The New Yorker On The Raid In Abbottabad
Moon of Alabama | August 2, 2011
Inside a New Yorker piece which tells the official “inside” story of the Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad the U.S. government wants you to know.
There is at least one quite unbelievable detail in it. The SEALs that went in had a translator with them who’s role was to keep locals off during the raid.
A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard.
[…]
Not everyone on the team was accustomed to helicopter assaults. Ahmed had been pulled from a desk job for the mission and had never descended a fast rope. He quickly learned the technique.
[…]
As long as everything was cordial, Ahmed would hold curious neighbors at bay.
[…]
Outside the compound’s walls, Ahmed, the translator, patrolled the dirt road in front of bin Laden’s house, as if he were a plainclothes Pakistani police officer. He looked the part, wearing a shalwar kameez atop a flak jacket.
[…]
Eventually, a few curious Pakistanis approached to inquire about the commotion on the other side of the wall. “Go back to your houses,” Ahmed said, in Pashto, as Cairo stood watch. “There is a security operation under way.” The locals went home, none of them suspecting that they had talked to an American. When journalists descended on Bilal Town in the coming days, one resident told a reporter, “I saw soldiers emerging from the helicopters and advancing toward the house. Some of them instructed us in chaste Pashto to turn off the lights and stay inside.”
After 10 years of continuous fighting in Afghanistan the Special Forces do not have an operational Pashto speaker but have to draft a desk jokey? And why was the translator a “chaste Pashto” speaker? The common languages in Pakistan, the lingua franca, are Urdu and English and then there is this fact:
According to the 1998 Census of the 881,000 who resided in the Abbottabad District, Hindko was spoken by 94.26% of the population, followed by Potohari at 2.30%, Pashto at 2.22% and Urdu at 1.05%. Although the first language of most people in the district is Hindko, Urdu is understood and spoken fluently by majority of the residents and commonly used in markets, offices and formal functions. English is widely used in business and education.
If that account in the New Yorker is true it was a major planning mistake and screw up to send a Pashto speaker with the special forces instead of an Urdu speaker. For an important operation planned over months this sounds unbelievable.
There is also this curious wording in New Yorker piece:
Back in Abbottabad, residents of Bilal Town and dozens of journalists converged on bin Laden’s compound, and the morning light clarified some of the confusion from the previous night. Black soot from the detonated Black Hawk charred the wall of the animal pen. Part of the tail hung over the wall. It was clear that a military raid had taken place there. “I’m glad no one was hurt in the crash, but, on the other hand, I’m sort of glad we left the helicopter there,” the special-operations officer said. “It quiets the conspiracy mongers out there and instantly lends credibility. You believe everything else instantly, because there’s a helicopter sitting there.”
Hmm.
Why Israel’s Struggle Is Our Struggle, Too
From the desk of Fjordman (associated with the Norwegian terror suspect) published in The Brussels Journal on 2010-04-12
As Bat Ye’or showed in Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and I elaborated in my own book Defeating Eurabia, Eurabia was born when Western European leaders abandoned their pro-Israeli stance due to Arab threats in the 1970s. This should serve as a reminder of how closely the fate of Europe is tied to that of Israel. Three years ago I wrote the essay Why Europeans Should Support Israel. As I stated there, “Bat Ye’or’s predictions about Arab anti-Semitism spreading in Europe as the continent’s Islamization and descent into Eurabia continues have so far proved depressingly accurate. This trend needs to be fought, vigorously, by all serious European anti-Jihadists. Not only because it is immoral and unfair to Israelis, which it is, but also because those who assist it are depriving Europeans of the opportunity to fully grasp the threat and understand the nature of the Jihad that is now targeting much of Europe as well.”
I remember one Holocaust survivor who was asked what he had learned from the Second World War. He replied that “When somebody says he wants to kill you, you should believe him.” Jews have learned this lesson the hard way, which is why they will fight, as they should, when people such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the Islamic Republic of Iran brag about how they want to wipe out Jews in a “final victory.” The rest of us should fight, too.
The incessant demonization of Israel in the mass media prevents us from realizing that what we are dealing with is a global campaign of bloody conquest. Those of us who read the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) or websites such as Jihad Watch know that Islamic leaders and preachers regularly and openly brag about how they are planning to conquer our lands, defile our women and wipe out our civilization. When people say that they want to kill you and wipe out your culture you should take them seriously. They mean exactly what they say; it’s not a code word for “I feel so humiliated by Western support for Israel.”
And it’s not about “human rights,” either. The “human rights” of Muslims, especially those of Muslim women, are violated every single day in Muslim majority countries, not to mention those of the religious minorities who are unfortunate enough to live there. From an Islamic point of view, human rights are the invention of Western Crusaders. Groups such as Palestinian Hamas only talk about “human rights” to deceive a Western audience. What they really mean is “We hate you, infidel scum, and your worthless culture. Our brave Jihadists will slaughter you and crush you like bugs while we defile your women and keep your children as slaves.” Of course, if asked by the BBC, the CNN or The New York Times they will state their concern for “human rights” and “Islamophobia.” It sounds much better on TV.
If Arabs truly wanted peace with Israel they could have had peace a long time ago. But they don’t want peace. This is about the fact that Islam should dominate the entire world, starting with the Middle East. The Jews of Israel, in contrast, do not want to “take over the entire world,” they simply want a tiny piece of land where they can live in dignity and practice their religion in freedom. What is happening between Israelis and their neighbors is not a “cycle of violence,” any more than it is in the Indian subcontinent. After the partition of India, non-Muslim communities have been nearly wiped out in Pakistan due to persecution, whereas Muslims in the Republic of India have increased their numbers and enjoy special rights. It’s not about mutual ethnic cleansing; it’s about brutal Muslim oppression of non-Muslims, sanctioned by Islamic law and religious texts. The same goes for Thailand and Southeast Asia. Thai Buddhists do not have a history of bothering others; Muslims have an uninterrupted history stretching across 1400 years and several continents of doing so. Those who focus on the non-existing “Israeli aggression” serve to hide the global violence coming from the Islamic world.
I have exchanged emails with an Israeli gentleman who fears that we are approaching a new world war. Frankly, so do I, and the main reason for this is the irrational and suicidal behavior of the modern West. Having an anti-Western, pro-Islamic Marxist at the helm of the largest Western country doesn’t help, nor does it help that the European Union has de facto surrendered the entire European continent to ongoing Islamic colonization, and bans any opposition to this among the natives. I fear for the future of Europe, and of Israel. The Israeli gentleman hopes that Israel will survive yet another military clash with their Muslim neighbors, and perhaps be enlarged, due to their traditional Muslim inaptitude. He also believes, as do I, that the West is in a decadent phase and will soon face a financial collapse.
It bears repeating what I wrote regarding the retreat of the Western world order in 2007: These massive changes and the real or perceived weakness of the Western civilization that has been dominant globally for centuries could very well create a new world war. Multiculturalism and the inability or unwillingness of Western nations to uphold their borders from massive immigration is viewed by Muslims as an invitation for attack and a signal that their ancient Western rival is weak and ripe for conquest. This is no doubt the background for the ongoing aggressive posture by the Iranian president, among others.
Muslims really do believe that the time has now come for overthrowing the West and putting Islam into the global, dominant position it should have according to their scriptures. They will spare no efforts, including nuclear war, in achieving this goal. The Iranian president has quite openly stated that “Islam will soon rule the world,” which implies that they will have to destroy or subdue the West. Al-Qaeda strategists have earlier outlined a schedule for awakening the Islamic world and crushing the West, with a timeline stretching over the coming fifteen to twenty years. They still stick to this plan, which means that tensions are bound to escalate even further in the near future. Westerners need to understand that a world war of sorts with the Islamic world is already inevitable by now, no matter what we do. The only question is whether this will be a cold or a hot world war. We will rapidly approach the latter, if countries such as Iran are allowed to gain nuclear weapons and continued Muslim immigration pushes Western European nations to the brink of civil war. Iranian nukes need to be prevented at absolutely all costs, if we are to have any chance of avoiding further escalation of the most dangerous kind.
In the animal kingdom, if the top dog shows signs of weakness then the others will start competing about who should replace him as leader. The West – the USA very much included, not just Western Europe – is now showing unmistakable signs of weakness and ideological senility. This means that all of the major tectonic plates of global politics will soon make rapid moves, which will trigger a wave of earthquakes and political tsunamis that will completely alter the political landscape. I cannot say exactly how this will play out, but it will accelerate within the coming generation, probably already within the next five to ten years.
As the French writer Guillaume Faye puts it: “I believe that if you drive down the wrong side of the freeway you will eventually have a head-on collision. The precise moment such a collision will occur is difficult to predict, but it is certainly bound to happen. Within ten years or so we are going to be confronted with something never before seen. But more than race war, we are going to experience economic breakdowns, ecological crises, and catastrophic shortages of oil. . . . All the world’s governments operate with short-term agendas and nothing at this point is more disastrous. It is often said that the Earth is sick. But it is man that is sick.”
He thinks we are witnessing the early stages of an Islamic offensive: “Twice before in history it has sought to conquer Europe. The first time it was stopped by Charles Martel at Poitiers [in 732]; the second time, in the 17th century, it was beaten back at the walls of Vienna. Islam’s present conquering ambition was revived in Egypt in the 1920s. I’m convinced that certain Islamic leaders believe the moment is now right for a third offensive against the West. As the former Algerian president Houari Boumediène once boasted, the Islamic world today carries in the wombs of its women the weapons that will conquer Europe.”
We have forgotten both our Sun Tzu and our Machiavelli. It is ancient wisdom that you shouldn’t injure what you cannot kill. Either you fight a war properly, with the aim of utterly crushing your enemy’s spirit, or you make peace with him. Don’t tease or hurt him to make him angry and then retreat. This will make you look evil or weak or both, yet that is precisely what the West is doing in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. Waging a Politically Correct war against Muslims to make them love us and adopt democracy has to be the stupidest idea anybody has come up with. As columnist Caroline Glick points out, Arab societies are “strong horse” societies where everything boils down to being perceived as the strong horse. The Western world will prevail as long as we are seen as the strong horse and Muslims fear us more than they hate us. Now we give them absolutely no reason to fear us, therefore they despise us.
Muslims respond only to force, even in their own societies, as Wafa Sultan so correctly describes in her brave and brilliant book A God Who Hates. You have to forcefully puncture their always-inflated Muslim egos and make sure they understand that attacking us will gain them nothing, or worse, will be outright counterproductive. It’s the only way to deal with them. That goes for other enemies and potential rivals, too, but for Muslims in particular.
Western so-called leaders currently go out of their way to give Muslims more money and special treatment the more they threaten us, and actively silence those among their own people who oppose continued colonization by alien peoples. The entire West has an “I’m a brainwashed fool, please kick me and squeeze me for money”-sign on our backs. Nobody respects that. We’re the sick man of the world and the joke of the planet. This will not change until somebody forcefully pushes back. If the current crop of Western leaders doesn’t have what it takes then new leadership will be required. Either that or the West will be finished.
Mahathir Mohamad, the then-Prime Minister of the “moderate” Muslim majority country Malaysia, during the Islamic Summit Conference in 2003 called for Muslims to pool their resources to achieve a final victory over “the Jews.” Not everybody remembers that he also longed for a return to the glory days when “Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.” They want us to kneel and tremble in fear. That’s their ultimate goal, as stipulated in Islamic sharia, in the personal example of Muhammad and in their holy texts. They cannot and will not settle for anything less than that.
Rather than unfairly attacking Israel we should thank Israelis for having served as brave frontline soldiers against the global Islamic Jihad for generations. They are fighting our fight, and we spit them in the face for it. The truth is that Israelis have shown remarkable restraint and civilized behavior compared to the consistently uncivilized behavior of their enemies.
I don’t believe Islam can be reformed; that is impossible. But it has lived by the sword and could die by it. Perhaps a military defeat even more crushing and humiliating than 1967 will shatter the Muslims’ belief in Islam in its very foundations. If they keep on alienating all the major centers of power on the planet simultaneously – from the USA via Europe, Russia and India to China – then that could eventually turn out to be what they get.
Yet another program on “What Do White, Jewish Think-Tankers in D.C. Think the U.S. Should Do About Iran?”
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | July 21, 2011
During Bloggingheads‘ latest installment of “What Do White, Jewish Think-Tankers in Washington D.C. Think the U.S. Should Do About Iran?” , former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, now a fellow at the bizarrely-named Progressive Policy Institute (given its penchant for espousing hawkish foreign policy views, especially on Iran), gave a veritable tutorial on how to cram every long-debunked fear-mongering talking point about the Islamic Republic into a mere 50-minute conversation. […]
In the course of his discussion with Joel Rubin, Director of Policy and Government Affairs at the Ploughshares Fund, Block repeated (among other things) the false claim that Obama “exposed” a secret Iranian nuclear enrichment at Fordow in September 2009, insisted that Iran seeks hegemony over the Middle East and is violently involved in Iraq, advocated forcefully for regime change (though he called it “democratic change”, and was oh so sincere about it), was adamant about Iran’s headlong pursuit of nuclear weapons (any other perspective, like one based evidence, was “nonsense”), said that the IAEA itself has said Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and even added a new mathematical assessment of Iran’s nuclear progress. He said that Iran’s mere capacity to enrich uranium up to 20% is “90%, if not more, of the ability to get to the fuel you need for a nuclear weapon.”
Despite Rubin’s efforts to infuse certain facts into the discussion (filtered, of course, through a significant amount of silliness of his own), Block remained a blowhard, a blabbermouth, and a liar. The best part, perhaps, was when Block, furrowed his brow, and said:
I’d like to see no war. I’d like to see peace! But I think the best chance to get there, the best chance to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, which, by the way, it’s not just a question of them dropping a bomb on Israel. I mean, they went into the streets in 2009 and were brutal to their own people. They walk around saying Bahrain belongs to them. How will they act when they have a nuclear weapon? What kind of activity will we see then? Who will be able to stop them? How will they treat their people then?
Block advocated “more pressure” to “destabilize” the Iranian government in order to ensure his preferred outcome. He also refused to admit that Israeli and U.S. predictions about when Iran would obtain a nuclear weapon have been wrong for three decades. Rather, he credited sanctions for “working” over that time and then completely misrepresented the TRR nuclear deal between Iran, Brazil, and Turkey. […]
Block closed, predictably, by advocating a military attack on Iran by pretending to ask a rhetorical question.
‘Iran will deny UN rapporteur entrance’
Press TV – July 21, 2011
Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast says the Islamic Republic will not allow the UN special Rapporteur on human rights to enter the country.
“Appointing a UN special Rapporteur on human rights for Iran is a political and illegal move, and the Islamic Republic will not allow the envoy to enter the country under any circumstances,” Mehmanparast said on Thursday.
In a move spearheaded by the US, in June the UN Human Rights Council named former Maldivian Foreign Minister Ahmed Shaheed as its human rights investigator on Iran.
“Unfortunately the human rights issue is the political tool of certain Western countries which have serious problems with regards to human rights and are accused of many cases of violating human rights,” Mehmanparast added.
The Iranian official added that appointing the UN special Rapporteur on human rights for Iran aims at mounting political pressure on Tehran.
Tehran blames Western governments, the US administration in particular, for violating international laws, disregard for the basic rights of their citizens and support for violation of human rights across the globe.
A National Park for Nukes?
By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM | CounterPunch | July 20, 2011
When the Truman administration dropped the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, they not only initiated a Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, they also began a struggle over the meaning of the atom bomb inside the United States.
It began slowly. Criticism of the bomb was at first strongly repressed by McCarthyism and other militaristic histrionics, but by the late 1950s hard questions about nuclear weapons were publicly being raised. By the late 1960s doubts and criticisms went mainstream. Disillusioned Americans wondered, had it been necessary to reduce two Japanese cities to dust, killing hundreds of thousands in mere seconds? Was it necessary to sacrifice vast zones of the American West to uranium mining, nuclear dumps, testing grounds, and weapons silos? Had the government acted in hasty ignorance, or in knowing neglect when it allowed miners and downwinders and soldiers to be poisoned with radioactive dust? Was there really a “missile gap”? Did atomic scientists actually purposefully expose their own children to radiation? Would it be possible to survive nuclear war, as the experts told us? What did the creators of the atom bomb really think about their “achievement”? What opportunity costs was our multi-trillion dollar investment in nukes imposing upon us as a country?
These and other questions about the nation’s commitment to nuclear weapons were intensely debated as the Vietnam war rose to a fever pitch. New evidence continually surfaced revealing that the federal government had often acted with malice and intentional deception throughout the Manhattan Project, through the 1950s, and beyond. Historians began to document the realities of the nuclear age, including willful poisonings, and experimental defilement of the people and ecosystems of North America, especially Nevada’s Great Basin, and also the South Pacific’s Marshall Islands, and other testing and nuclear dumping grounds where generations would suffer on lands poisoned for thousands of years.
Quickly much of the logic that had justified the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came apart, and newer, more informed histories were drafted, showing cynical US leaders bent on punishing Japan and thwarting Soviet occupation of that island, not quickly ending the war and saving US and Japanese life. Gar Alperovitz’s “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” presented the bones of this argument. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s “Racing the Enemy” concluded the argument in extensively researched detail.
In other exposés of journalism and archival research the nuclear labs and testing grounds of America were exposed not as monuments to great achievements of science and national will, but rather as institutions of hubris and death, occupying stolen Indian lands, and dreaming up ever more deadly doomsday machines in the forms of thermonuclear weapons, MIRVed missiles, neutron bombs, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. The willingness of US leaders to threaten the use of nuclear weapons again and again against non-nuclear states was revealed, particularly after Vietnam.
The nation’s nuclear weapons program lost its early luster then as many Americans came to fully grasp the toxic legacy, and understand the antidemocratic tendencies inexorably tied to the bomb and the institutions that created it. The 1980s brought this awareness to a peak as public perceptions of the bomb and its creators congealed around condemnation and a desire to abolish nuclear weapons.
When the Cold War ended the toxic legacy of the Manhattan Project and the continuing US nuclear weapons program was subjected to its greatest scrutiny of all. Losing their mythical rival in the Soviet “evil empire,” the weapons labs entered a long decade of scandalous revelation; declining morale, accidents, corruption, theft, espionage, greed, incompetence. The 1990s and early 2000s brought repeated crises for the US nuclear establishment. ‘If only it were possible to bring back the good old days,’ thought the bewildered senior weaponeers. However, these good old days too were tarnished by the truth.
All the while, all through these eras of revelation and crisis, the weaponeers who dedicated their lives to the nuclear enterprise waged a battle of ideas to hide the ugly truths of the Manhattan Project’s historical legacy. These acolytes of nuclearism —old Cold Warriors retired from the weapons labs, the Department of Energy, the military, and the private sector corporations that have made billions from building the bomb and spoiling the land and water and DNA of large swaths of the earth— they organized their own effort to re-write history all over again, to recast nuclearism in the benevolent form it had lost. They sought to recapture former glories that had withered through decades of sobering reality. As public perceptions of the bomb and the nuclear labs further soured they stepped up their game, especially in the 1990s.
Their revisions began modestly enough, but quickly turned into a national institutionalized effort. Historical foundations were incorporated by DOE retirees and nuclear boosters around various Cold War nuclear weapons sites. Soon large sums of money were raised, and with the eager cooperation of the nuclear labs and military-industrial corporations still designing and building nuclear arms, museums were opened to the public. These museums grew into absurdly large and well financed propaganda pieces.
The Bradbury Museum in downtown Los Alamos, named after Norris Bradbury, the second Los Alamos Laboratory director, became a museum of “science,” not just of the lab, or simply the weapons it built, or merely the Cold War. No, it is “science.” This aspiration to educate the public about “general science” was reflected LANL’s intense effort in the 1990s and early 2000s to obscure its own core mission of nuclear weapons, constantly draping itself in the prestige of being a “national laboratory,” or as the lab still describes itself, “a premier national security research institution, delivering scientific and engineering solutions for the nation’s most crucial and complex problems.” The lab also launched its own history web site in the 2000s showing its preferred arc of development, from the Manhattan Project to “computing,” and “basic science,” even though the lab remained thoroughly a nuclear weapons facility, and today is in fact becoming more and more dedicated to weapons manufacturing.
Inside the Bradbury Museum is an entire history of LANL, the Manhattan Project, nuclear science, and a few exhibits extolling the lab’s supposedly non-nuclear contributions. Full scale nuclear missiles and bombs float on wires above and sit in displays within arms reach. You’re encouraged to touch the bomb. You’re told not to fear radiation. The Bradbury Museum, funded with federal dollars, became a key site of struggle over history in the 1990s as community groups battled the lab and DOE to include a different interpretation of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, a narrative that didn’t claim it was a “necessity” to end the war and save lives, one that showed in images, and described through first hand accounts what the victims experienced. Parties without an agenda to promote nuclear weapons were, in other words, simply asking the Bradbury to present the history that most historians now acknowledge as most complete. In the end the lab and museum’s staff, composed of pro-nuclear managers, allowed an alternative display in a dark corner of the museum, completely marginalized from the rest of the lavish exhibits.
For about a decade the Bradbury Museum stood as the premier pro-nuclear weapons propaganda tool. Other sites within the weapons complex were busy building their own museums though. The Nevada Test Site opened the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas in 2005 after a pro-nuclear weapons lobby, the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, raised enough money and convinced the Smithsonian Institute to join up.
It should be noted that the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, like the foundations that run or help support the Bradbury and other nuclear museums, is run by a roster of retired Test Site employees and contractors, all strong believers in nuclear weapons as forces of unquestionable good in the nation’s past and present. The NTSHF’s president Nick Aquilina, for example, was described in a tribute published in the Congressional Record in 1994 as a man who “characterizes the spirit and dedication of a generation of Americans who dedicated their lives to maintaining our nuclear deterrent”. Aquilina was a thirty-two year career DOE manager. The foundation’s chairman, Troy Wade, is head of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, a lobby for the state’s military-industrial complex, and also a retired DOE manager. With or without the Smithsonian’s involvement it’s obvious what sort of historical narrative about nuclear weapons testing attendees will be exposed to.
In the Atomic Testing Museum one is subjected to an entire historical narrative emphasizing the race for the bomb between the USA and Germany, culminating in the “necessary” dropping of the bomb on Japan, and then describing decades of testing in the desert northwest of Vegas, emphasizing the greatness of nuclear weapons and the men who built and blew them up. It’s all packaged in a feel good, almost kitschy nostalgia. There’s even a theater where you can sit through a simulated nuclear blast in which air is blown into your face and the bench beneath you rumbles and shakes. The kids must love that.
The biggest museum contribution to the pro-nuclear weapons historical narrative to date, however, is the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. Located in a hanger-sized building along a major boulevard in Albuquerque, New Mexico, just blocks from Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base (where thousands of nuclear weapons are currently stockpiled) the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is nothing less than a flattering shrine to nuclear weapons, replete with a seventy foot tall Redstone missile in the front parking lot. Like the Atomic Testing Museum, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is also a Smithsonian affiliate, but it casts its own role in much grander terms: according to the Museum’s web site, its “mission is to serve as America’s resource for nuclear history and science.” That’s “America’s resource” singular – a one stop oracle of truth.
Like Bradbury or the Atomic Testing Museum, the National Museum’s exhibits extoll the history of nuclear science, recounting a narrative filled with bravery and wonder regarding the Manhattan Project’s personalities. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan is predictably explained as a benevolent, if unfortunate necessity to save the lives of not only American GIs, but also Japanese women and children. The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History also has a backyard in which it displays decommissioned nuclear-capable aircraft, disassembled nuclear missiles, nuclear rocket launchers, and even a submarine. Like the other pro-nuclear museums everything is kid friendly. You can walk right up and rub your hand on the nose of a nuclear missile.
Apparently not satisfied with this now national network of pro-nuclear weapons museums, each with multi-million dollar budgets and tens of thousands of visitors (there’s another in TOak Ridge, Tennessee called the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the B Reactor Museum Association in Richland, Washington) the nuclear weaponeers have for years sought a more powerful medium through which to communicate their hagiography of nuclear weapons.
In 2004 they found it in a bill sponsored by New Mexicos’ Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman (it was probably dreamed up and written by the same pro-nuclear weapons boosters who organized and built the atomic propaganda museums in Los Alamos and Albuquerque). Senator Bingaman, in partnership with his then senior colleague Senator Pete Dominici, and also the two Senators from Washington State, and Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, introduced the “Manhattan Project National Historical Park Study Act,” the first step in establishing a national park dedicated to nuclear weapons. Money for the study was initially hard to find, but eventually allocated. Completed recently, the Obama administration announced on the 13th of July its intention to embrace this project and create a national historic park in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
It would be a very strange national park. Los Alamos Laboratory was built on sacred lands filled with Native American ruins, existing and extensively used ceremonial sites, burial grounds, and other places of profound cultural significance to the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande Valley. Were it not a nuclear weapons lab, it is likely it would have long ago been deemed reservation land because of its true ownership, or a National Park because of its sublime beauty, or given some other dedication of preservation and reverence.
Pressing against LANL’s boundaries on three sides already is the Bandelier National Monument, created in 1916 by Congress, and containing tens of thousands of archaeological sites and 23,000 acres of wilderness. As a National Park Service property should be, Bandelier is dedicated to the high desert, to the western pine, juniper, and fir forests of the Southwest, and to a history of human habitation that is thousands of years old. When Los Alamos was built, it was on top of this one-of-a-kind landscape that Congress had previously recognized as nationally unique and worthy of preservation. The lab colonized this landscape and occupied it with gigantic industrial-nuclear manufacturing and testing facilities. The spotted owls, coyotes, and spirits of the land, one imagines, fled the fumes and noise.
The entire notion of creating a national park dedicated to the history of nuclear weapons seems completely out of sync with the purpose of parks. The National Parks Service, for example, explains in its own criteria for establishing national parks that, “hunting, mining, and other consumptive uses such as grazing are generally prohibited in National Parks”. Well what about nuclear weapons designing, nuclear waste dumping, high explosives testing, and biological warfare experimentation? What about planning for and manufacturing the weapons for the annihilation of entire ecosystems? Is that allowed in National Parks? It will be if this plan moves forward.
The National Parks Service has already had to defend this proposal from criticism leveled by myself and my colleague Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group. According to a spokesperson for the NPS, the Manhattan Project’s sites “are significant parts of our national cultural history. And before they get bulldozed over, we are in favor of preserving these places so future generations can study these events, for good or bad.” This description all sounds very neutral and useful, but it’s not at all what’s happening.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that it completely ignores how the proposal to create a Manhattan Project National Historic Park came about, that it was the idea of pro-nuclear lobbyists who have already succeeded in creating a national network of taxpayer-funded, Smithsonian-affiliated museums dedicated to glorifying nuclear weapons. These parties are not interested in preserving places for unbiased reflection on the bomb’s creation. They are set on valorizing nuclear weapons, and they understand that a National Historic Park for the Manhattan Project would be the pinnacle.
And more than anything, they understand that reclaiming the past and re-polishing the bomb’s image by dedicating a National Park to it will serve their aims today, aims that include pushing ahead with highly controversial and historically unprecedented investments in new nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos is, after all, currently undertaking a construction program that is larger in dollar terms than the entire Manhattan Project in New Mexico, all to build a new plutonium bomb pit factory.
Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Navarro, CA. He can be reached at: darwin@riseup.net
Finding Order in the Orwellian Chaos
By Eric Blair | Activist Post | April 10, 2011
It has become nearly impossible to determine the “truth” in our increasingly chaotic world. Reality is seemingly being twisted and flipped on its head in this rapid unfolding of multi-front crises. The world is facing a new world war in the Arab world, nuclear holocaust from the Fukushima meltdown, total economic collapse/takeover, and a stunning rise in the cost of essential commodities.
In each case, the public is being told directly the opposite of basic human understanding. In fact, it’s so blatant that it appears to be a test to see how fast and far the collective human psyche can be warped. George Orwell would be impressed with the level of doublespeak manipulation that has taken place concerning these recent catastrophic events.
War is now classified as a humanitarian action. Nuclear radiation is now good for your health. Private and government financial collapse is the fault of the taxpayer. And the price for food and oil are dependent on gambling, not actual supply and demand.
Never before, that I and others can recall, have we been hit with so many crises at once with previously unacceptable explanations coming from the people’s supposed leaders. The U.S. president can now put American soldiers into combat and spend tax dollars on war without even consulting the citizens’ elected officials. The EPA can autocratically adjust acceptable radiation levels for human health despite all evidence to the contrary. The private bankers can demand bailouts and austerity cuts from an already ailing population who had nothing to do with their debts. The price of food and oil are allowed to be determined in Wall Street’s casino at the expense of humanity. And we’re being told it’s for our own good, our personal safety, and our economic security.
This insane warping of morals and common sense can only occur under the direction of a force which requires mass confusion and a compromise in human morality to accomplish an unpopular agenda. A force whose motto is “Order Out of Chaos.” A force whose deliberate purpose for creating such calamitous situations is more consolidated control. And clearly, it’s a force with great access to the mainstream media megaphone to propagate their desired reaction to these crises.
What’s different about these events compared to the past is their size, scope, and coalescence at the same time. What David Icke refers to as the “Totalitarian Tiptoe” in his explanation of the establishment’s creeping tyranny through problem-reaction-solution engineering of crises, has seemingly turned into the “Last Leap.” In other words, it can’t be more obvious that we’re quickly moving toward a malevolent global dictatorship with or without the acceptance of the masses. Yet, efforts to defuse and desensitize the population with morally-conflicting messaging appear to be intensifying.
In order to induce hypnosis, a hypnotist must overload the participant’s mind with unknown “message units” to trigger the primitive survival instincts of “fight, flight, or play dead.” As the mind attempts to interpret these foreign message units it becomes overwhelmed. The hypnotist then senses the peak of the overload and releases the subject to flee-and-play-dead with the command to “sleep.” However, it is likely that the participant would have chosen this path regardless of the command, because the participant began the process in a relaxed position and, as a domesticated animal, has certain preconditioning to escape to flight when overwhelmed.
Once in this state of message unit overload, the part of the mind required for critical thinking is defused and the subject is willing to accept nearly any suggestion — as comically seen in stage hypnosis shows. During this stage show by the elite, we have witnessed rabid anti-war liberals turn into lapdogs for preemptive killing. We’ve witnessed health community officials promote a variety of poisons as normal. And we’ve witnessed free market economists promote monopoly cartels as genuine capitalism.
Accepted knowns are remarkably easy to manipulate using suggestive messaging, especially if attached to a strong emotional response like fear. Make no mistake, this method is a well-understood science; being human, we are all certainly susceptible to these manipulative techniques. So how do we keep our moral bearings during this calculated onslaught of reprogramming?
First, we must recognize when fear, which is the most powerful of emotional triggers, is being used to influence our perception of a given policy, or reality in general. We must not allow ourselves to feel the fear, but instead recognize it as the tool of control that it is. Once mastered, you will notice other less-potent emotional triggers being aimed at convincing your mind to accept unknowns. You will be amazed at how many of your peers fall for it and will desperately try to argue that the fear justifies some inhumane action.
Secondly, it seems wise to drop our perceived meaning of all labels like Democrat or Republican, or capitalism or communism, etc. And we must stop rooting for a team or blindly following a leader based on certain labels. For example, does an aggressive war become righteous if a Democrat with a Peace Prize launches it? Or even if religious leaders promote its cause? Don’t be blinded by mindless groupthink that is often directed by authority in all its forms. Think for yourself.
Ultimately, we must narrowly focus our compass toward the core human beliefs of peace, love, and liberty. When our bias is always being pulled by those forces, we are less likely to be led off course. Believers in peace cannot possibly justify violence unless a direct threat requires immediate self-defense; and only then as a last resort. Believers in love respect their neighbors as equals and would never stand for injustices perpetrated against them — socially, economically, environmentally etc. Believers in liberty would rather die as a consequence of their own decisions than have their essential freedom confined by authority. Significantly, when our compass is dialed into these human principles, we’ll typically find ourselves in a polar conflict with the establishment version of events and desired solutions. These extreme opposite forces allow us to see the real agenda more clearly.
Recognizing the game that is being played for our minds allows us to filter out previously unknown message units as trash so that they never bring about an overload. It allows you to live a life of your own accord. And that is the key to transforming the prevailing system. In other words, we can’t defeat this powerful negative force by playing into their reality. We must, individually, live by our principles even when others frown upon it. Don’t worry, the others will break their trance eventually, as the manufactured anger to justify war, engineered hatred of their neighbors, and the constant bombardment of injustices upon them will eventually grow old. And you, as one living example of purity, will disprove a thousand lies.
New York Times stands by Ethan Bronner’s Facebook fabrications
By Ali Abunimah – The Electronic Intifada – 07/13/2011
Ethan Bronner(Flickr)
The New York Times has told The Electronic Intifada it stands fully behind an article by its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner despite compelling evidence that the article contains fabrications, misleading statements, and gross exaggerations.
In a series of emails between The Electronic Intifada and The New York Times foreign editor Susan Chira, the newspaper defended the article and denied that any corrections or clarifications were required. This is despite the fact that additional data presented by The Electronic Intifada shows that the central premise of the article is false.
In a 9 July article, Bronner profiled a Facebook page called YaLa – Young Leaders. The article suggested that an “enthusiastic” response to the page from thousands of people all over the Arab world indicated an upsurge of interest in coexistence with Israelis that brought to mind the “Facebook-driven revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.”
On 10 July, The Electronic Intifada cast severe doubts on many aspects of Bronner’s story.
Not only is there no evidence of a groundswell of interest in online dialogue between Israelis and Arabs, there is substantial evidence to contradict Bronner’s narrative. Additional data collected by The Electronic Intifada and presented to The New York Times found that only a handful of Facebook users had anything more than a cursory relationship with the page before Bronner’s article appeared.
Moreover, The New York Times did not respond to a direct question as to whether it believed a key anecdote in Bronner’s story, after The Electronic Intifada published evidence suggesting it is false.
This post lays out the key issues we asked The New York Times about, analyzes its responses and presents new evidence contradicting Bronner’s central narrative.
How many “active users” does the YaLa – Young Leaders Facebook page have and what does that mean?
In his article, Bronner claimed that the YaLa – Young Leaders Facebook page:
has had 91,000 views in its first month. Of its 22,500 active users, 60 percent are Arabs – mostly Palestinians, followed by Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Lebanese and Saudis.
The Electronic Intifada asked The New York Times for the source of this information and to define what constituted an “active user.”
We also presented The New York Times with a study we did of every post and comment on the YaLa – Young Leaders page’s Wall from 4 May through 9 July (the full study is included at the end of this post).
The study found that in total there were 146 Facebook users who made a total of 519 posts/comments on the Wall. Eighty-six of these users (58%) made only a single post/comment and another 25 (17%) made 2 comments/posts. So 75% of active users made only 1 or 2 comments or posts.
The top ten most active commenters/posters accounted for 51% of the posts/comments (265 out of 519). The most active poster/commenter was the Yala – Young Leaders page owner, while Hamze Awawde and Moad Arqoub were the third and fourth most prolific. They, along with two other top ten users were quoted in Bronner’s article.
In contrast to the claims of broad participation from across the Arab world, we found only two Facebook users who identified themselves as coming from an Arab country other than Palestine – both from Egypt. One made a single comment, and the other a small handful. Neither were among the top ten users.
In response to these data, foreign editor Susan Chira wrote:
Despite your own study, we believe the article remains factually correct. You assert that the only way to participate in a Facebook page is to “like” it. However, Facebook users can engage with a page in multiple ways, including commenting on a status update, liking a post, and other ways without “liking” the page, according to Facebook and to my colleagues who have been administrators of Facebook pages. That activity is described in the article as monthly active users. Mr. Savir shared the Facebook data with us so we could verify it, and the data does in fact substantiate our description of the monthly active users. Your own research is predicated on the “like” metric, so it does not obviate the statistic we use.
Chira did not share with The Electronic Intifada the data she says was shown to The New York Times by Uri Savir, the former Israeli diplomat and director of the Peres Center for Peace who founded the page.
Chira’s claim that Facebook users can “engage with a page” without first “liking” it (becoming a fan) was simply incorrect.
This is important because on 9 July, the YaLa – Younger Leaders page had only about 3,000 fans. It has more than doubled since then as a result of publicity from Bronner’s article.
In a follow-up, Chira acknowledged that in fact a Facebook user must “like” a page before she can post/comment on the Wall. However, Chira insisted:
it is incorrect to say Facebook users cannot see a Wall without LIKING a page or other parts of the page, including applications. It is also incorrect to say users cannot comment or share posts from a Facebook page that they do not LIKE. Users can comment and share a status update/post from a Facebook page – onto their own Facebook page – without LIKING the page.
Can’t see the forest for the trees
At this point The New York Times has completely lost sight of the forest for the trees. Let’s remind ourselves of the main thrust of Bronner’s narrative:
over the past month, the Facebook page has surprised those involved by the enthusiasm it has generated, suggesting that the Facebook-driven revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt may offer guidance for coexistence efforts as well.
Called Facebook.com/yalaYL, the site, created by a former Israeli diplomat and unambiguous about its links to Israel, has had 91,000 views in its first month. Of its 22,500 active users, 60 percent are Arabs – mostly Palestinians, followed by Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Lebanese and Saudis.
What any reasonable person would understand from this is that the “enthusiasm” for the page is comparable in scope and significance to “the Facebook-driven revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.”
But the only evidence cited for this is the “active user” number of 22,500 which any reasonable reader would understand to mean that thousands of people had flocked to the page to take part in the kind of discussions snippets of which Bronner quoted.
But that’s just not a true picture. An actual examination of the human interactions on the YaLa – Young Leaders Facebook page indicates that only a tiny handful of people have had anything more than a cursory interaction with the page.
Yet The New York Times insists that the fact that some Facebook users could have shared YouTube videos, photos or other innocuous posts of the kind that dominate the YaLa page to their own personal pages is sufficient to support the claim that there is a groundswell of Arab interest and participation in a project “unambiguous about its links to Israel” worthy of a full write-up on its august pages.
At the same time the newspaper ignores the actually observable human interactions that completely contradict this narrative.
Are Bronner’s lead paragraphs true?
In its original critique of Bronner’s article, this blog cast doubt on the story Bronner told in his lead:
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Moad Arqoub, a Palestinian graduate student, was bouncing around the Internet the other day and came across a site that surprised and attracted him. It was a Facebook page where Israelis and Palestinians and other Arabs were talking about everything at once: the prospects of peace, of course, but also soccer, photography and music.”
“I joined immediately because right now, without a peace process and with Israelis and Palestinians physically separated, it is really important for us to be interacting without barriers,” Mr. Arqoub said as he sat at an outdoor cafe in this Palestinian city.
The story is not credible because Arqoub was one of the earliest posters/commenters on the page soon after its official launch, and Arqoub already personally knew the other Palestinian closely involved in the site, Hamze Awawde. Both Arqoub and Awawde, as The Electronic Intifada reported, had met through their involvement an in Israeli organization called MEPEACE.
The Electronic Intifada asked The New York Times if Arqoub or Awawde were administrators or closely involved with the project, and this question:
Do you believe the story in Bronner’s lede that Arqoub was simply “bouncing around on the Internet the other day” and serendipitously happened upon this page?
Chira did not give a direct response to the latter question. However, she wrote:
On your … point about the origins and affiliations of the people Mr. Bronner quoted, I asked him to go back both to Mr. Savir and to each of the people he interviewed and check whether any of them were officially affiliated with the site or had any role in setting it up. The answer from all of them is no. The people interviewed are indeed active in interacting with the site, but they have no official role, according to Mr. Savir, Mr. Awade and Mr. Arqoub. Nor did the article state that Mr. Awade and Mr. Arqoub “were brought together by the page.” It said they are both Palestinians who have had an interest in coexistance efforts before.
Chira did not say if The New York Times examined the strong evidence that both Awawde and Arqoub were de facto administrators and representatives of the YaLa initiative in an “unofficial” capacity, nor what their relationship was with the page’s founders prior to its launch.
Nor do we know who actually administers the page if it is not Awawde or Arqoub. Savir, while the figurehead for the project, has no postings under his name.
Given the fact that the story about how Arqoub came across the site “the other day” is almost certainly false – and Chira would not stand by it – it seems extraordinary that The New York Times would rely on the word of the same sources and decline to carry out any fact-checking of its own.
Another important question Chira should ask Bronner – assuming she hasn’t: how did Bronner come upon this story? Who fed it to him?
Ignoring the grassroots, watering the astroturf
The Electronic Intifada asked in its initial posting on Bronner’s story and in the correspondence with Chira why Bronner would promote this marginal Facebook page with a small handful of active participants and ignore the real groundswell of Palestinians and Arabs who oppose “dialogue” initiatives aimed at normalizing Israel’s relations with the Arab world.
Just last week, for example, the Egyptian Independent Union Federation issued a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people that pledged to “reject any form of normal relations” with Israel, including gas supply agreements, and confirmed the trade union federation’s support for the Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).
Chira wrote:
in response to your objection that we failed to note the context that there are Palestinians who object to this kind of contact, the article does state, “At a time when Arabs generally shun contact with Israelis, those on the site speak openly about their desire to learn more about one another.”
Does Chira really think that noting in passing that “there are Palestinians” who object, while hyping and exaggerating a trivial dialogue initiative, substitutes for real reporting on why Palestinians overwhelmingly oppose such initiatives, and allowing them to explain their critiques and analyses?
Why does this matter?
The highly misleading narrative and dubious factual claims in Bronner’s article on the YaLa-Young Leaders Facebook page constitute serious journalistic malpractice. But instead of acknowledging this, The New York Times has dug in to defend this bogus story come what may.
Perhaps this is because acknowledging any error on the part of Bronner – or his editors – would force the newspaper to reckon with Bronner’s blatant and even more significant biases.
In January 2010, The Electronic Intifada revealed that Bronner had a serious conflict of interest: his son had enlisted in the Israeli army.
Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of The New York Times at the time agreed with us and urged that Bronner be reassigned. The newspaper did not take their colleague’s advice.
Since then, Hoyt has sadly been proven right that the question of Palestine is simply “too close to home” for Bronner.
Last May, as Palestinians marked the 63rd anniversary of their expulsion from Palestine – the Nakba – Bronner presented a highly skewed version of history, a common Israeli propaganda refrain:
After Israel declared independence on May 15, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces.
As The Electronic Intifada reported, Bronner omitted the crucial fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes by Zionist militias in the months before 15 May 1948 and the intervention of Arab armies – a fact that completely changes many people’s understanding of what occurred.
In an important analysis, Youssef Munayyer, executive director of The Palestine Center, showed that Bronner’s skewed reporting about the Nakba contradicted even the Times’ own contemporaneous reports from 1948.
When the Jerusalem bureau chief was confronted about this by the current public editor, Arthur Brisbane, “Mr. Bronner responded that space was limited in a short story and he wasn’t trying to recite the full history.”
So Bronner’s idea of reporting is to make sure to fill up his word allotment with information that supports Israel’s official narrative while omitting facts that are central to Palestinian history and present-day claims.
Bronner’s latest piece of shoddy journalism not only reminds us of his own inability to see the situation from outside the cozy corner of West Jerusalem, ethnically-cleansed of Palestinians, that he inhabits, but indicates that he is aided and abetted by editors who will apparently put up with any absurd claim or outright falsehood.
Public Editor Arthur Brisbane revealed a truth when he wrote:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in short, is the third rail of New York Times journalism. Touch it and burn.
Conclusion
We can conclude from this analysis that YaLa-Young Leaders was not a remarkably active or popular Facebook page.
The Electronic Intifada’s Facebook page (which has more than 13,000 fans), for example, has been as or much more active even without any celebrity endorsements of the kind this page received even prior to Bronner’s article. Moreover, interactions of the kind on the YaLa page show no remarkable level of dialogue or anything that deviates from the typical comments sections found on thousands of websites and Facebook pages (I would argue that the Wall of my personal Facebook account was probably a more active a forum for discussion including between Arabs and Israelis!).
Many of the posts on the page are messages of support/congratulations that appear to have been solicited from organizations and minor celebrities. All, except perhaps the one from Mahmoud Abbas, are Israeli. There’s no evidence of any Arab organizational buy-in.
There is nothing here that suggests thousands of “active users” nor anything that can be matched in reality to Bronner’s description which invokes the spirit of mass action of the Arab uprisings. Nor is there any evidence of participation or buy-in from beyond a small handful of Israelis and Palestinians.
Here’s what Bronner wrote:
“But over the past month, the Facebook page has surprised those involved by the enthusiasm it has generated, suggesting that the Facebook-driven revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt may offer guidance for coexistence efforts as well.”
“Called Facebook.com/yalaYL, the site, created by a former Israeli diplomat and unambiguous about its links to Israel, has had 91,000 views in its first month. Of its 22,500 active users, 60 percent are Arabs — mostly Palestinians, followed by Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Lebanese and Saudis.”
This is a completely misleading description, which has generated an entirely false public perception of this page.
Who might be wrongfully accusing ISI of killing journalist?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | July 13, 2011
Writing in The National Interest, John R. Schmidt expresses some much-needed scepticism regarding the allegations that Pakistan’s military intelligence service was responsible for the murder of Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad:
If ISI was responsible for murdering Shahzad, it may well have been a first. … But why would ISI choose Shahzad as its first victim? He was not a big-name journalist, nor was he among those who raised embarrassing questions about ISI and the army over the Abbottabad raid on bin Laden. His Karachi-naval-base story did not accuse ISI of improper conduct, and it is not clear why it would have killed him over a story that, if it embarrassed anyone, would have embarrassed the Pakistani Navy, a relatively minor player in the nation’s military firmament. […]
But the fact remains that senior U.S. officials told the New York Times they had “reliable and conclusive” intelligence that ISI was responsible.
Schmidt might have asked who those “senior U.S. officials” are, and whether they might also have a motive for discrediting the ISI. As Justin Raimondo pointed out in a recent Antiwar.com piece,
While keeping the heat on for a direct attack on Iran, the powerful pro-Israel lobby — the driving force behind the anti-Iran crowd — is biding its time, confident they’ll win in the end. In the meantime, they are carefully building up momentum for the final push toward war, and a key part of that is agitating for a complete break in US-Pakistan relations.
The Lobby’s fingerprints are all over the latest anti-Pakistani agitprop. It was one Simon Henderson, described as the resident “expert” on Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), who recently released an alleged letter from a top official of the North Korean regime “proving” Pakistan supplied Pyongyang with nuclear technology. WINEP was founded by Martin Indyk, former research director of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as an “academic” adjunct to AIPAC, the primary conduit of pro-Israel propaganda in the US.
Considering such efforts by the Israel lobby to undermine US-Pakistan relations, isn’t it highly probable that the senior U.S. officials attempting to discredit the ISI also have close ties to Israel? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the New York Times has served as a conduit for “reliable and conclusive” intelligence from American officials with questionable loyalties that turned out to be false. If Pakistan is to avoid the fate of Iraq, it had better identify clearly the source of its rapidly deteriorating relationship with a United States that has proven itself prone to self-destructive deception from that same source — and take action accordingly.
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Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
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