Peculiarities of Russian television reporting on the Hamas-Israeli war
By Gilbert Doctorow | October 11, 2023
A couple of days ago, I mentioned how Russian state television news was providing viewers with information about aspects of the ongoing armed conflict between Hamas and Israeli armed forces that you would not find in Western media during the first days of reporting. In particular, it was immediately evident from the news briefings on Vesti that Russian emphasis was on the military side rather than on the humanitarian catastrophe side.
BBC, Euronews, CNN have all focused attention on the slaughtered Israeli citizens and the apparent savagery of the Hamas fighters including today’s revelations about the hundred or more men, women and children who were killed in a Hamas raid on a kibbutz in the South of Israel. Russian news from day one showed pictures of the latest generation Israeli tank destroyed by a grenade dropped by a drone and of Hamas fighters approaching Israeli shores from the sea on paragliders. On two successive Evening with Vladimir Solovyov shows, images of the destruction to Israel’s billion dollar wall around Gaza and similar engineering feats by the insurgents as they moved deep into Israel proper. Solovyov’s panelists also provided expert analysis of the military threats Israel faces from the neighborhood if the war in Gaza escalates.
Why is this difference in what is reported important? Because coverage of the slaughter of civilians by Hamas fighters and interviews with relatives of those taken captive to Gaza as hostages plays into the hands of the Hamas strategists: it places enormous pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to proceed with a land invasion of Gaza which will result in many thousands of deaths among Israeli Defense Force soldiers as well as deaths of civilians in Gaza that may be an order of magnitude higher. The violence of an Israeli invasion may be so shocking as to justify outside Palestinian forces, namely Hezbollah in Lebanon and Arab fighters in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen to send contingents of armed men to join the battle on the side of Hamas in Gaza.
The Western reporting has provided a wealth of material for those who would denounce the Hamas fighters as “sub-human.” However, considering the great sophistication of the Hamas methods to overcome Israeli technical devices at the border and the wall itself intended to prevent such a raid from the enclave, considering the 5,000 or more missiles sent by Hamas into Israel that overwhelmed the “Iron Dome” Israeli defenses, it is unreasonable to speak of the executions and hostage taking as spontaneous or expressions of raw anger by Arab youths. No, it had to be planned in advance and handed over to disciplined fighters for implementation with a certain military objective in mind: namely to provoke the Israeli government and draw it into the lair of urban, guerilla warfare in Gaza.
A couple of days ago, in my geopolitical analysis of the conflict, I mentioned that the dispatch of a U.S. naval force led by the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford to the waters adjacent to Israel was likely intended to intimidate Iran and possibly to prepare for an American attack on Iran under accusations that Teheran had aided and guided the Hamas attack. However, the Biden administration has now stated clearly that it has no evidence Iran was involved in preparing the Hamas action. This confirms what the supreme religious leader of Iran said yesterday in a public speech, namely that the Palestinians themselves are fiercely independent and that they alone prepared the assault on Israel. He insisted that in the West people under-appreciate the skills and determination of Palestinians. It is only individual American politicians like would-be Republican candidate for the presidency Nikki Haley and the ever saber rattling Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who are calling for Iran to be attacked now.
Based on the information about the military capabilities of pro-Hamas forces in the neighborhood aired on the Solovyov show last night by first quality Russian experts, it is far more likely that the United States military presence is intended for use against Hezbollah in Lebanon than against Iran. This organization is now said to be the strongest pro-Palestinian force in the region with tens of thousands of fighters, with advanced military equipment including perhaps one hundred thousand missiles ready for use against Israel at any time. Israel’s last incursion into Lebanon to crush Hezbollah in 2006 ran into serious difficulties when enemy strength surprised them. Some fifty Israeli tanks were said to have been destroyed then. There is no question that Hezbollah has become more powerful since. Its war hardened forces received battlefield experience very relevant to the present Hamas-Israel conflict when they fought in the civil war in Syria.
One of the Russian experts who spoke at length about the situation in Israel on Sunday night was Yevgeny Satanovsky, who is a professor attached to two centers of Near East studies in Moscow. He appeared in the past on Russian television talk shows when the subject was Russian-Turkish relations but his core specialty is in fact Israeli politics and the economy. It was difficult to follow Satanovsky’s remarks in detail because he was speaking as if to academic friends over a cup of coffee and there was a lot of jargon. But his appraisal of the Israeli military’s degraded state was clear enough. The deplorable discipline within their army compounded the initial problems from the intelligence failures of Mossad. The common denominator both in intelligence and in military command was hubris, undeserved self-confidence, lulled by technological superiority over the enemy. But just as Hamas outfoxed Israeli intelligence by returning to 19th century methods of communications, couriers and face to face meetings in place of electronic means that Israel can intercept, so fairly rudimentary bulldozers were sufficient to break through the Israeli wall and a combination of firearms and drones neutralized the sensors and cameras protecting Israel from Gaza raids.
Said Satanovsky, the Israeli military has suffered an additional debilitating flaw, namely the succession of second quality generals who rose to the premiership of Israel over the past thirty years and the politicization of military ranks. He blamed in particular the 2005 decision by then prime minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw all Israeli presence from inside Gaza and to secure the enclave from its perimeter.
For those who want to know more about who Satanovsky is, he has a large entry in the Russian language edition of Wikipedia. Suffice it here to say that he calls himself an atheist as well as a “Russian Jew,” and for several years at the start of the new millennium he helped to create the Russian Jewish Congress and served as its president for three years. He has a teaching affiliation with the International Center of University Instruction on Jewish Civilization in the Jewish University of Jerusalem.
I mention this aspect of the man’s past and present because it brings us to the special relationship that Russia has with Israel. More than one million Soviet and Russian Federation Jews emigrated to Israel. These included people from every walk of life, including some scandalously wealthy crooks who evaded Russian justice for crimes including murder and are not extradited. Since the start of the Special Military Operation, their numbers have risen with the arrival in Israel of Russia’s ‘fifth column’ personalities in the entertainment industry, in finance, in government. With the Hamas attack some of those, like the billionaire banker Mikhail Fridman, took the first plane out of Israel for Moscow this past Sunday, as reported in a feature article of The Financial Times. The scoundrel who assisted Yeltsin’s fraudulent election in 1996 and then stayed on in power to enrich himself, serving in a succession of high positions, Anatoly Chubais, also slithered out of Israel the same day, but not to Moscow, where he would face arrest. Their compatriots in Russia snigger over the cowardice and selfishness of these high visibility characters.
Of course the vast majority of Russian settlers in Israel are normal, hard working folks and it is they to whom the Vesti journalists turn now for first-hand accounts of the impact of the Hamas attack. They can be doctors receiving the wounded at hospitals or officials in the mayor’s office of one or another Israeli city. You will not see them on CNN.
On the other side of the coin, Russia has and needs excellent relations with the Arab world. Fifteen per cent of the Russian population is Muslim, with their cultural and religious center in Kazan, some 860 km southeast of Moscow, in a wealthy oil-producing region. Chechnya is also a Muslim center in the Russian Federation and its leader Ramzan Kadyrov is well known in the Middle East. More to the point, Russia is a highly valuable partner of Saudi Arabia in Opec+ in which they jointly set production targets and price targets for the global oil industry. And Russia has close relations with the United Arab Emirates, particularly financial arrangements. The UAE dirham is now used as a currency for settling import-export transactions by Russia. Of course, Russia is closely aligned with Iran as a fellow member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and, as from 1 January 2024, BRICS. The close ties to Syria need no explanation, since Russia singlehandedly saved the government of Bashar Assad from the radical fundamentalist fighters that Washington was arming. The closeness of Russian ties with Iraq was in full evidence yesterday during the state visit of the Iraqi prime minister to Moscow. Russian companies Lukoil, Gazpromneft and others have already invested $16 billion in production assets in Iraq.
The official position with respect to the war now raging between Israel and Hamas was stated yesterday on television by President Putin: it can be solved only with implementation of the UN resolution on creation of a fully sovereign Palestine state, i.e. the “two state solution” that has been so long discussed but never brought to fruition. However, what will follow the creation of such a state is equally important and remains terra incognita: which world powers will guarantee the security of these two states?
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
Putin’s Valdai Speech, What You Need to Know
By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | October 12, 2023
On October 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the plenary session of the Valdai International Discussion Club near Sochi, Russia. The session was attended by scholars and diplomats from forty-two countries. Putin spoke for half an hour and then answered questions for about three hours. Several interesting things were said.
In western discourse it is always said that Russia started an unprovoked war in Ukraine. There has been much discussion—though not in the mainstream media nor in statements issued by western governments—about whether the war was unprovoked. But there has been little discussion about whether Russia started it.
Putin claimed that Russia’s “special military operation” did not start the war in Ukraine but, rather, was designed to stop it. “I have said many times that it was not us who started the so-called ‘war in Ukraine,’” Putin said. “On the contrary, we are trying to end it.”
The war started, according to Putin, when the United States “orchestrated a coup in Kiev in 2014.” Putin said that the U.S. “provoked the Ukraine crisis by supporting the coup in Ukraine in 2014. They could not fail to understand that this was a red line, we have said this a thousand times. They never listened.”
After the coup, the new government in Kiev “intimidate[d]” the ethnic Russian populations of Crimea and the Donbas, prohibited them from speaking “their native language,” and threatened them “with ethnic cleansing.” It was Kiev, and not Russia, “who tried to force Donbass to obey by shelling and bombing.” The new government in Kiev bombed the region “for nine years, shooting and using tanks. That was a war, a real war unleashed against Donbass.”
The war started, not a year and a half ago, according to Putin’s chronology. Instead, “This war, the one that the regime sitting in Kiev started with the vigorous and direct support from the West, has been going on for more than nine years, and Russia’s special military operation is aimed at stopping it.”
With the end of the Cold War, there was a window of opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the previous destructive era. There was an opportunity to move from “military and ideological” blocs to collective solutions. First Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and then Russia, sought a new international order that transcended blocs. Putin even recalled “a moment when I simply suggested: perhaps we should also join NATO?”
But Putin says that Russia’s “interest in constructive interaction was misunderstood, was seen as obedience, as an agreement that the new world order would be created by those who declared themselves the winners in the Cold War. It was seen as an admission that Russia was ready to follow in others’ wake and not to be guided by our own national interests but by somebody else’s interests.”
American “arrogance” attempted to establish a global “hegemony” over a world “too complicated and diverse to be subjected to one system.” This arrogance led to two things. The first was “endless expansion” by the political West. “NATO expansion has been pursued for decades.”
Putin reminded his audience that Russia was “promised verbally” about NATO “non-expansion to the east.” He then complained, “Yes, we were promised everything verbally, and our American partners do not deny this, and then they ask: where is this documented? There is no document. And that was it, goodbye. Did we promise? It looks like we did, but it was worth nothing.”
Eventually, this broken promise led to NATO expansion creeping up to Ukraine and right up against Russia’s borders. “Among the ways the crisis in Ukraine was provoked,” Putin said, “was the irrepressible desire of Western countries, especially the United States, to expand NATO to the borders of the Russian Federation.”
“After all,” Putin pointed out, NATO “is not only a political bloc, it is a military and political bloc, and the approach of its infrastructure is fraught with a grave threat to us.” He then added, “NATO’s expansion right up to our borders is threatening our security. This is a massive challenge to the Russian Federation’s security.”
To attain its hegemonic goal, it was necessary for the United States to “to replace international law with a “rules-based order.” But unlike the international law of the charter international system that is based on the United Nations, “It is not clear what rules these are and who invented them.” In the service of Americna hegemony, the U.S. “arbitrarily set[s] these rules.”
In a recent essay, professor of international law John Dugard has said that it is neither clear what the rules of the rules-based order are nor “the method for their creation,” and has offered as a possible explanation of the rules based order that it is “international law as interpreted by the United States to accord with its national interests,” meaning whatever the U.S. needs it to mean in any given situation. He suggests that the United States tries “to impose the concept of a rules-based world order on the international community. They use this banner to promote, without any hesitation, a unipolar model of the world order where there are ‘exceptional’ countries and everyone else who must obey the ‘club of the chosen.’”
In this world order, the United States not only tells other nations how they “should behave overall” in a “colonial mentality,” but there exists “an international system where arbitrariness reigns, where all decision-making is up to those who think they are exceptional, sinless and right [and] any country can be attacked simply because it is disliked by a hegemon.”
Putin says that Russia sees a future multipolar world order in which “no one can unilaterally force or compel others to live or behave as a hegemon pleases even when it contradicts the sovereignty, genuine interests, traditions, or customs of peoples and countries.” Russia sees “civilization [as] a multifaceted concept subject to various interpretations.” The world has evolved from the “colonial interpretation whereby there was a ‘civilized world’ serving as a model for the rest, and everyone was supposed to conform to those standards. Those who disagreed were to be coerced into this ‘civilization’ by the truncheon of the ‘enlightened’ master. These times, as I said, are now in the past, and our understanding of civilisation is quite different.”
Putin argued, as he has consistently, for the principle of the indivisibility of security, the idea that security cannot be divided so that the policies that increase the security of one country decrease the security of another. Indivisibility of security assures that the security of one state should not be bought at the expense of the security of another.
The American insistence on the right of states to unrestrained free will in their choice of security alignments and the accompanying NATO open door policy to Ukraine ignores the indivisibility of security. Putin said, “The main thing is to free international relations from the bloc approach and the legacy of the colonial era and the Cold War. We have been saying for decades that security is indivisible, and that it is impossible to ensure the security of some at the expense of the security of others.”
Putin said he thinks that suggestions of “a new security system in Europe, which would include Russia, and the United States, and Canada; but not NATO, but together with everyone else: for Eastern and Central Europe… would solve many of today’s problems.”
It is often said in the West that Putin seeks to reestablish a Russian empire and reacquire vast territories, starting with Ukraine. Putin, though, says in contradiction to those claims, “The Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear… [W]e have no interest in conquering additional territory.” He insisted, “This is not a territorial conflict and not an attempt to establish regional geopolitical balance. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.”
Those principles are a balanced multipolar world, indivisibility of security, an end to blocs and to NATO encroachment and protection of ethnic Russians in the Donbass and Crimea.
During the question and answer period, political scientist Sergei Karaganov suggested that the current Russian nuclear doctrine is no longer taken seriously by the West as a deterrent. He asked whether it was not time to modify the nuclear doctrine and lower the threshold.
Often portrayed in the West as a nuclear weapons sabre rattler, Putin tamped down the question, answering, “I do not see the need to change our conceptual approaches. The potential adversary knows everything and is aware of what we are capable of.”
Putin explained Russia’s existing nuclear doctrine. He said there are two situations that could trigger a “possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia.” The first is that “the use of nuclear weapons against us… would entail a so-called retaliatory strike.” The second situation is “an existential threat to the Russian state—even if conventional weapons are used against Russia, but the very existence of Russia as a state is threatened.”
Putin insisted that Russia does not need to change its stance. In the case of the first scenario, “this response will be absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor, because seconds after we detect the launch of missiles… the counter strike in response will involve hundreds—hundreds of our missiles in the air, so that no enemy will have a chance to survive.” As for the second, important as an insight into how Putin evaluates the situation in Ukraine, “There is no situation imaginable today where something would threaten Russian statehood and the existence of the Russian state.”
However, Putin said that nuclear testing is “a whole different matter.” He says that, after signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the United States never ratified it. Russia, on the other hand, both signed it and ratified it. He told his audience that the development of new strategic weapons—including the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile with “basically unlimited range” and the super heavy Sarmat missile—is “nearing completion.” He then said that Russia can “act just as the United States does” and “offer a tit-for-tat response,” suggesting that Russia could repeal the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and begin testing new weapons.
In response to the question of whether Russia objected to Ukraine joining the European Union, Putin responded that Russia had “never objected or expressed a negative attitude to Ukraine’s plans to join the European economic community—never.” He said that Russia opposes Ukraine joining NATO because NATO is a “military bloc” and a “tool of U.S. foreign policy.” But “the EU is not a military bloc,” and, as for “economic cooperation, or economic unions, we do not see any military threat.”
US Provides Data of Syrian, Russian Military’s Movement to Jihadists – Russian Intel Head
Sputnik – 12.10.2023
MOSCOW – The United States is providing jihadists with data on the places of dislocation and movement routes of the Syrian and Russian military in Syria, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergei Naryshkin said on Thursday.
“Work is underway to destabilize the situation, including through the capabilities of ISIS [Islamic State, a terrorist group banned in Russia]. Information about places of dislocation and movement routes of the Syrian army and Russian military is being transmitted to the jihadists,” Naryshkin was quoted as saying by the SVR.
US President Joe Biden’s administration is aimed at disrupting the emerging positive dynamics around and inside Syria, Naryshkin added.
Hungary should consider leaving EU if Brussels makes drastic treaty change move, argues Hungarian columnist
Hungary has a new red line as Germany and France move in to seize control of the entire bloc, writes Hungarian political analyst.
By John Cody | Remix News | October 10, 2023
Following news that Germany and France are moving forward with reforms that would drastically curtail the sovereignty of EU nation-states, Hungarian columnist Tamás Fricz argued in the Magyar Nemzet newspaper that if such changes really do come to pass, Hungary needs to consider the possibility of leaving the European Union.
All I can say is that if we can really get this through the EU institutions, we really need to seriously consider our role and the conditions for staying in the EU,” wrote Fricz in response to the new reform measures being proposed.
“Once again, the two EU powers have found each other: France and Germany are determined to reform — or, in other words, to curtail — the rights of the member states this year, including the abolition of the veto in the European Council, the only EU body where the member states say still counts,” he wrote.
He described how the move was first discussed by German Minister of State Anna Lührmann and French EU Minister of State Laurence Boone during an interview with Euractiv a few weeks ago. However, since then, the EU has accelerated its plans, with 12 experts commissioned by Germany and France to produce a 60-page draft reform paper detailing how the EU would be “reformed,” most notably by abolishing the veto.
Fricz asks why Hungary should go along with these reforms, and writes if Hungary does not fight back against the abolition of the veto, “we will be permanently at the mercy of the mainstream, liberal, globalist elite in Brussels.”
“That is when a qualified majority, 15 countries and at least 65 percent of the population, is enough for the globalists to impose their will on the member states,” he wrote.
He then details the various areas where Hungary would face serious challenges, writing that Hungary would be “forced to take in tens of thousands of migrants under a mandatory quota” or “pay through the nose” to refuse them.
He also notes that the EU would force Hungary to abolish its child protection laws, thus “opening ourselves up — as already done in Western Europe — to LGBTQI+ propaganda in our schools, in our kindergartens, on our streets, in advertising, in cultural works, on television channels, everywhere and anywhere.”
He then listed various initiatives that Hungary would be powerless to stop, such as the global passport scheme from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the abolishment of cash.
“The European Central Bank wants to abolish the use of cash, one of the main guarantees of individual freedom, and the Union is giving huge amounts to Ukraine to continue fighting the war,” writes Fricz.
“I could go on citing the examples, but if our French and German ‘friends’ are able to abolish the veto, if they can do this feat, then there is nothing more to talk about,” he concluded.
Russia fully supports establishment of Palestinian state: Putin
Press TV – October 11, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin says Moscow has always fully supported the establishment of a Palestinian state, as the Israeli regime is ceaselessly pounding the besieged Gaza Strip with barrages of missile attacks.
Speaking at the plenary session of the Russian Energy Week on Wednesday, Putin stressed that his country has always supported the implementation of the United Nations Security Council’s decision on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
“We have always supported the implementation of the decisions of the UN Security Council, I mean, first of all, the creation of an independent Palestinian state,” the Russian leader emphasized.
Putin’s remarks came as Israel has been launching deadly strikes on the densely-populated Gaza Strip since Saturday after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group waged a surprise attack, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, against the usurping entity.
Hamas says that its operation came in response to Israel’s violations at al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East al-Quds and growing settler violence.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Putin called the eruption of violence between Israel and the Palestinians a vivid example of the failure of US policy in the Middle East.
He stressed that Washington’s policy in the region has taken no account of the needs of the Palestinians as the White House tried to focus on financial assistance, rather than finding solutions to existing fundamental political challenges.
“It is unclear whether it will be possible to somehow calm the situation in the near future, but we must strive for this because the expansion of the conflict zone can lead to dire consequences,” Putin said.
The Russian president also denounced as a mistake the Washington’s move of sending a carrier strike group, which includes the USS Gerald R. Ford, closer to Israel.
“I don’t understand why the US is dragging aircraft carrier groups into the Mediterranean Sea. I don’t really understand the point. Are they going to bomb Lebanon or what? Or have they decided to try to scare someone? There are people there who are no longer afraid of anything. This is not the way to solve the problem. Compromise solutions need to be looked for. Of course, such actions are inflaming the situation,” Putin said.
More than a thousand people have been killed and thousands more have been injured in nearly five days of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, a besieged territory on the Mediterranean which is home to some 2.3 million people despite its relatively small land area.
Iran and Saudi Arabia say Israel, its supporters inviting ‘destructive insecurity’
Press TV – October 11, 2023
Iran and Saudi Arabia have said that the Israeli regime’s crimes and the United States’ green light for the atrocities stand to invite “destructive insecurity” for the occupying regime and its supporters.
The remarks were made on Wednesday in the first phone call to take place between President Ebrahim Raeisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Mohammad Jamshidi, the Iranian chief executive’s deputy chief of staff for political affairs, wrote on a message on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The comments came after the Gaza Strip’s resistance movements initiated their biggest operation against Israel in years on Saturday in response to the occupying regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodshed and destruction against Palestinians.
Codenamed the al-Aqsa Storm Operation, the campaign killed at least 1,000 Israeli forces and settlers, and led to many others among them being taken hostage by the resistance groups.
Shedding further light on the contents of the conversation between Raeisi and bin Salman, Jamshidi said, “…the 2 agreed on the need to end war crimes against Palestine.”
Israel has responded to the Palestinian operation by waging a “long” war against Gaza, for which it has called up an unprecedented 300,000 reservists.
The Israeli war has killed at least 1,100 Palestinians, including 326 children, and injured 5,339 others.
The military campaign has seen the regime leveling entire districts and featured its use of banned white phosphorous munitions against densely populated neighborhoods.
Earlier this week, Israeli Minister for Military Affairs Yoav Gallant announced a “total blockade” to stop food and fuel from reaching Gaza, home to 2.3 million people.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday said he was “deeply distressed” by Israel’s announcement of the complete siege.
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza was extremely dire before these hostilities; now it will only deteriorate exponentially,” Guterres said.
Decades before Snowden, this American patriot waged war against illegal surveillance in the US
In the 1970s, US Army Captain Christopher Pyle blew the lid on government agencies’ domestic spying
Former undercover agent Christopher Pyle testifies in the Senate that the Army has spied on politicians and thousands of ordinary Americans, February 24, 1971. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
By Robert Bridge | RT | October 11, 2023
In 1970, a US Army captain went rogue after he discovered that the military was conducting surveillance on dissidents across the country, thus sparking the first effort in modern times to tame US intelligence.
In 1968, almost half a century before the world heard the name of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on a US-run global surveillance system, Christopher Pyle, an Army captain who taught law at the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Holabird, Maryland, was about to do something no less memorable.
After Pyle had concluded one of his popular lectures on civil disorder, which focused on how the military could better quell riots in those highly volatile times, a military officer directly involved in such operations approached him with the request for a meeting. Several days later, Pyle was escorted into a large warehouse facility that once had been used to assemble railroad engines. In his 2006 book, No Place to Hide, Robert O’Harrow described what happened next.
“Pyle walked into the cage, where an officer showed him books containing mug shots. He looked in the first volume and saw a familiar face. It was Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s assistant. Officers called the books the ‘black list.’”
“Outside the cage, Pyle saw more than a dozen teletype machines. The head of the CONUS [acronym for Continental United States] intelligence section told him they were spitting out reports from some fifteen hundred Army operatives about demonstrations with twenty people or more. Pyle was starting to understand how naive he’d been. He began formulating a plan. He would be getting out of the Army soon. He could tell the world about what was going on. When he joined the Army he took an oath to defend the country against all enemies, here and abroad. In his mind now, that included the Army’s intelligence operation. They turned in their security badges and left the building.”
And thus was born one of the most consequential whistleblowers of the post-World War II era.
In January 1970, Pyle, now a full-fledged private citizen, penned an article for the Washington Monthly entitled, ‘CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics.’ The explosive opening paragraph said it all: “[t]he U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States. Nearly 1,000 plainclothes investigators … keep track of political protests of all kinds – from Klan rallies in North Carolina to anti-war speeches at Harvard.”
Immediately, some US media swung into action as journalists began hounding the Department of Defense and the US Army to determine the veracity of the claims. Given Pyle’s extreme proximity to the subject matter at hand, however, it soon became clear that Uncle Sam got caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
Pyle’s revelations were enough to prompt Congress, as well as a slew of litigation lawyers, to sit up and take notice. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senator Samuel James Ervin, a self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina, worked together with Pyle to investigate and expose the clandestine domestic spying program.
Pyle and Ervin eventually spent countless hours delivering testimony before various congressional meetings over a span of several years. The first fruit of their labors came with passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on December 31, 1974, the legislation states: “No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains…” In other words, although the law didn’t actually stop the US Army or intelligence agencies from infiltrating civil action groups and public demonstrations, it did hamper the feds from disclosing the identities of the activists without their foreknowledge.
To this end, Pyle served as a consultant for three Congressional committees: the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on the Judiciary Committee (1971-1974), the Committee on Government Operations (1974), and the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975).
According to Pyle, as a result of those successful investigations, “the entire US Army Intelligence Command was abolished and all of its files were burned.” For his actions, Pyle ended up on then-President Richard Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List.”
Given the severity of their overall findings, however, the congressional investigations triggered by the US Army captain did not stop there.
1975, the ‘Year of Intelligence’
On January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4, the US Senate created the so-called Church Committee, chaired by Democrat Senator Frank Church, to further examine abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The House carried out its own set of investigations with the Pike Commission and the Rockefeller Commission, thereby prompting the media to label 1975 as the ‘Year of Intelligence,’ and not in a way that was flattering to the intelligence community.
Pyle lent his expertise to the ambitious Church Committee, headed by Iowa Senator Frank Church, which discovered a number of questionable, unethical and outright illegal activities by the CIA between 1959 and 1973. Detailed in a series of reports dubbed the ‘Family Jewels’, these activities included conducting physical surveillance on journalists, amassing files on nearly 10,000 Americans connected to the antiwar movement, funding behavior modification research on unwitting subjects, and plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban President Fidel Castro and DR Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
The most impactful discovery made by the Church Committee, however, was that of Project SHAMROCK. Started in 1940 during World War II and running into the 1970s, the NSA was given secret authority to access all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. At the peak of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages were captured and analyzed by NSA personnel in a month. The pertinent information contained in these messages was then forwarded to other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Department of Defense. This formed the basis of the so-called ‘Watch List’ of the 1970s that included thousands of American citizens, including high-ranking politicians, celebrities, academics and antiwar activists.
The findings led Senator Frank Church to conclude that Project SHAMROCK was “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”
Based on the recommendations of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Under FISA, the government is required to obtain warrants to conduct electronic surveillance against individuals from a special court. Such a warrant requires “probable cause to believe” that the surveillance target is a foreign government or organization, or an agent thereof, “engaging in clandestine intelligence activities or international terrorism,” as per a Department of Justice (DOJ) clarification.
Yet, as we shall see, even this minor legislative hurdle would prove too cumbersome for the Bush administration in its war on terror.
Privacy in the age of terrorism
The tireless work of the Church Commission was put to a test in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as US lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle were prepared to sacrifice citizens’ privacy in the name of national security. Thus, less than one week after three hijacked aircraft toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people in the process, one of the most comprehensive plans for conducting surveillance on American civilians and individuals worldwide – the USA PATRIOT ACT (an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’) – was already being disseminated to members of Congress.
Arguably the most controversial part of the Patriot Act is contained in Section 215 of the 342-page document, which calls for sweeping government powers against private and public enterprises, individuals, and personal privacy. Most crucially, Section 215 did away with the requirement that the target of the records search be a non-US citizen and “an agent of a foreign power.” American citizens were now legitimate targets as well.
In the Senate, the Patriot Act passed in a 99 – 1 vote. The only senator to vote against it was Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold. “There is no doubt,” he declared on the Senate floor before the historic vote, “that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists…But that would not be a country in which we would want to live.”
Even with this widening of surveillance powers, then-US President George W. Bush, as part of the global ‘War on Terror’ that he declared following the events of 9/11, ordered the NSA to tap the communications of an untold number of people in the US, including citizens, without the warrants demanded by the FISA court – despite the fact that between 1979 and 2005, only four out of over 15,000 warrant requests were rejected by the FISA court.
Christopher Pyle, who was still committed to his cause over 30 years after he chose to become a whistleblower, labeled Bush “a criminal” for violating the FISA law and suggested that he should be impeached.
“The Constitution says he must take care that all laws be faithfully executed, not just the ones he likes,” Pyle said during an interview with Democracy Now in 2005. “The statute says … that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive law governing these international intercepts, and he violated it anyway. And the law also says that any person who violates that law is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. By the plain meaning of the law, the President is a criminal.”
More recently, Christopher Pyle, 83, who now works as Professor Emeritus of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, spoke out on behalf of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower who revealed a massive global intelligence program run by the so-called Five Eyes, a once-secretive intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“He’s just an ordinary American,” Pyle explained in 2013. “He’s trying to start a debate in this nation over something that is critically important. He should be respected for that and taken at face value and we should move on to the big issues, including the corruption of our system that is done by massive secrecy and by massive amounts of money and politics.”
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
Support not ‘indefinite’, White House tells Ukraine
RT | October 12, 2023
The US is running out of money for Ukraine unless Congress approves additional funding, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday.
“In the near term, we’ve got appropriations and authorities for both Ukraine and for Israel,” Kirby said during the daily press briefing. “But you don’t want to be trying to bake in long-term support when you’re at the end of the rope.”
“And in Ukraine, on the Ukraine funding, we’re coming near to the end of the rope,” he added. “Today we announced $200 million, and we’ll keep that aid going as long as we can, but it’s not going to be indefinite.”
Asked to define “near term,” Kirby said he could not point to a specific date, because that depended on how quickly Ukraine and Israel expended their equipment and ammunition “or what the need is and what our ability to do it is.”
On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesperson assured reporters that the US had the ability to “continue our support both to Ukraine, Israel, and maintain our own global readiness.”
Kirby, however, admitted that the money previously appropriated for Ukraine by Congress is “not going to last forever” and that the lawmakers needed to approve more and soon.
“The sooner there’s a speaker of the House, obviously, the more comfortable we’ll all be in terms of being able to support Israel and Ukraine,” he said.
The House of Representatives has not had a speaker since last Tuesday, when Kevin McCarthy became the first-ever speaker to be ousted in a House vote, over an alleged secret deal with the White House to approve more Ukraine funding. Several Republicans led the charge against their California colleague, backed by all of the minority Democrats. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican nominee to succeed McCarthy, has been supportive of funding Ukraine in the past.
Since February 2022, when the conflict with Russia escalated, the US has channeled almost $44 billion worth of military aid to Ukraine, as well as billions more in cash, humanitarian and economic assistance.
Musk Fires Back at EU Regulator: X Content on Palestine-Israel Conflict ‘Open Source & Transparent’
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 11.10.2023
A European regulator had issued Elon Musk a warning about the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” on X amid the Mideast escalation, warning that in case of “non-compliance, penalties can be imposed.”
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk went on X (formerly Twitter) to fire back at the EU regulator’s complaint that his platform allegedly spreads “illegal content and disinformation” about the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Responding to the allegations, Musk wrote that the platform’s policy is “everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports.” He also added, “Please list the violations you allude to on 𝕏, so that that [sic] the public can see them. Merci beaucoup.”
Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, had sent a letter to the tech billionaire, claiming that his office has received “indications” that groups are spreading misinformation and “violent and terrorist” content on X, along with “repurposed old images”. Breton urged Musk to ensure “a prompt, accurate, and complete response,” and contact “relevant law enforcement agencies” within the next 24 hours. Breton reminded Musk that he needed to have “proportionate and effective mitigation measures to tackle the risks to public security and civic discourse stemming from disinformation”.
Furthermore, the commissioner alluded to the platform’s updated public interest policy that redefines which posts are ‘newsworthy.’
Screenshot of X post announcing the platform’s revamped Public Interest Policy. © Photo : Safety/X
Breton, who had shared his letter via an X post, had also included a hashtag referencing the Digital Services Act, used by the European Commission (EC) to exert pressure on online platforms under the pretext of creating “a safer digital space”.
The tech guru also responded on his social media platform to an X post by Glenn Greenwald. The American journalist and lawyer had tagged the news about the EU commissioner’s warning to Elon Musk, saying that the EU intended to wield its new censorship law to “punish” X. Greenwald referenced the firm “Reset” that the EU had hired as ostensibly “disinformation experts”. Reset is an initiative run by UK-based Luminate Projects Limited, a company owned by Luminate, an organization founded by the Omidyar Group. A study by “Reset”, the American journalist reminded, had accused X of failing to censor “pro-Russia propaganda.”
Replying to Greenwald’s post, Musk wrote that not only must the public “hear exactly what this disinformation consists of and decide for themselves,” but that, “many times, we have found the ‘official fact-checker’ to be the very individual making false statements.”
This May, the social media giant owned by Elon Musk exited the voluntary European Union Code of Practice of Disinformation, launched last June, which presupposes obligations to increase transparency, cooperate with fact-checkers, and track political advertising. Elon Musk insisted there is now “less misinformation rather than more” since he took over the platform in October, 2022. However, Thierry Breton had warned Musk that. “You can run but you can’t hide,” in a nod at the platform’s obligations as a so-called Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
“Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under #DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement,” Breton had tweeted.
Under the pretext of shielding Europeans from ‘undesired information,’ the European Commission (EC) conceived the Digital Services Act (DSA), which was signed into law and came into effect in November 2022. With the touted aim of creating “a safer and more accountable online environment”, the new legislation elevated the European bureaucrats to the position of a supervisor of the media sphere on the continent. After DSA entered into law, online platforms and search engines have been required to improve accountability and oversight by, for example, introducing a new flagging mechanism for what the authors of the law deem “illegal content.” Under the rules, digital platforms are obligated to, “increase the protection of minors”, and “give users more choice and better information.” Firms breaching the DSA will face a fine equating to 6% of global turnover. Those who continue to break the EU’s new digital rules may be prohibited from operating in Europe.
However, as part of the EU’s so-called “disinformation crusade,” the bloc stooped to outright censorship of Russian media, banning Sputnik, RT, and their subsidiaries, along with individual media channels of Russian bloggers amid Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine. The ban was met with condemnation from members of the European Federation of Journalists and the Dutch Association of Journalists (NVJ) at the time, who decried the fact that Europeans were being deprived of alternative viewpoints.
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Book Review
Why the War on Conspiracy Theories Is Bad Public Policy
By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • February 1, 2019
A Review of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass Sunstein (based on an earlier paper co-authored with Adrian Vermeule); In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business by Charlan Nemeth; and Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski
On January 25 2018 YouTube unleashed the latest salvo in the war on conspiracy theories, saying “we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”
At first glance that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants YouTube or anyone else to recommend bad information. And almost everyone agrees that phony miracle cures, flat earthism, and blatantly false claims about 9/11 and other historical events are undesirable.
But if we stop and seriously consider those words, we notice a couple of problems. First, the word “recommend” is not just misleading but mendacious. YouTube obviously doesn’t really recommend anything. When it says it does, it is lying. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Putin’s key remarks on peace talks and Europe’s ‘schizophrenia’
- Trita Parsi: Israel Set a Trap for Total War in the Region
- Trump’s Iran war is on an Israeli leash
- Saudi oil boss issues global supply warning
- Riyadh Says Its Oil System Is Intact. The Numbers Say Otherwise.
- Trump and Netanyahu Want to “Finish the Job” on Iran
- US ‘one-sided dictation’ not Iran’s beliefs makes rational talks impossible: Baghaei
- Iran’s Next Strike May Not Explode. It Could Shut You Down /Col Doug Macgregor
- Iran: US political targets legitimate if assassinations return
- Iraq shuts key border crossing with Iran under US pressure: Report
- If Americans Knew
- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
- The Israel Lobby’s Changing Fortunes
- AIPAC has become such a political liability that it’s shifting to a more “nimble” approach to buying politicians
- At least 160 Israeli settler attacks in 2 weeks
- Will Gaza’s Ancient Christian Community Disappear Forever?
- Israel’s vision of regional security rests on keeping Arab states weak
- Heidi Levine recounts how Palestinian youths helped save her in settler attack
- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
- Trump’s Intensifying Sabotage of the ICC, for Israel’s Sake
- Israeli military detain US and UK volunteers in West Bank including Democratic NY politician Brad Lander
- No Tricks Zone
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
