‘Russiagate’ hoax helped turn ordinary Russians against the US
By Bryan MacDonald | RT | March 28, 2019
‘Russiagate’ is over. But its toxic legacy will endure. And in Russia it has led to disenchantment with the United States.
Red Army Street is a 3km-long thoroughfare in Krasnodar, southern Russian, notable for its many bars and nightclubs, which number in the dozens. Indeed, it’s so raucous it makes snooty Moscow look rather pedestrian.
Last summer, I was in one hostelry, with a South African farmer who was visiting the region. Naturally, we spoke in English. This seemed to upset three drunken locals who (in Russian) were loudly exchanging anti-American slurs.
Eventually, the largest, and scariest, of the trio broke into English to shout “Yankee, go home.” To which I swiftly replied that I was Irish. Suddenly, he ran over, bear-hugged me, and shouted at the top of his voice: “Conor McGregor!”
It wasn’t always like this. When I moved to Russia, nine years ago, Americans were very popular here. And Russians knew little of my homeland, most wrongly seeing it as an extension of the United Kingdom.
If I’d had a dollar, in the early part of the decade, for every Russian who’d expressed a desire to visit the US, I’d easily have had enough to fund return tickets there myself, plus a few weeks in a decent hotel.
However, times have changed. And admiration and curiosity towards the US has been replaced with disappointment, hostility and often anger. We’re a long way from Mikhail Gorbachev advertising “Pizza Hut” now.
Wide Awake
And, it’s largely down to the Russiagate hoax which consumed American politics and its mainstream media for almost three years, before Robert Mueller kicked it into touch last weekend. Of course, there are other factors, among them US interference in Ukraine, anti-Russia sanctions and continued NATO expansion, but it’s the xenophobia Russiagate unleashed which has done the most damage.
Russians are not stupid. And their media is not behind a Chinese-style firewall. Instead, Russian news outlets are firmly positioned in the Western information ecosystem and carry unfiltered stories from various international sources, many of them American.
As a result, when a famous publication like the Washington Post reports how Netflix is Russian propaganda and alleges Russia hacked the Vermont power grid, people read all about it in the local press.
Furthermore, even if most can’t speak English well, a great many of them understand it. Thus, they know what’s been going on and can see online how prominent Americans have smeared them, and their country, during the mass hysteria of the past few years.
And, viewed from here, the delirium, panic and frenzy is greeted with dismay and incredulity. Because, for Russians, the notion of Putin somehow swaying the US election isn’t credible. But the fact so many prominent Americans deluded themselves into believing the trope serves to make the US, once seen as mighty, look very, very weak. Which confuses people who spent close on two decades lamenting how feeble Russia itself had become after the Soviet collapse ended Moscow’s superpower days.
Not Easy
Especially given the Kremlin can’t even control domestic Russian elections. For evidence, witness the failures of Putin’s preferred candidates in various Gubernatorial contests last year, including Khabarovsk, Khakassia and Vladimir. Now, given the latter region’s administrative centre is only 180km from Moscow, United Russia’s defeat there doesn’t say much for the efficiency of Kremlin election manipulation.
Despite this, high-profile fantasists in the US, such as Rachel Maddow, Michael McFaul and Joy-Ann Reid, have spent years whipping up delirium about a “Trump/Putin” conspiracy. And Russians are fully aware. They know James Clapper, the former Intelligence chief, said “the Russians are not our friends”, before he added how Russians are “almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor.” Comments which were xenophobic and bigoted towards an entire ethnicity and far beyond criticism of Putin and his government.
They’ve also seen Morgan Freeman’s nutty video, where the veteran American actor tells viewers “we are at war with Russia”. As a result, the biggest legacy of “Russiagate” here is the transformation of attitudes to the US. And it’s hard to see how goodwill can be restored, in the immediate term.
In simpler times, at the tail end of the Cold War, a series of TV shows named “Space Bridge” tried to help Russians and Americans understand each other, as the hosts, Vladimir Pozner and Phil Donahue, encouraged dialogue between their audiences.
Both are still around. For his part, Pozner hosts a weekly show on Russia’s First Channel. However, Donahue was fired by MSNBC in 2002, due to his opposition to the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq. Perhaps this, in itself, explains a lot about how the two countries have diverged.
‘Hard to find a black cat in a dark room, if it isn’t there’ – Kremlin on Mueller report
RT | March 25, 2019
Russia doesn’t interfere in the affairs of other countries and has no intention of doing so, the Kremlin said, dismissing accusations of meddling in US elections, contained in the Mueller report, as groundless.
“It’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it isn’t there,” the President’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on the release of a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
He added that the Kremlin has seen only the released summary of the report “which, incidentally, does not say anything new, except for the recognition of the absence of collusion.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the “political motivation” of Mueller’s investigation was obvious and called the report “a disgrace of American justice.”
In a statement, the ministry expressed hope that Washington would have the “courage” to officially acknowledge that “any slurs about the ‘Russian meddling’ were groundless defamation.”
Wrapping up 22 months of the investigation, Mueller’s report found no proof that “the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
However, Mueller’s report does claim that the Russian government sought to influence the 2016 election, via the organization called the Internet Research Agency.
The report accuses the agency of conducting “disinformation and social media operations” to sow discord in US society and alleges that Russian hackers obtained the emails of Hillary Clinton’s associates and passed them to WikiLeaks.
Beware foreign policy ‘experts’ who are shills for imperialism
By Yves Engler · March 20, 2019
Aside from government officials the dominant media is fond of quoting “experts” from foreign policy think tanks when discussing Canada’s role in the world. While presented as neutral specialists, these opinion shapers are generally entangled with powerful, wealthy, elites.
Take the case of Venezuela and Canada’s leading foreign policy ‘ideas organization’. Recently Canadian International Council President Ben Rowswell has been widely quoted promoting Ottawa’s regime change efforts in Venezuela. After 25 years in Canada’s diplomatic service, including stints as chargé d’affaires in Iraq and ambassador in Caracas, Rowswell joined the CIC in November. Rowswell’s move highlights the close relationship between Global Affairs Canada and this corporate funded think tank, which has deep imperial roots.
Formerly the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, CIC has 15 (mostly university based) regional branches that hold dozens of conferences and seminars annually. The head office publishes International Journal, Behind the Headlines as well as reports and books. It also does media outreach.
Officially formed in 1928, CIIA’s stated aim was to promote “an understanding of international questions and problems, particularly in so far as these may relate to Canada and the British Empire.” Its first meeting was held at the Ottawa home of staunch imperialist Sir Robert Borden, prime minister between 1911 and 1920.(Borden publicly encouraged Canadian businessmen to buy up southern Mexico and sought to annex the British Caribbean colonies after World War I.) Borden was made first president of CIIA and another former prime minister, Arthur Meighen, became vice-president in 1936. On hand to launch CIIA was the owner of six Canadian newspapers, Frederick Southam, as well as Winnipeg Free Press editor John W. Dafoe and Ottawa Citizen editor Charles Bowman.“The CIIA’s early leadership constituted a roster of Canada’s business, political, and intellectual elite”, explains Priscilla Roberts in Tweaking the Lion’s Tail: Edgar J. Tarr, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, and the British Empire, 1931–1950.
CIIA’s genesis was in the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference. At the 1919 conference British and US delegates discussed establishing internationally focused institutes. The next year the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), or Chatham House Study Group, was founded in London and in 1921 the Council on Foreign Relations was set up, notes Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy, “to equip the United States of America for an imperial rule on the world scene.”
The driving force behind these international affairs institutes was British historian Lionel Curtis. An “indefatigable proponent of Imperial Federation” and former Colonial Office official in South Africa, Curtis set up a network of semi-secret Round Table Groups in the British Dominions and US. The aim was “to federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes”, the famous British imperialist. The Rhodes Trust and South African mining magnet Sir Abe Bailey financed the Round Table Groups and former British Secretary of State for War Lord Milner promoted the initiative.
Before its official formation CIIA sought to affiliate with RIIA. A number of prominent Canadians were part of Chatham House and the Canadian elite was largely pro-British at the time. “Much of the impetus and funding to” launch CIIA, Roberts writes, “came from Sir Joseph Flavelle, a meatpacking and banking magnate who strongly supported British Imperial unity. Other key Anglophile supporters included Newton W. Rowell, a leading Liberal politician, the wealthy Liberal politician and diplomat, Vincent Massey, and Sir Arthur Currie, commander of Canadian forces on the Western front during the war, who became principal of McGill University in 1920.”
The CIIA’s early powerbrokers generally identified with British imperialism. But its younger members and staff tended to back Washington’s foreign policy. In subsequent decades US foundation funding strengthened their hand. The Rockefeller Foundation accounted for as much as half of CIIA’s budget by the early 1940s. Alongside Rockefeller money, the Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation supported the institute. Set up by US capitalists responsible for significant labour and human rights abuses, the Big 3 foundations were not disinterested organizations. In The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy Edward Berman writes: “The Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations have consistently supported the major aims of United States foreign policy, while simultaneously helping to construct an intellectual framework supportive of that policies major tenants.”
In subsequent decades CIIA would receive significant funding from Canada’s External Affairs and the Department of National Defence. But the institute’s nonfinancial ties to the government have always been more significant. After nearly two decades at External Affairs, John Holmes returned to lead the institute in 1960. In Canada’s Voice: The Public Life of John Wendell Holmes Adam Chapnick notes, “during [Prime Minister Lester] Pearson’s time in office [1963-68] Holmes had unprecedented access to the highest levels of government. He could reach Pearson personally when he was in Ottawa, and the Prime Minister promoted the CIIA while entertaining. Holmes also drafted speeches for Minister of Trade and Commerce Robin Winters.”
Upon leaving office external ministers Lester Pearson, Paul Martin Senior and Mitchell Sharp all took up honorary positions with CIIA. In 1999 former foreign minister Barbara McDougall took charge of the institute and many chapters continue to be dominated by retired diplomats. Active Canadian diplomats regularly speak to CIIA meetings, as did Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien.
Alongside Ottawa and US foundations, Canadian capitalists with foreign policy interests also funded CIIA. Annual reports I analyzed from the late 1960s to mid-1990s list numerous globally focused corporate sponsors and corporate council members, including Bata Shoes, Toronto Dominion, Bank of Montréal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Brascan, Barrick Gold and Power Corporation.
In 2006 CIIA’s operations were subsumed into CIC. With financing from Research In Motion (RIM) co-founder Jim Balsillie, CIIA partnered with the Balsillie-created Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) to establish CIC. The CIIA library and its publications were maintained while an infusion of cash bolstered local chapters. The new organization also added a major national fellowship program, which is headquartered at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for Global Affairs.
Balsillie was made founding chair of CIC and the initial vice chairs were former foreign ministers Bill Graham and Perrin Beattie. “The CIC promises to transform the debate about and understanding of Canadian foreign policy,” said Balsillie in 2007.
Balsillie put up $1-million in seed funding and launched a fundraising drive in the corporate community. Trying to drum up support for CIC, Balsillie wrote a commentary for the Globe and Mail Report on Business, explaining that “in return for their support, contributing business leaders would be offered seats in a CIC corporate senate that would give them influence over the research agenda and priorities of the new council.” In another piece for the National Post Balsillie wrote: “To create a research base on Canadian foreign policy, I have spearheaded the creation of the Canada-wide Canadian International Council (CIC). The Americans have their powerful Council on Foreign Relations, which offers non-partisan analysis of international issues and integrates business leaders with the best researchers and public policy leaders.”
The CIC Senate has included the CEOs of Barrick Gold, Power Corporation, Sun Life Financial and RBC. According to the most recent financial statement on its website, half of CIC’s funding comes from corporate donations (a quarter is from its International Journal and another quarter from dues).
Ben Rowswell’s transition from Global Affairs Canada to President of the Canadian International Council reflects the institute’s long-standing ties to government. His aggressive promotion of regime change in Venezuela also fit with the politics of an ‘ideas organization’ tied to the corporate world.
Trump Reportedly Takes Helm in US-DPRK Negotiations as MSM Cries Foul
Sputnik – 21.03.2019
In the aftermath of the failed Hanoi summit between the US and North Korea, US President Donald Trump has reportedly taken the helm in denuclearization negotiations with Pyongyang. Meanwhile, Seoul now sees the ball as having landed in its court to convince its neighbor to give up its weapons and rocket programs.
According to Trump administration officials who spoke with Time for a Monday article, the US president is “sidelining” his special envoy to North Korea, Stephen Biegun, and “dismissing the warnings of top intelligence and foreign policy advisers” who dissent from his continued policy of negotiation with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Time reports that Trump has shut down attempts by Biegun to establish a back channel to Pyongyang via the socialist country’s United Nations mission in New York, citing US and South Korean officials, and is focusing on attempts to negotiate a deal with Kim instead of bowing to the advice of his advisers to press North Korea harder with sanctions — or to abandon negotiations altogether.
Trump and Kim met late last month in Hanoi, Vietnam, for a second round of denuclearization talks to follow up on a June 2018 summit that laid the groundwork for peace on the Korean Peninsula. While Pyongyang has made considerable progress with the South toward that end, negotiations with Washington have stalled, as the two sides reached a point where neither was willing to budge any further until the other side gave something first.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has made several good faith moves toward reducing tensions, including the halting of weapons tests and the destruction of key missile and nuclear program sites. However, Kim was unwilling to make further concessions before Washington lowered at least some of its economic sanctions blocking international trade in many items with his country. The US has refused to lower any of those sanctions until Kim produces “verified denuclearization.” The Hanoi summit failed to surmount this impasse.
Trump administration officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton have used Pyongyang’s red line to argue that Kim is intransigent and not cooperative. The mainstream media has also largely adopted this position, as the articles by Time, CNN and The Hill on these developments show.
Indeed, ever since Trump agreed to meet with Kim last spring, the mainstream media has been devoted to producing stories that undermined Trump’s attempts at peace, and hawkish foreign policy think tanks have produced report after report claiming Kim has violated the terms of the negotiations. Their reports are often based on outdated or undated evidence, supposition or otherwise unverifiable claims, Sputnik has reported.
One example, from Time’s Tuesday article, tries to juxtapose Trump’s supposedly delusional belief that “Kim is his ‘friend,'” according to an administration official, with the “unanimous assessment by multiple agencies that Kim remains wedded to his nuclear program,” and thus is incapable of responding to a carrot, understanding only the stick.
Indeed, such has been the common refrain by US state officials for decades, going back to George F. Kennan’s eponymous telegram about how the US should handle the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and even further to the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in imperial China at the turn of the last century.
Meanwhile, South Korean President Moon Jae In has continued his rapprochement with Kim, despite US-DPRK failures.
“We’re in a deep agony over how to take advantage of this baton that has been handed over to us,” said a Moon administration figure earlier this week, according to South China Morning Post.
“We agree with the view that no deal is better than a bad deal… However, in reality, it is difficult to achieve complete denuclearization at one stroke. I think we need to reconsider the so-called all or nothing strategy,” the official said.
Seoul aims to get Pyongyang to “agree with a broad road map aimed to achieve the overarching goal of denuclearization,” the official said, noting that “we should make further efforts to turn a small deal into a deal that is good enough. In order to achieve meaningful progress, we need one or two early harvests for mutual trust-building to move on toward the final goal.”
Still, in the aftermath of Hanoi, Moon’s popularity fell in his country from a high of 70 percent last summer to a measly 45 percent earlier this month, Sputnik reported.
The metaphor of the “harvest” presents a timely parallel as North Korean officials have pressed the UN to step up its food and medical aid to DPRK in the coming year due to bad harvests last year and projected shortages in 2019, Sputnik has reported.
“Although Security Council sanctions clearly exempt humanitarian activities, life-saving programs continue to face serious challenges and delays,” Tapan Mishra, the UN’s resident coordinator in the DPRK lamented earlier this month. “While unintended consequences of sanctions persist, these delays have a real and tangible impact on the aid that we are able to provide to people who desperately need it.
US and other international sanctions bar many useful medical items from being imported by DPRK, too. For example, a paper published last December by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey looked at scientific projects in which North Korean scientists had partnered with scholars from other countries, noting that roughly 100 of the 1,300 they examined had “identifiable significance for dual-use technology, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or other military purposes.”
That means that even though DPRK doctors might be studying epidemiology, their work could be subject to weapons sanctions. “When you study infectious diseases, which are a big burden in North Korea, you have to grow bacteria,” Harvard Medical School neurosurgeon Kee Park, director of DPRK Programs for the Korean American Medical Association, told NPR at the time. “That’s the kind of technology that goes into creating biological weapons.”
The problem is that “virtually all technology you can possibly think of is dual use,” professor and author Tim Beal told Sputnik.
Time reports that Trump administration officials fear the US president might try and strike a deal with Pyongyang and lift some sanctions in exchange for a pledge to continue their freeze on weapons development and testing, which Trump has said he considers to be more important to maintain than the total removal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems from North Korean possession. However at the same time, it seems to be the consensus among administration officials that any such deal wouldn’t actually make progress at all, only “remove much of the leverage” on the DPRK that they believe compels the country to negotiate in the first place.
New Republic: Climate Change = Vietnam War
By David Middleton | Watts Up With That? | March 18, 2019
Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War
It’s an existential threat to millennials—and older Americans are standing in the way of action.
By MATT FORD – The New Republic – March 14, 2019
Every year, the world’s elite gather like the Illuminati in the Swiss chalet town of Davos for the World Economic Forum, where they discuss how to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. Often that results in comically out-of-touch conversations, such as the idea, put forth at this year’s summit, that digital “upskilling” can solve economic inequality. But sometimes it provides a platform for someone like the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who appeared before these elites like the prophet Cassandra.
“Either we prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming or we don’t,” she said at the summit in January. […]
Like the Vietnam protesters of the ’60s and ’70s, millennials have shown a knack for mass organizing. […]
The ruling gerontocracy won’t make it easy for younger Americans to translate their political energy into policy. […]
The Vietnam War was a clear mortal threat to young people, tens of millions of whom were eligible to be drafted; nearly 60,000 Americans were killed in the conflict. Climate change presents a different sort of threat to millennials. It’s less immediate than an ongoing war, less visceral than being shot at. But ultimately it will prove more catastrophic. Even if drastic action is taken over the next decade, the impact of rising global temperatures on civilization will dwarf the Vietnam War’s bloodshed. The World Health Organization has projected that come 2030, climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year.
Combatting climate change will take much more effort than ending the Vietnam War, and much longer. […]
I’m still laughing. When I saw the title, I said to myself, “Self, they’re right. The Global War on the Weather is like the Vietnam War. No matter how much blood & treasure our government spends, it can’t win.” But, the author went in a whole different direction; he’s comparing the Global War Against the Weather to protests against the Vietnam War.
I think my analogy is better. In the early 1960’s, the choices were: Either we defeat communism in Southeast Asia or we don’t. From 1953 to 1975 spent $168 billion (almost $1 trillion in 2011 USD) and 58,000 American lives on a war that was unwinnable under the conditions imposed by our government. In the Global War Against the Weather, we face a choice of preventing or not preventing 1.5 °C of warming.
“Either we prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming or we don’t,” [Greta Thunberg] said at the summit in January.
Greta, I’m afraid I have bad news for you. With or without the New Green Deal Cultural Revolution… we don’t prevent 1.5 °C of warming. Let’s use the Paris Accord as a proxy for the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution.
Bjorn Lomborg
We already have 1.0 °C relative to the mid 1800’s and about 1.5 °C relative to the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age, the coldest part of the Holocene Epoch. If 1.5 to 2.0 °C of warming relative to the glacial interstadial temperatures of the Little Ice Age is an “existential threat to millennials,” their threshold for existence is set too low (or would that be too high?).
Central Greenland temperature reconstruction (data from Alley, 2000)
The Vietnam War was a clear mortal threat to young people, tens of millions of whom were eligible to be drafted; nearly 60,000 Americans were killed in the conflict. […]
The World Health Organization has projected that come 2030, climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year.
Is this a non sequitur or a red herring?
Vietnam War…
STATISTICS FOR INDIVIDUALS IN UNIFORM AND IN COUNTRY
VIETNAM VETERANS3. 2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam , this number represents 9.7% of their generation.
CASUALTIES
2. Non-hostile deaths: 10,800
3. Total: 58,202 (Includes men formerly classified as MIA and Mayaguez casualties). Men who have subsequently died of wounds account for the changing total.
(a) 2,709,918 divided by 9.7% equals 27,937,299.
(b) 58,202 divided by 27,937,299 equals 0.002… 0.2%.
(c) 99.8% of the Vietnam War generation did not die in the Vietnam War.
Those were real deaths. The brave men and women who sacrificed their lives in the Vietnam War were real people… They have names.
Global War Against the Weather…
The World Health Organization has projected that come 2030, climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year.
Is this comparable to to Vietnam War in any way, shape or form?
Estimated 2011
Death Rate
• 8 deaths/1,000 population
• 55.3 million people die each year
• 151,600 people die each day
• 6,316 people die each hour
• 105 people die each minute
• Nearly two people die each second
In 2011, 55.3 million real people died. That’s 0.8% of 7 billion people. If I add 250,000 to 55.3 million, it’s still 0.8% of 7 billion people. Furthermore, these hypothetical deaths are the results of models. There will be no way to actually attribute any of these deaths, if they occur, to whatever climate changes actually occur between now and 2030.
Now, we do have a pretty good idea how many real people, with names, are currently dying due to energy poverty.
Energy Poverty Kills More People Than Coal and Cecil B. DeMille… Combined!
4 million is 7% of 55.3 million. Will a $240/gal tax on gasoline to fund a $122 trillion Global War on Weather make energy poverty better or worse? My bet is on worse.
Combatting climate change will take much more effort than ending the Vietnam War, and much longer.
Note to The New Republic: There’s only 1 “t” in combating.
The Global War Against the Weather will cost at least $122 trillion, claim tens of millions of lives and have no discernible affect on the weather.
Water Shortage? Blame Climate Change!
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | March 19, 2019
Water shortage? Why not blame it on global warming!
Within 25 years England will not have enough water to meet demand, the head of the Environment Agency is warning.
The impact of climate change, combined with population growth, means the country is facing an “existential threat”, Sir James Bevan told the Waterwise Conference in London.
He wants to see wasting water become “as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby”.
“We all need to use less water and use it more efficiently,” he said.
Sir James Bevan was appointed chief executive of the Environment Agency – the public body responsible for protecting the environment and wildlife in England – in 2015 after a career as a diplomat.
He told his audience that, in around 20 to 25 years, England would reach the “jaws of death – the point at which, unless we take action to change things, we will not have enough water to supply our needs”.
Only one slight snag with Sir James’ little theory, there has been no reduction in rainfall levels in England, and droughts used to be much more severe and prevalent in the past:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
Even commonly made claims that summers are getting drier do not stand up to scrutiny:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
And just for good measure, the area of the country which is most vulnerable to water stress is also not becoming drier:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
And finally, summers in England are not getting hotter. The hottest summer still remains that of 1976. Indeed, last summer was the only one other than 1976 which was actually hotter than 1911!
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
There may be many reasons for water shortages, such as increased demand and leaks, but “climate change” certainly is not one of them.
But it is much easier for Sir James Bevan to blame global warming and ask us all to take less baths, than have to provide solutions to problems he can address.
The Media & the WWF Torture Scandal
News organizations have turned their own journalists into WWF cheerleaders
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | March 20, 2019
Click for source
Earlier this month, BuzzFeed published a three-part exposé about violent goons, funded and equipped by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who persecute indigenous communities. In the words of the BuzzFeed journalists, the WWF
works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. As recently as 2017, forest rangers at a WWF-funded park in Cameroon tortured an 11-year-old boy in front of his parents…
UK politicians have called on the government to respond to these “appalling and deeply disturbing” allegations. US senator Patrick Leahy has likewise demanded an “immediate and thorough review” of the support the WWF receives from American authorities.
BuzzFeed reports that the UK Charity Commission will be asking the WWF “serious questions.” Also in the UK, explorer Ben Fogle has stepped away from his public relationship with this organization, due to these “very serious human rights allegations.”
Longtime WWF supporter, actress Susan Sarandon, says she expects an “in-depth investigation” to take place.
Likewise, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has called on the WWF to “provide the public with a full and transparent accounting of their findings.” (In 2016, DiCaprio – who sits on the WWF’s Board of Directors in the United States, symbolically ‘shared‘ his 2016 Golden Globe award “with all the First Nations peoples represented in this film and all the indigenous communities around the world.”)
Despite the celebrities, the prominence of the WWF brand, and the serious nature of these allegations, much of the media has chosen to ignore this story. Could that have anything to do with the fact that news organizations have spent the past decade turning their own journalists into WWF cheerleaders?
Here in Canada, our largest circulation newspaper, The Toronto Star, has served as an official sponsor of the WWF’s annual Earth Hour (see this 2008 discussion, and this from 2012).
Think about that cozy, inappropriate relationship – and then ask yourself why The Star has yet to tell its readers about the WWF torture scandal.
Since its Australian beginnings, Earth Hour was a deliberate media creation. Rather than reporting neutrally on current affairs, rather than applying an equally skeptical eye to all large multinational entities (WWF, come on down), news organizations instead promote certain events, certain entities, and certain environmental perspectives.
The flip side of that pathological arrangement is that these same news organizations also have the power to decide what isn’t news. Every single day, they decide what not to tell the public.
Attempt to prosecute Assad at ICC is aimed at undermining Syrian peace process
Historian John Laughland explains why the International Criminal Court’s attempt to indict President Assad of Syria reveals its dictatorial and warmongering tendencies.
RT | March 18, 2019
The announcement that “a group of Syrian refugees and their London lawyers” have found “a neat legal trick” to press for an indictment against Syrian President Bashar Assad by the International Criminal Court demonstrates, yet again, the dangerous corruption of international justice, against which I have been warning for over a decade.
The Syrian war is nearly over, thanks to the military successes of the Syrian army and its Russian and Iranian allies. Exhaustion on both sides has probably helped. Diplomatic overtures have started to re-integrate Syria into the international system, starting at the regional level: the United Arab Emirates have re-opened their embassy in Damascus; the Sudanese president, Assad’s near namesake, Omar Al-Bashir, has visited Syria, as have senior Egyptian officials; Syrian officials have attended pan-Arab summits; even Israel is maintaining its dialogue with Russia over Syria. In short, the situation is being slowly normalised as Syria herself embarks on the painful search for internal peace.
The attempt to get Assad prosecuted is an attempt to stamp out these seedlings of peace before they take root. Any prosecution against Assad would scupper, or at least severely damage, this slow acceptance that the Syrian president is part of the solution. When even the British government has accepted that Assad is here to stay, and that peace must be made with him, his implacable enemies fear that their prize is about to slip out of their grasp. They do not want peace, if that means keeping Assad.
We know that the goal is to sabotage any peace process because this kind of indictment is old hat in international criminal law. At the end of the Bosnian Civil War in 1995, indictments were issued against the Bosnian Serb leaders, especially Radovan Karadzic, specifically in order to remove them from the Dayton peace talks. Antonio Cassese, then president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said in 1995, just after the indictment was issued against Karadzic, that it had been issued for that reason: “The indictment means that these gentlemen will not be able to participate in peace negotiations” (quoted in the Italian daily L’Unità, 26 July 1995). Incidentally, Cassese had himself encouraged the prosecutor to bring these prosecutions even though he, as a judge and president of the tribunal, was supposed to be neutral.
The “legal trick” is designed to overcome the fact that Syria is not a state party to the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court and therefore not subject to its jurisdiction. Assad’s enemies are seeking to sidestep the fact that Syria is beyond the ICC’s reach by seeking to apply to Syria a principle which, unfortunately, the ICC itself applied to Burma last year. In September, the ICC judges agreed that a case could be brought against Myanmar (Burma), even though that country is not a state party to the Rome statute, because the crimes it had allegedly committed – deportation – had caused people to flee into Bangladesh, which is a state party. By analogy, Syria’s enemies hope that the presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan, a state party to the ICC statute, will enable them to go after Assad. They seem not to care that this is the first time anyone has ever mentioned “deportation” in Syria, although Damascus has been accused of all manner of other crimes.
The ruling on Myanmar and Bangladesh illustrates everything that is wrong with international justice. Not only did the decision to apply jurisdiction to the Burmese authorities break the fundamental principles of international law, as expressed in the “treaty on treaties,” the 1969 Vienna Convention, which says that the principle of free consent is “universally recognized” and whose Article 34 says, “A treaty does not create either obligations or rights for a third state without its consent,” it also broke an even more fundamental principle by specifically claiming the right to define its own powers (referred to, in English texts, with the French and German expressions la compétence de la compétence and Kompetenz-Kompetenz). The Court described this as “a well-established principle of international law according to which any international tribunal has the power to determine the extent of its own jurisdiction.” In reality, it is no such thing.
On the contrary, the powers of all organisations are determined by law. Even sovereign governments are restricted by national laws in their powers. The idea that an international organisation has the legal right to determine its own powers, and to extend its jurisdiction to states that have not accepted it, is about as blatant a violation of the rule of law as one can imagine. In the past, such claims were equivalent to declarations of war, because a claim like this can only be settled by force. For example, on July 23 1914, Austria demanded the right for its police to carry out investigations inside Serbia for the assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 29. It sent an ultimatum to Belgrade to this effect, which Serbia refused. The result was the First World War, launched by Vienna in the name of the right to punish the perpetrators of that crime.
The ICC has already discredited itself massively after the Laurent Gbagbo fiasco. Having collaborated in the politically-motivated indictment of the president of Côte d’Ivoire in 2011 – a collaboration which gave legitimacy to the French military operation to oust him, just as it gave legitimacy to the NATO attack on Libya by also indicting Colonel Gaddafi at the same time – the Court was forced to acquit Laurent Gbagbo eight years later, in January of this year.
By seeking to extend its lamentable rule to Syria, and thereby to disrupt a barely embryonic peace there, the ICC risks destroying its reputation even further. For the rules limiting the jurisdiction of international organisations to states which have consented to accept them are not some arcane technicality of international law. Instead, they reflect the most basic principle of politics, which is that those who wield power need to be constitutionally linked to those over whom they wield it. International organisations which are not based on such consent violate that very basic principle flagrantly, and therefore start to resemble the very dictatorships they pretend to combat.
John Laughland, who has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and who has taught at universities in Paris and Rome, is a historian and specialist in international affairs.
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‘Mask is off’: US shifts to open coercion & manipulation against ICC, analysts tell RT
UN Works with Intelligence Contractors to Destabilize North Korea Dialogue
By William CRADDICK | Disobedient Media | March 15, 2019
Just a few days after NBC News and National Public Radio (NPR) launched propaganda attempts to undermine the peace process between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the United Nations has waded into the fray with a new attempt to build a case for retaining sanctions that have proven to be a sticking point between the negotiation teams.
Much like previous reports, the United Nation’s Panel of Experts (PoE) on North Korea utilized misleadingly interpreted satellite footage provided by private firms who have contractual connections to the CIA and Pentagon. The panel’s findings will ultimately be used to support policies that are aimed at playing on North Korean fears and make them more likely to withdraw or engage in counterproductive behavior.
I. Continued Misleading Interpretation Of Satellite Footage
The PoE’s claimed that the DPRK has been using an “underwater pipeline” at an oil terminal in Nampo, North Korea to offload fuel it receives by sanctioned methods. Much like with previous attempts to “prove” North Korean behavior with satellite imagery that did not actually show evidence of claimed activity the UN’s contentions are similarly based on shaky grounds.
Image: UN Panel of Experts
A second photo run by NKNews.org from private defense contractor Planet Labs purports to also show the “underwater pipeline.” NK News claimed that the underwater pipeline had been used since 2018 solely based on the fact that ships moved in and out of the area, which is obviously designated for mooring.
Vessel docked in the area connected by an alleged “underwater pipeline.” Image: Planet Labs
There are a number of problems with both the photos provided by the Panel of Experts and the Planet Labs image published by NK News. These issues are outlined below.
- None of the images shows where the “underwater pipeline” comes ashore. It is not visible under the water’s surface, even where the shoreline is shallow.
- None of the cables connecting to the ship are pipelines. They are cabling used to moor the ship in place.
- All of the buoys are in place to mark either mooring cables or the ship’s anchor which would have been dropped alongside it once it came to a stop. The UN PoE labeled the anchor buoy as an “offloading buoy” misleadingly in one of their images.
- An “underwater pipeline” creates a huge risk for salt water contamination of gasoline being pumped through it. This is why all such transfers are done above the surface of the water.
Additional markings on the UN PoE’s images discuss the storage capacity and location of the oil terminal in Nampo but provide no evidence of an “underwater pipeline.” Even more damning, the image provided to NK News by Planet Labs shows a very clear shadow running down its center. This indicates that either two photographs were laid on top of each other and copied, or the original image was creased to hide some detail that would have otherwise been visible.
The use of an underwater pipeline is not the standard method by which ships refuel. Previous reports discussing sanctions evasion display photographs showing how ships will commonly lash together before exchanging gasoline above the water line. When ships to take on fuel from land, they will pull up along a dock. These kinds of details might be obvious to anyone with a degree of maritime knowledge but not a layman.
Image showing customary method by which ships dock to take on fuel.
II. Satellite Footage Of Nampo Docks Is Sourced From Intelligence Contractors
Much like with previous attempts to undermine the Korean peace process, the UN PoE has sourced their imagery from private contractors who primarily work with the CIA and Pentagon. The PoE’s satellite footage is attributed to DigitalGlobe. As Disobedient Media has previously reported, DigitalGlobe is an American vendor of satellite imagery founded by a scientist who worked on the US military’s Star Wars ICBM defense program under President Ronald Reagan. DigitalGlobe began its existence in Oakland, CA and was seeded with money from Silicon Valley sources and corporations in North America, Europe and Japan. Headquartered in Westminster CO, DigitalGlobe works extensively with defense and intelligence programs. In 2016, it was revealed that DigitalGlobe was working with CIA chipmaker NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services to create an AI-run satellite surveillance network known as Spacenet.
DigitalGlobe is a subsidiary of Maxar Technologies, a private conglomerate which boasts contracts with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Some subsidiaries of Maxar derive as much as 90% of their annual revenue from government contracts with the Department of Defense and U.S. Special Operations Command.
Planet Labs, whose imagery was cited in NK News reports of the UN PoE’s findings, is a private satellite imaging corporation based in San Francisco, CA that allows customers with the money to pay an opportunity to gain access to next generation surveillance capabilities. In February 2016, Federal technology news source Nextgov noted a statement from former CIA Information Operations Center director and senior cyber adviser Sue Gordon that Planet Labs, DigitalGlobe and Google subsidiary Skybox Imaging were all working with the NGA to provide location intelligence. Planet Labs’ own website also lists press releases detailing past contracts for subscription access to high resolution imagery with the NGA.
The pervasive involvement of companies providing satellite footage with the CIA in particular is deeply inappropriate. On March 13, 2019 Spanish paper El País reported that the CIA had been implicated in a shockingly violent attack on the North Korean embassy in Spain during the week before the Hanoi Summit. The attack was speculated to be an attempt to gain intelligence on former ambassador to Spain Kim Hyok Chol, who had been appointed by Kim Jong Un to spearhead negotiation efforts with their American counterparts. The involvement of such contractors in a UN panel responsible for overseeing sanctions put into place against North Korea suggests the very real possibility that the entire process is designed to undermine any hope of a denuclearization agreement.
III. The UN PoE Touts Sanctions At A Highly Inappropriate Time
The UN’s decision to continue to tout sanctions in the aftermath of the Hanoi Summit can only be interpreted as an attempt by internationalists and American neoconservatives to scuttle President Donald Trump’s attempts to seek denuclearization for the DPRK. Hugh Griffiths, a British national heading the Panel of Experts, was widely quoted by the media as being of the opinion that Chairman Kim Jong Un had only come to Hanoi to try and relieve the pressure of created by sanctions. It apparently did not bother the international and American press that Mr. Griffiths’ mandate does not include giving his opinion about unrelated peace talks.
Griffiths finds himself in agreement with a number of GOP neoconservative hardliners such as former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley who stress the importance of sanctions with the ostensible goal of cutting off revenue to the DPRK. Some such as John Bolton have openly called for an increase in sanctions in clear opposition to President Trump’s clearly stated desire to seek further dialogue. North Korea has explicitly mentioned the actions and comments of Bolton as endangering the health of negotiations while continuing to maintain that personal relations between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were “still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful.”
While the stated objective of sanctions is to deprive North Korea of revenue that can be used to finance purchases related to its nuclear program, it is undeniable that they contribute majorly to economic hardship and starvation for the civilian population of the DPRK. In 2018, UNICEF noted that sanctions create severe issues with the delivery of humanitarian aid and put the lives of tens of thousands of children in danger alone. While North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was certainly what landed them in the situation they currently find themselves in, it is the callous disregard of human welfare by the United Nations, internationalist and certain American interests which causes an increase in such needless suffering.
Considering that nations such as Japan have recently moved to suspend efforts to condemn and punish the DPRK for their rights abuses in light of progress made during the negotiation process, the UN’s move to shift the spotlight back onto sanctions is incredibly poorly-timed. The same can be said for US agencies such as the Department of State who have interfered with talks by openly welcoming the Panel of Expert’s report.
IV. Media And The UN Ignore Actual Evidence Of Sanctions Evasion
Despite all the efforts of international media, the UN and other factions to foment conflict between the DPRK and United States they been curiously unable to identify real evidence of parties who are trying to smuggle goods in and out of North Korea to dodge sanctions.
Footpaths being used to move goods to and from China along the border near Kusong-Dong, North Korea. Credit: DigitalGlobe, detail added by Disobedient Media
With a search of just a few minutes on Google Earth along the Chinese-North Korean border, Disobedient Media was able to identify pathways being used by smugglers to move goods in avoidance of sanctions near Kusong-Dong, North Korea. The ease with which this verifiable information could be found shows just how inept and uninterested monitoring bodies and international media organizations are in finding actual evidence of any potential sanctions violations. The failure of these institutions suggests that their efforts are made solely with propaganda in mind.
The current drive to highlight supposed bad faith behaviors by the DPRK has absolutely nothing to do with promoting peace or encouraging North Korea to abandon their nuclear arsenal which is as dangerous to them as it is any of their enemies. The increase with which such disingenuous reports have been promulgated since the Hanoi Summit shows the increasing desperation with which certain factions are seeking to maintain hostilities which create a benefit for some but which are ultimately dangerous to the entire world. It seems that there is no low to which such parties will not stoop in order to prevent peace from being realized.
Perhaps the United Nations should spend more time focusing on preventing their officials and peacekeepers from committing a plethora of sex crimes while on the job.
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In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.
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