The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. With 2.2 million people behind bars, and millions more on probation or parole, 1 in 35 American adults is caught up in the prison system. AJ+ teamed up with The Marshall Project to examine why.
Some 574 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli occupation forces in July, a joint statement by human rights groups revealed yesterday.
The Prisoners’ Affairs Commission, Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and Al-Mezan Human Rights Association said in their statement that 189 Palestinian were arrested from occupied Jerusalem, 869 from the West Bank and 16 from the Gaza Strip.
The numbers include 112 children and 12 women.
There are currently around 350 Palestinian children being held in Israeli the prisons of Megiddo and Ofer located west of occupied Ramallah, the statement said.
This is in addition to the 62 women, including 13 minors, who are also being held.
Twenty-one Palestinian journalists are also being detained.
Occupation forces issued 127 administrative detention orders in July, 38 of them were new. This brings the number of Palestinians held under this system to 750, the statement said.
TULKAREM – Israeli forces on Wednesday detained three siblings of Malik Ubeid, a Palestinian from the village of Farun in the northern occupied West Bank district of Tulkarem who is wanted by Israeli authorities, just two days after the detention of his mother and brother, as an attempt to pressure Malik to turn himself in to Israeli authorities, Palestinian security sources said.
Sources told Ma’an that Majdi, Qatiya, and Maha Ubeid were detained after Israeli forces raided their house. Israeli forces also attempted to detain Malik Ubeid himself in the early morning hours on Tuesday during a military raid in the Farun village, but failed, and instead detained four Palestinian youths.
Locals told Ma’an that Israeli forces have raided the Ubeid home several times, but have failed to detain him.
Malik’s mother and brother, Wafiqa Daoud Nasser Ubeid and Suleiman Ahmad Abd al-Qader Ubeid, were detained on Monday after being summoned to the Israeli liaison offices.
Malik’s mother has reportedly been released, according to sources. It remained unclear whether his brother remained in custody as of Wednesday.
Israeli authorities also reportedly telephoned Malik’s brother-in-law, who lives in the Tulkarem refugee camp, on Monday and threatened to detain Malik’s sisters if he didn’t turn himself in.
An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an she could not provide a comment on the detentions, but would look into reports.
It remained unclear what Malik has been suspected of by Israeli authorities.
Israeli authorities have often come under criticism for policies aimed at punishing the families of Palestinians suspected of wrongdoing, including routinely detaining family members of wanted Palestinians, with rights groups calling the policies a form of “collective punishment” which target those who have not committed any crime.
Official documents on Britain’s relationship with Israel, including papers on “military and nuclear collaboration” in the 1970s, have disappeared from the National Archives in the last four years.
More than 400 records have gone missing from the repository in Kew, southwest London, including a 1947 letter from Winston Churchill and a Home Office document on the 1910 Suffragettes “disturbances.”
The Archives reassured the public it is following a “robust” plan to find the lost files.
The loss of the documents was uncovered following a BBC freedom of information (FoI) request, which found the last recorded knowledge of the 402 historical dossiers was January 2012.
Among them is a Foreign Office file titled ‘Military and nuclear collaboration with Israel: Israeli nuclear armament,’ in which the British government notes Israel’s intention to purchase nuclear weapons.
The document is thought to be linked to a United Nations resolution from 1978 listing the “increasing evidence” of the Middle Eastern country’s attempts at acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
This is not the only National Archives paper to report on Anglo-Israeli nuclear agreements. A 1958 document, made public by the BBC a decade ago, showed how Britain sold 20 tons of heavy water – one of the ingredients needed to generate plutonium – to Israel, to be used in the country’s top secret Dimona nuclear reactor.
The lost file is believed to have been part of a portfolio of official 1970s documents on arms control and nuclear disarmament.
Israel neither admits nor denies its possession of nuclear weapons and has never publicly tested one. It is universally believed to have them, however, but its official secrecy means it is unclear exactly how many.
It is thought that the files may have simply been misplaced and will soon be found. National Archives officials highlighted that less than 0.01 percent of the library’s 11 million public records disappear, accounting for around 100 files each year.
“We are a working archive with a robust, ongoing program dedicated to locating misplaced documents and many are subsequently found again after a thorough search,” a spokesperson for the Archives said.
Around 1,600 documents were reported missing between 2005 and 2011.
“The challenge is to ensure that you’ve got the systems to prevent that, because with every loss of a potential piece of archive you’re losing some history and understanding,” said Labour MP and All-Party Parliamentary Group on Archives and History vice-chair Tristram Hunt.
“You’re losing a sense of connection and you’re losing the fabric of the past.”
More than two weeks after Turkey’s dramatic failed coup, what exactly happened remains shrouded in mystery leaving only speculation that has hardened into “fact” in the absence of convincing evidence.
Two main theories have emerged: The first is that this was yet another in a long line of CIA-backed coups. The other is that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan either staged or let the coup happen to give him the opportunity to consolidate his rule through a vicious and ongoing purge of his perceived enemies.
The first theory has now passed into the realm of “fact” because some commentators unquestioningly accept that the CIA tried to remove Erdogan for suddenly seeking to repair relations with Russia, Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Assad is a man Erdogan has squandered substantial political capital trying to overthrow for five years.
This theory asserts that defeating the coup was a “victory against the U.S. empire” because Erdogan has defied Washington by suddenly moving Turkey into the multipolar camp with a view towards Eurasian union, rather than the European Union.
“Suddenly” is the key word. What led to Erdogan’s apparent about-face? His Syria policy of supporting ISIS and opposing Damascus, Moscow and Teheran completely blew up in his face. He failed to overthrow Assad. Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane damaged Turkey’s economy (when Russia imposed retaliatory sanctions). ISIS turned on him, attacking Ataturk Airport. He was on the ropes. Erdogan is a supreme survivor. He’ll switch enemies and friends on a dime if need be. He’s proven no loyalty but to himself.
Tactical or Strategic?
For the moment, Erdogan’s shift instead appears to be a short-term, tactical, move, to ensure his survival. Time will tell whether it is also strategic. It’s too early to declare he’s turned his back on the U.S., NATO and the European Union and joined the multipolar world. I doubt Moscow, Tehran and Damascus fully trust Erdogan’s overtures as a long-term commitment, willing as they are to feel him out.
The Turkish government, though not Erdogan himself, has blamed the U.S. for the coup. A hardline conservative newspaper that backs Erdogan, Yeni ?afak, has even named U.S. General John F. Campbell as “one of the top figures who organized and managed the soldiers behind the failed coup attempt,” citing “sources close to ongoing legal process” against those arrested for the coup. It said Campbell “managed’ more than $2 billion to pay for the coup through CIA links with UBA Bank in Nigeria.
Without named sources or documentary evidence, which covert operations by their nature rarely yield, it’s easy to blame the CIA. In this case, the speculation rests on two assumptions, the first is the supposed U.S. reaction to Erdogan’s pivot East. But as Philip Giraldi, a former CIA agent who was stationed in Turkey, has pointed out the coup plotters and other Erdogan opponents hated his Syria policy and would welcome his rapprochement with Assad and a move East.
The coup’s motive may have instead been to stop Erdogan, who sees a Sultan in the mirror, from continuing his march to one-man rule. The coup leaders called themselves the Peace Council, claiming they wanted to restore democracy and overthrow a tyrant who is ruling unconstitutionally. (Erdogan is already ruling as though Turkey has changed to a presidential system, though the referendum he wants hasn’t yet been held.)
The “Terrorists”
The second assumption is that Erdogan’s arch-enemy, the Pennsylvania-based imam Fethullah Gülen who Erdogan blames for masterminding the coup, is a CIA asset running a “terrorist” organization. Erdogan calls anyone who disagrees with him a “terrorist”: academics, journalists, Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament. I’m surprised he hasn’t called Pope Francis a terrorist for calling Armenia a genocide.
The only evidence offered connecting Gülen with the CIA is a letter written by Graham Fuller, a former CIA agent once posted in Turkey, in support of Gülen’s 2006 U.S. green card application. Fuller himself has condemned the coup and his blog is often highly critical of U.S. Middle East policy.
Gülen communicates daily to his followers around the world in sermons viewed over the internet. These as well as his other communications must be monitored by the Turkish government. Evidence that would stand up in a U.S. court of Gülen ordering the coup is what Washington would need in Erdogan’s frantic extradition request for Gülen. The quality of that evidence could determine whether Gülen was behind the coup. Of course, if you already believe the CIA did it, you won’t believe what a U.S. court says.
Even without proof, it can’t be ruled out that military men inspired by Gülen may have been involved (with secular Kemalists). But Gülenists have been more numerous in the police than the military.
I was the first American reporter to interview Gülen for The Wall Street Journal, when I visited him in his Pennsylvania compound in 2010. I’ve studied the group the past six years, getting to know dozens of his followers, visiting schools in the U.S, Turkey and elsewhere.
In my research, I have been on the inside living with his followers while teaching English at one of the schools. Religion is not taught. It is not in the curriculum. The idea that these are jihadist madrases, or that Gülenists are extremists or terrorists is beyond absurd as anyone who knows them will attest.
One such person is John Esposito of Georgetown University, one of America’s leading experts on Islam. In this video interview, Esposito calls Gülen’s a “pluralistic” movement “unique” to Islam.
Though I disagree with Gülen on certain things, notably his lack of criticism of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, it is ludicrous to accept Erdogan’s branding of his followers as terrorists. The Gülenists have no political party. It is a social movement that does however seek to influence Turkey’s political direction. They were almost certainly behind the leaked audio of Erdogan telephone calls exposing his corruption in a real estate deal.
The New York Times reported that my interview with Gülen, in which he took Israel’s side in the Mavi Marmara incident, led to the first open breech in the uneasy alliance between Gülen and Erdogan. The leaked telephone calls were the last straw. Erdogan fired and arrested policemen and judges who dared investigate the corruption allegations.
In response to the coup attempt, Erdogan has shut down every Gülen-affiliated institution in Turkey by decree, including thousands of schools, foundations and charities. He finished the job of shutting down all of its media properties.
“A Gift From God”
In all, 60,000 people in the military, civil service, judiciary and academia, who couldn’t possibly have all been involved with the coup, have either lost their jobs or been arrested in Erdogan’s ruthless retaliation. Amnesty International says some have been tortured.
Worse for the coup plotters, their gambit has fortified his mounting absolute rule, which brings us to the other theory: that Erdogan either staged or allowed the coup to happen. Gülen himself alleges it was staged. His followers name an Erdogan-loyal general, Mehmet Disli, who they claim gave the order to start the coup.
Because Erdogan knew of the coup hours before, there is a stronger possibility that he let it happen to smoke out disloyal officers, confident his handpicked brass would crush it. They may have played along with the coup and then double-crossed the coup leaders once it was underway. It would be a seriously amateurish attempt to go ahead without the consent of the top military leadership.
Erdogan seized the chance the coup afforded him, which he himself called “a gift from God,” to solidify his rule over Turkey like a Gulf monarch, while accruing international support and even sympathy.
Erdogan’s Rise to Power
At this point we need to step back a moment and look at Erdogan’s slow rise to power and how he took control of a hostile, secular military. Erdogan deceived plenty of people in Turkey, but especially in the West. He was seen as the leader of a model Islamic democracy who would put the military under civilian control.
Erdogan’s AKP party is essentially part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohammad Morsi named his Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood party after Erdogan’s — The Justice and Development Party. The Brotherhood’s strategy is to gain power through elections and then gradually implement an Islamist agenda, as opposed to attempting to seize power violently like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State — like the Mensheviks, rather than the Bolsheviks.
I took part with a small group of reporters interviewing Erdogan at the United Nations in New York in 2009. At the time his strategy of getting the Turkish military out of politics, in which they had intervened in four coups, seemed convincing. He sought to root out the Ergenekon underground network of organized crime, military and intelligence officers in the Turkish Deep State in a move that appeared to be in favor of civilian-led democracy.
But as the Turkish opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the People’s Republican Party (CHP), told me in a one-on-one interview in Washington in 2014, Erdogan arrested the wrong people supposedly involved in the Ergenekon conspiracy. Many innocent people were falsely charged at a time the Gülenists supported the move to get the military out of politics.
In fact Erdogan was cleverly replacing the brass with his own military men and seized control of the Deep State. His actions, especially after the failed coup, show that democracy has not been his motive.
Would the CIA have organized a coup without the support of the top brass? Would the CIA have moved so quickly on what might just be a short-term tactical shift by Erdogan? Were Gülenists involved in the coup or was it Erdogan’s version of the Reichstag fire? These are questions that may never be answered leaving us mired in speculation — a poor substitute for the facts.
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist based at the U.N. since 1990. He can be reached atjoelauria@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.
Once in a while one of the videos somebody emails me a link to turns out to be well worth watching. Such is this one. In it a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union tries to explain to Vladimir Putin why new U.S. missile bases near the border of Russia should not be understood as threatening. He explains that the motivation in Washington, D.C., is not to threaten Russia but to create jobs. Putin responds that, in that case, the United States could have created jobs in peaceful industries rather than in war.
Putin may or may not be familiar with U.S. economic studies finding that, in fact, the same investment in peaceful industries would create more jobs than does military spending. But he is almost certainly aware that, in U.S. politics, elected officials have, for the better part of a century, only been willing to invest heavily in military jobs and no others. Still, Putin, who may also be familiar with how routine it has become for Congress members to talk about the military as a jobs program, appears in the video a bit surprised that someone would offer that excuse to a foreign government fixed in U.S. sights.
Timothy Skeers who sent me the video link commented: “Maybe Khrushchev should have just told Kennedy he was just trying to create jobs for Soviet citizens when he put those missiles in Cuba.” Imagining how that would have played out may help people in the United States to grasp how their elected officials sound to the rest of the world.
That one main motivation for U.S. military expansion in Eastern Europe is “jobs,” or rather, profits, is almost openly admitted by the Pentagon. In May the Politico newspaper reported on Pentagon testimony in Congress to the effect that Russia had a superior and threatening military, but followed that with this: “‘This is the “Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling” set in the Army,’ the senior Pentagon officer said. ‘These guys want us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation: The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. What a crock.”
Politico then cited a less-than-credible “study” of Russian military superiority and aggression and added:
“While the reporting about the Army study made headlines in the major media, a large number in the military’s influential retired community, including former senior Army officers, rolled their eyes. ‘That’s news to me,’ one of these highly respected officers told me. ‘Swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles? Surprisingly lethal tanks? How come this is the first we’ve heard of it?'”
It’s always the retired officials speaking truth to corruption, inlcuding retired Ambassador Jack Matlock in the video. Money and bureaucracy are euphemized as “jobs,” and their influence is real but still explains nothing. You can have money and bureaucracy promote peaceful industries. The choice to promote war is not a rational one. In fact, it is well described by a U.S. writer in the New York Times projecting U.S. attitudes onto Russia and Putin:
“The strategic purpose of his wars is war itself. This is true in Ukraine, where territory was a mere pretext, and this is true of Syria, where protecting Mr. Assad and fighting ISIS are pretexts too. Both conflicts are wars with no end in sight because, in Mr. Putin’s view, only at war can Russia feel at peace.”
This was, in fact, how the New York Times reported last October on the event from which the video linked above is taken. (More here.) I condemn the Russian bombing of Syria all the time, including on Russian media on almost a weekly basis, but if there is a nation that is always at war it is the United States, which backed a right-wing anti-Russia coup in Ukraine and now refers to the Russian response as irrational war-making.
The wisdom of the New York Times writer, like the wisdom of Nuremberg, is selectively applied in a hostile manner, but still wise. The purpose of war is indeed war itself. The justifications are always pretexts.
The ad pierces your consciousness and catches you by surprise. Plastered on the side of King County Metro buses, it hurls you momentarily back in time, to a time when nuclear weapons were an imminent threat to our survival. Or did the era never end?
The ad — sponsored by activists from the Poulsbo-based Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action — reads: “20 miles west of Seattle is the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S.”
Behind this text is a map, depicting the proximity of Seattle to Naval Base Kitsap, located on the eastern shore of Hood Canal. The base is home port for eight of the U.S. Navy’s fourteen Trident ballistic missile submarines and an underground nuclear weapons storage complex. Together they’re believed to store more than 1,300 nuclear warheads, according to Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
This is arguably the biggest single concentration of nuclear warheads not only in the U.S., but in the world.
King County Metro was initially hesitant to run the ad, until Kristensen confirmed its accuracy. The combined explosive power contained in the base is equivalent to more than 14,000 Hiroshima bombs, he says.
But the most surprising thing to him about the underground nuclear weapons storage complex — known as the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWF-PAC), and completed in 2012 — is the extent to which a $294 million bunker has largely escaped public debate, except for a few industry-related articles.
The small non-profit behind the ad shares a land border with the naval base. It launched when Robert Aldridge, an engineer for Lockheed Martin — the arms manufacturer with a plant on the base — quit his job directing development of Trident ballistic missiles at the base, when he saw they could be used in a preemptive first strike against the Soviet Union.
According to Glen Milner, an active member of the Center, Aldridge then contacted two peace activists in the area — Catholic theologian Jim Douglas and his wife Shelley — and the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action was formed.
For a time, Ground Zero was successful in engaging the public. When the first Trident warship arrived in Hood Canal in 1982, several thousand protesters gathered on shore and a small flotilla of boats to meet it. The U.S. Coast Guard kept them at bay by severing outboard gas lines and threatening to use fire-hoses.
When nuclear warheads began to arrive at Naval Base Kitsap on rail cars from a Pantex assembly plant in north Texas, momentum in the anti-nuclear movement began to build. The rail cars were initially white, says Milner. As a result, the “white trains” became a focal point not only for anti-nuclear weapons protesters in Washington but around the country. The trains were met by protesters on their way to Bangor. After this, the Department of Energy stopped shipping warheads by train and began moving them via unmarked trucks and trailers.
The enormous amount of nuclear weaponry in Seattle’s backyard is no secret to industry analysts, military contractors, or public officials. But the general public is less informed, say those who initiated Ground Zero’s bus campaign. They describe the goals of the advertisements as two-fold: to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the naval base, and to re-ignite public debate about nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal.
“This is a wake up call,” says Ground Zero’s Leonard Eiger. “Why do these nuclear weapons exist 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why do we continue to not only deploy them but why are we maintaining them and planning for a new fleet that could run over $100 billion? What are the economic, political and social costs?”
The Washington Military Alliance — a group formally established in 2014 by Governor Jay Inslee, which advocates for military investment in the state — notes that Naval Base Kitsap is a driving economic force in the region. 56 percent of all military revenue coming into the state relies on the U.S. Navy, says Kristine Reeves, spokesperson for the Alliance.
“Our focus is how do we partner at the state level to ensure that this $13 billion dollar industry, representing over three percent of our GDP, is strategic about investments being made,” says Reeves. “We’re not necessarily interested in whether nuclear weapons are good or bad. What we are interested in is furthering the great partnership with the U.S. Navy from a public-private perspective, economic perspective and environmental.”
Naval Base Kitsap is the third-largest Navy base in the U.S., one of only two strategic nuclear weapons facilities, and is the Navy’s largest fuel depot.
Over 1900 companies do business on behalf of the Department of Defense, says Reeves. “And they’re not just building things that go boom,” she says. “These are some of the world’s best innovators building things for the generation of tomorrow.”
The economics of Naval Base Kitsap’s nuclear armory may be changing, as the U.S. Navy is currently proposing a new fleet of ballistic missile submarines. Currently the base houses over half of the submarines capable of carrying Trident ballistic missiles, which can deliver a nuclear payload.
The U.S. Navy has presented a plan to spend over a trillion dollars during the next 30 years upgrading and maintaining the entire triad of U.S. based nuclear weapons, according to Martin Fleck of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a group that advocates for nuclear disarmament. This includes over $100 billion to replace the base’s nuclear submarines.
The plan has yet to be approved by the Obama administration.
“We and our allies,” says Fleck, “are arguing for sanity with nuclear weapons given that we have enough already to end the world several times over. Why on earth would we invest another trillion dollars in them at this late date?”
Nuclear weapons contractors in the United States brought in $334 billion in government contracts between 2012 and 2014, according to research conducted by Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Representative Adam Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, has questioned the nuclear spending currently being proposed. Smith joined 159 other members of the House of Representatives to support an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations bill, which would have slashed funding for a nuclear cruise missile.
Both Lockheed Martin and Boeing Corporation weighed in to oppose the amendment, and it was defeated along partisan lines. But the vote, says PSR’s Fleck, proved that Congress is far from united over the government’s trillion dollar nuclear weapons plan. Smith’s later penned an op-ed for Foreign Policy magazine, titled “America Already Has More Than Enough Nuclear Missiles.”
Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists disputes whether a new nuclear arms race is underway, but admits there’s been a resurgence in the adversarial relationship between the United States and Russia. As a result, “nuclear weapons are gradually becoming more explicit. For now, this is fueling modernization of arsenals and adjustments of operations and strategies.”
Nine nations, including China and North Korea, are engaged in building or modernizing their nuclear arsenal. In the face of this, those behind Ground Zero’s bus ad say it’s time to “demilitarize diplomacy.”
“It’s time to step back from building another generation of nuclear weapons,” says Eiger. “The doctrine came out of the Cold War but it still exists. It’s a dangerous road to travel.”
The ICTY’s exoneration of the late Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Yugoslavia, for war crimes committed in the Bosnia war, proves again we should take NATO claims regarding its ‘official enemies’ not with a pinch of salt, but a huge lorry load.
For the past twenty odd years, neocon commentators and ‘liberal interventionist’ pundits have been telling us at every possible opportunity, that Milosevic (a democratically elected leader in a country where over 20 political parties freely operated) was an evil genocidal dictator who was to blame for ALL the deaths in the Balkans in the 1990s. Repeat after me in a robotic voice (while making robotic arm movements): ‘Milosevic’s genocidal aggression’ ‘Milosevic’s genocidal aggression’.
But the official narrative, just like the one that told us that in 2003, Iraq had WMDs which could be launched within 45 minutes, was a deceitful one, designed to justify a regime change-op which the Western elites had long desired.
The ICTY’s conclusion, that one of the most demonized figures of the modern era was innocent of the most heinous crimes he was accused of, really should have made headlines across the world. But it hasn‘t. Even the ICTY buried it, deep in its 2,590 page verdict in the trial of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic who was convicted in March of genocide (at Srebrenica), war crimes and crimes against humanity.
There was no official announcement or press conference regarding Milosevic‘s exoneration. We’ve got journalist and researcher Andy Wilcoxson to thank for flagging it up for us.
How very different it all was when the trial of the so-called ‘Butcher of the Balkans’, began in February 2002! Then, you‘d have to have been locked in a wardrobe not to be aware of what was going on.
CNN provided blanket coverage of what was described as “the most important trial since Nuremberg.” Of course, Milosevic’s guilt was taken as a given. “When the sentence comes and he disappears into that cell, no one is going to hear from him again,” declared US lawyer Judith Armatta from the Coalition for International Justice, an organization which had the former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, as an advisory board member.
Anyone who dared to challenge the NATO line was labeled a “Milosevic apologist”, or worse still, a “genocide denier”, by ‘Imperial Truth Enforcers’.
But amid all the blather and the hype surrounding the ’trial of the century’ it soon became apparent the prosecution was in deep, deep trouble. The Sunday Times quoted a legal expert who claimed that “Eighty percent of the prosecution’s opening statements would have been dismissed by a British court as hearsay.” That, I believe, was a generous assessment.
The problem was that this was a show trial, one in which geopolitics came before hard evidence. It’s important to remember that the original indictment against Milosevic in relation to alleged Kosovo war crimes/genocide was issued in May 1999, at the height of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and at a time when war was not going to plan for the US and its allies.
The indictment was clearly designed to exert pressure on Milosevic to cave into NATO’s demands.
The trouble for NATO was that by the time Milosevic’s trial was due to start, the Kosovo narrative had already unraveled. The lurid claims made by the US and its allies about genocide and hundreds of thousands being killed, catalogued by the great John Pilger here, had been shown to be false. In September 2001, a UN court officially held that there had been no genocide in Kosovo.
So in an attempt to beef up their weakening case against Milosevic the prosecutors at The Hague had to bring in new charges relating to the war in Bosnia, accusing ‘Slobo’ of being part of a ‘joint criminal conspiracy’ to kill/ethnically cleanse Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims in pursuance of a ’Greater Serbia’ project.
In normal criminal prosecutions evidence is collected and then, if it’s deemed sufficient, charges are brought. But the opposite happened in the case of Milosevic: he was charged for political reasons and the hunt for evidence then followed.
The irony is that the former Yugoslav President had already been praised by President Clinton for his role in brokering a peace deal in Bosnia in 1995, which was signed in Dayton, Ohio.
The truth is that Milosevic was no hardcore Serb nationalist but a lifelong socialist, whose commitment was always to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.
His aim throughout his time in power was not to build a ’Greater Serbia‘, but to try and keep Federal Yugoslavia together, as the ICTY now belatedly acknowledges.
Not only was Milosevic not responsible for ethnic cleansing which took place in Bosnia, he actually spoke out against it. The ICTY noted Milosevic’s “repeated criticism and disapproval of the policies made by the Accused (Karadzic) and the Bosnian Serb leadership.” Milosevic, a man for whom all forms of racism were anathema, insisted that all ethnicities must be protected.
But in order to punish Milosevic and to warn others of the consequences if they dared to oppose US power, history had to be re-written. The pro-Yugoslavia socialist who had opposed the policies of the Bosnian Serb leadership had to be turned, retrospectively, into the villain of the Bosnian War and indeed blamed for all the bloodshed which took place in the Balkans. Meanwhile, the aforementioned US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, whose malign intervention to scupper a diplomatic solution helped trigger the Bosnian conflict got off scot-free.
The ‘Blame it All on Slobo’ campaign saw facts simply thrown out of the window. One article, written, I kid ye not, by an Oxford University Professor of European Studies even had Milosevic as leader of Yugoslavia in 1991 (the year that Slovenia broke away). In fact the Bosnian Croat, Ante Markovic, was the leader of the country at the time.
Inevitably, Milosevic was likened to Hitler. “It was just like watching the evil strutting Adolf Hitler in action,” wrote the News of the World’s political editor, when Milosevic had the temerity to defend himself in court. “There were chilling flashes of the World War Two Nazi monster as the deposed Serb tyrant harangued the court.”
To make sure readers did get the Milosevic=Hitler point, the News of the World illustrated their diatribe with a picture of Hitler ‘The Butcher of Berlin’, in front of a concentration camp, with a picture of Milosevic ‘The Butcher of Belgrade’ superimposed on a picture of a Bosnian concentration camp. Which in fact, he had nothing to do with.
Very conveniently for the prosecution, Milosevic died suddenly in his cell in March 2006.
Going by what we had seen at the trial up to that point, it’s inconceivable that a guilty sentence could have been passed. A whole succession of ’smoking gun’ witnesses had turned out to be dampest of damp squibs.
As I noted in an earlier piece:
Star witness Ratomir Tanic was exposed as being in the pay of Western security forces, whilst ex-Yugoslav secret police chief Rade Markovic, the man who was finally going to spill the beans on Milosevic and reveal how his former master had ordered the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, in fact did the opposite and testified that he had been tortured to tell lies and that his written statement had been falsified by the prosecution.
In addition, as I noted here, the former head of security in the Yugoslav army, General Geza Farkas (an ethnic Hungarian), testified that all Yugoslav soldiers in Kosovo had been handed a document explaining international humanitarian law, and that they were ordered to disobey any orders which violated it. Farkas also said that Milosevic ordered no paramilitary groups should be permitted to operate anywhere in Kosovo.
When Milosevic died, his accusers claimed he had “cheated justice”. But in fact, as the ICTY has now confirmed, the injustice was done to Milosevic.
While he had to defend himself against politically-motivated charges at The Hague, the US and its allies launched their brutal, illegal assault on Iraq, a war which has led to the death of up to one million people. Last year a report from Body Count revealed that at least 1.3 million people had lost their lives as a result of the US-led ‘war on terror’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Those sorts of figures help us get Kosovo into some kind of perspective. Even if we do hold Milosevic and the Yugoslav government responsible for some of the deaths there in 1999, (in a war which the West had clearly desired and provoked) far, far, greater death and destruction has been caused by the countries who were the keenest to see the President of Yugoslavia in the dock. As John Pilger noted in 2008, the bombing of Yugoslavia was the “perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Since then we’ve also had the NATO destruction of Libya, the country which had the highest living standards in the whole of Africa and the backing of violent ‘rebels’ to try and achieve ‘regime change’ in Syria.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see a pattern here.
Before a US-led war or ‘humanitarian intervention’ against a targeted state, a number of lurid claims are made about the country‘s leader and its government. These claims receive maximum media coverage and are repeated ad nauseam on the basis that people will bound to think they’re true.
Later it transpires that the claims were either entirely false (like the Iraq WMD ones), unproven, or greatly exaggerated. But the news cycle has moved on focusing not on the exposure of the fraudulent claims made earlier but on the next aggressive/genocidal ‘New Hitler’ who needs to be dealt with. In 1999 it was Milosevic; now it’s Assad and Putin.
And guess what, dear reader? It’s the same people who defend the Iraq war and other blood-stained Western military interventions based on lies, unproven claims or great exaggerations, who are the ones doing the accusing.
As that very wise old saying goes: When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you.
Not that long ago in Europe, one had to go to a church, a temple or a mosque to imbibe industrial quantities of religious doctrine.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, however, it has become possible to access it in a great and self-satisfied profusion on the editorial pages of the continent’s “serious” and nominally progressive dailies, papers like The Guardian, El País, La Repubblica, Le Monde, and Suddeutsche Zeitung.
The particular brand of theology being pushed?
Neo-Liberal Imperialism, something the faith’s leading clerics—people like Timothy Garton-Ash, Niall Ferguson. Moisés Naim, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hermann Tertsch, Antonio Caño, Joseph Joffe, and that erstwhile philosopher-clown, Bernard Henry-Levi—prefer to describe in terms of “promoting trans-Atlantic partnerships” and creating and maintaining “Open Societies”.
One day, historians will wonder how it was [US military occupation?] that the EU, a wealthy and ostensibly unified polity with a population of over 500 million people and an extremely deep and sophisticated history of indigenous intellectual production, came to have its public discourse dominated by the narrow and often quite parochial concerns of the elites of another country (right down to their absurd and largely unconditional devotion to a small and bellicose apartheid state in the Middle East) located halfway around the globe.
And if these historians are sharp, they will zero in on whatever it was that took place in newsrooms and other centers of media production (or perhaps more germanely, the boardrooms that set their policies) in Europe during the first decade of the 21st century.
The US desire to spread the Atlanticist creed, which essentially holds that life for Europeans is best when they sublimate their economic and strategic interests to those of the US security and financial establishments, is nothing new. Indeed, it has been one of the primary thrusts of US diplomatic and intelligence activity in Europe since the end of World War II.
The career of Joffe, marked by residencies at the Stanford’s Hoover Institution and appearances on the US establishment’s pre-eminent venue for self-promotion and the consolidation of US-Israeli official talking points, The Charlie Rose Show, provides eloquent testimony to the benefits that accrue those willing to promote the American view of reality to their European countrymen on a daily basis.
What is different today is the relative weight of this ideology, with its love of military force and fiscal bullying, on one hand, and crass indifference to the clear long-term interests of the great bulk of the European population (e.g. establishing vigorous cultural and commercial interchanges with Russia, the basic physical health of Greeks) on the other, within the continent’s opinion-making landscape. Whereas slavish pro-Americans like Joffe used to constitute one voice among many, they and their views on foreign policy are now predominant in most major European papers.
How did this happen?
For those with a need to believe—and there are, sadly, still many—in the essentially benevolent nature of the US foreign policy and the existence of a more or less free and unfettered “marketplace of ideas” within the US and Europe, the answer is simple. As they got older and more prosperous Europeans became more conservative and began to demand the presence in major outlets of people whose ideas reflected these changing views.
However, for those that understand the enormous importance that the post-war US establishment has always put on “perception management” and how information warfare was and is an enormously important element of the Rumsfeldian notion of “Full Spectrum Dominance”, such an explanation strains credibility.
For example, are we really supposed to believe that of all the intelligent, experienced and well-traveled people available in the traditionally pro-Palestinian country of Spain, the person best equipped to serve as El País’ weekend foreign policy guru was Moisés Naím, a Zionist former minister of the arch-corrupt Venezuelan government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, former executive director of the World Bank, and long-time editor of the in-house bible of mainstream US imperialism Foreign Policy? Do we really believe that the paper’s core socialist readership, which is traditionally pro-welfare state and very solidly anti-interventionist was pining for that?
Lest this all seem too speculative, I suggest you watch an interview conducted with Udo Ulfkotte, a veteran German reporter and former assistant editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, conducted in 2014. In it, he speaks of how he and other European journalists were, and are, routinely bought off by American operatives of one sort or another, going so far as to describe his country, Germany, as a “banana republic” and also a “colony of the Americans” where journalists who serve the interests of “trans-Atlantic” organizations are rewarded handsomely and where those that do not play along suffer dire consequences.
The interview took place on the occasion of the release his book Gekaufte Journalisten which is to be translated, I am told, as “Bought Journalists”, in which he goes into great detail about these matters. It is interesting to note that despite having been published two years ago and quickly rising to the status of a best-seller in Germany, it is still not available in English or any other European language. There has been talk for a while now of a “forthcoming” English version of the text. But every time I check up on it, the release date seems to have been pushed back another few months.
Think there is any pressure being applied to the people in charge of bringing the English translation of the book to market?
A couple of newspaper articles caught my attention this weekend. The first was in The Times, and claimed the following:
President Putin has launched a secret propaganda assault on Britain from within its own borders, The Times can reveal. The Kremlin is spreading disinformation through a newly opened British bureau for its Sputnik international news service, and is infiltrating elite universities by placing language and cultural centres on campuses. Analysts said that the push was part of Russia’s military doctrine, which specifies the use of ‘informational and other non-military measures’ in conflicts.
The Times is particularly alarmed by the fact that, ‘the University of Edinburgh accepted £221,000 from the Russkiy Mir (Russian World) Foundation to host Britain’s first Moscow-sponsored language and cultural centre. The foundation has also opened centres at Durham University, which accepted £85,000, and St Antony’s College, Oxford.’ According to The Times, ‘A NATO source accused Russia of “operationalising information” from within Britain. “The Russian information effort is to muddy the waters, to create uncertainty,” he said.’
The second article was published in Sunday’s New York Times. In this, the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul claims that ‘Everywhere, autocrats are pushing back against democrats, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is the de facto leader of this global movement.’ America must resist this movement, McFaul says. Otherwise, ‘The threats will grow and eventually endanger our peace, as we saw in Europe and Japan in the 1930s, and Afghanistan in the 1990s.’
What exactly should America do? McFaul suggests:
Just as the Kremlin has become more sophisticated at exporting its ideas and supporting its friends, so must we. We should think of advancing democratic ideas abroad primarily as an educational project, almost never as a military campaign. Universities, books and websites are the best tools, not the 82nd Airborne.
But it’s best not to do this openly, McFaul admits. He says, ‘Direct financial assistance to democrats is problematic: A check from an American embassy can taint its recipients. America’s next president should privatize such aid and help seed new independent foundations.’
So, let me get this straight. Russkii Mir openly provides money to the University of Edinburgh for the study of Russian language and culture. That constitutes a ‘secret propaganda assault on Britain’. Ambassador McFaul proposes giving money to Russian universities through disguised channels and for decidedly political purposes, and that is ‘advancing democratic ideas’. ‘Nuff said!
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Second part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”.
In his recent presentation at the “Left Forum” in New York, Kevin Barrett didn’t mince words. He rarely does. Barrett accused the 87-year old Noam Chomsky of contributing to the fast deterioration of the human condition by purposely diverting skeptical attention away from the true culprits responsible for the lies and crimes of September 11, 2001. In his essay, “Why Chomsky is Wrong on 9/11,” Barrett extended a growing trajectory of suspicion questioning the real agenda motivating America’s most highly publicized professor. What is behind Dr. Chomsky’s zeal to obstruct fair and balanced professional debate about contested interpretations of 9/11?
The contradictions are conspicuous between Chomsky’s oft’ proclaimed ideals as an academic investigator and the personalized vitriol of his attacks on those exposing the litany of lies permeating the most transformative event of the twenty-first century. The stakes in this matter are high indeed given the hagiographic extremes associated with Prof. Chomsky’s worldwide reputation. In the eyes of millions, Chomsky is the primary academic embodiment of anti-establishment dissidence within the US system of higher education.
Barrett’s critique of Chomsky adds to the observations of an already sizeable list of public intellectuals that have come to the conclusion that the celebrity Prof is not what he seems to be. The increasingly insistent accusation is that the crude diversionary tactics deployed by Prof. Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within. Among the commentators that have strongly criticized Chomsky’s work as a limited hangout are Ken Adachi, Barrie Zwicker, Daniel L. Abrahamson, James Corbett, Jeff Blankfort, Douglas Herman, Alfred Schaefer, and Benjamin Marhav.
Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within.
Internet broadcaster James Corbett has encapsulated the consternation concerning the obvious contradictions internal to Chomsky’s academic work. Depending on his subject, Chomsky develops themes that contrapuntally expose and promote the workings of empire. Corbett has argued, “Whatever Chomsky is doing, he is functioning as if he’s working hand in hand with the very elite he proclaims to be fighting against.”
“Intellectuals Are In a Position to Expose the Lies of Government”
Chomsky’s academic work began in the 1950s in the field of linguistics. Chomsky’s analysis of speech, the primary medium of communicative interaction among humans, highlights his theories about the universality of mental structures governing the convergence of perception, abstraction, and articulation. Chomsky famously imagined a “black box” of language formulation as part of a universal feature of human brains. Chomsky’s metaphors on human mental hardware naturally attracted the attention of deep state operatives in the CIA and related agencies with a professional interest in influencing human attitudes and behaviors.
The scholar’s original academic discipline, therefore, provided him with an excellent platform from which to launch his applied study of the connections linking propaganda to contemporary imperialism and warfare. Since the late 1960s Chomsky has entered the outer stratosphere of intellectual notoriety, both pro and con, based on his very public interventions into the big contemporary issues of life and death, war and peace. From his very secure base of academic tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prof. Chomsky would emerge in the final decades of the twentieth century to become probably the most recognized and oft quoted professor in the entire history of American higher education.
Beginning with his opposition to US military intervention in Indochina, Chomsky applied his expertise in linguistic manipulation to the study of the media’s role in manufacturing consent for many nefarious operations. In a 1967 article entitled “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky explained his intervention in what was then the most contentious issue in domestic and international politics. In hard-hitting prose that created markers against which Chomsky’s position on 9/11 would later be measured, the MIT professor wrote, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
While all citizens have the responsibility to oppose deceptions and crimes committed on our behalf, intellectuals have an added weight of responsibility to act in the public interest against state terror and injustice. “Intellectuals,” he wrote, “are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”
A Jewish Sage and Lawgiver Preaching from
New England’s Most Prestigious Academic Pulpit
The contrasting treatment of Kevin Barrett and of Noam Chomsky by the custodians of US higher education forms a revealing backdrop against which to appreciate the deeper implications of the former’s assessment of the latter at the Left Forum. In recent decades Chomsky’s dramatic career has come to be invested with a kind of Hollywoodized aura. For his adept and incredibly prolific jabs directed at corporate giants, war hawks and the like, Chomsky was embraced as the Left’s most tireless warrior of the pen. He is a wordsmith of the first order who, in his spoken language, articulates frequently with such precise effect that transcripts of his speeches, interviews and panel discussions are often quickly transcribed to become popular publications.
Many have come to think of Chomsky as a kind of secular prophet seeking to inspire his followers to save America from its own worst attributes. The intensity of Chomsky’s mission to redeem America invokes Old Testament ideals of the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem. The theocratic ideals associated with the creation of a New Jerusalem in the New World have churned through the dynamic matrix of US history ever since the Calvinist Puritans founded New England. New England’s founding Protestant patriarchs conceived of themselves as Israelites, as God’s Chosen People chartered by the Lord to realize a special evangelical mission.
The perception that there was a divine charter underlying the Puritans’ creation of Massachusetts extended to the sense of “Manifest Destiny” invoked to explain and justify the transcontinental expansion of the US republic in the nineteenth century. American exceptionalism is the term currently used to identify the secular outgrowth of the old religious justifications for imperial expansion. The psychology of God-given exceptionalism has animated US expansionism throughout its transition from transcontinental to hemispheric to trans-Pacific to global proportions.
In seeming to lead the Left’s quest for the Promised Land of liberation from corporatist tyranny, Chomsky has come to embody key elements of the American Dream. A strong statement is seemingly announced by the fact that Chomsky has been able to perform his dissenting role from a place of tenured academic security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With Harvard and about twenty other prestigious universities nearby, MIT is one of the most well established, stable, and safe platforms of intellectual power in the United States.
Chomsky’s academic home is well known for its old, deep and elaborate ties with the research arms of the military-industrial complex and its attending agencies of so-called national security. In spite of the military attachments and connotations of his academic home, however, Prof. Chomsky was permitted to thrive as a leading critic of the very interests that contributed significantly to his reputation and primary livelihood. One apparent implication of Chomsky’s career path is that a key institution at the very strategic core of the American superpower was made to appear accepting of radical criticism from within. This accommodation of Chomsky’s scholarly political activism conveyed the implicit message that the USA continues to be alive to constant adaptive change in response to a never-ending need for intellectual and logistical renewal.
Shakespearian chords resonate through the drama that has culminated in Professor Chomsky becoming the most high profile academic elder of Cambridge Massachusetts. The scholar grew into the role of a Jewish sage and lawgiver revered as a modern-day prophet preaching from the most prestigious secular pulpit in the American capital of higher education. From this important site of power in the Promised Land where New England’s Calvinist founders once found refuge from their persecutors in Europe, the Left’s favorite scholarly jurist handed down many judgments and dictums.
Chomsky’s decision to side with power and against skeptical analysis of the lies and crimes of 9/11 would prove to be the most consequential judgment of his entire career. In a book first published in November of 2001 and in many judgments delivered extemporaneously from his academic pulpit, Prof. Chomsky condemned as heretics those engaged in skeptical investigation of 9/11. The effect of Chomsky’s fatwa on systematic research into the deep state origins and character of the 9/11 crime was the professional equivalent to an intellectual burning of heretics on the cross of professional infamy.
Chomsky’s academic oversight of the professional assault on 9/11 skeptics amounts to a twenty-first century equivalent in a professional context to the Salem Witch Trials. Indeed, New England’s heritage of Puritan witch trial proceedings is made to weave through many features of the psychological operation attached to the aggressive warfare mounted by the real protagonists of the 9/11 crimes.
By misrepresenting the scholarly and pedagogical work of Muslim academic Kevin Barrett, Prof. Chomsky has led the academic facet of the twenty-first century’s most severe and unrelenting witch hunt. The University of Wisconsin’s professional martyrdom of Dr. Kevin Barrett, whom Dr. Chomsky smears with careless disregard for even the rudimentary niceties of academic protocol, well illustrates the nature of the post-9/11 assault on reason, due process, human rights, civil liberties, evidence-based reportage and decency itself. The episode constitutes a telling illustration of the elaborate psychological operation aimed at diverting Left-leaning activists from paying close attention to the true nature of the 9/11 crime.
At the Left Forum in New York, Dr. Barrett was outspoken in holding Noam Chomsky accountable for his directing role in the Left’s failure to deal cogently with the core realities of who did what to whom in the originating event of the ongoing 9/11 Wars.
In an interview that is sure to infuriate Russophobic neocons backing Hillary Clinton, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump once again broke from the establishment party line on Russia, doubling down on his statements the US needed a better relationship with the country.
After stringently denying any personal links to Vladimir Putin in the interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump was asked about his campaign removing a plank from the Republican party platform which called for arming the Ukrainian regime. Trump said he wasn’t involved, but denied Putin wanted to invade Ukraine anyway:
Trump: He’s not going into Ukraine – just so you understand – he’s not going to go into Ukraine. You can mark it down…you can take it any way you want.
Stephanopoulos: Well he’s aready there.
Trump: Well he’s there in a certain way, but I’m not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama.
Stephanopoulos then challenged Trump on Crimea, asking if he would recognize Russia’s “annexation” of the peninsula. Mr. Trump replied that he might:
Stephanopoulos: But you said you might recognize [Crimea].
Trump: I’m going to take a look at it. But you know, the people of Crimea – from what I’ve heard – would rather be with Russia, than where they were. And you have to look at that also. […] As far as the Ukraine is concerned, it’s a mess, and that’s under Obama’s administration with his strong ties to NATO.
Trump then reiterated his stance that improving relations with Russia is paramount:
Trump: And we’ll do better [than Obama on Ukraine], and yet we’ll have a better relationship with Russia. Maybe. But having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.
So it appears that Donald Trump is standing firm on his commitment to restoring mutually beneficial relations with Russia, China, and other countries. It also appears the barrage of smear directed at Trump and Putin by US mainstream media is seemingly having little effect on his popularity.
Those in the political establishment with vested interests in continued confrontation and “regime change” must be tearing their hair out.
By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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Some 574 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli occupation forces in July, a joint statement by human rights groups revealed yesterday.
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