Canadians subjected to CIA brainwashing experiments at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute are taking legal action against the federal government, demanding a public apology and compensation.
The Survivors Allied Against Government Abuse (SAAGA) group met in Montreal, Canada, on May 20. “The government should offer an apology and there should be recognition of the injustice that was done,” said Gina Blasbalg, a patient at the institute in 1960.
Dr. Ewen Cameron, who co-founded the World Psychiatric Association, served as director of the Allan Memorial Institute psychiatric hospital between 1943 and 1964.
Cameron oversaw ‘depatterning’ and ‘psychic driving’ experiments which attempted to erase a patient’s memories and reprogram them with new thoughts, according to CBC News.
Cameron tested experimental drugs such as LSD and PCP, medically induced sleep for extended periods, and also oversaw extreme forms of electroshock therapy and sensory deprivation. Many of his patient suffered brain damage as a result.
Between 1950 and 1965, the government funded Cameron’s project to the tune of US$500,000 – US$4 million at today’s rates – along with smaller funding from the CIA, using a front organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
One of the most complicated and frustrating aspects of operating a global capitalist empire is maintaining the fiction that it doesn’t exist. Virtually every action you take has to be carefully recontextualized or otherwise spun for public consumption. Every time you want to bomb or invade some country to further your interests, you have to mount a whole PR campaign. You can’t even appoint a sadistic torture freak to run your own coup-fomenting agency, or shoot a few thousand unarmed people you’ve imprisoned in a de facto ghetto, without having to do a big song and dance about “defending democracy” and “democratic values.”
Naked despotism is so much simpler, not to mention more emotionally gratifying. Ruling an empire as a godlike dictator means never having to say you’re sorry. You can torture and kill anyone you want, and conquer and exploit whichever countries you want, without having to explain yourself to anyone. Also, you get to have your humongous likeness muraled onto the walls of buildings, make people swear allegiance to you, and all that other cool dictator stuff.
Global capitalists do not have this luxury. Generating the simulation of democracy that most Western consumers desperately need in order to be able to pretend to believe that they are not just smoothly-functioning cogs in the machinery of a murderous global empire managed by a class of obscenely wealthy and powerful international elites to whom their lives mean exactly nothing, although extremely expensive and time-consuming, is essential to maintaining their monopoly on power. Having conditioned most Westerners into believing they are “free,” and not just glorified peasants with gadgets, the global capitalist ruling classes have no choice but to keep up this fiction. Without it, their empire would fall apart at the seams.
This is the devil’s bargain modern capitalism made back in the 18th Century. In order to wrest power from the feudal aristocracies that had dominated the West throughout the Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie needed to sell the concept of “democracy” to the unwashed masses, who they needed both to staff their factories and, in some cases, to fight revolutionary wars, or depose and publicly guillotine monarchs. All that gobbledegook about taxes, tariffs, and the unwieldy structure of the feudal system was not the easiest sell to the peasantry. “Liberty” and “equality” went over much better. So “democracy” became their rallying cry, and, eventually, the official narrative of capitalism. The global capitalist ruling classes have been stuck with “democracy” ever since, or, more accurately, with the simulation of democracy.
The purpose of this simulation of democracy is not to generate fake democracy and pass it off as real democracy. Its purpose is to generate the concept of democracy, the only form in which democracy exists. It does this by casting a magic spell (which I’ll do my best to demystify in a moment) that deceives us into perceiving the capitalist marketplace we Westerners inhabit, not as a market, but as a society. An essentially democratic society. Not a fully fledged democratic society, but a society progressing toward “democracy” … which it is, and simultaneously isn’t.
Obviously, life under global capitalism is more democratic than under feudal despotism, not to mention more comfortable and entertaining. Capitalism isn’t “evil” or “bad.” It’s a machine. Its fundamental function is to eliminate any and all despotic values and replace them with a single value, i.e., exchange value, determined by the market. This despotic-value-decoding machine is what freed us from the tyranny of kings and priests, which it did by subjecting us to the tyranny of capitalists and the meaningless value of the so-called free market, wherein everything is just another commodity … toothpaste, cell phones, healthcare, food, education, cosmetics, et cetera. Despite that, only an idiot would argue that capitalism is not preferable to despotism, or that it hasn’t increased our measure of freedom. So, yes, we have evolved toward democracy, if we’re comparing modern capitalism to medieval feudalism.
The problem is that capitalism is never going to lead to actual democracy (i.e., government by and for the people). This is never going to happen. In fact, capitalism has already reached the limits of the freedom it can safely offer us. This freedom grants us the ability to make an ever-expanding variety of choices … none of which have much to do with democracy. For example, Western consumers are free to work for whatever corporation they want, and to buy whatever products they want, and to assume as much debt as the market will allow to purchase a home wherever they want, and to worship whichever gods they want (as long as they conform their behavior to the values of capitalism and not their religion), and men can transform themselves into women, and white people can deem themselves African Americans, or Native Americans, or whatever they want, and anyone can mock or insult the President or the Queen of England on Facebook and Twitter, none of which freedoms were even imaginable, much less possible, under feudal despotism.
But this is as far as our “freedom” goes. The global capitalist ruling classes are never going to allow us to govern ourselves, not in any meaningful way. In fact, since the mid-1970s, they’ve been systematically dismantling the framework of social democracy throughout the West, and otherwise relentlessly privatizing everything. They’ve been doing this more slowly in Europe, where social democracy is more entrenched, but, make no mistake, American “society” is the model for our dystopian future. The ruling classes and their debt-enslaved servants, protected from the desperate masses by squads of hyper-militarized police, medicated in their sanitized enclaves, watching Westworld on Amazon Prime as their shares in private prisons rise and the forces of democracy defend their freedom by slaughtering men, women, and children in some faraway country they can’t find on a map, and would never visit on vacation anyway … this is where the USA already is, and where the rest of the West is headed.
Which is why it is absolutely crucial to maintain the simulation of democracy, and the fiction that we’re still living in a world where major geopolitical events are determined by sovereign nations and their leaders, rather than by global corporations and a class of supranational elites whose primary allegiance is to global capitalism, rather than to any specific nation, much less to the actual people who live there. The global capitalist ruling classes need the masses in the West to believe that they live in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and so on, and not in a global marketplace. Because, if it’s all one global marketplace, with one big global labor force (which global corporations can exploit with impunity), and if it’s one big global financial system (where the economies of supposed adversaries like China and the United States, or the European Union and Russia, are almost totally interdependent), then there is no United States of America, no United Kingdom, no France, no Germany … or not as we’re conditioned to perceive them. There is only the global capitalist empire, divided into “national” market territories, each performing slightly different administrative functions within the empire … and those territories that have not yet surrendered their sovereignty and been absorbed into it. I think you know which those territories are.
But getting back to the simulation of democracy (the purpose of which is to prevent us from perceiving the world as I just suggested above), how that works is, we are all conditioned to believe we are living in these imperfect democracies, which are inexorably evolving toward “real” democracy but just haven’t managed to get there quite yet. “Real” being the key word here, because there is no such thing as real democracy. There never has been, except among relatively small and homogenous groups of people. Like Baudrillard’s Disneyland, “Western democracy” is presented to us as “imperfect” or “unfinished” (in other words, as a replica of “real democracy”) in order to convince us that there exists such a thing as “real democracy,” which we will achieve … someday.
This is how simulations work. The replica does not exist to deceive us into believing it is the “real” thing. It exists to convince us that there is a “real” thing. In essence, it invokes the “real” thing by pretending to be a copy of it. Just as the images of God in church invoke the “god” of which they are copies (if only in the minds of the faithful), our imperfect replica of democracy invokes the concept of “real democracy” (which does not exist, and has never existed, beyond the level of tribes and bands).
This is, of course, ceremonial magic … but then so is everything else, really. Take out a twenty dollar bill, or a twenty Euro note, or your driver’s license. They are utterly valueless, except as symbols, but no less powerful for being just symbols. Or look at some supposedly solid object under an electron microscope. Try this with a tablespoon. As that bald kid in The Matrix put it, you will “realize that there is no spoon” … or, rather, that there is only the spoon we’ve created by believing that there is a spoon.
Look, I don’t mean to get all spooky. What that kid (among various others throughout history) was trying to get us to understand is that we create reality, collectively, with symbols … or we allow reality to be created for us. Our collective reality is also our religion, in that we live our lives and raise our children according to its precepts and values, regardless of whatever other rituals we may or may not engage in on the weekend. Western consumers, no matter whether nominally Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, or of any other faith, live their lives and raise their children according to the values and rules of capitalism. Capitalism is our religion. Like every religion, it has a cosmology.
In the cosmology of global capitalism, “democracy” is capitalist heaven. We hear it preached about throughout our lives, we’re surrounded by graven images of it, but we don’t get to see it until we’re dead. Attempting to storm its pearly gates, or to create the Kingdom of Democracy on Earth, is heresy, and is punishable by death. Denying its existence is blasphemy, for which the punishment is excommunication, and consignment to the City of Dis, where the lost souls shout back and forth at each other across the lower depths of the Internet, their infernal voices unheard by the faithful … but, hey, don’t take the word of an apostate like me. Go ahead, try it, and see what happens.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.
The Trojan horse was the earliest recorded military psyop. That psyop continues to be deployed on unsuspecting populations and it is just as useful as ever, but today’s tricksters have donned the mantle of philanthropy, and their Trojan horses are not wooden statues but non-governmental organizations offering “aid” to foreign nations. In today’s edition of The Corbett Report, we’ll learn about how NGOs are the deep state’s Trojan horses.
If you haven’t been living in a hole in a cave with both fingers plugged into your ears, you may have noticed that an awful lot of fuss gets made about Russian propaganda and disinformation these days. Mainstream media outlets are now speaking openly about the need for governments to fight an “information war” against Russia, with headlines containing that peculiar phrase now turning up on an almost daily basis.
Here’s one published today titled “Border guards detain Russian over ‘information war’ on Poland,” about a woman who is to be expelled from that country on the grounds that she “worked to consolidate pro-Russian groups in Poland in order to challenge Polish government policy on historical issues and replace it with a Russian narrative” in order to “destabilize Polish society and politics.”
Here’s one published yesterday titled “Marines get new information warfare leader,” about a US Major General’s appointment to a new leadership position created “to better compete in a 21st century world.”
This notion that the US and its allies are fighting against Russian “hybrid warfare” (by which they typically mean hackers and disinformation campaigns) has taken such deep root among think tanks, DC elites and intelligence/defense circles that it often gets unquestioningly passed on as fact by mass media establishment stenographers who are immersed in and chummy with those groups. The notion that these things present a real threat to the public is taken for granted to such an extent that they seldom bother to even attempt to explain to their audiences why we’re meant to be so worried about this new threat and what makes it a threat in the first place.
Which is, to put it mildly, really weird. Normally when the establishment cooks up a new Official Bad Guy they spell out exactly why we’re meant to be afraid of them. Marijuana will give us reefer madness and ruin our communities. Terrorists will come to where we live and kill us because they hate our freedom. Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction which can be used to perpetrate another 9/11. Kim Jong Un might nuke Hawaii any second now.
With this new “Russian hybrid warfare” scare, we’re not getting any of that. This notion that Russians are scheming to give westerners the wrong kinds of political opinions is presented as though having those political opinions is an inherent, intrinsic threat all on its own. The closest they typically ever get to explaining to us what makes “Russian disinformation” so threatening is that it makes us “lose trust in our institutions,” as though distrusting the CIA or the US State Department is somehow harmful and not the most logical position anyone could possibly have toward historically untrustworthy institutions. Beyond that we’re never given a specific explanation as to why this “Russian disinformation” thing is so dangerous that we need our governments to rescue us from it.
The reason we are not given a straight answer as to why we’re meant to want our institutions fighting an information war on our behalf (instead of allowing us to sort out fact from fiction on our own like adults) is because the answer is ugly.
As we discussed last time, the only real power in this world is the ability to control the dominant narrative about what’s going on. The only reason government works the way it works, money operates the way it operates, and authority rests where it rests is because everyone has agreed to pretend that that’s how things are. In actuality, government, money and authority are all man-made conceptual constructs and the collective can choose to change them whenever it wants. The only reason this hasn’t happened in our deeply dysfunctional society yet is because the plutocrats who rule us have been successful in controlling the narrative.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. This has always been the case. In many societies throughout history a guy who made alliances with the biggest, baddest group of armed thugs could take control of the narrative by killing people until the dominant narrative was switched to “That guy is our leader now; whatever he says goes.” In modern western society, the real leaders are less obvious, and the narrative is controlled by propaganda.
Propaganda is what keeps Americans accepting things like the fake two-party system, growing wealth inequality, medicine money being spent on bombs to be dropped on strangers in stupid immoral wars, and a government which simultaneously creates steadily increasing secrecy privileges for itself and steadily decreasing privacy rights for its citizenry. It’s also what keeps people accepting that a dollar is worth what it’s worth, that personal property works the way it works, that the people on Capitol Hill write the rules, and that you need to behave a certain way around a police officer or he can legally kill you.
And therein lies the answer to the question. You are not being protected from “disinformation” by a compassionate government who is deeply troubled to see you believing erroneous beliefs, you are being herded back toward the official narrative by a power establishment which understands that losing control of the narrative means losing power. It has nothing to do with Russia, and it has nothing to do with truth. It’s about power, and the unexpected trouble that existing power structures are having dealing with the public’s newfound ability to network and share information about what is going on in the world.
Until recently I haven’t been closely following the controversy between Wikipedia and popular anti-imperialist activists like John Pilger, George Galloway, Craig Murray, Neil Clark, Media Lens, Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson. Wikipedia has always been biased in favor of mainstream CNN/CIA narratives, but until recently I hadn’t seen much evidence that this was due to anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is a crowdsourced project and most people believe establishment-friendly narratives. That all changed when I read this article by Craig Murray, which is primarily what I’m interested in directing people’s attention to here.
The article, and this one which prompted it by Five Filters, are definitely worth reading in their entirety, because their contents are jaw-dropping. In short there is an account which has been making edits to Wikipedia entries for many years called Philip Cross. In the last five years this account’s operator has not taken a single day off–no weekends, holidays, nothing–and according to their time log they work extremely long hours adhering to a very strict, clockwork schedule of edits throughout the day as an ostensibly unpaid volunteer.
This is bizarre enough, but the fact that this account is undeniably focusing with malicious intent on anti-imperialist activists who question establishment narratives and the fact that its behavior is being aggressively defended by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales means that there’s some serious fuckery afoot.
“Philip Cross”, whoever or whatever that is, is absolutely head-over-heels for depraved Blairite war whore Oliver Kamm, whom Cross mentioned as a voice of authority no fewer than twelve times in an entry about the media analysis duo known collectively as Media Lens. Cross harbors a special hatred for British politician and broadcaster George Galloway, who opposed the Iraq invasion as aggressively as Oliver Kamm cheered for it, and on whose Wikipedia entry Cross has made an astonishing 1,800 edits.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of constant malicious editing, as well as outright admissions of bias by the Twitter account linked to Philip Cross, Jimmy Wales has been extremely and conspicuously defensive of the account’s legitimacy while ignoring evidence provided to him.
“Or, just maybe, you’re wrong,” Wales said to a Twitter user inquiring about the controversy the other day. “Show me the diffs or any evidence of any kind. The whole claim appears so far to be completely ludicrous.”
“Riiiiight,” said the totally not-triggered Wales in another response. “You are really very very far from the facts of reality here. You might start with even one tiny shred of some kind of evidence, rather than just making up allegations out of thin air. But you won’t because… trolling.”
“You clearly have very very little idea how it works,” Wales tweeted in another response. “If your worldview is shaped by idiotic conspiracy sites, you will have a hard time grasping reality.”
As outlined in the articles by Murray and Five Filters, the evidence is there in abundance. Five Filters lays out “diffs” (editing changes) in black and white showing clear bias by the Philip Cross account, a very slanted perspective is clearly and undeniably documented, and yet Wales denies and aggressively ridicules any suggestion that something shady could be afoot. This likely means that Wales is in on whatever game the Philip Cross account is playing. Which means the entire site is likely involved in some sort of psyop by a party which stands to benefit from keeping the dominant narrative slanted in a pro-establishment direction.
A 2016 Pew Research Center report found that Wikipedia was getting some 18 billion page views per month. Billion with a ‘b’. Youtube recently announced that it’s going to be showing text from Wikipedia articles on videos about conspiracy theories to help “curb fake news”. Plainly the site is extremely important in the battle for control of the narrative about what’s going on in the world. Plainly its leadership fights on one side of that battle, which happens to be the side that favors western oligarchs and intelligence agencies.
How many other “Philip Cross”-like accounts are there on Wikipedia? Has the site always functioned as an establishment psyop designed to manipulate public perception of existing power structures, or did that start later? I don’t know. Right now all I know is that an agenda very beneficial to the intelligence agencies, war profiteers and plutocrats of the western empire is clearly and undeniably being advanced on the site, and its founder is telling us it’s nothing. He is lying. Watch him closely.
Facebook has engaged a think tank funded by weapons manufacturers, branches of the US military and Middle-Eastern monarchies to safeguard the democratic process. It’s akin to hiring arsonists to run the fire brigade.
If Facebook truly wanted to “protect democracy and elections worldwide,” it would build a broad coalition of experts and activists from a wide and disparate range of the countries it serves. Instead, the American social media giant has outsourced the task to NATO’s propaganda wing.
For the uninitiated, the Atlantic Council serves as the American-led alliance’s chief advocacy group. And its methods are rather simple: it grants stipends and faux academic titles to various activists that align with NATO’s agenda. Thus, lobbyists become “fellows” and “experts,” while the enterprise constructs a neutral sheen, which is rarely (if ever) challenged by Western media outlets – often reliant on its employees for easy comment and free op-eds.
While that has always been ethically questionable, Facebook’s latest move, given its effective monopoly position, is far more sinister. Because it is now tied to a “think tank” which has proposed terrorist attacks in Russia and has demanded Russian-funded news outlets be forced to register as “foreign agents” in the United States.
Make no mistake: this is a dream scenario for NATO and those who depend on it for their livelihoods and status. Because the Atlantic Council is now perfectly positioned to be the tail wagging the Facebook dog in the information space.
On Thursday, the social network announced how it was “excited to launch a new partnership with the Atlantic Council, which has a stellar reputation looking at innovative solutions to hard problems.” It then added that “experts” from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL) will liaise closely with Facebook’s “security, policy and product teams” to offer “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”
Now, this sort of talk would be fine if Facebook had assembled a diverse group, comprised of stakeholders from a wide range of democracies. But, by selecting a clearly biased actor to police “misinformation and foreign interference” during “elections and other highly sensitive moments” and also work to “help educate citizens as well as civil society,” Mark Zuckerberg’s team has essentially made their company a tool of the US military agenda.
Just look at who funds the Atlantic Council: donors include military contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, all of whom directly profit from tensions with powers like Russia and China. Meanwhile, in addition to NATO itself, there are also payments made by the US State Department, along with bungs from the US Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines.
Other major paymasters include the government of the United Arab Emirates, which is, of course, an absolute monarchy. And more UAE cash comes via the Abu Dhabi state oil company and Crescent Petroleum. Not to be outdone, Morocco, again not noted for its freedoms, also throws significant coin into the bucket.
Clear bias
And here’s the absurdity inherent in Facebook’s approach. It has essentially handed over control to activists who are funded by enemies of democracy and entities which benefit from stirring up hysteria about malevolent external influence in Western elections. Not forgetting, naturally, how the US itself has been, by some distance, the biggest election meddler around.
What’s more, the paucity of Western media coverage of Thursday’s announcement is alarming, because big-hitters like CNN, the Washington Post, BBC and the New York Times (who all frequently use Atlantic Council lobbyists as guests, “experts” or analysts) more-or-less ignored the story. And the outlets who have covered it, such as CNET and The Hill, failed to reference the think tank’s agenda. Notably, influential media journal Adweek even began its report with a description of the lobby group as “non-partisan.”
Now, if you are sitting in Washington, non-partisan may mean supporting neither the Democratic or Republican parties, but in the rest of the world, the Atlantic Council is clearly factional. Because it exists to promote, via NATO, US foreign policy objectives, particularly in Europe.
And, let’s be clear, without Moscow as an enemy, NATO ceases to exist. Which means smearing Russia is an existential matter for the Atlantic Council.
As a result, Facebook’s new partners bear a vested interest in creating the impression that Moscow is interfering in Western elections. Indeed, given the platform’s penetration rates in the country itself, they now also have the power to potentially meddle in Russia’s own polls. This hasn’t been lost on officials in Moscow who appeared alarmed at the development on Friday.
As for why the Atlantic Council was chosen? Well, only last month Mark Zuckerberg was the subject of an intense grilling at the US House of Representatives. And what better way to assuage the Washington establishment’s fears than to employ workers from NATO’s own propaganda adjunct as fact-checkers?
Bryan MacDonald is an Irish journalist based in Russia.
We have lived a month full of tragedy in our country. The peace we achieved as a people, so fragile and at the cost of so many lives, is in immanent danger of disappearing irreparably. There are now two sizeable camps of the population with dangerously contrary positions. On one side, there is a combination of private university students, media outlets with rightwing owners representing the oligarchy, Catholic Church bishops close to Opus Dei, the private sector and, of course, the US Embassy, working together to create a situation of chaos in the country in order to remove president Daniel Ortega. This group of actors accuses the National Police of having killed dozens of protestors in the riots that reached all Nicaraguan cities, ostensibly against a reform—since revoked—to the system of social security. As we have described, the reality is more complex, and the violence was generalized and explosive, involving protestors with homemade firearms that often misfired, as well as counter-protestors, paid pickets, unknown gunmen and street gangs. The National Police was really a minor actor in the violence, using tear gas and rubber bullets to clear crowds in a few points of Managua, but not involved in the vast majority of the 50 or more deaths that have been reported since April. The InterAmerican Commission of Human Rights has been invited by the government and currently is investigating the events of April.
A national dialogue began on Wednesday, May 16th, with the participation of anti-government students, civil society organizations, and the Presidency, and mediation by the Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church led by Archbishop Leonaldo Brenes. However, the coup-like violence has only grown and currently, rightwing armed groups have all of the main highways in the country closed. On the other side of the conflict, the militancy of the Sandinista Front continues to withstand phenomenal provocations, including:
The destruction of its Sandinista homes (party headquarters) in dozens of cities
The destruction or defacement of hundreds of historic monuments, murals, and memorials of Sandinistas
The arson of dozens of public buildings
The interruption of work and the food shortages that have resulted from the road closures and violence
The deaths of passersby and journalists by paid pickets and violent protestors
Relentless false accusations and lies circulated by corporate media.
It must be added that Facebook has been the primary means for transforming Nicaraguan society that one month ago was at peace into a toxic, hate-filled nightmare. Currently, hundreds of thousands of fake Facebook profiles amplify the hatred and pressure Nicaraguan Facebook users to begin to share and post hate messages. Many, if not most, of these fake Facebook profiles have been created in countries other than Nicaragua, and in particular, Miami is the city where many of the Facebook and WhatsApp accounts behind the violence are managed.
Historically, the ATC has been a participant in the Sandinista struggle. In truth, we have not felt consulted or represented by the current FSLN government. The current coup attempt makes use of these historical contradictions and is trying to co-opt the symbols, slogans, poems and songs of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, since of course the rightwing has none of its own. However we may feel about Daniel Ortega, the ATC would never contribute to making chaos and sowing violence in order to force the collapse of the democratically elected government in order to install a more docile, Washington-friendly neoliberal government. There are clearly real frustrations in sectors of the population, especially youth, and if these sectors are unable to find popular organizing processes, they will end up being the cannon fodder for a war, which would be the worst possible situation for the Nicaraguan people.
In this context, the ATC has called for “all national actors to reorganize themselves based on their aspirations.” With this intention, the ATC proposes to confront the national crisis with a series of dialogues among young people, without party distinction or any ideological basis, in favor of peace and understanding. We propose extraordinary youth assemblies in the cities of San Marcos, Jinotepe, Rivas, Granada, Masaya, Estelí, Matagalpa, Jinotega, Juigalpa, Santo Tomás and Tipitapa, as spaces for young people to discuss the national situation and find points of unity. It is important to mention that we do not have a previously defined “line” to impose upon these debates—they will be spaces for listening, forming ideas and thinking with our hearts.
We call upon your solidarity and generous support for the creation of an emergency fund for peace in Nicaragua that makes possible this round of extraordinary youth assemblies. The national coordinators of the Rural Youth Movement, Sixto Zelaya and Marlen Sanchez, will have the responsibility of organizing the assemblies and administering the fund with absolute transparency.
It is urgent to organize the Nicaraguan family and win peace!
Fake news, propaganda, public relations, advertising — it goes by many names, but at the core of all these terms is the idea that powerful institutions, primarily governments and corporations, strive to manipulate our understanding of world affairs. The most effective such shaping of opinion is invisible and therefore unquestioned.
Left criticism of French imperialism in Africa provides a stark example. Incredibly, the primary contemporary criticism North American leftists make of French imperialism on that continent concerns a country it never colonized. What’s more, Paris is condemned for siding with a government led by the lower caste majority.
To the extent that North American progressives criticize ‘Françafrique’ they mostly emphasize Paris’ support for the Hutu-led Rwandan government after Uganda/Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded in 1990. Echoing the Paul Kagame dictatorship’s simplistic narrative, France is accused of backing Rwandan genocidaires. In a recent article for thevolcano.org, a leftist outlet based on unceded Coast Salish Territories, Lama Mugabo claims, “the organizations that organized this anger into genocide, and the instruments of murder that they wielded, were outfitted by French colonial power.” In Dark Threats and White Nights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism Sherene H. Razack writes that “French peacekeepers made a number of decisions that prolonged and exacerbated the conflict.” The “post-colonial” Canadian academic also decries “French support for him [Hutu President “Hanyarimana” — her (repeated) misspelling] scuttled any fledging peace efforts.”
In taking up Kigali/Washington/London’s effort to blame France for the mass killings in Rwanda (rather than the Uganda/RPF aggressors and their Anglo-American backers), Razack and others even imply that Paris colonized the country. But, Germany conquered Rwanda and Belgium was given control of the small East African nation at the end of World War I. The nearest former French colony — Central African Republic — is over 1,000 km away.
What Razack, Mugabo and other leftists ignore, or don’t know, is that Washington and London backed the 1990 Uganda/RPF invasion. Officially, a large number of Rwandan exiles “deserted” the Ugandan military to invade (including a former deputy defence minister and head of military intelligence). In reality, the invasion was an act of aggression by the much larger neighbour. Over the next three and a half years Kampala supplied the RPF with weaponry and a safe haven.
Throughout this period Washington provided the Ugandan government with financial, diplomatic and arms support (Ottawa cut millions in aid to Rwanda, prodded Habyarimana to negotiate with the RPF and criticized his human rights record while largely ignoring the Uganda/RPF aggression). Washington viewed the pro-neoliberal government in Kampala and the RPF as a way, after the Cold War, to weaken Paris’ position in a Belgium colonized region, which includes trillions of dollars in mineral riches in eastern Congo.
Echoing Kigali/Washington/London/Ottawa, many leftists have taken up criticism of Paris’ policy towards a country France never colonized and where it sided with a government from the lower caste (over 85% of the population, Hutus were historically a subservient peasant class and the Tutsi a cattle owning, feudal ruling class). Concurrently, leftists have largely ignored or failed to unearth more clear-cut French crimes on the continent, which Washington and Ottawa either backed or looked the other way.
In 1947–48 the French brutally suppressed anticolonial protests in Madagascar. Tens of thousands were also killed in Cameroon during the 1950s-60s independence war. Paris’ bid to maintain control over Algeria stands out as one of the most brutal episodes of the colonial era. With over one million settlers in the country, French forces killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians.
To pre-empt nascent nationalist sentiment, Paris offered each of its West African colonies a referendum on staying part of a new “French community”. When Guinea voted for independence in 1958, France withdrew abruptly, broke political and economic ties, and destroyed vital infrastructure. “What could not be burned,” noted Robert Legvold, “was dumped into the ocean.”
France hasn’t relinquished its monetary imperialism. Through its “Pacte Coloniale” independence agreement, Paris maintained control of 14 former colonies’ monetary and exchange rate policy. Imposed by Paris, the CFA franc is an important barrier to transforming the former colonies’ primary commodity based economies. As part of the accord, most CFA franc countries’ foreign exchange reserves have been deposited in the French treasury (now European Central Bank), which has generated large sums for Paris.
Alongside its monetary imperialism, France has ousted or killed a number of independent-minded African leaders. After creating a national currency and refusing to compensate Paris for infrastructure built during the colonial period, the first president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio, was overthrown and killed by former French Foreign Legion troops. Foreign legionaries also ousted leaders in the Central African Republic, Benin, Mali, etc. Paris aided in the 1987 assassination of famed socialist Burkina Faso leader Thomas Sankara.
While undermining independence-minded leaders, Paris has backed corrupt, pro-corporate, dictatorships such as four-decades long Togolese and Gabonese rulers Gnassingbé Eyadema and Ali Bongo Ondimba (their sons took over).
France retains military bases or troops in Djibouti, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Gabon, Mali, Chad and Niger. French troops are also currently fighting in Mali and Niger.
Compared to Paris’ role in Rwanda, French influence/violence in its former colonies gets short shrift from North American leftists. Part of the reason is that Washington and Ottawa largely supported French policy in its former colonies (Ottawa has plowed nearly $1 billion into Mali since the 2013 French invasion and gave Paris bullets and other arms as 400,000 French troops suppressed the Algerian independence struggle). Additionally, criticizing France’s role in Rwanda dovetails with the interests of Kigali, Washington, London and Ottawa.
The North American left’s discussion of France’s role in Africa demonstrates the influence of powerful institutions, especially the ones closest to us, in shaping our understanding of the world. We largely ignore what they want us to ignore and see what they want us to see.
To build a movement for justice and equality for everyone on this planet, we must start by questioning everything governments, corporations and other powerful institutions tell us.
The best evidence that Russia-gate is sinking beneath the waves is the way those pushing the pseudo-scandal are now busily covering their tracks. The Guardiancomplains that “as the inquiry has expanded and dominated the news agenda over the last year, the real issues of people’s lives are in danger of being drowned out by obsessive cable television coverage of the Russia investigation” – as if the Guardian’s own coverage hasn’t been every bit as obsessive as anything CNN has come up with.
The Washington Post, second to none when it comes to painting Putin as a real-life Lord Voldemort, now says that Special counsel Robert Mueller “faces a particular challenge maintaining the confidence of the citizenry” as his investigation enters its second year – although it’s sticking to its guns that the problem is not the inquiry itself, but “the regular attacks he faces from President Trump, who has decried the probe as a ‘witch hunt.’”
And then there’s the New York Times, which this week devoted a 3,600-word front-page article to explain why the FBI had no choice but to launch an investigation into Trump’s alleged Russian links and how, if anything, the inquiry wasn’t aggressive enough. As the article puts it, “Interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the FBI was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known.”
It’s Nobody’s Fault
The result is a late-breaking media chorus to the effect that it’s not the fault of the FBI that the investigation has dragged on with so little to show for it; it’s not the fault of Mueller either, and, most of all, it’s not the fault of the corporate press, even though it’s done little over the last two years than scream about Russia. It’s not anyone’s fault, evidently, but simply how the system works.
This is nonsense, and the gaping holes in the Times article show why.
The piece, written by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Nicholas Fandos and entitled “Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation,” is pretty much like everything else the Times has written on the subject, i.e. biased, misleading, and incomplete. Its main argument is that the FBI had no option but to step in because four Trump campaign aides had “obvious or suspected Russian ties.”
‘At Putin’s Arm’
One was Michael Flynn, who would briefly serve as Donald Trump’s national security adviser and who, according to the Times, “was paid $45,000 by the Russian government’s media arm for a 2015 speech and dined at the arm of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.” Another was Paul Manafort, who briefly served as Trump’s campaign chairman and was a source of concern because he had “lobbied for pro-Russia interests in Ukraine and worked with an associate who has been identified as having connections to Russian intelligence.” A third was Carter Page, a Trump foreign-policy adviser who “was well known to the FBI” because “[h]e had previously been recruited by Russian spies and was suspected of meeting one in Moscow during the campaign.” The fourth was George Papadopoulos, a “young and inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation. Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton.”
Seems incriminating, eh? But in each case the connection was more tenuous than the Times lets on. Flynn, for example, didn’t dine “at the arm of the Russian president” at a now-famous December 2015 Moscow banquet honoring the Russian media outlet RT. He was merely at a table at which Putin happened to sit down for “maybe five minutes, maybe twenty, tops,” according to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein who was just a few chairs away. No words were exchanged, Stein says, and “[n]obody introduced anybody to anybody. There was no translator. The Russians spoke Russian. The four people who spoke English spoke English.”
The Manafort associate with the supposed Russian intelligence links turns out to be a Russian-Ukrainian translator named Konstantin Kilimnik who studied English at a Soviet military school and who vehemently denies any such connection. It seems that the Ukrainian authorities did investigate the allegations at one point but declined to press charges. So the connection is unproven.
Page Was No Spy
The same goes for Carter Page, who was not “recruited” by Russian intelligence, but, rather, approached by what he thought were Russian trade representatives at a January 2013 energy symposium in New York. When the FBI informed him five or six months later that it believed the men were intelligence agents, Page appears to have cooperated fully based on a federal indictment filed with the Southern District of New York. Thus, Page was not a spy but a government informant as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out – in other words, a good guy, as the Times would undoubtedly see it, helping the catch a couple of baddies.
As for Papadopoulos, who the Times suggests somehow got advance word that WikiLeaks was about to dump a treasure trove of Hillary Clinton emails, the article fails to mention that at the time the conversation with the Australian ambassador took place, the Clinton communications in the news were the 30,000 State Department emails that she had improperly stored on her private computer. These were the emails that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about,” as Bernie Sanders put it. Instead of spilling the beans about a data breach yet to come, it’s more likely that Papadopoulos was referring to emails that were already in the news – a possibility the Times fails to discuss.
FBI ‘Perplexed’
One could go on. But not only does the Times article get the details wrong, it paints the big picture in misleading tones as well. It says that the FBI was “perplexed” by such Trump antics as calling on Russia to release still more Clinton emails after WikiLeaks went public with its disclosure. The word suggests a disinterested observer who can’t figure out what’s going on. But it ignores how poisonous the atmosphere had become by that point and how everyone’s mind was seemingly made up.
By July 2016, Clinton was striking out at Trump at every opportunity about his Russian ties – not because they were true, but because a candidate who had struggled to come up with a winning slogan had at last come across an issue that seemed to resonate with her fan base. Consequently, an intelligence report that Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee “was a godsend,” wrote Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in Shattered, their best-selling account of the Clinton campaign, because it was “hard evidence upon which Hillary could start to really build the case that Trump was actually in league with Moscow.”
Not only did Clinton believe this, but her followers did as well, as did the corporate media and, evidently, the FBI. This is the takeaway from text messages that FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok exchanged with FBI staff attorney Lisa Page.
Andrew McCarthy, who has done a masterful job of reconstructing the sequence, notes that in late July 2016, Page mentioned an article she had come across on a liberal web site discussing Trump’s alleged Russia ties. Strzok texted back that he’s “partial to any women sending articles about nasty the Russians are.” Page replied that the Russians “are probably the worst. Very little I finding redeeming about this. Even in history. Couple of good writers and artists I guess.” Strzok heartily agreed: “f***ing conniving cheating savages. At statecraft, athletics, you name it. I’m glad I’m on Team USA.”
The F’ing Russian ‘Savages’
This is the institutional bias that the Times doesn’t dare mention. An agency whose top officials believe that “f***ing conniving cheating savages” are breaking down the door is one that is fairly guaranteed to construe evidence in the most negative, anti-Russian way possible while ignoring anything to the contrary. So what if Carter Page had cooperated with the FBI? What’s important is that he had had contact with Russian intelligence at all, which was enough to render him suspicious in the bureau’s eyes. Ditto Konstantin Kilimnik. So what if the Ukrainian authorities had declined to press charges? The fact that they had even looked was damning enough.
The FBI thus made the classic methodological error of allowing its investigation to be contaminated by its preconceived beliefs. Objectivity fell by the wayside. The Times says that Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 agent whose infamous, DNC and Clinton camp paid-for opposition research dossier turned “golden showers” into a household term, struck the FBI as “highly credible” because he had “helped agents unravel complicated cases” in the past. Perhaps. But the real reason is that he told agents what they wanted to hear, which is that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years” with the “[a]im, endorsed by PUTIN, … [of] encourage[ing] splits and divisions in [the] western alliance.” (which can be construed as a shrewd defensive move against a Western alliance massing troops on Russian borders.)
What else would one expect of people as “nasty” as these? In fact, the Steele dossier should have caused alarm bells to go off. How could Putin have possibly known five years before that Trump would be a viable presidential candidate? Why would high-level Kremlin officials share inside information with an ex-intelligence official thousands of miles away? Why would the dossier declare on one page that the Kremlin has offered Trump “various lucrative real estate development business deals” but then say on another that Trump’s efforts to drum up business had gone nowhere and that he therefore “had had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success”? Given that the dossier was little more than “oppo research” commissioned and funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, why was it worthy of consideration at all?
The Rush to Believe
But all such questions disappeared amid the general rush to believe. The Times is right that the FBI slow-walked the investigation until Election Day. This is because agents assumed that Trump would lose and that therefore there was no need to rush. But when he didn’t, the mood turned to one of panic and fury.
Without offering a shred of evidence, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a formal assessment on Jan. 6, 2017, that “Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election … [in order] to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
The New Yorkerreports that an ex-aide to John McCain hoped to persuade the senator to use the Steele dossier to force Trump to resign even before taking office. (The ex-aide denies that this was the case.)
When FBI Director James Comey personally confronted Trump with news of the dossier two weeks prior to inauguration, the Times says he “feared making this conversation a ‘J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,’ with the FBI presenting embarrassing information “to lord over a president-elect.”
But that is precisely what happened. When someone – most likely CIA Director John Brennan, now a commentator with NBC News – leaked word of the meeting and Buzzfeed published the dossier four days later, the corporate media went wild. Trump was gravely wounded, while Adam Schiff, Democratic point man on the House Intelligence Committee, would subsequently trumpet the Steele dossier as the unvarnished truth. According to the Times account, Trump was unpersuaded by Comey’s assurances that he was there to help. “Hours earlier,” the paper says, “… he debuted what would quickly become a favorite phrase: ‘This is a political witch hunt.’”
The Times clearly regards the idea as preposterous on its face. But while Trump is wrong about many things, on this one subject he happens to be right. The press, the intelligence community, and the Democrats have all gone off the deep end in search of a Russia connection that doesn’t exist. They misled their readers, they made fools of themselves, and they committed a crime against journalism. And now they’re trying to dodge the blame.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics.
When in Syria, and before going to Dara’a itself, I interviewed Dr. Amer Ghantous about his experiences and observations on having worked in a military hospital in Dara’a governorate in March 2011. He spoke of being instructed to give priority to treating any civilians who came to the hospital before soldiers. He also spoke of the hospital receiving soldiers who had clearly been shot by snipers.
In this short clip, Dr. Ghantous speaks of the lies of Al Jazeera, and touches on the pre-planned nature of events in March 2011. Full interview to follow.
The statements made by US and Mexican politicians about alleged the interference of Moscow in the elections in Mexico are unfounded, Ernesto Cordero Arroyo, the president of the Mexican Senate, told Sputnik.
“They had not presented any evidence and we should understand that during the election campaign people become very creative and inventive,” the Mexican politician said.
According to the senior lawmaker, the Mexican side has not registered any foreign meddling in the election process.
Mexicans will elect the next president of the nation on July 1. Ahead of the vote, former US National Security Adviser Herbert McMaster said that the United States noticed signs of “Russian intervention” in the Mexican presidential election.
Enrique Ochoa, the leader of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (IRR), said the international media outlets had “documented” the interests of Russia and Venezuela in backing leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Russia has faced numerous accusations of interference in foreign elections, including the 2016 US presidential vote. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has called the claims groundless, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has stressed that there was no evidence to substantiate such accusations.
The soaring hopes generated by the recent Inter-Korean Summit are now supplanted by uncertainty, due to North Korea’s suspension of a planned meeting with the South.
In the weeks following the summit’s Panmunjom Declaration, North Korea took actions to demonstrate its goodwill and desire for peaceful resolution of differences.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK – the formal name for North Korea) announced that it would dismantle its underground nuclear test site, culminating in explosions to collapse tunnels, the blocking of entries, and removal of above-ground facilities.
Substantial progress has already been made on disabling the site. The DPRK could have waited and made this a negotiable issue in talks with the United States. Instead, it offered the step to the United States ahead of the summit as a confidence-building measure. Before that, North Korea also committed to a suspension of nuclear and missile testing. As an additional gesture of good intentions, North Korea released all three American prisoners.
Initial signs from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s meetings with Chairman Kim Jong Un were quite encouraging, hinting at an uncharacteristic degree of flexibility on the part of the Trump administration. North Korean media reported that the talks indicated that Trump “has a new alternative” and a “proactive attitude,” and that Kim and Pompeo had reached a “satisfactory agreement on the issues.”
Meanwhile, as Pompeo and Kim were making apparent headway, the process began to unravel from a different direction. There were many in the Trump administration who were not keen on the idea of reciprocity. The dominant view was that rewards, such as they were, could only come after denuclearization.
National Security Advisor John Bolton was trotted out for a series of interviews to elucidate the U.S. position. Permanent, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization would have to take place before “the benefits start to flow.” The expectation is that the DPRK should abandon its nuclear deterrent without receiving anything more in return than the promise of future rewards. Nor does Bolton consider nuclear disarmament to be sufficient. Negotiations have not begun, and already the U.S. is piling on more demands. Talks, Bolton insisted, would also need to tackle the DPRK’s ballistic missile program and human rights concerns. Chemical and biological weapons will also be on the agenda, he said, despite the fact that their existence is purely speculative. Negotiations on denuclearization will be challenging enough. Overloading the talks with additional issues is likely to be a recipe for failure.
Even as North Korea strives to meet American demands, it can expect no relief from sanctions and threats. Bolton asserts that the U.S. needs to see North Korea implementing denuclearization, and the policy of maximum pressure will not relent until that happens.
What kind of benefits can North Korea expect in return for compliance with U.S. demands? “I wouldn’t look for economic aid from us,” Bolton bluntly stated. Presumably, once North Korea has satisfied all of the Trump administration’s demands, sanctions will start to be reduced or eliminated. That is not a reward. If someone is punishing another, and then promises to reduce the amount of punishment, it is safe to say that the victim will not regard that as a “reward.”
On the economic front, Mike Pompeo agrees with Bolton. No taxpayer funds will go towards assisting North Korea, he said. What the United States is willing to do is send rapacious corporate investors to North Korea to seek profit-making opportunities. Once denuclearization has been completed and sanctions lifted, Pompeo says that what Chairman Kim “will get from America is our finest – our entrepreneurs, our risk takers, our capital providers…They will get private capital that comes in.” A strong argument could be made that those are actually among America’s worst people, and not to be wished upon North Korea or any other nation.
Pompeo went on to talk about North Korea’s need for energy, agricultural equipment, and technology. The need is there. But why is that? For decades, the United States has subjected the DPRK to enormous economic damage through sanctions. The North Korean people are not incapable of improving their lot. They only need to be allowed to do so, unhindered and unpunished. What the DPRK needs and what it consistently calls for is normalization of relations.
Certainly, North Korea is not looking to privatize state-owned firms or to contract out work to U.S. firms that it is capable of doing itself, once it is released from the burden of sanctions.
It is clear that the Trump administration is not willing to give anything to North Korea. It costs nothing to lift sanctions or to cherish the hope that lucrative opportunities will blossom in North Korea for U.S. investors. Signing a piece of paper promising a security guarantee imposes no burden on the United States. The Trump administration, or any future administration for that matter, is free to ignore that guarantee and send the cruise missiles flying whenever it sees fit.
Nor does the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran inspire confidence in the reliability of the United States as a negotiating partner.
Bolton’s pronouncements, perhaps aided by behind-the-scenes maneuvering, appear to have led Pompeo to walk back on his earlier statements about progress being made and having reached a mutual understanding with Chairman Kim. He is now reporting that a great deal of work remains and the U.S. and North Korea are not “remotely close.”
“We have very much in mind the Libya model from 2003, 2004,” Bolton recently told Fox News. That model would have North Korea ship its nuclear weapons to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for destruction. The DPRK would be required to complete disarmament before receiving relief from sanctions.
So how did that model work for Libya? That nation began to denuclearize at the beginning of 2004, and throughout the process, it fully complied with U.S. demands for unilateral denuclearization. But the United States was slow when it came to compensation, and the Libyans often complained to American diplomats that they had not been rewarded for their compliance. It was not until 2006 that the U.S. restored diplomatic relations and removed Libya from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Although the U.S. was sluggish in providing relief to Libya, it was eager to issue more demands. John Bolton, who was Under-secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration at the time, told Libyan officials that they had to sever military cooperation with Iran in order to complete the denuclearization agreement. On at least one occasion, a U.S. official pressured Libya to cut off military trade with North Korea, Iran, and Syria.
American officials also demanded that Libya recognize the independence of Kosovo, a position that Libya had consistently opposed. That was followed by a U.S. diplomatic note to Libya, ordering it to vote against the Serbian government’s resolution at the United Nations, which requested a ruling by the International Court of Justice on the legality of Kosovo independence. Under the circumstances, Libya preferred to absent itself from the vote rather than join the United States and three other nations in opposing the measure.
The U.S. was more successful in winning Libya’s vote in favor of UN sanctions against Iran. Under U.S. pressure, Libya also launched a privatization program and opened opportunities for U.S. businesses.
North Korea can expect the same treatment if it follows this model. The United States will start to treat it as a vassal state, expecting it to take orders on myriad issues having nothing to do with denuclearization.
We know how the model ended, with the United States and its NATO partners bombing Libya, and the brutal murder of Muammar al-Qaddafi. The North Koreans know it, too.
In 2006, Great Britain and Libya signed a Joint Letter on Peace and Security. The document stated that the two nations “pledge in their international relations to refrain from the threat or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of one another.” It further obligated the parties to refrain from intervening in the internal affairs of one another. Five years later, Great Britain was aiding jihadists fighting to overthrow the government, and joining NATO in bombing Libya. That is the Libya model, too, in which a Western security “guarantee” is proven worthless.
The DPRK has a more credible action-for-action approach in mind for negotiations, in which there is a phased approach, and each side gains something as progress continues towards the final goal of denuclearization and normalization of relations.
In continuing to set a framework of mutual respect for talks, North Korea sharply reduced the scale of its annual armored vehicle exercises this month.
Washington is sending signals of a different nature, however. On May 11, the joint U.S.-South Korea Max Thunder air drills kicked off, deploying over 100 aircraft, including advanced Stealth F-22 Raptor fighter planes. This year’s exercise is the largest ever held, in an apparent bid to apply additional pressure on North Korea.
In response, North Korea announced that it was suspending its May 16 meeting with South Korean officials. KCNA, North Korea’s news agency, pointed out that the expanded drills constituted “an undisguised challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration,” in which both Koreas had pledged to cease all hostile acts. It added that the Panmunjom Declaration cannot be implemented by one party alone.
DPRK’s First Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Kim Kye Gwan followed that up by announcing that the improvement in relations with the United States risks being undone by American officials calling for unilateral disarmament and adherence to the Libya model. North Korea has already stated its intention to denuclearize in exchange for an end to the U.S. hostile policy, he continued. “But now, the U.S. is miscalculating the magnanimity and broad-minded initiatives of the DPRK as signs of weakness.”
North Korea has left the door open to the U.S. and South Korea. The May 16 meeting with South Korean officials was suspended, not cancelled. And the North Koreans are saying that they will closely watch the behavior of U.S. and South Korean officials. Portrayed in Western media as an act of inexplicable petulance, the suspension of the inter-Korean meeting is a wake-up call to the United States and South Korea. The capitulation model is not a viable approach. Reciprocity is essential.
The North Koreans are not going to relinquish their nuclear deterrent for nothing more than an empty security promise and the suggestion that sanctions may be lifted if they meet a host of additional demands.
During the Obama administration, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was at a sufficiently immature stage of development that the United States felt it could demand that North Korea fully denuclearize as a precondition for talks.
After the DPRK completed its fast-track nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs, it now has something substantial to trade. It expects the United States to engage in the normal give-and-take of diplomatic negotiations. Former U.S. Department of State Special Representative for North Korea Joseph Yun notes, “The price has gone up. You have to address what they want. If you believe they should only address what we want I think that’s a very, very mistaken path.”
Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and a Korea Policy Institute associate. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific.
The US, Israel and Saudi Arabia – can change regime in Iran, and Trump’s policy provides an opening for it, a former top Mossad official speculated, adding that if a coup fails, Iranians will still be fighting each other.
Haim Tomer, a former Mossad official said to lead Intelligence, Counter-Terrorism and International Divisions, explicitly talked about possible options for regime change in Tehran during an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Claiming that the “Khomeini-ist Islamic state” wants to destroy Israel, Tomer argued: “We can deal with the threat itself: nuclear weapons, conventional Iranian missiles. We can defend against them.” The former intelligence chief went further, saying Trump’s policy on Iran “created a major opening… to carefully weigh pushing for regime change as a formal goal.”
Tomer outlined what a possible coup in Iran would look like. Israel could “clandestinely help facilitate regime change” and the US “could support it on various fronts,” while the Saudis could fund the effort.
Asked what exactly Israel could try, he said “clandestine actions can lead to change… There is a lot that the Mossad can do when it gets a mission. I cannot go into the details… but it would be clandestine.”
Tomer, who now works as investment and tech advisor, bluntly said that the Iranian government – presided over by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – is unpopular with the Iranian public, and the Supreme Leader himself is old and has health issues.
He said Mossad, widely believed to have carried out several clandestine operations on Iranian soil in the past, can play a crucial role in conspiring against the Islamic Republic. “The Mossad carries out substantial and complex operations – and has carried out many,” referring to 2013 reports that Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz was ravaged by a Stuxnet malware.
“The Mossad has done many things in Iran before. This was among the most important, but there have been operations like it, and maybe even more important,” Tomer said.
The ex-Mossad official also said that the Israeli intelligence agency is one of few which carries out targeted killings. “[Regarding] targeted killings, very few [foreign intelligence agencies] do this; Israel [is one that] does, according to foreign sources,” he added.
However, he acknowledged: “I am not saying it will be a piece of cake – The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basiji militias are very strong.” But even if it does not succeed, “it is better to have the Iranians fighting among themselves.”
Israeli leaders have at times made similar statements on the issue. “When this regime [the Iranian government] finally falls, and one day it will, Iranians and Israelis will be great friends once again,” Prime Minister Bebjamin Netanyahu said in January amid violent unrest in Iran. He praised the protesters who have rallied since Thursday, saying that they sought “freedom and justice.”
Iran has already seen a CIA-orchestrated coup which toppled the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. The CIA and State Department had given green light on overthrowing Mosaddegh – codenamed Operation Ajax – after he nationalized major oil assets.
The coup d’etat is thought to give birth to Iranian nationalism, which, in turn, paved way to the 1979 Islamic Revolution – a major event that poisoned US-Iran relations into the 21st century.
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