Iran investing over $1.5bn on gas network in deprived region
Press TV – December 22, 2019
Iran’s Oil Ministry is investing more than $1.5 billion on completing the national gas grid in the deprived and remote regions bordering Pakistan.
Head of the National Iranian Gas Company said on Sunday that works to link up cities and towns in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan to the national gas network had made significant progress over the past months.
Hassan Montazer Torbati said expanding the gas pipeline network in the sprawling province had become the flagship project of Iran’s natural gas sector.
Sistan and Baluchestan, the second largest but one of the poorest of the 31 Iranian provinces, has become a focal point of government’s development plans over the past years.
That province has a long coastline on the Sea of Oman where Iran is seeking a massive expansion of the maritime and port infrastructure to facilitate regional trade.
The completion of the gas grid in the province would be a great boost to businesses in the port of Chabahar, Iran’s largest Ocean port which is being developed through partnership with India, the country that seeks access to markets in Afghanistan and countries in Central Asia through Sistan and Baluchestan.
Montazer Torbati said that the gas network was more than 76 percent complete in the provincial capital of Zahedan, where some 31,000 households now had access to the utility service, adding that construction of pipelines and other installations was going on simultaneously for seven other cities in the province.
He said a total of 310 factories and industrial units across the province will be linked to the gas network, including 81 that have already started using the service.
The official said that linking Chabahar to the national grid would pave the way for massive development of petrochemical industries on the Sea of Oman.
He said a 300-kilometer pipeline is under construction to link the port city to the city of Iranshahr, located to the center of Sistan and Baluchestan.
Media ignores explosives revelations about chemical weapons in Syria
By Yves Engler · December 22, 2019
The Canadian media gets a failing grade when it comes to its coverage of chemical weapons in Syria.
Among the basic principles of reporting, as taught in every journalism school, are: Constantly strive for the truth; Give voice to all sides of a story; When new information comes to light about a story you reported, a correction must be issued or a follow-up produced.
But the Canadian media has ignored explosives revelations from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It’s a stark example of their complicity with belligerent Canadian foreign policy in Syria.
In May 2019 a member of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission in Syria, Ian Henderson, released a document claiming the management of the organization misled the public about the purported chemical attack in Douma in April 2018. It showed that the organization suppressed an assessment that contradicted the claim that a gas cylinder fell from the air. In November another OPCW whistleblower added to the Henderson revelations, saying that his conclusion that the incident was “a non chemical-related event” was twisted to imply the opposite. Last week WikiLeaks released a series of internal documents demonstrating that the team who wrote the OPCW’s report on Douma didn’t go to Syria. One memo noted that 20 OPCW inspectors felt the report released “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria].”
I couldn’t find a single report about the whistleblowers/leaks in any major Canadian media outlet. They also ignored explicit suppression of the leaks.
Journalist Tareq Haddad “resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letter were refused for no valid reason.” Haddad wrote a long article explaining his resignation, which detailed how an editor who previously worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations blocked it.
There is an important Canadian angle to this story. Twenty-four hours after the alleged April 7, 2018, chemical attack foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland put out a statement claiming, “it is clear to Canada that chemical weapons were used and that they were used by the Assad regime.” Five days later Prime Minister Justin Trudeau supported cruise missile strikes on a Syrian military base stating, “Canada supports the decision by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to take action to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to launch chemical weapons attacks against its own people.”
Canadian officials have pushed for the organization to blame Bashar al-Assad’s government for chemical attacks since Syria joined the OPCW and had its declared chemical weapon stockpile destroyed in 2013–14. Canada’s special envoy to the OPCW, Sabine Nolke, has repeatedly accused Assad’s forces of employing chemical weapons. Instead of expressing concern over political manipulation of evidence, Nolke criticized the leak.In a statement after Henderson’s position was made public she noted, “Canada remains steadfast in its confidence in the professionalism and integrity of the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] and its methods. However, Mr. Chair, we are unsettled with the leak of official confidential documents from the Technical Secretariat.”
Amidst efforts to blame the Syrian government for chemical weapons use, Canadian officials lauded the OPCW and plowed tens of millions of dollars into the organization. A June 2017 Global Affairs release boasted that “Canada and the United States are the largest national contributors to the JIM [OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism for Attributing Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria].” The statement added that Canada “is the largest voluntary cash contributor to the organization, having provided nearly $25 million since 2012 to help destroy chemical weapons in Libya and Syria and to support special missions and contingency operations related to chemical weapons use, investigation, verification and monitoring in Syria.” Two months after the Douma incident Freeland announced a $7.5 million contribution to the OPCW in a statement heavily focused on Syria.In August Governor General Julie Payette even traveled to The Hague to push OPCW Director-General, Fernando Arias, on Syria. After a “meeting focused on OPCW activities in Syria”, Payette highlighted Canada’s “$23 million in voluntary funds for Syria-related activities.”
Ottawa backed the group that produced the (probably staged) video purporting to show chemical weapons use in Douma. The Liberals backed the White Helmets diplomatically and financially. In a release about the purported attack in Douma Freeland expressed Canada’s “admiration for … the White Helmets”, later calling them “heroes.” Representatives of the White Helmet repeatedly came to Ottawa to meet government officials and Canadian officials helped members of the group escape Syria via Israel in July 2018. Alongside tens of millions of dollars from the US, British, Dutch, German and French governments, Global Affairs announced “$12 million for groups in Syria, such as the White Helmets, that are saving lives by providing communities with emergency response services and removing explosives.”
Credited with rescuing people from bombed out buildings, the White Helmets fostered opposition to Assad and promoted western intervention. Founded by former British army officer James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets operated almost entirely in areas of Syria occupied by the Saudi Arabia–Washington backed Al Nusra/Al Qaeda insurgents and other rebels. They criticized the Syrian government and disseminated images of its purported violence while largely ignoring civilians targeted by the opposition. Their members were repeatedly photographed with Al Qaeda-linked Jihadists and reportedly enabled their executions.
The White Helmets helped establish an early warning system for airstrikes that benefited opposition insurgents. Framed as a way to save civilians, the ‘Sentry’ system tracked and validated information about potential airstrikes.
Canada funded the Hala Systems’ air warning, which was set up by former Syria focused US diplomat John Jaeger. It’s unclear how much Canadian money was put into the initiative but in September 2018 Global Affairs boasted that “Canada is the largest contributor to the ‘Sentry’ project.”
Ottawa is dedicated to a particular depiction of the Syrian war and clearly so is the dominant media. Committed to a highly simplistic account of a messy and multilayered conflict, they’ve suppressed evidence suggesting that an important international organization has doctored evidence to align with a narrative used to justify military strikes.
Journalists are supposed to seek the truth, not simply what their government says. In fact, according to what is taught in J-school, journalists have a special responsibility to question what their government claims to be true.
No journalism program in Canada teaches that governments should always be believed, especially on military and foreign affairs. But that is how the dominant media has acted in the case of Syrian chemical weapons.
A Criminal State Under investigation
“If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table”. – Anonymous legal advice
By Gilad Atzmon | December 22, 2019
Reports from Israeli press outlets this weekend show that the Jewish State fears the ICC’s (International Criminal Court) decision to move forward with an investigation into whether Israel committed war crimes in the Palestinian territories. Such a probe may expose current and former government officials and military personnel to prosecution on the global stage.
The ICC will investigate Israel’s policy of settling its citizens in the West Bank, its actions during the 2014 war in Gaza, and its response to Palestinian protests on Gaza’s border beginning in March of last year. The ICC will examine indiscriminate shooting by Hamas and other Palestinian groups into Israeli cities as well.
Israel plans to refuse to cooperate with the ICC, although such a move may put a long list of Israeli officials, potentially including the prime minister, defense ministers, IDF chiefs, the heads of the Shin Bet security service, and military officers as well as low-ranking soldiers, at risk of international arrest warrants if, in the absence of a state response, the ICC proceeds with the prosecution of individuals for the alleged crimes.
Israel’s reaction to the ICC’s top prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s decision to investigate is instructive. Instead of responding ethically and showing a willingness to defend its actions, Israel is hiding behind legalistic Talmudic arguments that seek to refute the ICC’s legitimacy and deny its jurisdiction over Israel and Israeli war criminals.
Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s defense is based on the ICC’s supposed ‘lack of jurisdiction.’ On Saturday, Mandelblit said that Israel “is a democratic state of law, obligated and committed to respecting international law and humanitarian values. This commitment has stood strong for decades, through all the challenged and tough times Israel has faced. It is rooted in the character and values of the State of Israel and guaranteed by a strong and independent justice system… there is no place for international judicial intervention in such a situation.”
Is this really an accurate description of Israel? If Israel is ‘democratic state of law’ that adheres to a universalist value system as Mandelblit insists, why is Israel so afraid of the ICC looking into its behaviour? The reality of Israel contradicts Mandelblit’s position. We are dealing with a criminal state, an institutional ethnic cleanser that explores barbarian tactics locking millions of people in the largest open-air prisons known to man.
Just to prove how ‘ethical’ the Jewish State is not, Israeli Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give the Palestinian Authority a 48-hour ultimatum to pull its petition to the ICC or see the Ramallah-based political authority “torn down.”
Blue and White Party Chairman, Benny Gantz, also attacked the ICC’s decision. Citing his decades of military service, including as the IDF’s 20th chief of staff, Gantz unequivocally stated that “the IDF is one of the most moral armies in the world.” Gantz forgot to mention that he is himself a suspected war criminal and may be charged by the ICC. In 2016 we learned that the District Court of the Hague was holding a hearing to determine whether to hear a war crimes case against Gantz relating to his command decisions during the 2014 Gaza War.
Former ‘justice’ minister, Ayelet Shaked, called the move “a political, hypocritical and predictable decision.” Shaked said the ICC “has no authority” to open the probe. She urged the government to “fight the court with all the tools at its disposal.”
PM Netanyahu called the ICC’s announcement “a dark day for truth and justice.” What, one may wonder, would Netanyahu consider a shining moment for truth and justice?
As we now see and could have anticipated, the official Israeli response in opposition to the ICC’s probe is legalistic as opposed to ethical. Israeli officials made public a legal opinion by Mandelblit arguing that the court does not have jurisdiction to conduct an investigation. Instead of attempting to refute the substance of the complaint, Israel and its officials invest in a wall-to-wall attempt to deny the court’s jurisdiction.
The rationale for Israel’s defiance is pretty obvious. Israeli decision makers are clever enough to grasp the prospective outcome of such an investigation. It would drain whatever is left of the Israeli military’s will to fight. Israeli combatants – platoons, pilots, drone operators, commanders- would know that their actions have legal consequences and as a result might be reluctant to execute military orders. The ICC may have closed the door on Israel’s military options and strategy. For a country that survives by the sword and invests in the ‘War between the Wars,’ the ICC investigation is understood as a lethal threat.
I am not holding my breath for the ICC to accomplish its job. I anticipate intensive Lobby efforts to interfere with the court’s work. However, by now we know that an attempt by Jewish power to silence opposition to Jewish power, can only be realised through the manifestation of such power. In Britain, for instance, the Israel Lobby and its stooges within politics and media exposed itself through its relentless war against Corbyn and his party. By the time Corbyn and his party were literally wiped out, every Brit knew who runs this country for real.
The Lobby is more than welcome to expose its sharp teeth and interfere with the ICC’s work. It may destroy the ICC, but Israel won’t be vindicated of its crimes against Palestinians, as these crimes are committed in the open for everyone to see.
The Trudeau Government Joins the Global Majority on Israel-Palestinian Relations
By Anthony James Hall | American Herald Tribune | December 22, 2019
The Chief Executive of B’nai Brith Canada has condemned as anti-democratic a vote in late 2019 by Canada’s Trudeau government. In one of its first major international acts, Trudeau’s minority government sided with 166 other member states of the United Nations’ General Assembly. The Jewish organization expressed “outrage” at Canada’s position on a resolution dealing critically with the subject of Israel-Palestinian relations. “This vote reflects poorly on Canada’s record as a defender of democracy and justice. It stains Canada’s reputation,” said B’nai Brith’s CEO, Michael Mostyn.
Apparently Mr. Mostyn thinks nothing of invoking the principles of democracy and justice as justification for discounting as wrong and misguided the dramatic outcome of a free and fair vote by the world’s governments. In Mr. Mostyn’s view, all that is just and democratic adheres to the position of the five dissident governments that voted against the UN Resolution. The naysayers are Israel, the USA, Australia, Micronesia and Marshall Islands.
Mr. Mostyn and many other representatives of the Israel lobby have chastised the Trudeau government for taking a step that pulls Canada into the mainstream of global opinion especially when it comes to conditions in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. The Trudeau government has planted Canada’s flag among those of 167 national delegations. The governments of all these countries agreed to place an international spotlight on the many illegal acts that violate “the permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people.”
In giving explicit reasons for its condemnation of the now-adopted UN Resolution, B’nai Brith Canada stated that it “rejects the contention that the [Jewish] settlements [in the Occupied Territories including East Jerusalem] are the core issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict.” The UN Resolution details many of the consequences for indigenous Palestinians of the influx of 700,000 Jewish settlers into territories illegally seized through armed conquest by the Israeli Armed Forces in 1967.
The Resolution sanctioned by the government of Canada and most of the world’s other governments “deplores the detrimental impact of the Israeli settlements on Palestinian and Arab natural resources, including the destruction of orchards and crops and the seizure of water wells by Israel Settlers.” It expresses “grave concern about the widespread destruction, caused by Israel, the occupying Power, to vital infrastructure, including water pipelines, sewage networks, and electricity networks in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
The Resolution also lists some of the public health abominations forced on “the Gaza strip during the military operations of July and August of 2014, which, inter alia, has polluted the environment and which negatively affects the functioning of sanitation systems and water supply.” There is reference to “unexploded ordinance” as well as a “chronic energy shortage” in Gaza where “only 5% of the ground water remains potable.”
The Resolution makes specific reference to “the detrimental impact on Palestinian natural resources being caused by the unlawful construction of the wall by Israel, the Occupying power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, and in its grave affect as well on the economic and social conditions of the Palestinian people.”
B’nai Brith’s criticism of the Trudeau government ignores most of the explicit content outlined in the now-adopted UN Resolution. Instead of facing the facts, B’nai Brith radically misrepresents as “anti-terror measures” the broad set of changes the Israel government has imposed on the lands at issue.
The Resolution clearly identifies the actions of a government whose goal it is to favor one group by dispossessing and disempowering another. The situation on the ground in the area occupied and controlled by the Israeli government makes it absolutely clear that the real goal is to replace the indigenous Palestinian population. The international emblem of Israel’s replacement project has become the 131 illegal Jewish settlements plus the 110 illegal outposts created to prevent Palestinians from enjoying any security of habitation.
B’nai Brith Canada sometimes represents itself as a “human rights” organization engaged in benevolent philanthropy. It has exploited this image to gain federal recognition as a registered charity capable of granting tax deductions for donations. Perhaps the time has come for an objective federal assessment to see if B’nai Brith Canada has lived up to its side of the bargain. Has B’nai Brith Canada acted like a genuine charity devoted to the ideal of universal human rights or has it acted more as a partisan political lobby?
B’nai Brith Canada announced in its press release that it “remains opposed to Palestinian attempts to internationalize the issue.” How ironic. As I see it, the track record of B’nai Brith Canada is one part of a much larger body of evidence demonstrating the scale of an elaborate Israel lobby based in many countries? Doesn’t the multinational reach of this very active political lobby effectively internationalize the core issues of Israel-Palestinian relations on a 24/7 basis?
The instability of relations between Israel and the Palestinians has significant implications for the domestic and international polices of many countries. For instance, how will the Trudeau government and the Trump government deal with the contentions that have put them on different sides of the recent UN vote? Will the Trudeau government continue to move away from the legacy of ther Harper government when it comes to correcting the gross inequities permeating almost every aspect of Israel-Palestinian relations?
Anthony James Hall has been Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune since its inception. Between 1990 and 2018 Dr. Hall was Professor of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge where he is now Professor Emeritus. The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial globalization since 1492.
Afghan Papers Inadvertently Document WaPo’s Role in Spreading Official Lies
By Joshua Cho | FAIR | December 18, 2019
The Washington Post’s publication of the “Afghanistan Papers” (12/9/19) unveiled over 2,000 pages of unpublished notes of interviews with US officials involved in the Afghanistan War, from a project led by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate waste and fraud. Hailed by some as the “Pentagon Papers of Our Generation” after the Post won access to those documents under the Freedom of Information Act in a three-year legal battle, the Post’s exposé found that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
The paper published direct remarks on the war by US officials who assumed that “their remarks would not be made public”:
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
While more explicit admissions of deception on the part of US officials involved in wars are always appreciated, one question rarely discussed among the reports and opinion pieces praising the “Afghanistan Papers” is what this scoop says about the Washington Post.
If the Post is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,” shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same “talking points” to spin the coverage in the desired fashion?
FAIR has been tracking the Post’s coverage of the Afghanistan War from the very beginning, when the paper—along with the rest of corporate media—was actively following the Bush administration’s “guidance” on how to cover the war. In 2001, a FAIR survey (11/2/01) of the Post’s op-ed pages for three weeks following the September 11 attacks found that
columns calling for or assuming a military response to the attacks were given a great deal of space, while opinions urging diplomatic and international law approaches as an alternative to military action were nearly nonexistent.
Eight years later, FAIR (3/1/09) found that the Post’s cheerleading coverage didn’t change much from 2001, as 7 out of 9 Post op-eds and 4 out of 5 editorials supported some kind of military escalation from the day Barack Obama was elected president (11/4/08) through March 1, 2009, as the US was debating a “surge” of additional troops in Afghanistan later that year.
Another study (Extra!, 11/1/09) of the first ten months of the Post’s opinion columns that same year found that
pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on US military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.
The Post offered this lopsided coverage even though there were several polls at the time showing a majority of the US public opposed the war, because they believed that the Afghan War was “not worth fighting.”
The Post also has a history of facilitating official spin for the war. When WikiLeaks posted tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents related to the Afghanistan War, FAIR (7/30/10) found that the Post either dismissed them as not being as important as the Pentagon Papers (7/27/10), or absurdly spun the leaks as good news for the US war effort (7/27/10) because the “release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war’s importance,” and because they “bolstered Obama’s decision in December to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.”
The Post also buried attempts by whistleblowers and other journalists who were working to expose official lies and war crimes in Afghanistan. When US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison for sharing intelligence documents that first exposed what the “Afghanistan Papers” are now corroborating, the Post, along with other corporate outlets, largely neglected Manning’s legal trials and punishment (FAIR, 12/4/12, 6/18/14, 1/18/17, 4/1/19). The New York Times, to its credit, did give Manning space for an op-ed (6/14/19) to explain why she risked her freedom to expose matters that the US military recorded but left unreported, including hundreds of US military attacks on Afghan civilians. The Post, for its part, found room to publish frequent op-eds by the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon (e.g., 11/16/09, 6/26/10, 6/3/11, 2/10/13, 7/12/13) spouting the same optimistic US official talking points that the Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” has now exposed as lies (FAIR, 1/3/14).
In fact, one major reason why the Afghanistan Papers are unnecessary to discern deceit from US officials is that—as Michael Parenti pointed out in The Face of Imperialism—when US officials constantly provide new and different justifications for invasions, it’s a sign that they’re being dishonest, not incompetent.
The Post (12/9/19) admits this when it mentions that the US “largely accomplished what it set out to do,” with Al Qaeda and Taliban officials “dead, captured or in hiding,” yet “veered off in directions that had little to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11.” This is consistent with FAIR’s finding (Extra!, 7/11) that corporate media largely ignored the question of whether to end the Afghanistan War after the ostensible goal of the invasion—to capture or kill the leader of the group that carried out the September 11 attack—was [allegedly] accomplished in the death of Osama bin Laden.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Post’s Afghanistan Papers have inadvertently exposed the Post as a subservient accomplice in disseminating US official lies; corporate media rely on official sources for free content and “scoops” to subsidize their journalism, which often spreads dishonest but convenient talking points by these same sources to retain “access” to this information, trustworthy or not (Extra!, 5/02; New York Times, 4/20/08; FAIR, 12/12/19).
Political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall pointed out, in an account (Common Dreams, 12/11/19) of being marginalized by corporate outlets like the Post :
“The Afghanistan Papers” is a bright, shining lie by omission. Yes, our military and civilian leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. But they could never have spread their murderous BS—thousands of US soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, trillions of dollars wasted—without media organizations like the Washington Post, which served as unquestioning government stenographers.
Press outlets like the Post and New York Times weren’t merely idiots used to disseminate pro-war propaganda. They actively censored people who knew we never should have gone into Afghanistan and tried to tell American voters the truth.
It’s this mutually beneficial relationship between the need for corporate media outlets like the Post for “access” to US official sources, and US officials who need corporate media outlets to propagate their preferred spin on US foreign policy to manipulate public opinion, that explains what the Afghanistan Papers expose as the Post’s own role in deceiving the US public. It’s why the Post’s coverage and editorial board can argue that the Trump administration shouldn’t “abandon the country in haste” (even though it’s been 18 years), and rally around the US’s “forever war” in Afghanistan (FAIR, 1/31/19, 9/11/19), even as the paper investigates the official lies the continuing occupation depends on.
Of course, this is also the reason why it’s systemically impossible for corporate outlets like the Post to take the opportunity to raise more substantive and provocative questions about whether deceit is a constant and essential aspect of US foreign policy, and not merely confined to isolated military invasions of “quagmire” countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan, despite the Afghanistan Papers providing a perfect opportunity to do so. To say nothing of challenging a worldview that invokes “winnable” wars, in which predictions of increasing numbers of (enemy) human deaths are best described as “rosy.”
There’s quite a long history of US media assisting officials in fabricating moral pretexts for invasion—from fictional accounts of North Vietnamese attacks on American destroyer ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (FAIR, 8/5/17), to conflating very different Islamic groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or claims that formerly US-backed dictator Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and the intent to use them against the US (CounterPunch, 6/11/14; FAIR, 3/19/07).
Observers note that the Afghanistan Papers “only confirm what we already know” (Daily Beast, 12/14/19), or that “the shocking thing about the Post stories… is how unshocking they are” (Atlantic, 12/9/19); even the Washington Post (12/12/19) reminds us that only people who “haven’t been paying attention” to the Afghan War are “surprised” by what’s found in the Afghanistan Papers.
Perhaps instead of pursuing FOIA requests to confirm the obvious, the Post could just interrogate its own contradictory coverage of the Afghan War and stop functioning as credulous mouthpieces for the US government. But to do that would also require confronting the lie that this entire so-called “War on Terror” has any moral credibility, when the US is a leading terrorist state that consciously pursues imperial policies that inflame hatred against the US to serve corporate interests (FAIR, 3/13/19, 11/22/19).
Absent that, an exercise like the Afghanistan Papers come off more as a “please consider” note to the Pulitzer judges than as an earnest effort to use the spotlight of journalistic investigation to speak truth to power and halt the ongoing, generation-long destruction of a foreign nation.