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Touting Isolationism, Trump Employs a String of Neoconservative Advisors

Sputnik – 22.03.2016

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump previously indicated that, if elected, his administration would focus on non-interventionist policies. His list of foreign policy advisers, released on Monday, says otherwise.

As a businessman with no governing experience, foreign policy has always been an especially vulnerable aspect of the billionaire’s presidential campaign. As Trump inches closer to the Republican nomination, his campaign has begun to shift gears, as he will likely face-off against former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

To distance himself from the Democratic frontrunner, he appears to have adopted an isolationist viewpoint. During an interview with the Washington Post on Monday, Trump questioned the need for the NATO alliance.

“We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” he said. “NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.”

Trump stated a similar position with regards to US involvement on the Korean peninsula.

“South Korea is [a] very rich, great industrial country, and yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do,” he said. “We’re constantly sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games – we’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing.”

But while Trump may be voicing support for non-interventionism, his actions suggest otherwise. The billionaire provided the Post with the five-member list of his foreign policy team, and it includes a string of individuals deeply invested in the military industrial complex.

At the top of that list is Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant. Kellogg is a former employee of CACI International, a “multinational professional services and information technology company” that operates across the world.

In 2004, CACI was sued by 256 Iraqis over its alleged involvement in torture, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, in relation to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Next on Trump’s list is Joe Schmitz, a former inspector general with the US Defense Department and, perhaps even more problematically for Trump’s isolationism, a former employee of security contractor Academi, when the company was still branded as Blackwater.

While Academi was still known as Blackwater, the contractor was vilified after its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007. For his part, Schmitz once publicly argued that lawsuits regarding Blackwater’s actions in Afghanistan should be dismissed. He argued that any charges filed in Afghanistan should be subject to regional Sharia law, which, conveniently, does not hold companies responsible for the actions of its employees.

George Papadopoulos, Trump’s third adviser, is the director of the Center for International Energy and Natural Resources Law & Security at the London Center of International Law. While he doesn’t have as questionably hawkish a past as Schmitz and Kellogg, he was a foreign policy adviser to erstwhile presidential hopeful Ben Carson. Given that the neurosurgeon candidate struggled to differentiate “Hamas” from “hummus,” it doesn’t bode well for Trump.

Dr. Walid Phares, another Trump pick, is a professor at the National Defense University in Washington DC. Phares is a former adviser to a violent Christian militia group responsible for a number of human rights violations during the Lebanese Civil War. According to Adam Sewer, writing for Mother Jones, Phares has been described by his colleagues as “one of the group’s chief ideologists, working closely with the Lebanese Forces’ Fifth Bureau, a unit that specialized in psychological warfare.”

Phares served in 2012 as a top adviser to former presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who ran on a promise to “deter Russian ambitions.”

The last name on Trump’s list is Carter Page, a managing partner at private equity firm Global Energy Capital. A former fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Page worked on US-style “economic development” in the Caspian Sea region and in former Soviet states.

Trump may claim that he seeks to reign in US adventurism, but based on the records of his chosen advisers, a Trump presidency would likely mean business as usual.

March 22, 2016 Posted by | Economics, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton: Iran poses threat to Israel

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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during the 2016 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 21, 2016. (AFP photo)
Press TV – March 21, 2016

US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said in a speech to an influential Zionist lobby group in Washington that Iran still posed a threat to Israel and needed to be closely watched.

Speaking on Monday to the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Clinton also criticized her Republican rival Donald Trump for having a “neutral” stance on Israel.

She said American leaders needed to show loyalty to Israel and “anyone who doesn’t understand that has no business being our president.”

“This is a serious danger and demands a serious response,” Clinton said, declaring that sanctions must be placed against the country. “We must work closely with Israel and other partners to cut off the flow of money and other arms from Iran to Hezbollah” she added.

Many of the US presidential candidates, in particular Clinton, receive large campaign funding from wealthy Jewish donors who have strong ties to the far-right wing in Israel, experts say.

“Clinton is heavily favored by the Israel lobby because she is quite clear about her intention to pursue the war policies of several presidential predecessors,” said Mark Dankof, who is also a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas.

“She is getting very, very strong backing from the Israeli lobby and is getting more money from the defense industry than any other candidate in this race,” Dankof told Press TV earlier this month.

On Sunday, activists gathered outside the building where the annual AIPAC conference was being held to protest America’s financial support for Israel.

The US government is pressured to serve Israel’s interests due to the influence of the powerful Zionist lobby in the United States. The pro-Israel pressure groups actively work to steer US foreign policy in favor of Israel.

March 21, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iraqi Shiite militias say US troops ‘forces of occupation,’ demand withdrawal

RT | March 21, 2016

Iran-backed Shiite militia forces in Iraq have strongly opposed new US troops deployed in the country. The militias warned that if Washington does not withdraw its forces “immediately,” they will deal with them “as forces of occupation.”

The US military are “making a new suspicious attempt to restore their presence in the country under the pretext of fighting their own creation, Daesh [acronym for Islamic State, IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL],” the Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia said on its TV channel, al-Ahd on Monday, as quoted by Reuters.

The Shiite group added that “if the US administration doesn’t withdraw its forces immediately, we will deal with them as forces of occupation.”

Additional troops deployed by Washington on Sunday were also strongly objected to by Iraqi Hezbollah on Monday.

The Hezbollah movement in Iraq said the new deployment of US marines is a plot to help IS terrorists.

Stressing its resistance against Washington’s “occupation of the regional states,” Hezbollah said the US has sent its forces to Iraq to further assist IS, the Iranian Fars news agency reported, citing the al-Mayadeen news channel.

Despite Baghdad saying it doesn’t need foreign assistance in fighting jihadists, the Pentagon announced the new deployment on Sunday, saying it has sent a detachment of US Marines to Iraq to bolster the fight against IS.

A group of Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), was on the ground in Iraq, the US military said, without specifying exactly how many personnel have been sent to Iraq. The move followed the killing of a US marine in an IS rocket attack last week.

March 21, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s Not Just Cancer! Radiation, Genomic Instability and Heritable Genetic Damage

By Chris Busby | CounterPunch | March 18, 2016

Those who fear the effects of radiation always focus on cancer. But the most frightening and serious consequences of radiation are genetic.

Cancer is just one small bleak reflection, a flash of cold light from a facet of the iceberg of genetic damage to life on Earth constructed from human folly, power-lust and stupidity.

Cancer is a genetic disease expressed at the cellular level. But genetic effects are transmitted across the generations.

It was Herman Joseph Muller, an American scientist, who discovered the most serious effects of ionizing radiation – hereditary defects in the descendants of exposed parents – in the 1920s. He exposed fruit flies – drosophila – to X-rays and found malformations and other disorders in the following generations.

He concluded from his investigations that low dose exposure, and therefore even natural background radiation, is mutagenic and there is no harmless dose range for heritable effects or for cancer induction. His work was honoured by the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1946.

In the 1950s Muller warned about the effects on the human genetic pool caused by the production of low level radioactive contamination from atmospheric tests. I have his original 1950 report, which is a rare item now.

Muller, as a famous expert in radiation, was designated as a speaker at the Conference, ‘Atoms for Peace’ in Geneva in 1955 where the large scale use of nuclear energy (too cheap to meter) was announced by President Eisenhower. But when the organisers became aware that Muller had warned about the deterioration of the human gene pool by the contamination of the planet from the weapon test fallout, his invitation was cancelled.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The protective legislation of western governments does, of course, concede that radiation has such genetic effects. The laws regulating exposure are based on the risk model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, the ICRP.

The rules say that no one is allowed to receive more than 1mSv of dose in a year from man-made activities. The ICRP’s scientific model for heritable effects is based on mice; this is because ICRP states that there is no evidence that radiation causes any heritable effects in humans.

The dose required to double the risk of heritable damage according to the ICRP is more than 1000mSv. This reliance on mice has followed from the studies of the offspring of those who were present in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Japanese/ US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC).

These studies were begun in 1952 and assembled groups of people in the bombed cities to compare cancer rates and also birth outcomes in those exposed at different levels according to their distance from the position of the bomb detonation, the hypocentre. The entire citadel of radiation risk is built upon this ABCC rock.

But the rock was constructed with smoke and mirrors and everything about the epidemiology is false. There have been a number of criticisms of the A-Bomb Lifespan Studies of cancer: it was a survivor population, doses were external, residual contamination was ignored, it began seven years after the event, the original zero dose control group was abandoned as being “too healthy”, and many others.

But we are concerned here with the heritable effects, the birth defects, the congenital malformations, the miscarriages and stillbirths. The problem here is that for heritable damage effects to show up, there have to be births. As you increase the exposures to radiation, you quickly obtain sterility and there are no pregnancies. We found this in the nuclear test veterans.

Then at lower doses, damaged sperm results in damaged foetuses and miscarriages. When both mother and father are exposed, there are miscarriages and stillbirths before you see any birth defects. So the dose response relation is not linear. At the higher doses there are no effects. The effects all appear at the lowest doses.

Bad epidemiology is easily manipulated

As far as the ABCC studies are concerned, there is another serious (and I would say dishonest) error in the epidemiology. Those people discarded their control population in favour of using the low dose group as a control.

This is such bad epidemiology that it should leave any honest reviewer breathless. But there were no reviewers. Or at least no-one seemed to care. Perhaps they didn’t dig deeply enough. In passing, the same method is now being used to assess risk in the huge INWORKS nuclear worker studies and no-one has raised this point there either.

Anyway, the ABCC scientists in charge of the genetic studies found the same levels of adverse birth outcomes in their exposed and their control groups, and concluded that there was no effect from the radiation.

Based on this nonsense, ICRP writes in their latest 2007 risk model, ICRP103, Appendix B.2.01, that “Radiation induced heritable disease has not been demonstrated in human populations.”

But it has. If we move away from this USA controlled, nuclear military complex controlled A-Bomb study and look in the real world we find that Muller was right to be worried. The radioactive contamination of the planet has killed tens of millions of babies, caused a huge increase in infertility, and increased the genetic burden of the human race and life on earth.

And now the truth is out!

In January of this year Prof. Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, of the University of Bremen, Dr Sebastian Pflugbeil of the German Society for Radioprotection and I published a Special Topic paper in the prestigious peer-review journal Environmental Health and Toxicology. The title is: Genetic Radiation Risks – a neglected topic in the Low Dose debate.

In this paper we collected together all the evidence which has been published outside the single Japanese ABCC study in order to calculate the true genetic effects of radiation exposure. The outcome was sobering, but not unexpected.

Using evidence ranging from Chernobyl to the nuclear Test Veterans to the offspring of radiographers we showed clearly that a dose of 1mSv from internal contamination was able to cause a 50% increase in congenital malformations. This identifies an error in the ICRP model and in the current legislation of a factor of 1,000. And we write this down. The conclusion of the paper states:

Genetically induced malformations, cancers, and numerous other health effects in the children of populations who were exposed to low doses of ionizing radiation have been unequivocally demonstrated in scientific investigations.

Using data from Chernobyl effects we find a new Excess Relative Risk (ERR) for Congenital malformations of 0.5 per mSv at 1mSv falling to 0.1 per mSv at 10mSv exposure and thereafter remaining roughly constant. This is for mixed fission products as defined though external exposure to Cs-137.

Results show that current radiation risk models fail to predict or explain the many observations and should be abandoned. Further research and analysis of previous data is suggested, but prior assumptions of linear dose response, assumptions that internal exposures can be modelled using external risk factors, that chronic and acute exposures give comparable risks and finally dependence on interpretations of the high dose ABCC studies are all seen to be unsafe procedures.

Radiation causes genomic instability

Our paper is available on the web as a free download, so you can see what we wrote and follow up the 80 or so references we used to construct the case.

Most of the evidence is from effects reported in countries contaminated by the Chernobyl accident, not only in Belarus and Ukraine but in wider Europe where doses were less than 1mSv. Other evidence we referred to was from the offspring of the nuclear test veterans.

In a study I published in 2014 of the offspring of members of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA) we saw a 9-fold excess of congenital disease in the children but also, and unexpectedly, an eight-fold excess in the grandchildren. This raises a new and frightening spectre not anticipated by Herman Muller.

In the last 15 years it has become clear that radiation causes genomic instability: experiments in the laboratory and animal studies show that radiation exposure throws some kind of genetic switch which causes a non-specific increase in general mutation rates.

Up until these genomic instability discoveries it was thought that genetic processes followed the laws of Gregor Mendel: there were specific dominant and recessive gene mutations that were passed down the generations and became diluted through a binomial process as offspring married away.

But radiation scientists and cancer researchers could not square the background mutation rate with the increased risks of cancer with age: the numbers didn’t fit. The discovery of the genomic instability process was the answer to the puzzle: it introduces enough random mutations to explain the observations.

It is this that supplies the horrifying explanation for the continuing high risk of birth defects in Fallujah and other areas where the exposures occurred ten to twenty years ago. Similar several generation effects have been seen in animals from Chernobyl.

Neonatal mortality in the nuclear bomb era

So where does that leave us? What can we do with this? What can we conclude? How can this change anything? Let’s start by looking at the effects of the biggest single injection of these radioactive contaminants, the atmospheric weapons tests of the period 1952 to 1963.

If these caused increases in birth defects and genetic damage we should see something in the data. We do. The results are chilling. If babies are damaged they die at or shortly before birth. This will show up in the vital statistics data of any country which collects and publishes it.

Busby-fig1

In Fig 1 (above right) I show a graph of the first day (neonatal) mortality rates in the USA from 1936 to 1985. You can see that as social conditions improved there was a fall in the rates between the beginning and end of the period, and we can obtain this by calculating what the background should have been using a statistical process called regression.

The expected backgound is shown as a thin blue line. Also superimposed is the concentration of Strontium-90 in milk (in red) and its concentration in the bones of dead infants (in blue). The graph shows first day neonatal mortality in the USA; it is taken from a paper by Canadian paediatrician Robin Whyte (woman) in the British Medical Journal in 1992. This paper shows the same effect in neonatal (1 month) mortality and stillbirths in the USA and also the United Kingdom. The doses from the Strontium-90 were less than 0.5mSv.

This is in line with what we found in our paper from Chernobyl and the other examples of human exposures. The issue was first raised by the late Prof Ernest Sternglass, one of the first of the radiation warrior-scientists and a friend of mine. The cover-ups and denials of these effects are part of the biggest public health scandal in human history.

It continues and has come to a venue near you: our study of Hinkley Point showed significant increased infant mortality downwind of the plant at Burnham on Sea as I wrote in The Ecologist.

It’s official – genetic damage in children is an indicator of harmful exposures to the father

As to what we can do with this new peer-reviewed evidence we can (and we shall) put it before the Nuclear Test Veterans case in the Pensions Appeals hearings in the Royal Courts of Justice which is tabled for three weeks from June 14th 2016 before a tribunal headed by high court judge Sir Nicholas Blake.

I represent two of the appellants in this hearing and will bring in the genetic damage in the children and grandchildren as evidence of genetic damage in the father.

We are calling Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, the author of the genetic paper, as one expert witness; the judge has conceded that genetic damage in the children is an indicator of harmful exposures to the father. He has made a disclosure order to the University of Dundee to release the veteran questionnaires. They have.

Finally, I must share with you a window into the mind-set of the false scientists who work for the military and nuclear operation. As the fallout Strontium-90 built up in milk and in childrens’ bones and was being measured, they renamed the units of contamination, (picoCuries Sr-90 per gram of Calcium) ‘Sunshine Units’.

Can you imagine? I would ship them all to Nuremberg for that alone.

Dr Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Riskand the author of Uranium and Health – The Health Effects of Exposure to Uranium and Uranium Weapons Fallout (Documents of the ECRR 2010 No 2, Brussels, 2010). For details and current CV see chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see greenaudit.org, llrc.org and nuclearjustice.org.

March 19, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Nuclear Power, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Canada rejects the rule of international law and embraces international barbarity

By Mark Taliano | American Herald Tribune | March 18, 2016

The United Nations’ (UN) Security Council Resolution 2254  clearly states that the war in Syria demands a “Syrian-led, Syrian-owned political transition to end the conflict.”  Additionally, it endorses “free and fair elections pursuant to the new constitution.”

In November, 2015, however, Canada defense minister Harjit Sajjan publically stated that “Assad must go”, basing his assessment on the “complexity of the problem” and “the horrible atrocities that have been committed to his (Assad’s) own people”. On both counts he is wrong: sustained evidence demonstrates that the foreign-backed mercenaries invading and destroying Syria are the culpable parties who are committing the atrocities. We also know that the invasion of Syria was planned well in advance, and that ISIS and its terror cohorts are deemed to be “strategic assets” by imperial war planners. Additionally, both historical evidence – the illegal invasions and destruction Iraq and Libya for example, and the US military doctrine of “unconventional warfare”  present a clear case that the terrorist invaders are Western proxies. The West uses proxies to avoid culpability and to avoid “putting boots on the ground”.

Decoded, then, Sajjan’s assertion is an endorsement for illegal regime change – in a sovereign country led by a (hugely popular) elected president — and it is an incitement to terrorism.

In the context of the carnage, imposed by the West,  on the Syrian peoples, an important question needs to be answered: What should Canada do?

A first step would be to reverse what Canada has already done.

Ken Stone, of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, explained in a 2013 article, Canada’s Harper Government Supports Covert Mercenary War On Syria, Funds AL Qaeda Affiliated Rebels,   what Canada was already doing to support illegal regime change in Syria:

1. Organizing the covert mercenary war against Syria through the Group of Friends of the Syrian People (“Friends of Syria Group”);

2. Establishing a regime of economic sanctions against Syria and hosting, in Ottawa, the Friends of Syria Group’s International Working Group on Sanctions;

3. Funding and supporting the so-called “rebel” side;

4. Planning for an overt western military action against Syria;

5. Working with Syrian-Canadians antagonistic to the Assad government;

6. Contributing to the demonization of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and to the de-legitimation and isolation of his government.

In an interview with this writer, Stone explained what we should be doing:

We should withdraw our troops from the (illegal) US Coalition “against ISIS”; we should normalize diplomatic relations with Syria; we should end the (illegal) sanctions against Syria; we should withdraw from the “Friends of Syria Group”; and we should get out of NATO.

Canada needs an independent foreign policy within the framework of international law.  The US coalition does not have UN Security Council approval, nor does it have the consent of the elected government of the independent sovereign nation of Syria.  Merely “shifting assets” within the illegal coalition is not the answer, nor does it represent “real change”.

Currently, there are over 6 million internally displaced Syrians – those fleeing the invading mercenaries by seeking refuge in government-controlled areas – and over 4 million refugees.  Thanks to Syria and its allies, including Russia and Iran, these people are now slowly returning home.

The return of refugees and displaced Syrians to their homes so that they can rebuild their country and their lives, is much preferable to the hardships that surviving refugees and displaced peoples are currently enduring.

Lifting sanctions would be a first important step in achieving this goal. We have already witnessed the devastating effects of (pre-war) sanctions against Iraq, which were directly responsible for the deaths of about five million children under age five and over one million others, so we should not tolerate sanctions against Syria.  Propagandists pretend that the suffering of the Syrian people is Assad’s fault, but evidence demonstrates over and over again that we are responsible for the carnage, and illegal sanctions are part of the nexus of crimes creating the carnage. Instead of increasing spending with the framework of an illegal coalition, Canada should focus on legal, life-enhancing, humanitarian goals.

Current NATO efforts to illegally balkanize Syria should also be condemned.  On a “macro” level, it is increasingly apparent that this criminal plan for a New Middle East, (as described by Professor Tim Anderson) is creating an overseas holocaust, and is pushing us to the brink of a third world war.

Instead of participating in this clearly fraudulent “war on terror”, the offshoot of the 9/11 neo-con coup d’etat, and the subsequent wars of aggression that have destroyed Libya, Iraq, Ukraine, and Syria, Canada needs to take a stand for humanity and justice.

An acceptance of a “Syrian solution” as stipulated by UN Security Council Resolution 2254, coupled with humanitarian aid – as opposed to illegal warmongering and selling military weaponry to ISIS’s chief financier, Saudi Arabia — would represent “real change”. Canada’s present course, disguised beneath a façade of humanitarianism, needs to be rejected.

March 19, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Behind the Crimea/Russia Reunion

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | March 18, 2016

With high symbolism Russian President Vladimir Putin is visiting Crimea “to check on the construction of the Kerch Strait Bridge, which will link the Crimean peninsula and continental Russia,” the Kremlin announced on Thursday.

As the Russians like to say, “It is no accident” that he chose today – marking the second anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea three weeks after the U.S.-sponsored coup in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014, and just days after a referendum in which Crimean voters approved leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia by a 96 percent majority.

The 12-mile bridge is a concrete metaphor, so to speak, for the re-joining of Crimea and Russia. When completed (the target is December 2018), it will be the longest bridge in Russia.

Yet, the Obama administration continues to decry the political reunion between Crimea and Russia, a relationship that dates back to the Eighteenth Century. Instead, the West has accused Russia of violating its pledge in the 1994 Budapest agreement — signed by Ukraine, Russia, Great Britain and the U.S. — “to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine,” in exchange for Ukraine surrendering its Soviet-era nuclear weapons.

Did Moscow violate the Budapest agreement when it annexed Crimea? A fair reading of the text yields a Yes to that question. Of course, there were extenuating circumstances, including alarm among Crimeans over what the unconstitutional ouster of Ukraine’s president might mean for them, as well as Moscow’s not unfounded nightmare of NATO taking over Russia’s major, and only warm-water, naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea.

But what is seldom pointed out is that the other parties, including the United States, seem to have been guilty, too, in promoting a coup d’etat removing the democratically elected president and essentially disenfranchising millions of ethnic Russian Ukrainians who had voted for President Viktor Yanukovych. In such a context, it takes a markedly one-dimensional view to place blame solely on Russia for violating the Budapest agreement.

Did the Western-orchestrated coup in Kiev violate the undertaking “to respect the independence and sovereignty” of Ukraine? How about the pledge in the Budapest agreement “to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty.” Political and economic interference were rife in the months before the February 2014 coup. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Who Violated Ukraine’s Sovereignty?”]

Did Ukrainian President Yanukovych expect to be overthrown if he opted for Moscow’s economic offer, and not Europe’s? Hard to tell. But if the putsch came as a total surprise, he sorely underestimated what $5 billion in “democracy promotion” by Washington can buy.

After Yanukovych turned down the European Community’s blandishments, seeing deep disadvantages for Ukraine, American neoconservatives like National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland pulled out all the stops to enable Ukraine to fulfill what Nuland called its “European aspirations.”

“The revolution will not be televised,” or so the saying goes. But the Feb. 22, 2014 putsch in Kiev was YouTube-ized two-and-a-half weeks in advance. Recall Nuland’s amateurish, boorish – not to mention irresponsible – use of an open telephone line to plot regime change in Ukraine with fellow neocon, U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, during an intercepted conversation posted on YouTube on Feb. 4.

Nuland tells Pyatt, “Yats is the guy. He’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the guy you know. … He has warned there is an urgent need for unpopular cutting of subsidies and social payments before Ukraine can improve.”

Arseniy Yatsenyuk (aka “Yats”) was quickly named prime minister of the coup regime, which was immediately given diplomatic recognition by Washington. Since then, he has made a royal mess of things. Ukraine is an economic basket case, and “Yats” barely survived a parliamentary vote of no confidence and is widely believed to be on his way out.

Did Moscow’s strong reaction to the coup, to the danger of NATO setting up shop next door in Ukraine come as a surprise to Nuland and other advisers? If so, she ought to get new advisers, and quickly. That Russia would not let Crimea become a NATO base should have been a no-brainer.

Nuland may have seen the coup as creating a win-win situation. If Putin acted decisively, it would be all the easier to demonize him, denounce “Russian aggression,” and put a halt to the kind of rapprochement between President Barack Obama and Putin that thwarted neocon plans for shock and awe against Syria in late summer 2013. However, if Putin acquiesced to the Ukrainian coup and accepted the dangers it posed to Russia, eventual membership for Ukraine in NATO might become more than a pipedream.

Plus, if Putin swallowed the humiliation, think of how politically weakened he would have become inside Russia. As NED’s Gershman made clear, not only did American neocons see Ukraine as “the biggest prize” but as a steppingstone to ultimately achieve “regime change” in Moscow, or as Gershman wrote, “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

Russian Equities

In a formal address in the Kremlin on March 18, 2014, the day Crimea was re-incorporated into Russia, Putin went from dead serious to somewhat jocular in discussing the general issue:

“We have already heard declarations from Kiev about Ukraine soon joining NATO. What would this have meant for Crimea and Sevastopol in the future? It would have meant that NATO’s navy would be right there in this city of Russia’s military glory, and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of southern Russia. …

“We are not opposed to cooperation with NATO … [but] NATO remains a military alliance, and we are against having a military alliance making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historic territory. I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit NATO sailors. Of course, most of them are wonderful guys, but it would be better to have them come and visit us, be our guests, rather than the other way around.”

A little-known remark by Putin a month later (on April 17, 2014) was unusually blunt in focusing on one of the main reasons behind Moscow’s strong reaction – namely, Russia’s felt need to thwart Washington’s plan to incorporate Ukraine and Crimea into the U.S. anti-ballistic missile deployment encircling Russia. Putin was quite direct:

“This issue is no less, and probably even more important, than NATO’s eastward expansion. Incidentally, our decision on Crimea was partially prompted by this.”

This is a serious bone of contention, with far reaching implications. In short, if the Russian military becomes convinced that the Pentagon thinks it has the capability to carry out a strategic strike without fear of significant retaliation, the strategic tripwire for a nuclear exchange will regress more than four decades to the extremely dangerous procedure of “launch on warning,” allowing mere minutes to “use ‘em, or lose ‘em.”

Russia has been repeatedly rebuffed – or diddled – when it has suggested bilateral talks on this key issue. Four years ago, for example, at the March 2012 summit in Seoul, Russia’s then-President Dmitry Medvedev asked Obama when the U.S. would be prepared to address Russian concerns over European missile defense.

In remarks picked up by camera crews, Obama asked for some “space” until after the U.S. election. Obama can be heard saying, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Putin claims to have seen no flexibility on this strategic question.

What Coup?

The Obama administration and its stenographers in the mainstream U.S. media would like the relevant Ukrainian history to start on Feb. 23, 2014 with “Yats” and his coup cronies deemed the “legitimate” authorities. To that end, there was a need to airbrush what George Friedman, president of the think-tank STRATFOR, publicly called “the most blatant coup in history” – the one plotted by Nuland and Pyatt in early February 2014 and carried out on Feb. 22.

As for Russia’s alleged designs on Crimea, one searches in vain for evidence that, before the coup, the Kremlin had given much thought to the vulnerability of the peninsula and a possible need to annex it. According to the public record, Putin first focused on Crimea at a strategy meeting on Feb. 23, the day after the coup.

Yet, given the U.S. mainstream media’s propagandistic reporting on the Ukraine crisis, it is small wonder that the American people forgot about (or never heard of) the putsch in Kiev. The word “coup” was essentially banished from the U.S. media’s lexicon regarding Ukraine.

The New York Times went so far as to publish what it deemed an investigative article in early 2015 announcing that there was no coup in Ukraine, just President Yanukovych mysteriously disappearing off to Russia. In reaching its no-coup conclusion, the Times ignored any evidence that there was a coup, including the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. In regards to Ukraine, “coup” became just another unutterable four-letter word.

Last year, when Sen. John McCain continued the “no coup” fiction, I placed the following letter in the Washington Post on July 1, 2015 (the censors apparently being away at the beach):

“In his June 28 Sunday Opinion essay, ‘The Ukraine cease-fire fiction,’  Sen. John McCain was wrong to write that Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea without provocation. What about the coup in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014, that replaced President Viktor Yanukovych with pro-Western leaders favoring membership in NATO? Was that not provocation enough?

“This glaring omission is common in The Post. The March 10 World Digest item ‘Putin had early plan to annex Crimea’ described a ‘secret meeting’ Mr. Putin held on Feb. 23, 2014, during which ‘Russia decided it would take the Crimean Peninsula.’ No mention was made of the coup the previous day. …” (emphasis added)

And so it goes. More recently, in Jeffrey Goldberg’s lengthy magnum opus in The Atlantic on Obama’s foreign policy, there were two mentions of how Russia “invaded” Crimea, two allusions to Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine, but not a word about the coup in Kiev.

Invincible Ignorance

In Catholic theology, the theory that some people can be “invincibly ignorant” can lessen or even erase their guilt. Many Americans are so malnourished on accurate news – and so busy trying to make ends meet – that they would seem to qualify for this dispensation, with pardon for not knowing about things like the coup in Kiev and other key happenings abroad.

The following, unnerving example brings this to mind: A meeting of progressives that I attended last year was keynoted by a professor from a local Washington university. Discussing what she called the Russian “invasion” of Crimea, the professor bragged about her 9-year-old son for creating a large poster in Sunday School saying, “Mr. Putin, What about the commandment ‘Thou Shall Not Kill?’” The audience nodded approvingly.

This picnic, thought I, needed a skunk. So I asked the professor what her little boy was alluding to. My question was met by a condescending smirk of disbelief: “Crimea, of course.” I asked how many people had been killed in Crimea. “Oh, hundreds, probably thousands,” was her answer. I told her that there were, in fact, no reports of anyone having been killed.

I continued, explaining that, with respect to Russia’s “invasion,” what you don’t see in the “mainstream media” is that, a treaty between Ukraine and Russia from the late 1990s allowed Russia to station up to 25,000 Russian troops on the Crimean peninsula. There were 16,000 there, when a U.S.-led coup ousted the democratically elected government in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014. (I had grabbed the attention of the audience; yet stares of incredulity persisted.)

In contrast to Crimea’s bloodless political secession from Ukraine, the Ukrainian government’s “anti-terror operation” against ethnic Russians in the east who resisted the coup authorities in Kiev has killed an estimated 10,000 people, many of them civilians. Yet, in the mainstream U.S. media, this carnage is typically blamed on Putin, not on the Ukrainian military which sent to the front neo-Nazi and other right-wing militias (such as the Azov battalion) contemptuous of ethnic Russians. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.”]

A few weeks before the professor’s remarks, after a speaking engagement in Moscow, I had a chance to do a little souvenir shopping on the Arbat. The behavior of the sales people brought me up short. It was decades since I had served as a CIA officer in the Soviet Union; the shopkeepers then were usually taciturn, allergic to discussing politics, and not at all given to bragging about their leaders.

This time it was different. The sales people wanted to know what I thought of President Putin. They were eager to thrust two coffee cups into the shopping bag that I had filled with small gifts for our grandchildren. On one was emblazoned the Russian words for “polite people” under an image of two men with insignia-less green uniforms – depicting the troops that surrounded and eventually took over Ukrainian installations and government buildings in Crimea without a shot being fired. The other cup bore a photo of Putin over the Russian words for “the most polite of people.”

The short conversation that ensued made it immediately clear that Russian salespeople in Moscow – unlike many “sophisticated” Americans – were well aware that the troubles in Ukraine and Crimea began in Kiev on Feb 22, 2014, with “the most blatant coup in history.” And, not least, they were proud of the way Putin used the “polite green men” to ensure that Crimea was not lost to NATO.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst he headed the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. In retirement, he helped create Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

March 18, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Britain to Sign Deal Providing Ukraine With Military Training, Intelligence

Sputnik – 18.03.2016

London will sign a new 15-year-long defense deal with Kiev, pledging to provide Ukraine with military training and intelligence to allegedly protect it from Russia, media reported Thursday.

Under the agreement, UK troops will take part in more joint drills and train larger numbers of Ukrainian troops, according to the paper. The countries will also share intelligence and expertise, it was reported in the article.

“The UK will stand firm with Ukraine as they defend their territorial integrity. This new defence agreement sets out that commitment as we enhance our training of Ukrainian armed forces,” UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said, as quoted by The Telegraph newspaper.

UK troops have previously carried out drills in Ukraine, however, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has repeatedly called for more military aid from the Western states, including the United Kingdom.

March 18, 2016 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Uncontrollable—Pentagon and Corporate Contractors Too Big to Audit

By Ralph Nader | March 17, 2016

The Reuters report put this colossal dereliction simply: “A law in effect since 1992 requires annual audits of all federal agencies—and the Pentagon alone has never complied.”

All $585 billion and more, e.g., for the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, of your money—not just unaudited, but, in the sober judgement of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) of the Congress, this vast military budget is year after year UNAUDITABLE. That means that the Congressional auditors cannot obtain the basic accounting data to do their job on your behalf.

Auditing the Department of Defense receives left/right support, from Senator Bernie Sanders (Dem. VT) to Senator Ted Cruz (Rep. TX).

H.R. 942, the “Audit the Pentagon Act of 2014,” is supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives. In the statement announcing this legislation, the sponsors declared “The Treasury Department’s Financial Report of the US Government for fiscal year 2012 shows the DOD yet again has nothing to audit—its books are a mess. In the last dozen years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when DOD would pass an audit. Meanwhile, Congress doubled Pentagon spending.”

Republican right-winger, Mike Conaway (Rep. TX) used to be a CPA in private life. At a Congressional hearing in 2011, he told Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “I go home to folks in West Texas, and when they find out the Department of Defense can’t be audited, they are stunned.” His constituents may be more stunned to learn that their Congressman also voted for all expanding defense budgets, which is why H.R. 942 is going nowhere unless the people rally to make auditing the Pentagon a presidential election issue.

Secretary Gates and his successor Secretary Panetta agree with Rep. Conway’s observations. Yet it has seemed that the military—this huge expanse of bureaucracy, which owns 25 million acres (over seven times the size of Connecticut) and owns over 500,000 buildings in the U.S. and around the world—is beyond anybody’s control, including that of the Secretaries of Defense, their own internal auditors, the President, tons of GAO audits publically available, and the Congress. How can this be?

Enormous scandal after enormous scandal is reported by newspapers such as Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and by news services such as Associated Press and ProPublica. Citizen groups from the left and Right excoriate this runaway budget, including the national Taxpayers Union, POGO, and Taxpayers for Common Sense. TO NO AVAIL!

Have you heard of the $43 million natural gas station in Afghanistan that was supposed to cost $500,000? Do you know about the $150 million villas that were built for corporate contractors in Afghanistan so they could spend another $600 million advising Afghans about starting private businesses in that war-torn country?

Or how about purchase of billions of dollars of spare parts because the Army or Air Force didn’t know the whereabouts of existing spare parts in forgotten warehouses here and there? What about the $9 billion the Pentagon admitted could not be accounted for in Iraq during the first several months of the invasion?

The list goes on, together with massive cost over-runs by the private contractors that are rewarded with more contracts. Soldiers get dirty drinking water, bad food, inadequate equipment, and security breaches by these contractors. No matter.
President Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex” becomes ever more of an understatement as it devours over half of the entire federal government’s operating budget.

Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s chief financial officer, has some startling explanations for why the Department is not ready for an audit. It’s not the Department’s “primary mission,” he says, which is “to defend the nation, fight and win wars.” He continues: “We’re too big to just sort of blow up all our systems and go buy one new, gargantuan IT system that runs the entire Department.”

Where are the accounting standards groups when we need them to speak up?

Mr. McCord certainly knows how to enhance his job security. Why no Pentagon audit? Too big to audit? No. Just too many scandals, too much waste, gigantic weapon system redundancies, overlaps between military branches, and many sinecures in bloated, inflexible bureaucracies, so often condemned by commanding generals in the field.

McCord himself has pointed to the areas in which he prefers to cut costs in order to save money: Congressionally-opposed base closures, retiree costs, and consolidating “its Tricare health system.”

In the final analysis, the principal culprits, because they have so much to lose in profits and bonuses, are the giant defense companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and others that lobby Congress, Congressional District by Congressional District, for more, more, more military contracts, grants and subsidies. They routinely hire ex-Pentagon specialists and top brass who know how to negotiate the ways and means inside of the government.

President Eisenhower sure knew what he was talking about. Remember, he warned not just about taxpayer waste, but a Moloch eating away at our liberties and our critical domestic necessities.

March 18, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The trillion dollar question

By Lawrence Wittner | Peace & Health Blog | March 16, 2016

Isn’t it rather odd that America’s largest single public expenditure scheduled for the coming decades has received no attention in the 2015-2016 presidential debates?

The expenditure is for a thirty-year program to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal and production facilities. Although President Obama began his administration with a dramatic public commitment to build a nuclear weapons-free world, that commitment has long ago dwindled and died. It has been replaced by an administration plan to build a new generation of US nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities to last the nation well into the second half of the twenty-first century. This plan, which has received almost no attention by the mass media, includes redesigned nuclear warheads, as well as new nuclear bombers, submarines, land-based missiles, weapons labs, and production plants. The estimated cost? $1,000,000,000,000.00—or, for those readers unfamiliar with such lofty figures, $1 trillion.

Critics charge that the expenditure of this staggering sum will either bankrupt the country or, at the least, require massive cutbacks in funding for other federal government programs. “We’re . . . wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it,” admitted Brian McKeon, an undersecretary of defense. And we’re “probably thanking our stars we won’t be here to have to have to answer the question,” he added with a chuckle.

Of course, this nuclear “modernization” plan violates the terms of the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires the nuclear powers to engage in nuclear disarmament. The plan is also moving forward despite the fact that the US government already possesses roughly 7,000 nuclear weapons that can easily destroy the world. Although climate change might end up accomplishing much the same thing, a nuclear war does have the advantage of terminating life on Earth more rapidly.

This trillion dollar nuclear weapons buildup has yet to inspire any questions about it by the moderators during the numerous presidential debates. Even so, in the course of the campaign, the presidential candidates have begun to reveal their attitudes toward it.

On the Republican side, the candidates—despite their professed distaste for federal expenditures and “big government”—have been enthusiastic supporters of this great leap forward in the nuclear arms race. Donald Trump, the frontrunner, contended in his presidential announcement speech that “our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work,” insisting that it is out of date. Although he didn’t mention the $1 trillion price tag for “modernization,” the program is clearly something he favors, especially given his campaign’s focus on building a US military machine “so big, powerful, and strong that no one will mess with us.”

His Republican rivals have adopted a similar approach. Marco Rubio, asked while campaigning in Iowa about whether he supported the trillion dollar investment in new nuclear weapons, replied that “we have to have them. No country in the world faces the threats America faces.” When a peace activist questioned Ted Cruz on the campaign trail about whether he agreed with Ronald Reagan on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, the Texas senator replied: “I think we’re a long way from that and, in the meantime, we need to be prepared to defend ourselves. The best way to avoid war is to be strong enough that no one wants to mess with the United States.” Apparently, Republican candidates are particularly worried about being “messed with.”

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has been more ambiguous about her stance toward a dramatic expansion of the US nuclear arsenal. Asked by a peace activist about the trillion dollar nuclear plan, she replied that she would “look into that,” adding: “It doesn’t make sense to me.” Even so, like other issues that the former Secretary of State has promised to “look into,” this one remains unresolved. Moreover, the “National Security” section of her campaign website promises that she will maintain the “strongest military the world has ever known”—not a propitious sign for critics of nuclear weapons.

Only Bernie Sanders has adopted a position of outright rejection. In May 2015, shortly after declaring his candidacy, Sanders was asked at a public meeting about the trillion dollar nuclear weapons program. He replied: “What all of this is about is our national priorities. Who are we as a people? Does Congress listen to the military-industrial complex” that “has never seen a war that they didn’t like? Or do we listen to the people of this country who are hurting?” In fact, Sanders is one of only three US Senators who support the SANE Act, legislation that would significantly reduce US government spending on nuclear weapons. In addition, on the campaign trail, Sanders has not only called for cuts in spending on nuclear weapons, but has affirmed his support for their total abolition.

Nevertheless, given the failure of the presidential debate moderators to raise the issue of nuclear weapons “modernization,” the American people have been left largely uninformed about the candidates’ opinions on this subject. So, if Americans would like more light shed on their future president’s response to this enormously expensive surge in the nuclear arms race, it looks like they are the ones who are going to have to ask the candidates the trillion dollar question.

[Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany  and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press). He is a regular contributor to the Peace and Health Blog.]

March 18, 2016 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

America’s Genocidal Wars

By Stephen Lendman | March 17, 2016

America’s pure evil is unequaled by any previous regime in history – inflicting more harm on more people over a longer duration.

None match US ruthlessness. Centuries of slaughter reduced its native population to a small fraction of its original numbers.

Five centuries of slavery were horrific. Black Africans were captured, branded, chained, force-marched, beaten, encaged, and stripped of their humanity.

Around 100 million human beings were sold like cattle. Millions perished during the Middle Passage, packed into filthy coffin-sized spaces, filled with human excrement, victims of dysentery, smallpox and other epidemic-level diseases, women raped and beaten, others flogged or clubbed.

Anyone believed diseased was dumped overboard like garbage. Modern-day genocide continues in new forms. WWII and endless US wars following involved mass extermination, countless millions perishing from violence, starvation, preventable diseases and overall deprivation.

Civilians are treated as ruthlessly as combatants in all US wars. State-sponsored genocide reflects their barbarity, ongoing in multiple theaters now.

High crimes demanding accountability go unreported. Wars of aggression masquerade as humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect and democracy building.

Unparalleled US hubris and arrogance threaten humanity’s survival. America is the world’s leading exponent of terrorism, ISIS and likeminded groups its creation, CIA operatives teaching their recruits the fine art of committing atrocities.

All US wars are waged lawlessly without mercy. John Kerry’s indictment of Daesh’s (ISIS) genocidal crimes belies its US creation, America bearing full responsibility for its existence and criminality.

On Thursday, Kerry ignored where blame lies, saying “(i)n my judgment, Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims.”

“Daesh is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology, and by actions, in what it says, what it believes, and what it does.”

Its fighters are “also responsible for crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing directed at these same groups, and in some cases also against Sunni Muslims, Kurds, and other minorities.”

Claiming “what (it) wants to erase, we must preserve” belies longstanding US imperial policy – waging endless wars of aggression, using ISIS and other terrorists as proxy foot soldiers, wanting all sovereign independent states replaced by pro-Western puppet ones, believing genocidal slaughter is a small price to pay.

Obama, Kerry, as well as other current and earlier top US officials are unindicted war criminals – guilty of the supreme crime against peace, responsible for genocidal mass murder.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

March 18, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s Troubling Choice of Sessions

By Gilbert Doctorow | Consortium News | March 17, 2016

I imagine many anti-war colleagues will choke over Donald Trump’s selection of the junior senator from Alabama Jeff Sessions to head his foreign policy team. Sessions’s past strong support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the prosecution of the war that followed features prominently in his Wikipedia entry.

Surely, it is not heart-warming to read about Sessions’s rally in 2005 to protest an anti-Iraq War rally the day before. There he described the other side as committing the sin first highlighted by President Ronald Reagan’s neoconservative United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1984 – “to blame America first.”

Then there are the other, non-foreign policy positions of Sessions that will be galling to all progressives. Ranked as one of the most conservative members of Congress, his positions on civil rights, gay marriage, race relations, immigration and abortion rights follow conservative orthodoxy. The list of his domestic policy red flags goes on and on.

In any case, Sessions is not widely regarded as a foreign policy expert. Despite his membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee, national security policy is not his strong suit. He is known more for his experience as a former state attorney general and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee,

By itself, the choice of Sessions is a seemingly sad commentary on Trump’s campaign. And yet it clearly fit within Trump’s political calculations of getting elected to the presidency. Picking Sessions came not long after Sessions issued his endorsement of Trump, one of the first major figures in the Republican establishment to do so. With his solid standing within the more conservative wing of the party, Sessions is a valuable asset to protect Trump against charges that he is not a real Republican, nor a real conservative.

Whether Trump really intends to take counsel from this new chief adviser on foreign policy is another matter, a question of strategy and not electoral tactics. In this sense, Trump may have been too clever by half.

As he draws together a foreign policy and security team, Trump’s choice of Sessions – a lockstep Republican on national security as illustrated by his staunch support of President George W. Bush’s Iraq War – may push aside “realist” and “anti-interventionist” military and civilian experts who have been left on the curb these past 20 years as the American foreign policy establishment purged its ranks of heterogeneous opinions to become dominated by a monolithic assemblage of warmongers.

A person who regularly communicates with me summarized the challenges facing Trump in formulating foreign policy as follows:

“The key is fleshing out for Trump what his elliptical statements, not only about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and Russia, mean, and translating his deal-making into a new non-militarist diplomacy — making big diplomatic deals that will end the cold war and open other prospects, e.g., on nukes, etc. I sense he is ready for this, but the military people Sessions will recruit have contrary instincts and no regional knowledge. Trump does best tapping into the real conservatives who are closer to Rand Paul and worship the Reagan of 1985-88. Even the retired Gen. [Martin] Dempsey [former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], based on what [investigative reporter Seymour] Hersh wrote, might advise Trump.” (Hersh described Dempsey as resisting interventionist pressure to engage in “regime change” in Syria and instead worked behind the scenes with Russia to thwart gains by jihadist terror groups.)

The first task for a President Trump would be to take us back from the brink of nuclear war with Russia. In the context of needless confrontations with Moscow, which have produced a feverish atmosphere of mutual distrust, preemptive nuclear strikes have become all too thinkable.

A potential Trump administration in January 2017 should arrive in office with well-defined plans for resuming arms control talks that address directly American concerns over Russian tactical nuclear weapons and Russian concerns over America’s global missile defense system. Trump and his team should be ready to discuss and to act on a desperate need for a new security architecture in Europe that brings Russia in from the cold.

Only after these debts in arrears are resolved can we proceed in positive territory to revising the rules of global governance and replacing rancor and discord with concerted actions by all the big global players. This is the foreign policy which the American public has backed in opinion poll after opinion poll over the past 30 years. It is the policy which the establishment elites have denied us for too long.

Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? (August 2015) is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites. For donations to support the European activities of ACEWA, write to eastwestaccord@gmail.com. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016

March 17, 2016 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Toll from Saudi raids on Yemen market hits 119: UN

Press TV – March 17, 2016

A senior UN official says the death toll from recent Saudi airstrikes on a crowded market in the Yemeni province of Hajjah has risen to nearly 120.

Meritxell Relano, deputy representative for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Yemen, on Thursday put the number of people killed in the Tuesday’s air attacks on the northern province at 119.

The strikes took place in the northwest of the Yemeni capital Sana’a after two Saudi airstrikes hit al-Khamees market in the district of Mustaba on March 15.

The UN sources say the victims include at least 20 children. Many other Yemenis were injured in the deadly aerial raids in the troubled region.

The UN children’s agency in a statement strongly denounced the deadly airstrikes.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also on Wednesday described the Saudi aerial raids as “one of the deadliest “ since Riyadh launched a military campaign against the impoverished Arab country in March last year. The UN chief also demanded a probe into the deadly incident.

The world body has already warned of a “human catastrophe unfolding in Yemen.”

Meanwhile, General Ahmed al-Asiri, a Saudi military spokesman, said on Thursday that Riyadh will scale down combat operations in Yemen in an apparent bid to divert mounting criticism of the military aggression.

However, al-Asiri stressed that the kingdom will continue to provide air support to Yemen’s former regime loyalists battling Houthi Ansarullah fighters and allied army units on the ground.

Riyadh has been under fire by international organizations and rights groups over the rising number of civilian casualties in Yemen.

The Saudi military strikes were launched in a failed effort to undermine the popular Ansarullah movement and bring the former fugitive president back to power.

At least 8,400 people, among them 2,236 children, have been killed so far and 16,015 others have sustained injuries.

March 17, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

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