Are you a western journalist or analyst with an issue you cannot explain? Do your symptoms include an unwillingness to learn anything from history and an unconditional embrace of western exceptionalism? Then we have just the thing for you: RussiaDidIt! Taken in the appropriate dosage, RussiaDidIt can be used for just any issue, small and large, old and new, near and far. Call your local US embassy or EU office and order your RussiaDidIt talking points. Side effects may include total paranoia, loss of credibility and a desire to wear the EU flag as a cape.
It seems like all the evils that plague the western world these days have a common cause. Brexit, Catalonia, Trump, racial tensions, the lack of credibility of the EU, all of these have a simple explanation, if we are to believe the mainstream media and pundits: Russia is behind it. And not just Russia, but Putin himself. He must be the busiest villain in history.
True journalists like Robert Parry have analysed and exposed the rise of this new McCarthyism, and how uncorroborated, or sometimes outrightly false, allegations gradually become unquestionable facts.(1)
Screenshots from the Washington Post and Politico
In this piece we examine three articles that have different angles of this RussiaDidIt approach. They have the paranoia of Russian meddling in US elections as a background, but everything applies just as well to similar stories about the EU. Inevitably it all ties back to an inability, or unwillingness, to learn anything from history, and this disgusting myth that everyone should look up to the West as a beacon of superior values. We start of course with the ineffable Guardian.
Cheap journalism and cheap meddling
One day journalism students will study the spiral of lowering standards that took hold of the Guardian. One can sense the denial taking hold of the newspaper as their liberal centrist paradise crumbles. They yearn for a knight in shining armour who can come and save them from Brexit, even if it is Tony Blair, because, believe it or not, the idea of the EU has been here since the Renaissance!(2)
As expected, the Guardian has embraced the idea that the Russians “hacked” the 2016 US elections (whatever that means) wholeheartedly. And it recently reported on new, ground-breakingrevelations:
“Russian trolls posing as Americans made payments to genuine activists in the US to help fund protest movements on socially divisive issues […]
[…] the newspaper RBC published a major investigation into the work of a so-called Russian “troll factory” since 2015, including during the period of the US election campaign, disclosures that are likely to put further spotlight on alleged Russian meddling in the election.”
So far it sounds very serious. We then learn that the main “socially divisive issue” was race relations.
“RBC counted 16 groups relating to the Black Lives Matter campaign and other race issues that had a total of 1.2 million subscribers. The biggest group was entitled Blacktivist and reportedly had more than 350,000 likes at its peak.
Last month, CNN also reported that US authorities believed the Blacktivist Facebook group and Twitter account were the work of Russian impostors.”
The liberal media have often thrown these outrageous suggestions that activism like Black Lives Matter is part of a foreign agenda, as opposed to a reaction to the structural racism that exists in the US (more on this later). But the main point that needs to be addressed about this cunning plan is the following: how much did the Russians spend in these devious activities of inflaming tensions in the US? A whopping… 80,000 dollars! The Guardian thinks the activities of some alleged troll factory engaging in social media activity and paying activists a grand total of $80,000 represents unacceptable Russian “meddling”!
Billboard accusing Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist
Let us put this number in perspective. Hillary Clinton made $3 million out of 12 speeches to big banks. The entire spending in the US presidential election was almost $2 billion. And the Guardian is worried about $80,000 worth of meddling. For comparison USAID spent $4.2 million advancing US interests in Venezuela in 2015 alone. Even if these $80,000 had been spent in a single year, it would still be 50 times smaller than what one of the US empire’s foreign policy branches spent only in Venezuela.
The Guardianpiece closes by mentioning that the evil Russians also bought ads on Google and Facebook for “tens of thousands of dollars” and “$100,000”, respectively. So in essence, the Guardian is reporting that it found suspicious grains of sand in the desert.(3) It would seem Putin is not just an evil mastermind, he is also a legendary bargain hunter. It should also be clear that the tech giants are more than happy to play their part in the witch-hunt and the crusade against “fake news”, which is nothing but an attempt by the dominant classes to monopolise their control over information.
Trump is a closet Marxist!
Next we look at anopinion columnwhich has got to be one of the most ludicrous texts ever written. At first glance it could be mistaken for satire, but it was actually written by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard and former member of the Obama administration, for Bloomberg News. The title is “Russia Is Using Marxist Strategies, and So Is Trump”!
While the entire piece should be framed for posterity, we will just quote some of the highlights:
“Karl Marx and his followers argued that revolutionaries should disrupt capitalist societies by “heightening the contradictions.” Russia used a version of that Marxist idea in its efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign. […]
What is more surprising, and far more important for American politics, is that President Donald Trump is drawn to a similar strategy.
Marx contended that as the conditions of workers started to improve, they would cease to be content with their lot, or to regard their alienation as inevitable. Lenin seized on this idea and transformed it into a revolutionary strategy. […] The job of the communist revolutionary was to “heighten” or “accelerate” those contradictions.
During the 2016 campaign, Russians did something very much like that, not to produce a revolution, but to deepen and intensify social divisions (and to help elect Donald Trump).
In short, the Russians tried to foster a sense of grievance and humiliation on all sides. […] Lenin would have been proud.”
The Russian actions that Sunstein is talking about are none other than the buying of social media ads and fostering of activism that we described in the previous section. But how about that for a deep understanding of Marx and Lenin? Sunstein does try to shield himself with a footnote that says:
“I am giving a brisk summary of some famously complex and ambiguous arguments from both Marx and Lenin.” (my emphasis)
Marx, Engels, Lenin… and Trump? Cass Sunstein of Harvard University and Bloomberg News is on the maximum dosage of RussiaDidIt !
There is nothing ambiguous about Marx and Lenin. Sunstein’s argument, on the other hand, is unambiguously idiotic. The fundamental contradiction in capitalist society is that one (large) group, the working-class, sells its labour, while another one, the bourgeoisie, profits from it because it owns the means of production. These two groups have fundamentally different interests and are irrevocably at odds, this is called class struggle. Marx’s work is monumental because it was the first truly scientific analysis of the capitalist system, which meant it also explained how it could be destroyed.
The “accelerating of these contradictions” means accelerating this class conflict in order to do a little more than “disrupting” capitalism. The goal is to overthrow capitalism altogether, have the workers seize power and the means of production, and have a society free of exploitation(4) and where production is directed to satisfy human need and not the profit of capitalists. In other words, socialism.
Lenin’s contributions to Marxism, both in theory and practice, are of course way beyond the childish arguments in this piece, from his understanding of capitalism’s inevitable development into imperialism, to his development of the role of the vanguard party. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were responsible for the October Revolution of 1917, the first time that capitalism was overthrown, and the starting point for all the liberation movements that followed.
The whole argument, if it were taken seriously, would be about the strategy to “divide and conquer”, which has nothing to do with Marxism. Just like Trump, the real-estate mogul and reality-TV star, has nothing Marxist about him. If anything, Trump is the highest embodiment of western capitalism.
Surely among the vast libraries at Harvard there must be a “Marx for dummies” book that Professor Sunstein can read. But of course, writing these disingenuous pieces is much easier. The goal of course is to simultaneously push the RussiaDidIt argument and discredit a true alternative to the (capitalist) system, which has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton and a lot (or everything!) to do with Marx and Lenin.
Black Power and Red Baiting
The final article we wish to examine appeared in The Atlantic magazine, and it focuses on the long history of Russia’s “involvement in America’s race wars”. First of all, for a country with a history of slavery and segregation of African-Americans, not to mention the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, the term “race wars” seems like an awful understatement. One thing that actually has not changed is the red-baiting practices of the mainstream media, accusing anyone who deviates from the approved narrative of being a Soviet/Russian agent.
The article explores the history of the Soviet Union taking advantage of racial injustice in the United States for propaganda purposes. How dare those commies bring up the plight of black people in the US?Anyone who knows a bit of history knows that this is not entirely out of place. For example, in the struggle against apartheid, notably in the war in Angola, the US was on the side of apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union was on the side of the Angolans (and of black South Africans), even if their hand might have been forced by the Cubans.
Soviet posters about the struggle against colonialism: Left: “Capitalism is doomed!” (Artsrunyan, 1966); Right: “People of Africa Will Overpower the Colonizers!” (Kukryniksy, 1960)
There is plenty to be said about the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, but the fact is that there was not a single liberation struggle in the Third World in which the Soviet Union was on the side of the oppressor/colonist and the US on the side of the liberation movement. In fact it is the opposite that was true in most cases, if not all.
This takes us to the crux of the matter. According to historian Mary Dudziak, quoted in this piece,
“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. couldn’t lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color,”
Dudziak and all these analysts and journalists take for granted that the US, and the west in general, are supposed to lead the world. According to them, these issues of treating black people as second class citizens are a problem mainly because they make the US look bad, and its noble mission of spreading freedom and democracy becomes much harder! It would seem that if racism was a little more polite (or if the Soviets did not bring it up!), then the Sandinistas would have been happy with Somoza, the Viet Cong would have had nothing to fight for, etc.
This unquestioned embrace of US exceptionalism, coupled to a complete ignorance of history, is what ensures that these analysts completely miss the point. For them, people rejecting and resisting US imperialism, or rejecting the EU after years of austerity policies, is just a misunderstanding, which needs to be explained by nonsense such as RussiaDidIt. Had these people actually read Marx and Lenin, as opposed to spewing these idiocies, they would understand that backlash against neoliberalism, or resistance against US imperialism, is to be expected. And there is no amount of fancy speeches by the likes of Obama, saying “freedom” and “democracy” in every other sentence, that will fix that.
The loyal flag-bearers of the imperial establishment are outraged at the idea of someone paying $80,000 to US activists, but the US spending tens of millions funding NGOs and political parties all over the world is more than natural. They are outraged that RT reports on Occupy Wall Street or Ferguson, but Voice of America and Radio Martí are supposed to be welcomed by the rest of the world. Because they stand for the better values… Apart from all the death and misery that is caused by US imperialism, it is this belief in American exceptionalism that makes the US so despised around the world.
Finally, we should stress that our argument is not whataboutism. We are not saying that this issue in place X should not be discussed because there is this other issue in the US. Outlets like RT and Sputnik should have their editorial lines and journalism standards analysed and criticised. The same holds true for Russia’s foreign policy. But, paraphrasing someone who was also accused of being a Soviet agent, it cannot be the greatest purveyor of meddling in the world and media outlets with ever lowering standards bringing these charges forward and pretending to be the Guardians of truth.
Notes
(1) We have also written on the ridiculous report published by the CIA, FBI and NSA on the Russian “hacking” of US elections.
(2) One wonders why the EU is symbolised by the Medici paying Leonardo da Vinci or by Erasmus and Thomas More being friends and not, for example, by the bubonic plague or Lucrezia Borgia’s antics. You know what else was common to all of Europe before the EU? The slave trade.
(3) More recently the Guardian published another bombshell piece, saying that Russia’s Facebook posts reached 126 million Americans. But we are talking about 80,000 posts, only 0.004% of news feed content according to Facebook, during a two year period. The big number is perfect for propaganda, but conveniently it is not made clear whether 126m different users saw the posts, or if for example 10m users on average saw 120 of these posts.
(4) We should clarify that exploitation does not mean having an evil boss that pays low salaries and forces workers to work weekends. Workers in capitalism are exploited simply because there is a value difference between what they earn and what they produce. In other words, profit comes from unpaid labour. Exploitation is the foundation of capitalism and should not be framed in moral terms, which imply that the problem is not the system but a matter of finding “good capitalists”.
In this classic episode on The Corbett Report from 2010, James peeks behind the facade of the Southern Poverty Law Center and find poverty pimping, race baiting and much, much worse.
With Syria making big strides toward victory and terrorists controlling ever-diminishing areas in the country, Muhammed Kheir al-Akkam, professor of international relations at the University of Damascus, told Sputnik how the US may meddle in the Kurdish issue.
“The US does not want the end of the Syrian war until their goals are achieved. Their main tool for the war in Syria, called Daesh, is living out their last days. So now they are switching to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which have to do what Daesh failed to fulfil,” Syrian political analyst Muhammed Kheir al-Akkam said.
According to him, “the US wants to extend the war in Syria as long as possible to implement its plans in the region.”
“Russia is trying to put an end to this war and along with the Syrians is seeking a peaceful solution. The Americans do not do it, paying lip-service top fighting terrorism; in fact, they are financing both Daesh and the SDF,” al-Akkam added. He pointed out that “what we see in Raqqa is a fully coordinated move by the US to replace Daesh with the SDF.”
“We might ask why the US is not fighting the al-Nusra Front and other similar organizations? The answer is simple: because the US supports them,” he said.
He recalled that the SDF carries out ethnic cleansing in Raqqa and discriminates against some Syrian peoples in the occupied territories, which is why the SDF cannot be called “democratic” or “Syrian”.
“The Syrian Kurds need to remember that the Americans will betray them as soon as their interests diverge, something that occurred to Masoud Barzani after Iraqi Kurds failed to secede from Baghdad,” al-Akkam said.
According to him, “the Syrian Kurds also should bear in mind that their strength depends on Syria’s unity.”
Al-Akkam added that the seventh round of the Syrian peace talks in Astana in many respects continued the course of the talks’ sixth round. At the same time, it is worth noting that there has been a new turn, according to him.
During the Astana talks, the sides managed to resolve many issues related to the military situation in Syria, something that he said the parties failed to do in Geneva. In Astana, the sides, in particular, agreed on exchanging prisoners and the holding of the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi, where Syria’s integrity will be high on the agenda.
“As for the Syrian opposition groups that will not attend the Sochi congress, they are dealing with the interests of those who finance their activities rather than those of the Syrian people,” al-Akkam concluded.
Whether preplanned or inadvertent, one of the most likely and far-reaching consequences of the fake news RussiaGate scandal is that Facebook and other social media giants might soon come under strict regulation by the state.
The artificially contrived and “deep state”-driven RussiaGate scandal has been inflated to epic proportions and has already resulted in the unexpected suicide of the US’ soft power, but this never-ending conspiracy theory is now poised to affect the rest of the world in a completely different way due to the likely “regulation” that Washington might soon impose on social media giants like Facebook. “Traditional” media has long been clamoring for the American government to do something about the astronomical rise of social media, which has poached millions upon millions of people away from newspapers and TV stations and redirected them to their smartphones instead. From the perspective of social media and many of its users, however, these people weren’t “poached”, but liberated from their prior status as a captive audience to conventional influence techniques and allowed to roam freely in cyberspace as they searched for alternative non-mainstream interpretations of current and past events.
The rise of social media coincided with that of Russia’s publicly funded RT and Sputnik media outlets, whose reporting and analyses soon went viral all over the internet because they satisfied the crucial information desire that so many people were craving for years. Their explosive popularity led to them gaining a sizeable following among Western audiences, who voluntarily shared their content online and contributed to what Facebook describes as “organic growth”, or the natural trending of non-advertised posts. While posing a challenge to Establishment narratives all across the world, neither RT nor Sputnik were seriously viewed as “threat” by the US and its allies because they had yet to be blamed for affecting any real-life change outside of the internet “matrix” of clicks, likes, and shares.
That all changed during the 2016 US election, however, since the Mainstream Media’s monopoly on information was wielded in such a blatantly and obviously biased nature against Trump that countless Americans began countenancing what would have previously been unthinkable to many of them just a year prior, and that’s trawling foreign-based media outlets in order to get a more accurate sense of the truth that their own country’s media barons were suppressing. This certainly says a lot about the deep distrust that was already prevalent among many Americans towards their own government, but it hit its climax the more that the Mainstream Media began concocting openly fraudulent “news” stories about Trump in a bid to derail his candidacy, with this effort becoming unquestionably clear when compared with the flowery coverage given to anything that Clinton said or did. As is now known, Americans rebelled against the Establishment by voting Trump into office, and the “deep state” was left scratching its head about how this could happen.
The author explained the domestic dynamics at play in his November 2016 article right after the election titled “Dear Foreign Friends, Here’s Why Trump Won (From A Clevelander)”, but the general idea is that the Democrats’ weaponization of identity politics miserably backfired as Americans sought out a radical solution to bring balance to their “deep state”-destabilized country. Nevertheless, the Establishment couldn’t bring itself to recognize the obvious, take the loss, and move on to fight another battle later on, hence why they decided to continue pressing the cringe-inducingly ridiculous narrative that “Russian trolls” somehow swayed the election due to their social media activity, and hinting that there might even be a whiff of outright collusion between Presidents Trump and Putin in organizing this movie-like conspiracy.
This narrative is convenient for many geopolitical reasons that are outside the scope of this analysis, but the domestic benefit that was expected to be derived from this storyline is that “traditional” media and the Establishment finally had the pretext that they were looking for to “regulate” social media. Bringing Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others into compliance with already existing American laws about revealing the source of election-related advertisements is one thing, but pressing these platforms to restrict the activity of Russian publicly financed media outlets like RT and Sputnik, as well as speculatively “shadow banning” some of their staff and supporters, is a bridge too far into dystopia, as is doing so on the US governments’ double-standard FARA witch hunt which alleges that the two are “foreign agents”. As a result, it appears as though the “good ‘ole days” of “freewheeling” across Facebook and sharing whatever content one finds enjoyable is soon coming to an end as Washington begins to “regulate” social media on the basis of “safeguarding democracy”.
Of course, the real reason is that some vested power interests also have a stake in supporting their decades-long allies in the “traditional” media against their new social media rivals, to say nothing of the self-evident imperative in suppressing non-mainstream news and analyses through the US’ War on Russian Media. The forthcoming “regulation” might even go further than what’s presently being observed, as there’s a chance that Washington could seek to label social media platforms like Facebook as being “media companies” in their own right, which would then instantly force them to comply with the existing legislation that their “traditional” media counterparts have had to contend with for years. In a sense, this would “level the playing field” between “traditional” and social media, but it could also destroy the very essence of social media itself. Not only that, but if the US comes to consider Facebook and Google as “monopolies”, then they could be broken up and “regulated” even further.
What’s terribly ironic about all of this is that the US government’s international stance has always been in favor of “internet freedoms”, routinely attacking Russia, China, and Iran for implementing national security-based legislation aimed at thwarting the risk that Color Revolutions and Hybrid Wars could dangerously recruit across social media, but now all of a sudden “the land of the free” is doing the same thing as the countries that it regularly smears as “dictatorships”, though without any convincing reason and depending solely on a trumped-up fake news conspiracy theory. As is typical, the ruling Establishment and their “deep state” supporters condescendingly believe that their true intentions are invisible to the naked eye because of their presumption that the populace is stupid and politically unaware, though the very fact that their “perfect candidate” was defeated by a “dark horse” like Trump totally disproves this notion.
The reality is that most Americans, and the rest of the world at large, see the US government’s “regulation” of social media for what it actually is, and that’s a dictatorial power grab which crushes any remaining doubt that “the land of the free” is anything but, and that the “freedom of speech” is only allowed if one is either supporting the Establishment or behaving as its “controlled opposition”. The number one thing that “American Democracy” can’t accept is the free flow of information and interpretations that challenge the prevailing state-supported narrative, which in and of itself negates the very basis of what the world always thought that “American Democracy” was supposed to be about, and this powerful revelation proves that the US government’s accusations that its geopolitical rivals are “authoritarian” was never anything more than a psychological projection of its own self.
The US’ obsession with “proving” alleged “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election and America’s subsequent institutional destruction as a result will go down in history as representing the suicide of this former superpower’s soft power.
The US spent decades building up its soft power reputation as “the land of the free” and portraying itself as the most “democratic” society in the world, only to have generations’ worth of soft power investments dramatically done away with over the past twelve months as the media-manufactured “RussiaGate” scandal transforms into an institutional inquisition. It’s presumed that the reader is already generally aware of what’s going on and why, namely that hostile elements of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”), in full collusion with academia, the Mainstream Media, and Hollywood, are vehemently working to subvert Trump’s surprise election victory by alleging that he only won because of secretive Kremlin support.
This is a completely false narrative that’s regularly debunked every time a newly invented accusation arises, but instead of crafting a different political approach to complicate Trump’s Presidency, the Democrats and their “deep state” accomplices have continued to advance this made-up storyline, and in the process they’ve inflicted irreparable soft power damage to the US’ international prestige. The country that was once the unquestioned superpower of the world has all but committed soft power suicide in the course of only a single year by confirming the same “conspiracy theories” that it’s worked so hard to belittle in the past, thereby exposing many of its international information campaigns as lies and ultimately contradicting the very essence of “American Exceptionalism”.
The “Deep State”
Take for example the existence of the “deep state”, which no objective observer would have ever countenanced to be a “conspiracy theory” in the first place because it’s just a method of analyzing inter-elite rivalries within any given country. Nevertheless, the US and its surrogates consistently insisted for years that nothing of the sort existed, at least not in the US that is, and that anytime this was brought to the global masses’ attention by the mainstream media, it was usually framed as “democratic” or “Western” forces in a foreign government struggling against “authoritarian” ones. Only sometimes was it suggested that corrupt interests were behind this rivalry, but mostly in the cases when a Western government was implicated due to some sort of scandalous behavior. By and large, however, the prevailing American-imposed “groupthink” was that the “deep state” didn’t exist within the US.
Now, however, it’s irrefutable that “deep state” elements are sabotaging the Trump Presidency, and the most immediate consequence is that the global masses are realizing that the previous Mainstream Media-driven narrative denying the existence of the American “deep state” was just a lie, and that not only was it there all along, but that it had conspired to discredit anyone else who had previously tried to discuss it.
Social Media Manipulation
Another “conspiracy theory” that the RussiaGate scandal has proven is that the American government finally acknowledges that voters could be manipulated by social media. Russia, China, Iran, and others had long been alleging this for some time, but because they’re attacked as “non-Western dictatorships” in the American and Mainstream Media discourses, the implied message was that they had just invented these threats in order to have a pretext for “cracking down on democracy and free speech”.
The US and its partners never took Russia or the others seriously when they said that people could be manipulated by foreign intelligence services over social media, but in a sudden about-face, Washington says that Moscow is capable of doing this within the US though without ever explaining why the CIA apparently can’t do the same in Russia or elsewhere. Just as with the commonly denied existence of the “deep state”, the former “conspiracy theory” of social media manipulation has been revealed to actually be a truth that the US government was long suppressing until some of its hostile elements decided to wage their War on Trump.
Misled Masses
It follows that if Russia was purportedly able to engage in social media manipulation, that the American masses are therefore easily misled, though this has been something that the US government denied for decades in order to portray its population as the most “democratically enlightened” in the world.
If the fake news narrative is to be believed, then Russia’s “weaponization” of social media was so successful that it caused masses of Americans to be misled into voting for Trump, thus negating at least 18 years of “democratic conditioning” in effortlessly submitting to crude “propaganda” and blindly voting for the candidate that the Russian “dictator” preferred. This of course isn’t what happened at all, but the fact that prominent American voices are inferring as much carries with it a degree of “authority” in showing the world that even the US “deep state” (which “officially” didn’t exist until after Trump’s victory) thinks that Americans are stupid.
Again, another pillar of American soft power crumbles as the “deep state” relentlessly attacks Trump with no concern being given to the profound collateral damage that they’re inflicting to their country’s reputation abroad.
Imperfect Democracy
Most people across the world had some idea or another about the imperfect nature of American Democracy, but it was still regarded by some as being superior to the other competing systems out there. After all, the thinking goes, if it wasn’t so effective, then it wouldn’t be the longest continually existing governmental model still around today, nor would so many wars have been fought to spread it across the rest of the world. The controversial Electoral College is assumed to be a unique characteristic of the US and therefore omitted from its “export package”, but that and a few other issues aside (Super PACs, lobbyists, etc.), the other shortcomings of American Democracy weren’t really all that well known, until now, that is.
Throughout the course of the RussiaGate inquisition, the world found out all about the “deep state”, social media manipulation, and the misled masses, thereby collapsing the very foundation of American soft power – its presumably better-than-average “democratic” model – by showing that it’s in fact imperfect and not much different than most of the rest.A large part of America’s international attractiveness rested for years on the “revolutionary brilliance” of its governing model, which was supposed to have been responsible for enabling people to “live their dreams” in the “land of the free”, but the end result is that the structural core of “American Exceptionalism” was revealed to have been nothing more than a carefully crafted perception management operation which was ultimately discredited by none other than the American elite themselves.
On Wednesday, a judge in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, sentenced a US Marine in charge of a military court’s legal representation to three weeks of confinement and ordered him to pay $1,000 for failure to follow orders concerning a case that involved the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
Brig. Gen. John Baker, 50, chief defense counsel for military commissions, received the sentence from US Air Force Judge Col. Vance Spath.
Spath said Baker failed to follow orders when he excused three Defense Department-paid attorneys — Rosia Eliades, Mary Spears, and Rick Kammen — from a military court case involving the USS Cole, something he did not have the authority to do, the Miami Herald reported. Spath said the decision to excuse them had been declared “null and void.”
The attorneys sought to leave the case on the basis that they should be able to represent and defend clients without government surveillance — the Daily Beast reports that the attorneys believed the government was listening in on what should be privileged communications. Baker, supported their exit, and in standing up for this principle, was found in contempt of the court — a court, he argued, that had no proper jurisdiction over his actions in the first place.
The ruling was the first time the military tribunal in Cuba issued a ruling since 2008.
Appearing in the war court Wednesday, Baker argued that the court was set up to prosecute foreign terrorists and lacked jurisdiction to punish him since he was a US citizen. Baker was apparently denied the ability to defend himself after he made this assertion and was ordered to sit down.
“There are things I want to say, and you are not allowing me to say them,” Baker told the judge, according to the Herald. “This is not a pleasant decision,” the judge replied, adding that the legal proceedings were neither “fun” nor “lighthearted.” Without the judge’s ruling, though, he said there would be “havoc” in the justice system.
The particular case concerns Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a 52-year-old Saudi Arabian national who has been detained at Guantanamo for the past 11 years, two months. In 2008, CIA Dir. Michael Hayden confirmed al-Nashiri was among the al-Qaeda operatives the agency tortured.
Speaking at Georgetown University’s 2016 NATSECDEF conference, Baker said that “put simply, the military commissions in their current state are a farce or as Rick Kammen — lead counsel for Mr. al-Nashiri — stated on the record last week, these commissions are ‘hopelessly flawed.'”
The disclosure that the Clinton campaign, using white-shoe law firm Perkins Coie as a cutout, financed the so-called Steele dossier confirms what we have known all along.
The Trump-Russia collusion story was a joint invention of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. It enabled the Obama administration to make use of the nation’s security and intelligence services to spy on Trump and his associates and to use whatever information they thereby gleaned to try to get Hillary into the White House. The failure of the scheme didn’t stop either Obama or the Clintons. Following the election debacle, an enraged Obama administration sought vengeance by disseminating the dossier as widely as possible with a view to undermining the incoming Trump administration and to ensuring that no rapprochement with Russia would be possible. In doing so, Obama and Clinton have thrown American politics into turmoil and have perhaps pushed the United States and Russia toward armed confrontation.
We have known the basic outlines of the Steele dossier story since January. The Steele dossier, we have been told, started off as a piece of opposition research prepared by Fusion GPS and financed by a Republican rival of Trump’s or perhaps a GOP NeverTrumper. Following Trump’s victory in the GOP primaries, the Democrats took over its funding. Fusion hired Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk at MI6 who now ran his own corporate intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. Using the leads Steele had developed during his years at MI6, he reported back to his paymasters his shocking discovery: The Russians had been cultivating Trump for years in preparation for his run for the presidency. So shocked was Steele by this that he rushed to alert the FBI, MI6 and even select reporters.
Most of this story is pure fiction. Neither the GOP nor a primary rival of Trump’s had any involvement with the dossier. To be sure, in October 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, a neo-conservative Web site funded by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, did hire Fusion to undertake opposition research on Trump. However, money for this undertaking dried up by May 2016.
The Steele-crafted Trump-Russia collusion story was from start to finish a Democratic Party operation. Its origins can be traced back to April 2016 and the leak of the Democratic National Committee e-mails. The DNC announced that it had been “hacked.” However, instead of reporting the matter to the proper authorities, the DNC turned to attorney Michael Sussmann, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann got in touch with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Inc. Now, CrowdStrike is no geeky, techno-gee-whiz firm. Its founder is Russian-born Dmitri Alperovitch, a senior fellow at the NATO-funded, intensely Russophobic Atlantic Council. “Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia,” the New York Times wrote. On June 14, CrowdStrike announced that the DNC hack perpetrators were two separate hacker groups employed by the Russian government.
Even though no one other than CrowdStrike had examined the DNC servers, U.S. intelligence agencies immediately declared that they were in agreement and that they had “high confidence” that the “Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents” from the DNC.
It was at this moment that the Clinton people made the strategic decision to tie Trump to Putin and to make the centerpiece of its campaign the idea that a vote for Trump was a vote for the Kremlin. Perkins Coie—yet again—got in touch with Fusion, which, in turn, got in touch with Christopher Steele. Steele had contacts at MI6 and, perhaps more important, contacts at the FBI. He had allegedly worked with the FBI in the takedown of FIFA.
Steele, who had many contacts at the FBI, understood what was required of him. On June 20, six days after CrowdStrike’s announcement, he filed his first report. It was exactly what the Clinton campaign was looking for: lurid, unsubstantiated but nonetheless juicy allegations. Russia had supposedly been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years.” Trump had hired prostitutes to “perform a ‘golden showers’ show in front of him” at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. “Trump’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities… with enough embarrassing material… to be able to blackmail him.”
Steele’s first memo enticed the Clinton people and they eagerly turned on the money spigots. Steele followed up with a memo revealing that the Russians were behind the DNC leak, that Putin “hated and feared” Hillary Clinton and that there existed a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump and the Russians. The recently-indicted Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, managed this co-operation on behalf of Trump by using “foreign policy advisor” Carter Page as an intermediary. “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise U.S./NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”
Carter Page, whom no one had ever heard of and who had never even met Trump, featured prominently in the Steele memos and in subsequent U.S. media coverage of the campaign. A July 19 memo from Steele had Page holding a “secret meeting” with Igor Sechin, executive chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, in which the two men discussed future bilateral energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related” sanctions against Russia.
The Clinton campaign theme was set. By July 23, 2016, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, was telling ABC News on Sunday that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke in to the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites. . . . It’s troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” A couple of days later, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was to lead the post-election “Trump-Russia collusion” charge in Congress, declared:
Given Donald Trump’s well-known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the D.N.C. and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party.
In August, it was reported, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote to FBI Director James Comey demanding disclosure of the contents of the dossier: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government… The public has a right to know this information.” And, of course, Hillary Clinton famously accused Trump of being “Putin’s puppet” during their third presidential debate.
The Steele dossier was now driving the Obama administration’s scrutiny of Trump’s people as well as media coverage of the campaign. Steele, the BBC reported, “flew to Rome in August to talk to the FBI. Then in early October, he came to the US and was extensively debriefed by them, over a week. He gave the FBI the names of some of his informants, the so-called ‘key’ to the dossier.” The FBI went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and obtained an order to “monitor the communications” of Carter Page, as “part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign.” According to the Guardian, the FISA court turned down its first application (an unusual event, if true), asking the agency to narrow its focus. Eventually, the FBI managed to convince the court that “there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.” What was the basis of this probable cause? CNN reported that the FBI based its application on the claims made in the Steele dossier. That’s very serious business. If the FBI was presenting the FISA court unverified material from the dossier as if it were verified then it was clearly deceiving the court in order to obtain a politically-motivated warrant.
By September 2016, U.S. media were reporting that Carter Page had become a person of interests for the U.S. government: “U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials—including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president.” Words straight from the dossier. The same media report had “U.S. intelligence agencies” receiving reports that Page met one Igor Diveykin, who “serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” This too is almost verbatim from Steele’s July 19 memo.
The U.S. government has actually made very little pretense that it didn’t make use of the dossier. FBI Director James Comey admitted to Congress that the dossier had been “one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation.” Then, on Jan. 11, 2017, following Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s meeting with Trump during which he and Comey presented the president-elect a summary of the dossier, Clapper issued a strange statement: The intelligence community “has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.” This was a classic non-denial denial. That he and his friends did not “rely” on the dossier doesn’t mean that they didn’t make full use of it.
Federal investigators also wiretapped Paul Manafort, both before and after the election and indeed right through to the last days of the Obama administration. According to CNN, the FBI launched an investigation of Manafort in 2014 shortly after the Feb. 22, 2014, coup d’etat in Ukraine. Manafort had worked as a political consultant work for former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. However, the “surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence.” In other words, by the time Manafort went to work for the Trump campaign in May 2016, he was no longer under FBI surveillance. The FBI resumed its surveillance at just about the time the first of Steele’s memos started arriving in Washington.
The wiretaps had nothing to do with the charges Special Counsel Robert Mueller has just brought against Manafort. Mueller’s charges involve activities that took place long before Manafort joined the Trump campaign. What the FBI was looking for was evidence that Manafort was a conduit between the Kremlin and Trump.
Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn also featured prominently in the dossier. He too came under Obama administration surveillance. Indeed, Obama’s people used the wiretaps in order to get him ousted from his newly-appointed position. Obama administration holdover, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, listened in on a conversation Flynn had had with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak, on Dec. 29, 2016, and decided that the incoming national security adviser was susceptible to blackmail from the Russians. She never really explained on what grounds the Russians could or would blackmail Flynn. Her argument seemed to be that because Flynn had discussed the possible lifting of sanctions—a policy that would run contrary to that of the Obama administration that was still in office at the time this conversation had supposedly taken place—he had violated the Logan Act, which prohibits private individuals conducting U.S. foreign policy. No one has been prosecuted under this statute for 200 years. Why the Russians would want to invoke an obscure statute to threaten Flynn, an official well-disposed toward them, with a prosecution that could never succeed and thereby to undermine the very policy they were seeking, namely, the lifting of sanctions, was never explained. Nonetheless, armed with this nonsense, Yates rushed over to the White House demanding dismissal of Flynn. He was susceptible to blackmail and was therefore a security risk. It seemed to be a joke, but for reasons that remain baffling, the White House meekly complied with Yates’s demand.
We now know that the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump’s people reached pathological levels following the election. It is almost certain that the FBI did pay Steele to continue his work. The Washington Post reported that the bureau had “reached an agreement with [Steele] a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.” The Post claims that “Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials.” This seems highly unlikely. According to a number of news stories, the Clinton campaign stopped paying Steele sometime at the end of October. Yet Steele continued sending memos through December. Somebody had to have paid him. Steele is not the type to work pro bono.
Obama people such as Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes went on an unmasking rampage during the election and after. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has claimed that the Obama administration made “hundreds of requests during the 2016 presidential race to unmask the names of Americans in intelligence reports, including Trump transition officials.” The requests were made without specific justifications on why the information was needed. More sinister were the activities of the Obama people after the election. Trounced by Trump, they vented their fury doing everything possible to undermine the incoming administration. The New York Times reported that during the last days of the Obama administration “White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential… across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.”
A former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration official, Evelyn Farkas, revealed that she was telling her former colleagues:
Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people that left…. That the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.
The full extent of the Obama administration’s campaign of surveillance, espionage and sabotage has yet to be revealed. The right-wing media have excitedly latched onto the Clinton revelations in order to put out a ridiculous story of their own. Americans are still innocent victims; Russians are still villains interfering with our gloriously pristine elections. The new victim-in-chief is Trump and the new Russian colluder-in-chief is Clinton. As ever, nothing changes in Washington.
On June 8, 1967 Israeli air and sea forces attacked a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, killing 34 crew members, wounding over 170, and fatally damaging the ship. For 50 years surviving crew members and families of the fallen have called for a full investigation of the attack – without success.
by Joe Meadors, USS Liberty Survivor
The USS Liberty was attacked on June 8, 1967. No investigation of the attack was conducted by the US government.
The USS Pueblo was attacked on January 23, 1968 – 229 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The attack on the USS Pueblo was thoroughly investigated by the US government. No investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty has been conducted. No evidence that any investigation has been contemplated by anyone in the US government.
The Marine Barracks in Beirut were bombed on October 23, 1983 – 5,981 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut was thoroughly investigated by the US government. USS Liberty survivors are still waiting for word that an investigation on their ship is in the works by the US government.
The USS Stark was attacked on May 17, 1987 – 7,286 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The attack on the USS Stark was thoroughly investigated by the US government. USS Liberty survivors are still waiting for an investigation of the attack on their ship.
The USS Cole was attacked on October 12, 2000 – 12,180 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The attack on the USS Cole was thoroughly investigated by the US government. USS Liberty survivors are still waiting.
The Niger attack was on October 4, 2017 – 18,381 days after the attack on the USS Liberty. The Niger attack is currently being investigated by the US government. No investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty is on the horizon.
In a DoD Press Release Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Joe Dunford tells us “The Defense Department owes the families of the soldiers lost in Niger and the American people an explanation of what the soldiers were doing in Niger and why it was important.”
Given its refusal to conduct an investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty the DoD obviously doesn’t feel the same about our families, the families of our fallen shipmates and those of us who survived the attack.
Below is an article that expands on this subject and provides a list of questions we’d like to have answered. By no means all of the questions on the table. Arguably not the most important questions.
I respectfully submit that the question on the top of the list is: Why has the US government refused to conduct an investigation of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty?
DOD Says truth on Niger more important than USS Liberty
“DoD Owes Families, Nation Information on Niger Action” but NOT on USS Liberty Attack
Four Green Berets were Killed in Action in Niger. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, held a prolonged, public press conference which was covered by every news outlet in the US.
In a DoD Press Release Gen. Dunford tells us “The Defense Department owes the families of the soldiers lost in Niger and the American people an explanation of what the soldiers were doing in Niger and why it was important.”
Given its refusal to conduct an investigation of the attack on the USS Liberty the DoD obviously doesn’t feel the same about our families, the families of our fallen shipmates and those of us who survived the attack.
Not that we haven’t asked.
USS Liberty crew, ignored by U.S. politicians for 50 years.
For over 50 years USS Liberty survivors have been begging the Department of Defense to conduct an investigation of the attack on our ship.
The Department of Defense obviously doesn’t think the American people deserve to hear from American servicemen who:
saw the unmarked aircraft as they attacked our ship;
heard the jamming of our radios on both US Navy tactical and international maritime distress frequencies;
witnessed the deliberate machine gunning of life rafts we had dropped over the side in anticipation of abandoning ship;
witnessed the slow circling of our ship by Israeli torpedo boats as they fired from close range at crewmen who were either trapped topside or who ventured topside to help their wounded shipmates;
saw the Israeli helicopters filled with armed assault troops hover very close to our ship in an apparent attempt to find a place to allow those troops to rappel down to the ship; and,
witnessed the torpedo boats immediate departure from the scene of the attack after cessation of hostilities instead of offering assistance as is their obligation under international law.
What questions have we been asking? I’ll share with you questions a USS Liberty widow asked then-Senator John Warner. Not surprising that he refused to respond to her questions:
Why didn’t the Sixth Fleet come to the aid of the Liberty?
Why were the rescue aircraft called back by the President of the United States?
What involvement did the 303 Committee have in the Liberty‘s deployment and mission?
What did Project Cyanide have to do with the Liberty, directly or indirectly?
What did Frontlet 615 have to do with the Liberty directly or indirectly?
Why wasn’t the USS Amberjack allowed to come to the aid of the Liberty?
Where is the film of the attack taken by the Amberjack?
Why weren’t violations of the UCMJ investigated?
Why were warning and operational messages to the Liberty intentionally mis-routed?
Why was the crew told to keep silent regarding the attack?
What secret is so volatile that cannot be revealed by our government after 50 years?
Why haven’t clear violations of international law been investigated?
Why was Admiral Tobin awarded the Bronze Star when he wasn’t even there?
Why hasn’t our former ambassador to Lebanon, Dwight Porter, ever been questioned by Congress, when it is known he listened to the attack at our embassy in Lebanon?
Why was Commander McGonagle awarded his Medal of Honor, our country’s highest honor, in the Navy Yard instead of in a ceremony conducted by the President at the White House?
These are just a sampling of the many questions that remain unanswered about the attack on our ship.
Questions that the Department of Defense will continue to ignore.
We are reaching out to everyone who believes that the attack on the USS Liberty should be treated exactly the same as the attacks on the USS Pueblo, USS Stark, USS Cole, as well as the 1982 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut and the death of the four Green Berets in Niger.
Help us persuade the US government to investigate the attack on our ship – including the War Crimes that were committed by and against the United States during that attack.
An impoverished family from the north of Beit Lahia enjoys a light moment. The father is strumming a guitar, a young girl is dancing while the boys are playing music with simple household utensils. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Mouhamad Al-Barawi
A quick Google search for Gaza will show you multiple images of rubble and raw sewage pouring into the Mediterranean. These are the images that often appear in our mind together with the things we once heard or read about the place. For example, that it is “the world’s largest outdoor prison” or that it “will become unlivable”. But is this the way Gazans themselves see their homeland?
The photo competition we launched among young and extremely talented Gazan photographers was meant to answer this question. At first, we were not sure, whether a photo competition was even a good idea. Would people, who are trying to live their lives though the economic crisis and the electricity crisis, unable to access basic goods and services, have time and energy to spare for such a trivial and unnecessary thing as a photo competition? It turned out they did. And we were taken aback by the results.
Young photographers, contemplating their immediate surroundings, showed that life in Gaza is much more than crises, fences, isolation and the enormous suffering they cause. It is a quiet moment where a little fisherman, who almost seems like a part of the seascape, is looking under the sea surface, probably wondering what the future will be like for him and his generation, in a place where the young face 66% unemployment rate. It is children holding candles in the darkness, not metaphorical, but very real, as people have to organize their lives around four hours of electricity per day. It is also immense joy and laughter when an improvised family band explores music making potential of aluminum cooking pots.
This diversity of moments of happiness, laughter, quiet contemplation show that people of Gaza did not just put their lives on hold waiting for long overdue political solutions. Every single day, they demonstrate incredible resilience in the face of the harsh realities that surround them.
This photo shows the joy and fun that children can experience in the face of poverty. It relays a profound message: Happiness is in simplicity. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Fadi BadwanThis photo shows the joy and fun that children can experience in the face of poverty. It relays a profound message: Happiness is in simplicity. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Fadi BadwanChildren from Gaza sit in the trunk of an old car. They play music on a toy and enjoy the moment despite their poor living conditions. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Ahmad HasaballChildren playing infront of their house seeking joy from the things around them. These kids lack toys and play grounds in light of the poor living conditions in Gaza. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Ahmad SalamehYouth performing parkour stunts at the eastern borders of Khan Younis. Due to the scarcity of playing areas and limited resources, they are forced to practice their sport in the empty areas near the borders. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Mohamad DahmanRaees is a deaf boy who doesn’t stop smiling despite his disability. He plays with a wheel and a stick with his brother, in east of Jabalia, near the borders, where they reside in tents. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Ahmad HijaziA Palestinian girl plays with her doll during the power outage. Gaza suffers from power cuts reaching up to 20 hours a day. CC BY-NC-ND / ICR Ibrahim NofalA child from Deir Al-Balah refugee camp in Gaza. CC BY-NC-ND / ICRC / Ayesh Haroun
For a complex and critical examination of the relationship between Canada, Israel, Judaism, and Zionism, Eric Walberg’s new work The Canada-Israel Nexus provides a challenging perspective.
It is challenging in several ways. Primarily, the most important ideas are the critical lines of thought towards the impact of Zionism within Canada. This includes the influences on the media, academics and academia, and the political. The latter mostly affects Canada’s foreign affairs position as a sycophant of the U.S. empire, but in many ways as a leading vocal supporter of Israeli Zionism and its colonial-settler policies.
Throughout the book, comparisons are made between Israel’s recent colonial-settler actions through its settlements, military law, and other civic aspects (education in particular), and the actions previously of the Canadian government towards its indigenous populations. While being different in particular details, the overall actions are very similar, especially considering Canada’s recent very public acknowledgement – both domestically and at the UN – of its own attempts at cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The first chapters cover the historical developments. First, that of Canada and its history of dispossession, Christianization, residential schools, (the last two were still ongoing through the Twentieth Century), assimilation and broken treaty promises towards the indigenous populations. Next, a brief outline of Jewish Zionist history covers the creation of Israel and its rise to a militarized nuclear power extending empire into a Middle East riven by war created by those supporting that extension.
Two longer chapters cover the history of Jewish people in Canada. The essential story is that of a self-isolating community being the ‘ragpickers’ of the communities, rising quickly to be behind the scenes power players in politics and the media. Today, the pro-Israeli stance has been successfully entrenched in Canada from all political parties (except for the Greens, who in spite of their leaders’ rhetoric, have supported a position supporting BDS).
In what will probably prove to be the most controversial section, Walberg discusses the Canadian right-wing activists who have denied the Israeli narrative and how they have been silenced by the courts and media. He extends the idea of holocaust to cover other mass killings, in particular that suffered by Russia during WW II, and the “ongoing slow-motion holocaust against the Palestinians.” Both Russia and the Palestinians as terrorists are both highly maligned in Canada’s press and political realm with the U.S. and Israeli imperial viewpoints being strongly supported.
A final look is taken concerning the parallels between the two ‘native nations’ of Canada and Israel. Humanitarian law, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, oil, pipelines, water resources, laws and the courts, education, and religious theology all carry similarities. The more recent actions defining or redefining antisemitism and Israel’s ongoing hasbara efforts (the act of explaining – now more broadly defined in its context at manipulating public attitudes towards Israel) reflect the impact of global dissidents against imperial hegemony supported by Canada and Israel.
The Canada-Israel Nexus is a thought provoking and challenging work, an important addition to the discussion of Canada’s relationship domestically with its own indigenous population and its foreign policy relationship with Israel and the greater imperial games of the west.
– Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor and columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles’ work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.
(The Canada-Israel Nexus. Eric Walberg. Clarity Press, Atlanta, Georgia. 2017.)
US and NATO representatives keep trying to convince the world that Afghanistan is not a corruption-ridden quagmire of violence, and US Defence Secretary, General Mattis, told reporters in Kabul on September 28 that “uncertainty has been replaced by certainty” because of new US policy, and that “the sooner the Taliban recognizes they cannot win with bombs, the sooner the killing will end.”
At the same press conference NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that following a Taliban attack on Kabul airport that day, which he described as “a sign of weakness, not of strength,” he “would like to commend the Afghan Security Forces which are handling these kinds of attacks and it is yet another example of how professional they are, how committed they are and how they are able to handle this kind of security threat.” (In September the US Air Force dropped more bombs on Afghanistan “than in any other month for nearly seven years.”)
In the following month, from October 17 to 23, there were six major insurgent attacks which demonstrated that the militants are far from weak:
At least 71 people were killed and hundreds wounded in suicide and gun attacks on police and soldiers in Ghazni and Paktia Provinces… Some 50 soldiers were killed in a Taliban assault on a military base in Kandahar province… A suicide bomber blew himself up in a Shiite mosque during evening prayers in Kabul, killing 56 people and wounding 55 others and another suicide bombing killed at least 33 people at a mosque in the central province of Ghor… A further suicide bomber killed 15 army officer cadets travelling in a bus in Kabul, and four policemen were killed in a Taliban attack on a security post in Ghazni province.
So the carnage continues, as do the visitors, and the New York Timesreported that on October 23, the same day as the Ghazni policemen were killed, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “made a secret two-hour visit” and the Washington Postnoted he “flew from Doha to Bagram [the massive US base]” while “a total news blackout was imposed until after they left the country and returned to Qatar.”
The Times was forthright in stating how shocking it is “that top American officials must sneak into this country after 16 years of war, thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars spent” and considered the furtive two-hour stopover to be “testimony to the stalemate confronting the United States because of a stubborn and effective Taliban foe that is increasingly ascendant.” But deception capers went further than disguising the visit itself.
It was noted by the BBC that both the Afghan and US governments said the meeting between Mr Tillerson and Afghanistan’s President Ghani took place in Kabul, as tweeted by the State Department (“Today, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with #Afghanistan’s President @ashrafghani in Kabul”). And this was right and proper, because visiting foreign government representatives should call on heads of state and not vice versa, and it seemed that appropriate civility had been observed.
Except that it hadn’t, because Tillerson didn’t go to the President’s office in Kabul, but spent his entire two hours at the heavily guarded US air base at Bagram. He didn’t dare travel the 50 kilometres from Bagram to Kabul to meet President Ghani, but President Ghani had to travel to Bagram to meet with him, which tells us a great deal about how Washington regards Afghanistan and its elected president. And then the attempt to have the world believe that the meeting took place in Kabul didn’t work out.
The deception collapsed because of a difference in a photograph of the meeting. According to the Times, “a press release from the US embassy in Afghanistan includes a photo with the wall above the two men’s heads cropped out” by photoshopping, but another photograph showed a clock on the wall displaying international time, which indicated that the photograph was taken at the US base and not in the President’s office in Kabul. (A helpful State Department spokesperson suggested that “the Afghan Government changed those photos probably to make it aesthetically more pleasing” which at least added a little humour to an otherwise gruesome farce.)
It isn’t clear what the visit was supposed to achieve, given that the Tillerson-Ghani meeting lasted less than an hour, although there was an eight-minute “media availability” at which four questions were asked by the six American journalists who were travelling with Tillerson in his aircraft. No Afghan reporters were permitted to be present, a decision indicative of the character of the visit as a whole, and it can hardly be expected that their exclusion would be regarded with approval by the Afghan government or media The conduct of this visit gave the Taliban and all other anti-American elements in the country a boost that is unquantifiable but is bound to be substantial.
Which takes us to another disastrous episode in US-Afghanistan relations, in May 2014, at which there were no aesthetically displeasing clocks in photographs when President Obama visited Afghanistan, because there was no meeting between him and the then Afghan Head of State, President Karzai.
Like Mr Ghani with the Tillerson visit, Mr Karzai had not been told in advance that Obama was coming to Afghanistan, but when eventually he was informed of his arrival he refused to travel to Bagram to call on him. A US official said that President Karzai had been “offered a meeting with Mr Obama during the brief visit but declined… We did offer him the opportunity to come to Bagram, but we’re not surprised that it didn’t work on short notice.”
The condescending contempt of that statement and the arrogance of the US attitude did not escape the citizens of Afghanistan, and the Wall Street Journalobserved that “Afghans praised President Hamid Karzai for refusing to meet with President Barack Obama during a brief visit to their country.” But it is disgraceful that the President of the United States (and any Washington administration official, such as Tillerson) can visit Afghanistan without informing its president beforehand. It wouldn’t work with France or China or Tahiti — but it seems that Afghanistan isn’t important enough to matter.
The ultimate insult of the Obama visit was that he brought “country music star Brad Paisley with him to provide entertainment for the troops,” which may have added to the vexation of President Karzai whose office issued a statement that “The president of Afghanistan said he was ready to warmly welcome the president of the United States in accordance with Afghan traditions but had no intention of meeting him at Bagram.”
Three years ago the president of Afghanistan made it clear that the president of the United States had failed to observe international custom and common courtesy and would be treated appropriately for his patronising conduct. But things have changed since then, and when a US official now visits Afghanistan, and scorns custom and courtesy, the current president of Afghanistan has to ignore the condescension and bow his knee by obeying orders to go to the visitor’s security cocoon in the Bagram base.
It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in Afghanistan that after sixteen years of US military operations and expenditure of over 800 billion dollars it is unsafe for the Secretary of State to visit the place unless his travel is kept entirely secret from the world — including the president of the country he is visiting. But it is even more appalling that the United States treats Afghanistan like a US colony, as evidenced by the fact that the US Secretary of State can summon the Afghan president to meet him in a US military base, rather than paying him basic respect as he would to a national leader anywhere else in the world.
Washington has not yet learned that winning wars and influencing people takes more than brute force. Trump declared in August that “Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition… preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan.” But he’ll never do that if the United States continues to behave like a colonial master.
Washington media, think tanks, various commentators and now John McCain continue hammering on an old theme— that the US has “no policy towards the Middle East.” This is fake analysis. In fact the US very much does have a long-standing policy towards the Middle East. It’s just the wrong one.
What, then, is US policy in the Middle East—under Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton (and even earlier)? When all the rhetoric has been stripped away, we can identity quite clear, precise, and fairly consistent major strategic policy positions.
First, Washington accedes to almost anything that Israel wants. This is an untouchable posture, a third rail, beyond any debate or discussion lest we anger the powerful Zionist lobby of AIPAC and end up being labelled “anti-Semitic.” The New York Times does not even allow us to know that in Israel itself these issues are indeed seriously debated—but never in the US. Small tactical issues aside, there is zero American discussion about whether the far-right government of Israel should be the lode-star of US policy-making in the Middle East.
-Second, we oppose all Iranian actions and seek to weaken that state. Not surprisingly this reflects a key Israeli position on the Middle East as well. Admittedly the US has its own grudges against Iran going back a long way, while the Iranians bear grudges against the US going back well before that.
-Oppose almost anything that Russia does in the Middle East and routinely seek to weaken the Russian position in the region.
-Destroy armed radical jihadi groups anywhere—unilaterally or via proxy.
-Support Saudi Arabia on nearly all issues. Never mind that the Saudi state is responsible for the export of the most radical, dangerous and ugly interpretations of Islam anywhere and is the prime promoter of extremist Islamist ideas across the Muslim world.
-Maintain a US military presence (and as many US military bases as possible) across the Middle East and Eurasia.
-Maximize US arms sales across the region for profit and influence. (There is of course a lot of competition here from the UK, Russia, France, China, and Israel.)
-Support any regime in the Middle East—regardless of how authoritarian or reactionary it may be—as long as it supports these US goals and policies in the region.
-“Protect the free flow of oil.” Yet that free flow of Middle East oil has almost never been threatened and its chief consumers—China, Japan, Korea—should bear whatever burden that might be. But the US wants to bear that “burden” to justify permanent US military forces in the Gulf.
But what about “American values” that are often invoked as goals—such as support for democracy and human rights? Yes, these values are worthy, but they receive support in practice only as long as they do not conflict with the paramount hierarchy of the main goals stated above. And they usually do conflict with those goals.
Far from a “lack of Middle East policy,” all this sounds to me like a very clear set of US policy positions. Washington has consistently followed them for long decades. They largely represent a solid “Washington consensus” that varies only slightly as the think-tankers of one party or the other revolve in and out of government.
Donald Trump has typically upset the apple cart somewhat on all of this—mostly in matters of style in his spontaneous policy lurchings of the moment. But official Washington is pretty good in keeping the range of foreign policy choices fairly narrowly focused within these parameters. Indeed, some might say that this policy mix is just about right. Yet these US aspirations have fairly consistently failed.
The most prominent US policy failures are familiar and proceed from the goals.
-If unquestioning support to Israel is the top priority, Washington has not failed here. But Israel remains about as truculent as ever in maintaining its own priority of extending territorial control and creeping takeover of all Palestinian lands and people. Washington has not been able to protect Israel from itself; Israel has never been more of an international pariah than now in the eyes of most of the world, including large numbers of Jews.
It would actually serve American interests to officially abandon the absurd theater of the “peace process” which has always served as Israeli cover for ever greater annexation of Palestinian land. Instead the US should let the international community assume the major voice, yes, including the UN, in holding Israel to international norms. By now the “two-state solution” is unreachable; the issue is how to manage the very difficult and painful transition to an inevitable “one-state solution” for Palestinians and Israelis—in a democratic and binational secular state.
-Russia is today stronger and more important in the Middle East than since Soviet days. Moscow has been outplaying the US in nearly every respect of the policy game since 9/11. US influence meanwhile has declined in both relative and absolute terms. Yet Washington’s determination to maintain its own absolute primacy across the world firmly excludes any significant Russian role in global issues. However, if Washington can bring itself to abandon the zero-sum game mindset and work towards a win-win approach with Moscow, it will find much to cooperate with Russia about. As it stands, persistent confrontational policies guarantee unending rivalry, a never-ending self-fulfilling prophesy.
-Contrary to stated US policy goals, Iran has emerged the massive winner from nearly all US policies in the region over two decades. Yet Turkey and Iran represent the only two serious, developed, advanced, stable states in the region, with broadly developed economies, serious “soft power,” and flexible policies that have gained the respect of most Middle Eastern peoples, even if not of their governments. Yes, Erdogan’s Turkey is at the moment a loose cannon; but Turkish political institutions will certainly survive him even as the clock is ticking on his power grip. Iran’s elections are more real than virtually any other Muslim state in the area. It may be convenient for some to lay virtually all US troubles in the region at Iran’s door, but such analysis upon serious examination is quite deliberately skewed.
-US policies and actions against radical and violent Islamist movements in the Muslim world represent a serious task. Sadly, it is the ongoing US military actions themselves that help explain much of the continued existence and growth of radical movements, starting with major US military support to Islamist mujaheddin in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Later the US destruction of state and societal structures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, to some extent even in Syria and Yemen, have further stirred up anger and radical jihadism.
What can be done? Withdrawal of US boots on the ground and the chain of military bases across the region and into Asia would represent a start, but only a start, in allowing the region to calm down. The region must work out its own problems and not be the object of incessant self-serving US helicopter interventions. Yes, ISIS is a target deserving of destruction, and US policies have been a bit wiser in at least allowing many international forces to play a role in that campaign. But radicalism invariably emerges from radical conditions. There are few military solutions to radical social, political, economic and identity problems. And autocratic rulers will always greet a US presence that helps maintain them in power.
Saudi policies that view Iran as the source of all Middle Eastern problems are erroneous and self-serving, and ignore the real roots of the region’s problems: unceasing war (primarily launched by the US), vast human and economic dislocations, self-serving monarchs and presidents for life, and the absence of any voice by the people over the way they are ruled.
The militarization of US foreign policy everywhere is ill-designed to solve regional problems that call for diplomacy and close cooperation with all regional powers—not their exclusion. Yet these US policies increasingly resemble the late days of the Roman Empire as it found itself up to its neck in barbarians.
Most of the world would welcome shifts in US policies away from the heavy focus on the military option. One reason the US has been losing respect, clout and influence in the region is due to this failing military focus. The rest of the world is now simply trying to work around US fixations. Donald Trump is exacerbating the problem but he is in many ways the logical culmination of decades of failed American policies. Even a kinder gentler Trump cannot solve systemic US foreign policy failures that are now deeply institutionalized.
So repeating the mantra that the US lacks a Middle East policy serves only to conceal the problem. The US very much does have a clear policy. It’s just been dead wrong.
Graham E. Fuller is a former senior CIA official, author of numerous books on the Muslim World; his latest book is “Breaking Faith: A novel of espionage and an American’s crisis of conscience in Pakistan.” (Amazon, Kindle) grahamefuller.com
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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For a complex and critical examination of the relationship between Canada, Israel, Judaism, and Zionism, Eric Walberg’s new work The Canada-Israel Nexus provides a challenging perspective.
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