The mainstream media are totally irresponsible in their priorities. At the moment of writing, five hours after the world’s most dangerous document was presented, no major Western media has featured it prominently. This means it won’t be. No chance it would go viral. The increasing risk of nuclear war isn’t important.
While people talk about fake, a much larger issue is omission:
What is hidden to you? What world order issues are deliberately down-graded?
What threats to humanity end up at the bottom of page 38 after 10 pages of sports, entertainment and celebrity stories?
Another technique is cover-up, talking about something else such as the ever convenient North Korean “threat” or Russia’s latest evil plot.
It’s not only ignorance. There are media and other power elites who know exactly what to hand out to you and how. And what to fake, omit and cover up instead of covering.
Time to wake up: The dominant Western media are rapidly becoming the largest single obstacles to understanding our world. One proof is this story.
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The Transnational has already posted a few articles about this scary, absurd and anti-ethical document, the Nuclear Posture Review, NPR:
• Huffington Post’s first article based on a leak from January 14, 2018.
• Pentagon advocates nukes against a cyber attack, in the New York Times, January 16, 2018.
Watch and listen carefully to how the Pentagon experts explain and rationalize it all, from within their box: So natural as if talking about pleasant everyday affairs.
And take note of the lame, cliquish questions asked by what must be highly selected media people who, it seems, have never read a book about nuclear policies. Don’t challenge a single underlying assumption or point to dangers.
The central words are ‘the safety of the American people’, the capabilities and it’s all held within the weapons technological framework and blurred security environment and deterrence. Not a single, intellectually defensible argument given.
No questioning of the framework – legal, political, ethical, psychological, civilisational…
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This is not only what the leading US psychiatrist of war, Nazi doctors and sect psychology, Robert Jay Lifton calls ‘psychic numbing’.
Or what Yale psychologist Irving Janis in his classical study called ‘groupthink’.
No, seldom has the Theatre of the Absurd of the MIMAC – the Military-industrial MEDIA-Academic Complex – been performed so well.
In a calm and rational manner, we learn how natural it is to perceive, to talk about – and never question – what is in reality directly and fundamentally related to the unthinkable omnicide – destruction of humanity and the world as we know it.
All in the name, of course, of maintaining the US-based, military-dominated post-1945 world order against America’s beloved enemies. What would it do without them? How would it develop new nukes at trillions of dollars if it did not invent enemies all around. Imagine it had a policy of co-operation with the world instead of dominating it?
It’s well known that one of the defining characteristics of terrorism is the targeting, wounding or killing of innocent people, of people who are in no way fighters or otherwise related to the conflict – like children on a school bus, patients at a hospital.
The Nuclear Posture Review is a plea for mega-terrorism, dwarfing ISIS and everybody else.
It’s about the use of nuclear weapons – NUTs meaning Nuclear Use Theory – not for the deterrence business as usual, or MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.
It is a document that argues in favour of nuclear weapons being usable, for the theory that the US can start, fight and survive a nuclear exchange. In other words, for making the unthinkable not only thinkable but acceptable.
You can’t use nuclear weapons without killing and wounding millions and making life uninhabitable for billions. Every thought about nuclear use is based on a terror philosophy – and practised today only by the United States of America.
The NPR 2018 lowers the psychological threshold and increases the likelihood vastly that nuclear weapons will be used in the future.
This kind of thinking brings huge dangers to the world. There are lots of vested interests that don’t want you to know.
This document should be condemned – as it would have been throughout the homogenised Western mainstream media had it been Russia or China or some other nuclear weapons state that had presented a similarly perversely dangerous and exceptionalist nuclear-use policy.
There is a simple solution to this nuclear madness: Nuclear abolition. That’s what the world’s huge majority wants and has voted for at the UN.
And if you don’t believe that, let’s try a little experiment in democracy – after all that’s what the US is, isn’t it? Get all the nuclear weapons states to hold free and fair referendums asking their citizens whether they want their own countries defended by nuclear weapons.
For the first time in human history. Then we take the struggle for nuclear abolition from there…
MOSCOW – The Russian Foreign Ministry on Saturday expressed disappointment with the confrontational and anti-Russian stance in the recently issued US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and outlined intentions to take the policies, revealed in the document, into account in ensuring its own security.
The NRP, published on Friday, claims a stronger US nuclear deterrent is needed to discourage Russia, China, Iran and North Korea from either developing new weapons or expanding existing arsenals. The US doctrine envisages short-term plans to modify existing submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) warheads to provide a low-yield option and pursue a modern nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) in the long run. The NPR notes that these activities are not intended at being employed in a nuclear warfare, however they are aimed at raising the US nuclear threshold to ensure that the country’s potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in nuclear escalation.
Moreover, in its nuclear doctrine the United States accuses Russia of repeated violations of several international arms control treaties and commitments, particularly the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov was the first to react to the release of the NPR. The diplomat suggested on Friday that Washington used alleged Russian threats to justify a hike in military spending and nuclear buildup. Antonov noted that the document raised questions and did not encourage practical work.
Moscow Will Have to Take US Policies into Account
“The content of the new nuclear doctrine (the so-called Nuclear Posture Review) released by the United States on February 2 has provoked our deep disappointment. The confrontational and anti-Russian nature of this document strikes the eye. We can state with regret that the United States explains its policies for large-scale boost of nuclear weapons by referring to modernization of the nuclear forces in Russia and alleged increasing role of nuclear weapons in the Russian doctrine statements. We are accused of lowering the nuclear threshold and of conducting some ‘aggressive’ behavior,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a Saturday statement on the NPR.
Moscow suggested that the NPR questioned Russia’s right to self-defense when countering aggression in situations critical for the country’s existence.
“Of course, we will have to take into account the approaches introduced by Washington and take all necessary measures to ensure own security,” the statement pointed out.
The projects on creation of low-yield weapons for sea-based cruise missiles and low-yield warhead for ballistic missiles carried by Trident II submarines, mentioned in the new US nuclear doctrine, represent the most danger, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted, adding that nuclear weapons with such characteristics are designed as “battlefield weapons.”
The ministry also suggested that the United States was misleading the global community by saying that the new NPR would not lower the threshold of nuclear weapons use.
“Even more dangerous is the belief of the US military experts and other specialists in the sphere of national security, emerging from the pages of the nuclear doctrine, in their ability to reliably simulate the development of conflicts, in which they allow usage of ‘low-yield’ nuclear warheads. For us, the opposite is clear: significantly lowered ‘threshold conditions’ may lead to a missile-nuclear war even during low-intensity conflicts,” the Russian ministry stressed.
Moscow expressed deep concern over the fact that in its NPR, the United States allowed for the possibility of using nuclear weapons in “extreme circumstances,” which, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, are not limited to military scenarios.
“Washington’s practically ‘adjustable’ approach to the use of nuclear weapons is concerning. The possibility of its use in the case of ‘extreme circumstances’ is declared, which the doctrine’s authors do not limit to military scenarios,” the statement read.
The US Nuclear Posture Review describes military scenarios in a rather unclear manner, thus allowing the United States to consider practically any case of military force use as a reason for carrying out a nuclear strike on those who it calls “aggressors,” the document continued.
“If all this is not an increase of the nuclear weapons factor in the doctrine, then what does the United States mean when it uses this notion about Russia?” the statement pointed out, referring to the US statement on the increasing role of nuclear weapons in the Russian military doctrine.
Groundless Accusations
The Russian Foreign Ministry categorically refuted all the allegations against it, made in the US nuclear doctrine.
According to the ministerial statement, “the US document is overfilled with different anti-Russia cliches starting from far-fetched accusations of ‘aggressive behavior’ and different kinds of ‘meddling’ and finishing with baseless accusations of ‘violations’ of a whole range of arrangements in the sphere of arms control.”
“Such peremptory cliches have recently been replicated by Washington without a pause. We consider this as an unfair attempt to shift on others the responsibility for the degradation of the situation in the field of international and regional security and the imbalance of arms control mechanisms, resulting from a series of irresponsible steps taken by the United States itself,” the ministry added.
The Russian Foreign Ministry called Washington’s statements saying that Moscow refuses to further decrease its nuclear capabilities yet another “falsification.”
The US nuclear doctrine said that Russia allegedly demonstrates lowering threshold for its first-use of nuclear weapons through statements of the country’s officials.
Reacting to this statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted that these accusations against Russia had nothing to do with reality.
“The military doctrine of the Russian Federation clearly limits the use of nuclear weapons to two hypothetical and purely defensive scenarios: only in response to aggression with the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction against Russia and (or) our allies, and also — the second scenario – in case of use of conventional weapons, but only when the very existence of our state is threatened,” the ministerial statement read.
The Russian ministry emphasized Moscow’s openness for discussion of various issues, related to strengthening international security.
“We have directed the attention [of various players] including the United States to the fact, that settling key strategic stability problems, such as unilateral and unrestricted deployment of the US global missile defense system, implementation of the ‘global strike’ concept, the US denial to ratify the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and refusal to rule out possibility of deploying weapons in space, would contribute to creating the needed conditions for moving on the path of nuclear disarmament,” the statement pointed out.
Moreover, Moscow reiterated its commitment to obligations under various international treaties.
“Russia strictly complies with its obligations under all the international agreements. We fully implement the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies,” the statement read.
The statement also noted that Moscow had not in any way violated its obligations under the 2011 Vienna Document of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on increasing security and confidence-building measures, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
“As for the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe [CFE], Russia could not have violated this document, because it had suspended its participation in the agreement back in 2007. This has been done because the Treaty, created during the era of confrontation between two military and political blocs, the Warsaw Treaty Organization and NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization], does not fit in today’s reality, because one of the blocs was dismissed long ago, while the other one, on the contrary, has been increasing its potential and expanding its ‘geography,'” the document pointed out.
This new reality has been reflected in the Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE-II), which NATO allies led by the United States refused to ratify, the statement noted.
China has expressed firm opposition to a recent US government report describing Beijing as a potential nuclear rival, also calling on Washington to reduce its much larger nuclear arsenal and join in efforts to promote regional stability.
Casting China as “a major challenge to US interests in Asia,” the 74-page US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) report said the US strategy for China was designed to prevent Beijing from mistakenly concluding that any use of nuclear weapons, however limited, was acceptable.
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang condemned the US report on Sunday and said his country exercised utmost restraint in developing nuclear capabilities and kept its nuclear arsenal at the “minimum level” required for national security.
The official Xinhua news agency cited Ren as saying that Beijing would resolutely stick to the peaceful development of nuclear weapons and pursue a national defense policy that was defensive in nature. It also added that under no circumstances would China use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states or nuclear-weapon-free zones.
The Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman called on the US — which possesses the world’s largest nuclear weapons arsenal — to conform to the irreversible world trend of peace and development rather than run in the opposite direction.
“We hope the US will abandon a Cold War mentality and earnestly shoulder its special and primary responsibility for its own nuclear disarmament, understand correctly China’s strategic intentions, and take a fair view on China’s national defense and military development,” Ren added.
China has the world’s fifth-largest nuclear arsenal, with 300 warheads, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The US and Russia each possess about 7,000 warheads, or about 20 times as many as Beijing.
Before he became US president, Donald Trump did a lot of China-bashing particularly in matters of trade; but since assuming office, Trump has taken a softer line on China and tried to cultivate a relationship with the Chinese leadership.
Recent newspaper obituaries and articles on the late Gene Sharp are a classic case of misinformation, and a good example of why so many people don’t trust the mainstream news.
Far from being a promoter of democracy through Gandhian non-violence, Gene Sharp made an entire career out of US/CIA regime change operations, from Yugoslavia to Venezuela to Ukraine to Syria.
His “color revolutions” all had the same formula — phony grass roots organizations, funded and advised by US government aid, suddenly appearing in public squares; covert operations making it look like the demonstrators were being attacked by government forces, and lavish coverage from Western news outlets calling for the toppling of the “evil dictator” responsible for killing his own people.
Gandhi would have rolled over in his grave if he saw the ends to which his philosophy was perverted by Gene Sharp.
Violence always lurked beneath his high-sounding but underhanded destabilization and coup campaigns.
Sharp was an agent and accomplice of the CIA in grossly illegal attacks on sovereign nations all around the world. He should be condemned, not praised.
MOSCOW – Frants Klintsevich, first deputy chairman of the Russian upper house’s Committee on Defense and Security, believes that the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) allows for another mass murder of civilians with the use of nuclear weapons similar to the atomic bombings of Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945.
“The whole world remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US nuclear doctrine does not taboo the repetition of such things, and this is the most concerning thing,” Klintsevich said in a statement on Saturday, as quoted by his press service.
The recently issued Nuclear Posture Review significantly boosts the confrontation aspect of the US foreign policy, basing its policies not on cooperation with Russia in this area, but on the rivalry with Moscow, the lawmaker pointed out.
By endorsing this nuclear doctrine, including multiple “ideological injections,” the United States stakes on undermining global strategic balance for its own benefit, at the same time trying to depict Russia as the main reason for modernizing US nuclear forces, Klintsevich added.
The lawmaker noted that the United States had halted the strategic dialogue on nuclear risks with Russia using the Crimea referendum as a pretext, and had switched subsequently to groundless accusations against Moscow, as well as violations of various agreements.
The new US Nuclear Posture Review has become Washington’s reaction to the changing global environments, Klintsevich suggested. The situation on the Korean peninsula has shown that the United States cannot feel its full dominance even in the conflict with Pyongyang, the lawmaker pointed out.
The 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review also envisages short-term plans to modify existing submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) warheads to provide a low-yield option pursue a modern nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) in the long run.
Oleg Morozov, a member of the Russian upper house’s International Affairs Committee, called the US nuclear doctrine “demagogic” as on the one hand, the United States demonstrated peacefulness while accusing Russia of preparing for a nuclear strike, on the other hand.
Morozov also called the US Nuclear Posture Review a declaration of “a new round of the Cold War.”
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States during the final stage of World War II remains the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history. The bombings left over 100,000 people killed and thousands of others injured.
After the end of the Cold War, the United States has seen a decrease in its weapons arsenal, particularly, due to the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty between Washington and Moscow. US President Donald Trump, however, has repeatedly vowed to build up the US nuclear arsenal.
A majority of Democrats now have a favorable view of former President George W. Bush — and three times as many Democrats have “a great deal” of trust in the FBI as Republicans do.
Oh, how easily people forget. It would be difficult to find a greater indicator of the fickle nature of politics or the hypocrisy of the party faithful than these two polls.
Democrats find Donald Trump so utterly loathsome that the man who illegally launched the catastrophic Iraq War, and signed the Patriot Act – stripping Americans of their privacy in the name of fighting terrorism – is enjoying the rehabilitation of his image in the eyes of the party that so vehemently opposed him all those years he was in office.
Loathsome as Trump may be, his sins thus far don’t come close to the list of atrocities committed by Bush. In fact, Trump’s sins haven’t even come close to those committed by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, whose “humanitarian” bombing, to take one example, helped to utterly destroy Libya — once the richest country in Africa, now a failed state and a haven for the slave trade.
The only thing that changes from one US administration to the next is the packaging and rhetoric. Human nature being what it is, people respond to the packaging far more than they do the policy. That kind of twisted and dishonest partisanship makes it easy for Democrats (or Republicans) to shout “war criminal!” at one man and cheer on another for doing essentially the same thing on a different day.
Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist and the author of divisive books the End of History and the Last Man, wrote in 2015: “Compared to Donald Trump, George W. Bush looks like a paragon of statesmanship”.
The View co-host Joy Behar, a supposedly dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who has written a whole book about her hatred of Trump, gushed last year: “I love George Bush now!” Behar’s colleague on the panel Sunny Hostin praised the “more thoughtful” Bush for not instituting a Muslim travel ban after the 9/11 attacks. Evidently starting wars and actually killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims is “thoughtful” and a lesser sin than temporarily banning their entry into your country.
What has Bush done now to deserve such outpourings of admiration? Not much, really. All he had to do was offer some tepid criticism of Trump’s presidency a few times. He said he wasn’t fond of the “racism” and “name-calling” of the Trump era — and suddenly, we’re all supposed to be nostalgic for the Bush years. He also paints nice portraits and rescued a dog, more deeds which seem to have helped absolve him of his sins in the eyes of liberals like Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel.
Polls like these prove what level-headed people have known forever: There really is not much difference, morally speaking, between Democrats and Republicans — despite both parties trying to pass themselves off as paragons of decency. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not painting all Democrats or Republicans with the same brush, but your average partisan is more than willing to whip out the rose-tinted glasses while trying to rationalize support for their preferred candidate — who oftentimes is incredibly similar to other options.
When it comes to Bush, it isn’t just his military misadventures and war crimes Democrats seem to have forgotten either. What about his inefficient and arguably racist response to Hurricane Katrina? Or the CIA’s horrendous torture regime overseen by his administration? Bush’s detrimental environmental policies were as disastrous as Trump’s are, but those are seemingly forgotten, too. Then there’s the attacks on the media. Bush might espouse the importance of the press these days, but he wasn’t shy about bombing journalists during his tenure in office. These are not things you easily forget if your opposition to them is sincere.
As journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Twitter, Democrats’ newfound love for the FBI is just as confusing as their Bush nostalgia. The FBI is an institution which has been targeting “young, vulnerable Muslims” with learning disabilities and mental health issues to “entrap them by leading them into terror plots and sending them to prison for decades,” Greenwald wrote on Twitter.
“When the FBI is once again seen as a vehicle to punish its political enemies,” Young Turks journalist Michael Tracey wrote, Republican opinion on the agency will “flip overnight”. We know this is true already. When James Comey announced the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, Comey was cheered by Republicans for that decision and despised by Clinton clan devotees. Now that the FBI is investigating alleged collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials, suddenly the Democrats have discovered a newfound faith in the agency. Because reality doesn’t matter, policy doesn’t matter — sticking with ‘your guy’ and winning is what matters.
The fact that Democrats find it so easy to whitewash Bush, his terrible domestic policies and his murderous foreign policy highlights the near-total absence of integrity and intellectual honesty in politics today — and none of that has anything to do with Donald Trump.
In the days since Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency mistakenly issued an emergency alert warning of an inbound ballistic missile to over a million people, many of us in Hawaii have been thinking a lot about weapons and war.
The reaction to the January 13 false alarm has ranged from the deliberative (state legislature hearings) to the deranged (death threats against the unnamed employee who clicked the wrong option and triggered the scare). There has been discussion of the need for a better alert system and a faster response time in case of false alarms.
Critics have pointed out a lack of public preparedness, while others argue that it’s a moot point. Still others see the missile scare as a call to load up on guns, iodine tablets, and MREs in preparation for a post-apocalypse Hawaii.
Everyone agrees that the frightening mishap should serve as a wake-up call not just for Hawaii but the entire country. The debate over how much duct tape and Vienna sausage to keep in stock in case of a nuclear attack overlooks the U.S. role in perpetuating a system that terrorizes people around the world.
Hawaii is home to the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), the oldest and largest of America’s unified commands. Under PACOM, soldiers and weapons from every branch of the military are stationed, tested, trained, and cycled through Hawaii to conflicts and flashpoints from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan, the Philippines, the Korean peninsula, and beyond.
The military’s financial influence over the Aloha State is enormous, accounting for $7.8 billion in spending in 2015 and employing over 64,000 defense personnel plus many thousands more who are economically dependent on the military presence.
In 2014, Hawaii ranked second in the nation (below Virginia) as the state with the highest defense spending as a percentage of its GDP. That same year, Honolulu County was in the top 10 (seventh place) for defense contracts. In 2017, Hawaii maintained its second highest ranking (nearly 10 percent) for defense spending as a portion of GDP.
Hawaii-based troops participate in everything from assault missions in Iraq and fighting insurgents in the Philippines to war games and military training on the Korean peninsula and Japan. It conducts these operations from Singapore to Australia and the Arctic. As such, Hawaii plays an enormous role in U.S. global military operations.
Increased military activities, many of them executed or advanced by the U.S., also leads to heightened tensions, internal conflict, invasions, and occupations and wars with both direct and indirect support for actual bombs dropped on actual people.
Pointing this out however, is not likely to be met with much enthusiasm or support. According to a recent NPR/PBS poll, 87 percent of respondents reported having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military compared with confidence in the media (at a tepid 30 percent).
Although members of Congress and the president complain that the Pentagon has been “gutted,” the United States continues to outspend all other countries by a long shot—nearly as much as the next nine largest military budgets (seven of which are close allies or strategic partners) combined.
The United States also remain the world’s largest arms dealer, accounting for roughly one-third of all global arms exports, with sales increasing more than 20 percent between 2007 and 2011.
In Trump’s first year, he unleashed a $60 million Tomahawk missile attack on a Syrian air base, dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal in Afghanistan, and insulted his way to the brink of a nuclear war against North Korea.
Meanwhile Trump is pushing to expand U.S. plans to modernize its nuclear weapons arsenal at a staggering projected cost of $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years. Trump, who reportedly asked, “If we have [nuclear weapons], why can’t we use them,” wants to develop “more usable” nuclear weapons deceptively called “mini-nukes” in order to create a “more credible” deterrent.
The false alarm that Hawaii recently experienced was terrifying, but it pales in comparison to the brutal reality other people experience when actual bombs fall. This militarism, perhaps America’s most destructive addiction, pours money into Hawaii’s coffers—but at a price. The real wake-up call has nothing to do with the lack of preparedness and everything to do with America’s own role in fostering insecurity in the world at large.
Both ‘arguments’ are framed in such a way so as to give the ‘impression’ that Serious Debate is taking place.
Indeed, the subtitle for each might be: Be prepared for intelligent discussions on the moral and legal and ethical consequences of using nuclear or other bombs to annihilate a sovereign country. And its people.
But no. Most of the pros and cons are the same. Most are based on the general assumption that this bombing will take place and it will be justified on every level known to man and that it would be silly to waste everyone’s time talking about things that are already completely and totally known and agreed upon.
So let us further agree not to bore each other with threats of moral and ethical and legal discussions. We are done and done. Had enough. We are moving on. Time for action. Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Agreed: Nuclear action will take place.
So now the authors are free to cut right to the core issue and discuss in the most sanitized words possible the fact that people will die. Perhaps many people. Perhaps even millions. Which is a shame. To be sure.
But, fear not. Most of the dead will be ‘over there.’ As in not here. As in ‘my, isn’t that horrible. Too bad they forced us to do that to them.’ As in, ‘if these poor people did not want to die, why didn’t they do something about it!’
The bottom line is that hundreds of thousands of people will die within days of a U.S. attack on North Korea and millions more could perish in the war that will inevitably follow. President Trump owes it to our allies in the region and our troops on the ground to adopt a smarter, more cautious approach.
Which is not to say the US should not make a ‘preemptive’ strike. It is to say the leader should be vigilant as to the effect such a move might have on US business partners throughout the world. He does not owe anything to the millions who could actually do all the perishing. We have agreed: Such deaths are inevitable.
Wikipedia: In nuclear strategy, a first strike is a preemptive surprise attack employing overwhelming force. … The preferred methodology is to attack the opponent’s strategic nuclear weapon facilities (missile silos, submarine bases, bomber airfields), command and control sites, and storage depots first.
FP again:
Even now, casualties could still be drastically reduced by a crash resilience program. This should involve clearing out and hardening with jacks, props, and steel beams the basements of buildings of all sizes; promptly stocking necessities in the 3,257 official shelters and sign-posting them more visibly; and, of course, evacuating as many as possible beforehand (most of the 20 million or so at risk would be quite safe even just 20 miles further to the south). The United States, for its part, should consider adding vigorous counterbattery attacks to any airstrike on North Korea.
And again, the argument is presented as though actually discussing whether the US has any moral responsibility to assist the millions of people in their quest to stay alive should the US take these actions.
Agreed: The US should sell more military equipment to South Korea so that they might better protect themselves in the aftermath of the inevitable attack of North Korea by the US.
Moving forward, we should support and empower the savvy U.S. foreign service officers and civil servants who are working to strangle the Kim regime’s lifelines of money, oil, and contraband.
Well, yes, but could it not be argued that many of those so strangled might be, you know, actual people?
Interesting thought. So in the end we have been presented with not one but two choices, really. To bomb innocent people or to starve them to death.
That is the democratic way! Two choices are always better than one!
But wait! We are human beings! We are not animals. In truth, we have no choice but to pick the more ‘humane’ alternative. Even the UN has agreed. The entire world has agreed. We have to do something and we could simply not bear witness to something as utterly inhumane as forced starvation of an innocent people.
Agreed: Bombing is most certainly preferable to death by starvation.
But, then again, what do ‘ordinary people’ know about mass, premeditated starvation. What do ‘ordinary people’ know about mass, premeditated starvation perpetrated by one regime, in one country after another, for decades and decades?
We can certainly be preemptively sorry for the death and destruction -whether by bombing or starvation- that has been and will be rained down upon millions of innocent people in the world, but Billy’s math marks are in the toilet and we need a certain level of calm if the stock market is to maintain its current levels and gosh if those darn drugs don’t work nearly as well as the used to.’
But clearly we have shown that our hands are not tied. We are making real choices. Indeed we are making humane choices. Indeed we have devoted an enormous amount of time thinking about what is best for the innocent people of Korea. And elsewhere.
Agreed: Nuclear war is not so bad after all.
Or, “Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you.”
Agreed: What about those Oprah for President tweets! Wow. Now that is a story with legs!
In 2011, an Alliance bomber exterminated his family in Sorman, Libya.
Speaking at the Rimini meeting in the summer of 2017, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg repeated several times that NATO works for peace and stability, with a shamelessness equal to the impunity enjoyed by the organization and its members.
To which NATO country did the bomber that exterminated the family of Khaled Al Hamedi on June 20, 2011 in Sorman, Libya belong?
“Only the NATO Alliance knows the country in question, and will not reveal it,” replies the Belgian lawyer Jan Fermon who represents Al Hamedi. The lifeless bodies of Khaled Al Hamedi’s pregnant wife, his children and other relatives and friends were removed from the rubble. Seven months – from March to September 2011 – the operation called “Unified Protector,” lasted in Libya, initiated thanks to the strategic use of false news and in the name of a new and instrumental international theory, the “responsibility to protect.”
The joint actions of NATO from the sky and the “rebels”, its allies on the ground, certainly resulted in thousands of dead and wounded among civilians. Think of the siege against Sirte and Bani Walid, the destruction of Tawergha (a city of Libyans of African origin, killed or deported by the armies of Misrata), the sub-Saharan workers who vanished while others were found among the bodies of the dead caught in the vortex of racist violence.
In July 2011, Tripoli presented a list with over a thousand names of victims. The process of assessment and verification of civilian casualties was interrupted by the “rebels” taking power, who then sabotaged all body count efforts.
Material and moral damages suffered by almost all victims would not have recognition or compensation even if international justice actually worked, rather than exempt the powerful as it does. But at least for certain events, legal avenues can be utilized and Khaled Al Hamedi embarked on this path of legal struggle in 2012 – so far without success.
He also created the NATO Victims Association (www.anvwl.com). The latest development was on November 23, 2017 when the Court of Appeal of Brussels (NATO is based in Belgium) responded negatively to the appeal of lawyer Jan Fermon: “The immunity of NATO has been confirmed.
A lost opportunity for a great step forward in the application of international law on human rights and international humanitarian law. But we will go on.” To a Martian, the immunity of an organization that bombards and therefore has the power of life and death throughout the world might seem strange. But so its founders decided with the Ottawa Treaty of 1951.
Immunity is combined with silence, and Fermon can not therefore act against the unknown country responsible for the bombing operation on Sorman. Khaled Al Hamedi called for Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for every citizen the right to access a court. A right, however, that may be subject to limitations, and the Court of Appeal reiterated it.
But would it not be able to raise the illegality of the NATO intervention in Libya, which went far beyond the dubious 1973 resolution of the Security Council that restricted the mandate to protect civilians?
“Yes,” the lawyer answers. “Launching such lawsuit on the political side makes things more difficult than if you stay on the ground of individual right. And then, even if the war were legal, the deliberate bombing of Sorman is still a war crime.”
So why not appeal to the International Criminal Court (ICC-CPI), however notoriously partial?
“The Security Council Resolution 1970, in effect, formally entrusted the ICC with all crimes committed in Libya; but it is very clear that it was aimed only at Gaddafi. And then, the prosecutor often does not even initiate the investigation. There are very strong pressures.”
Therefore Khaled will perhaps adhere to the European Court of Human Rights, or try again with Belgian justice. So far, all attempts made to try the winners of the wars of aggression (the “supreme international crime” according to the definition given at Nuremberg) when they are conducted by the NATO-Gulf Axis, have been useless.
At most, and not in many cases, there have been provisions for small compensation for the suffering of the “collateral damage” of war, the surviving victims – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
This is why, according to Jan Fermon, “the fight against impunity is above all a struggle by the peoples. It is political, even if it has to be translated into juridical principles.”
Note: This article first appeared in Italian in Il Manifesto
Newly published declassified files reveal the UK provided financial, material and practical support to jihadist fighters before and during the Soviet campaign, in what may well represent the country’s largest covert overseas operation since 1945.
On December 27 1979, the Soviet Union started a campaign in Afghanistan at the request of the country’s government, in response to a violent rebellion by extreme Islamic opposition elements. The conflict quickly became an international effort, with thousands flocking from the Middle East and North Africa to assist Afghan Muslims in a “holy war” against the Soviet Army.
American support for these fighters, under the auspices of Operation Cyclone, is well-documented. While supportive of these efforts, then-UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other officials either did not mention, or actively denied, the country’s involvement in the conflict.
However, newly published declassified files reveal Britain played a significant role in the financing, arming and training of mujahideen fighters before and during the Soviet operation, going so far as to help execute sabotage missions in the Soviet Union itself.
On July 3 1979, US President Jimmy Carter signed a covert directive that provided secret aid to violent opposition fighters in Afghanistan. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, later explained, the aid was sent in the full knowledge it would prompt the government to request Soviet military assistance.
“That secret operation was an excellent idea. It [drew] the Russians into the Afghan trap. The day the Soviets crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: we now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow [carried[ on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire,” Brzezinski told Counterpunch in 1998.
However, the files indicate the US was not alone – Britain likewise covertly supported the Afghan rebels before the Soviet invasion.
On December 17 1979, 10 days prior to the Soviet Army’s entrance to the country, US Vice President Walter Mondale convened a meeting in the White House – officials agreed to discuss with Britain “the possibility of improving the financing, arming and communications of the rebel forces to make it as expensive as possible for the Soviets to continue their efforts.”
The UK duly agreed to train the jihadist resistance in Afghanistan, and send military specialists to support their efforts.
While the operation was carried out entirely in secret, Thatcher effectively acknowledged the policy – and its motivations – on January 28 the next year, during a parliamentary debate.
“If [the Soviet] hold on Afghanistan is consolidated, the Soviet Union will have vastly extended its borders with Iran, acquired a border over 1,000 miles long with Pakistan, and advanced to within 300 miles of the Straits of Hormuz, which controls the Persian Gulf.”
The files reveal while the US provided far more in financial and material terms to the Afghan jihad, the UK played a direct combat role, with covert British forces – in particular the SAS – practically supporting resistance groups.
Current and former SAS officers trained numerous jihadi forces at MI6 and CIA bases in Saudi Arabia and Oman, teaching them sabotage, reconnaissance, attack planning, arson, and how to use explosive devices, heavy artillery such as mortars, and attack aircraft, among other things.
The SAS also, in conjunction with US special forces, training Pakistan’s Special Services Group (SSG), which led insurrectionary operations in Afghanistan, in the hope officers could impart their learned expertise directly to jihadists in Afghanistan.
Mujahideen were also trained in the UK – snuck into the country as tourists, they spent three-weeks at a time in camps situated in Scotland and the North of England. A key trainer was Brigadier General Rahmatullah Safi, former senior officer in the royal Afghan army who, who’d lived in the UK since the 1970s.
He trained as many as 8,000, continuing to live in the UK well into the 1990s, when he was regarded by the United Nations as the Taliban’s key representative in Europe, by then the undisputed rulers of Afghanistan.
Another key individual supported by the UK was Hadji Abdul Haq, of the Hizb-i-Islami group. He was provided 600 ‘Blowpipe’ anti-aircraft missiles missiles and maps of Soviet military positions by MI6, and introduced to the CIA.
Unlike many other jihadist groups, Haq had no qualms about targeting innocent civilians, arranging the infamous September 1984 bombing at Kabul airport, which killed 28, and attacks on hotels.
Despite this, in March 1986 he was welcomed to the UK as a guest of Thatcher. An official spokesperson explained at the time the Prime Minister had “a degree of sympathy with the Afghan cause” as they were “trying to rid their country of invaders, which you cannot say of the ANC or PLO.”
In reality, far in excess of a “degree of sympathy” with Afghan fighters, by that point the UK’s role in the conflict entailed directly military involvement not only in Afghanistan, but the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union.
MI6 organized and executed “scores” of terror strikes in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, on the basis Soviet Army troop supplies flowed from these areas – the first direct Western attacks on the Soviet Union since the 1950s. MI6 also funded the spread of extremist Islamic literature in the Soviet republics.
Soviet forces would eventually leave Afghanistan February 15 1989, leaving the government of Mohammed Najibullah to be overthrown in 1992. By 1996, the Taliban had taken control of the country, during which time strong restrictions were imposed on women, public executions were reinstituted, and international aid was prevented from entering Afghanistan, leading to thousands of deaths through starvation.
Consequences Ignored
The US/UK policy had significant ramifications not only for the future of Afghanistan, but the world. During the conflict, many individuals funded, armed and trained by the West formed militant groups, which in years to come would carry out terrorist attacks across the Middle East, Europe and North America.
For instance, the globally infamous Al-Qaeda was led and peopled by former members of the anti-Soviet jihadist resistance – in a July 8 2005 column for The Guardian, former UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook noted the group’s leader, the now-slain Osama Bin Laden, was “throughout the 1980s” armed by “the CIA, and funded by the Saudis, to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.”
“Al-Qaeda, literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians,” Cook wrote.
Missing from Cook’s list of culpable parties were the British, and MI6. While there is no evidence of direct financial or material support given to Bin Laden by London in the files, he is known to have been granted entry to the UK on many occasions through the 1980s, speaking at several mosques and Islamic centers.
Moreover, several camps used by the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war, such as the infamous Tora Bora,were constructed with British funding – these camps would subsequently serve as training centers and planning hubs for domestic and international terror strikes by Al-Qaeda.
The weaponry supplied by the UK to extremist forces also assisted the efforts of extremist groups in Afghanistan and elsewhere. For instance, Blowpipe missiles have regularly been found in Taliban and Al-Qaeda arms-caches across the country since the 2001 US-led invasion – as late as 2010, the mainstream media was reporting the shoulder-fired missiles were a major threat to US troops.
In essence, the UK both directly and indirectly assisted in the global rise of Islamist terrorism in the wake of the conflict – were it not for their arms, supplies, training and funding, scores of extremists would lack the means and infrastructure to plan and conduct major atrocities.
A recent report has exposed that two Israeli agents were involved in the car bomb explosion in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, which slightly wounded a member of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, earlier this month.
According to a report published by Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Akhbar newspaper on Monday, the pair was aided by two locals in the assassination operation against Mohammed Hamdan on January 14. They left Lebanon using Georgian, Swedish and Iraqi passports.
The report added that Lebanese security officials have now managed to identify the two Israeli officers, obtain their photographs and copies of their identity documents, the date of their entry into and exit from Lebanon, their respective roles in the operation and the nationality they used to operate under disguise.
Lebanese intelligence officials, requesting anonymity, told al-Akhbar that one of the Israeli agents was a man holding a duel Swedish-Iraqi citizenship, while another was a Georgian woman working for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.
The officials went on to say that, Mossad kept Hamdan under surveillance for more than seven months.
About six months ago, Hamdan lived in the Sirub district of Sidon, located 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the capital, Beirut, and a Lebanese national, identified as Muhammad H, lived in a nearby neighborhood.
Mossad then assigned its agent to closely monitor the high-ranking Hamas figure.
After that, Hamdan moved to al-Boustan al-Kabir area of Sidon, and the second Lebanese national, identified as 38-year-old Ahmad Baytiyah and strongly believed to be main suspect in the assassination bid, tracked him.
Baytiyah rented a warehouse near the house of the Hamas leader under the pretext of storing clothes.
The four assailants flew out of Lebanon to different destinations after the failed assassination operation. The two Lebanese nationals fled to Turkey.
Baytiyah was arrested by Turkish authorities and extradited to Lebanon at the request of Prime Minister Saad Hariri earlier this week, while the other managed to flee Turkey to Romania.
Hamdan suffered a leg injury in the car bomb explosion. He was taken to a local hospital for treatment.
The explosion destroyed the vehicle and caused damage to a nearby building, sending black smoke rising above the city.
Firefighters rushed to the scene to put out the flames, while security forces cordoned off the area.
A reading of the evidence presented by Vanessa Beeley regarding the UK FCO & USAID multi-million-financed White Helmet organisation embedded with terrorist factions inside Syria, also funded by the same hostile governments.
By Daniel Ken | TCW Defending Freedom | May 20, 2023
Over more than two decades in the classroom I’ve taught thousands of children and teenagers: some were lovely and lots were hard-working. On the other hand, quite a number were disruptive and argumentative, and a number were violently opposed to learning. But I don’t think I’ve taught more than a handful of kids who could be properly described as having the symptoms of ADHD. And that handful could just as easily have had something else wrong with them. Because here’s the thing: despite the fact that the best part of a million children are medicated for the condition, ADHD doesn’t exist.
There’s no definitive medical test for it, experts can’t agree on what it actually means, and most of the symptoms disappear if the child in question has lots of exercise, good diet and, crucially, a set of clear behavioural boundaries, preferably set early in childhood and, for the boys at least, enforced by a stable adult male living at home. … continue
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