabia’s repression of Arab Spring protests in Bahrain was muted, he refused to condemn the beheading of al-Nimr — the best the State Department could come up with was a statement declaring that the execution risked “exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced” — and Obama has even given military support to the kingdom’s air assault on Yemen.
Yet now the neocons blame him for not doing enough to keep the Saudis happy.
As noted by numerous commentators on the Middle East, the situation in Yemen remains very grave. The country has been devastated by the armed conflict being waged between the Houthis and the troops of ousted President Mansour Hadi, which in turn are being heavily supported by the air forces of the so-called Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
The ongoing airstrikes claim civilians lives, leave districts in ruin, and destroy the country’s infrastructure. Earlier this month at least three people were killed in an air raid on the hospital of Doctors Without Borders in the governorate of Saada. It’s been reported that hospitals are closing their doors, unable to operate under the current circumstances.
This is not the first medical facility to be bombed in Yemen – the so-called Arab coalition has even destroyed the Center for Care and Rehabilitation of the blind in the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Moreover, the international Human Rights Watch organization reported that the coalition was using cluster bombs to destroy certain facilities in Sana’a back in January.
One should note that massive civil unrest began in Yemen in 2011 as the direct result of so-called the Arab Spring, orchestrated by the US and its allies. In 2014, Shia tribesmen that are known today as the Houthis started fighting government forces and consequently managed to capture a significant part of the country due to the massive support that was shown for them by the Yemeni population. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia launched its first airstrikes against the Houthis, which were, according to various human rights organizations, badly coordinated and resulted in massive civilian casualties.
Concerned by the grave state of affairs in Yemen, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein announced at a meeting of the UN Security Council back in December that it is the so-called Arab coalition that is responsible for the absolute majority of attacks on residential areas and civilian targets in Yemen. According to Reuters, the UN High Commissioner announced that he:
“observed with extreme concern heavy shelling from the ground and air in areas of Yemen with a high concentration of civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools.”
It is curious to note that in pursuit of its criminal goals in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has been using weapons that were bought from the UK in 2012. Moreover, it keeps on restocking its supply of deadly British-made weapons. For this reason, at the end of last year, leading British diplomats and lawyers warned David Cameron that he was running the risk of facing an international tribunal for war crimes due to the fact that the weapons that his government supplies to Saudi Arabia are being extensively used against civilian targets in Yemen.
“Advisers to Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, have stepped up legal warnings that the sale of specialist missiles to the Saudis, deployed throughout nine months of almost daily bombing raids in west Yemen against Houthi rebels, may breach international humanitarian law…
… thousands of Yemeni civilians have been killed, with schools, hospitals and non-military infrastructure hit. Fuel and food shortages, according to the United Nations, have brought near famine to many parts of the country.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other NGOs, claim there is no doubt that weapons supplied by the UK and the United States have hit Yemeni civilian targets. One senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) legal adviser told The Independent: “The Foreign Secretary has acknowledged that some weapons supplied by the UK have been used by the Saudis in Yemen. Are our reassurances correct – that such sales are within international arms treaty rules? The answer is, sadly, not at all clear.”
Yet, The Guardian notes that Saferworld and Amnesty released a legal opinion from Professor Philippe Sands QC and a number of other lawyers, according to which the sales of British arms to Saudi Arabia in the light of its military intervention and bombing of Yemen violate national, European and international laws. The lawyers are pointing out that in the period of 9 months before July 2015 the UK supplied 9 million pounds worth of rockets and bombs, while in the next three months this number hit a staggering one billion pounds. Additionally, there’s clear evidence that those weapons were used against hospitals, schools, markets, warehouses, ports, and camps for displaced persons, turning Yemen into a nightmare. The Saferworld human rights organization is convinced that there’s a direct link between the increase in sales of ammunition and bombings in Yemen.
Many British observers, including those from The Guardian, have been pointing out that days after David Cameron’s statements about his attempt to “initiate a political process in Yemen,” and remarks that “there could be no military solution in Yemen,” the data released by the government showed that UK officials approved the sale of a billion pounds worth of bombs to Saudi Arabia.
Under these circumstances the only natural question is: Will international human rights organizations and the international community as a whole, all those who failed to say a resounding “NO” to Western military interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, that were only profitable for arms sellers, carry on watching silently the destruction of Yemen? How many Yemenis do we need to see die before we start solving conflicts within a political framework? How many lives should be spared? Do we ever bring to justice those responsible for such massacres? Or will we rather allow politicians, the likes of Cameron, to call for peace, while selling huge amounts of deadly weapons behind our backs with impunity?
Martin Berger is a Czech-based freelance journalist and analyst.
Almost two dozen people, including civilian rescuers and an ambulance driver from an MSF-affiliated hospital, have reportedly been killed after Saudi-led coalition planes carried out repeated airstrikes on the same target in Sa’ada province, Yemen.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) confirmed the fatal air raids in Sa’ada, saying the “planes went back to bomb areas already hit.”
“An ambulance driver from an MSF hospital [was] killed,” the NGO wrote, explaining that the first responders at the scene had been trying to help those wounded in the first round of strikes.
The ambulance had just picked up the victims when a direct strike killed everyone inside it, said the director of the Jumhuriya Hospital in Sa’ada province, according to the New York Times.
Yemen’s Health Ministry has strongly condemned the coalition’s actions as a “heinous massacre” that first targeted a residential building in Sa’ada, Saba news agency reports, citing ministry spokesperson Dr. Nashwan Attab.
According to reports, at least 20 people were killed and another 35 wounded, in what the medics claim was a deliberate attack. Following the initial air raid in the Dhahyan district of Sa’ada, first responders rushed to the scene to care for the wounded. But the planes soon returned to strike again in an attempt to “completely eliminate the few remaining medical staff in the province,” Dr. Attab said.
WARNING! DISTURBING VIDEO, VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!
“There are still people under the rubble and it is difficult to get them as a result of targeting by Saudi aggression of paramedics and medical personnel in the region,” he added.
Earlier this week, MSF said that the Saudi coalition continues to engage civilian targets on the ground, in particular medical treatment facilities, noting that over 100 hospitals have witnessed attacks since the Saudi-led intervention began last March.
The constant bombing of health clinics in Yemen has created conditions in which locals fear for their lives and try to avoid hospitals at all costs, MSF said. The United Nations has criticized the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen for the disproportionate number of civilian deaths and the destruction of infrastructure.
The UN estimates that the violence has resulted in a dramatic increase in civilian casualties, with more than 5,800 people killed in Yemen since March.
Andrey Lugovoy, accused of being involved in the death of former Russian FSB secret service agent Alexander Litvinenko by a recent UK inquiry, says the British intelligence tried recruiting him prior to Litvinenko’s death.
On Thursday, a UK inquiry into the case of Litvinenko found his former colleagues Dmitry Kovtun and Andrey Lugovoy deliberately poisoned Litvinenko with polonium-210.
Lugovoy said during the “Evening With Vladimir Solovyov” show on the Rossiya 1 TV channel that he was likely exposed to polonium simultaneously with Litvinenko.
Lugovoy also drew a connection between the death of Litvinenko and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
“Litvinenko died in November 2006, in March-April I was openly offered cooperation [by MI6] and in order to motivate me somehow, I was denied a visa, that was in May 2006. And after I called Litvinenko – I’ve said this multiple times – I was granted a visa all of a sudden. I have always connected these two events,” Lugovoy recalled.
He stressed that prior to May 2006, he had always received British visas without any problems.
“They [UK] always gave me visas, and did it with great pleasure before May 2006, when I was denied a visa after the British intelligence MI6 tried recruiting me.”
Lugovoy Plans to Stay in Russia After Release of UK Litvinenko Case Inquiry Report
Andrey Lugovoy, a former colleague of Alexander Litvinenko, does not plan to go to court to clear his name and does not intend to leave Russia in view of the recent developments in the Litvinenko case.
“I don’t care about anything they say,” Lugovoy said during the “Evening With Vladimir Solovyov” show on the Rossiya 1 TV channel.
Asked whether he plans to go to court, or clear his name somehow, Lugovoy said “I don’t intend to do that, because if I go into that, it means I will attach importance to what the British are doing, and they are trying to do everything so that we pay more attention to it [the UK inquiry], so that we react to it somehow.”
Lugovoy stressed that he has no plans of leaving Russia amid new claims related to Litvinenko’s death.
“I have not left Russia for a long time now and I do not plan to do it.”
Litvinenko moved from Russia to the United Kingdom in 2000. He died in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea with Kovtun and Lugovoy in London.
Lugovoy stated in the past that he had passed a polygraph test conducted by British experts, which proves that he was not guilty of murdering the former FSB agent.
The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that the UK inquiry revealed on Thursday was politicized and lacked transparency and had an adverse effect on Moscow-London relations.
The brother of Aleksandr Litvinenko says the UK government had more motivation to kill him than Russia did, despite a British public inquiry which concluded that President Putin “probably” approved the assassination.
Maksim Litvinenko, Aleksandr’s younger brother who lives in Rimini, Italy, responded to the Thursday report by saying it was “ridiculous” to blame the Kremlin for the murder of his brother, stating that he believes British security services had more of a motive to carry out the assassination.
“My father and I are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It’s all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government,” Litvinenko told the Mirror, adding that such reasoning is the only explanation as to why the inquiry was launched 10 years after his brother’s death.
He called the British report a “smear” on Putin, and stressed that rumors claiming his brother was an enemy of the state are false. He added that Aleksandr had planned to return to Russia, and had even told friends about the move.
Litvinenko went on to downplay his brother’s alleged role as a spy, working for either Russia or MI6, adding that the Western media is to blame for such characterization.
“The Russians had no reason to want Alexander dead,” he said. “My brother was not a spy, he was more like a policeman… he was in the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service] but he worked against organized crime, murders, arms trafficking, stuff like that.”
Litvinenko was murdered in London in 2006, when assassins allegedly slipped radioactive polonium 21 into his cup of tea at a hotel. But his brother Maksim cast doubt on whether that was actually the poison used, saying he believes it could have been planted to frame the Russians.
“I believe he could have been killed by another poison, maybe thallium, which killed him slowly, and the polonium was planted afterwards,” he said. He added that requests to have his brother’s body exhumed, in order to verify the presence of polonium, have been ignored by Britain.
“Now after 10 years any trace [of polonium or thallium] would have disappeared anyway, so we will never know,” he said, adding that British authorities had not collaborated with Russian investigators on the case.
“This case became a big PR campaign against the Russian government and its president in particular,” Maksim Litvinenko told RT in an interview in 2014. “The West is pressuring Russia very hard now. The MH-17 crash, Crimea, the war in Ukraine, sanctions against Moscow and now this inquiry – I’m not buying that this is a coincidence.”
When asked why Aleksandr Litvinenko’s widow Marina continues to maintain that the Kremlin is responsible for the murder, he said: “She lives in London, to survive she has to play the game and take this point of view. She can’t say anything else.”
Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry has also dismissed the British report, blaming London for politicizing the “purely criminal” case of Litvinenko’s death.
Russia’s UK ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, told RT that the inquiry’s conclusion was “not justified,” and that the investigation was “very politicized” and “biased.”
“In order to prove something, you have to present the facts. As soon as the British side proves…their conclusions, we will be ready to consider [them],” the ambassador said, adding that the Russian side “did not even have a chance to study the documents [of the investigation].”
An NSA document purporting to show Russian military hacker attempts to access a Florida company which makes voter registration software is sent anonymously to The Intercept. A low-level NSA contractor, Reality Winner, is arrested almost immediately. What’s wrong with this picture? A lot. … continue
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