Israel is exploiting the war in Gaza to deny Palestinians access to their West Bank land
By Fareed Taamallah | MEMO | December 18, 2023
Abla Lafi is 59 and from the village of Turmus Ayya, north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She is passionate when speaking about her olive groves, which the Israeli army and illegal Jewish settlers prevent the villagers from harvesting.
“This is our own land,” she said defiantly. “How dare they prevent us from entering it and picking olives from the trees as if we were thieves? We planted them with our own hands. The settlers are the thieves and we are the owners of the land.”
October and November make up the main olive harvest season for Palestinian farmers. Thousands of families depend on a good crop for their livelihood. Around 45 per cent of agricultural land in the occupied West Bank is planted with an estimated 10 million olive trees, producing between 32-35,000 metric tons of olive oil every year.
This year, due to the war on Gaza, settlers and the Israeli army are preventing thousands of farmers from reaching their olive groves. Last month, the occupation state’s extreme far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on the Israeli government to prohibit Palestinians in the West Bank from harvesting their olive trees. According to Smotrich, Israel needs to establish “sterile security zones” with no Palestinian presence around settlements and settler-only roads. It looks as if the Israeli occupation forces are implementing this policy in order to block Palestinians from getting to their own land.
“Extensive damage to land and trees and stringent movement and access restrictions by Israeli forces hamper access to olive trees, especially those close to settlements,” the UN has reported. “At the end of November, an initial estimate indicates [that] 800,000 dunums of land have not been harvested due to Israeli settler violence and access restrictions.”
“Olives not only have economic importance to Palestinians, but are also symbolic of their roots, resilience and attachment to the land. For the Palestinians, the olive tree represents their spirit and identity.”
“We used to go to work on the land with joy and love for all family members, men, women, children and animals, because cultivation means belonging to the land, a feeling which we pass on to our children and grandchildren,” explained Lafi. “The olive season is like Eid for us; we celebrate its blessings with joy and happiness, even the taste of its food is different.” However, she added, since the establishment of the illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, the locals have lived through the olive season in an atmosphere of fear, anxiety and terror from the settlers and the army. “The anxiety and sadness have increased this year due to the war on Gaza.”
The head of the agricultural committee in the village, Nidal Rabie, confirmed that since the war against the Palestinians in Gaza started, the settlers and settlement guards have stopped local residents from reaching their olive groves in the plain adjacent to the illegal settlements built on lands confiscated from the village. “They expelled us as recently as today,” said Rabie. “We tried to access our land, but they came and expelled us at gunpoint.”
The 61-year-old Palestinian farmer who holds US citizenship, added: “We are now in the middle of December trying to pick our olives to no avail. Every farmer who tries to pick olives is shot at. If we wait any longer, the olives will be ruined and the quality of the oil will become low and inedible.”
Although the settlers and soldiers obstruct the olive harvest every year, explained Rabie, sometimes the Palestinians succeed in harvesting at least part within hours and days determined by the Israeli army. “This year the soldiers prevented us from harvesting any olives in the plain. I personally own 30 dunums that I am not able to harvest at all.”
A few days ago, the army even stormed Turmus Ayya at night and confiscated 50 vehicles belonging to the villagers, because they were used in agricultural work. Altogether, around 2,500 dunums belonging to the villagers but adjacent to the illegal settlements have not been allowed to be harvested. “They would have produced around 70,000 litres of olive oil,” he added.
Palestinian farmers in the village are also prevented from cultivating their own land next to which illegal settlements have been built. Mishal Al-Quq, 43, said that he used to live in the US and went back to Palestine two years ago to take care of the land and cultivate it. “This year we are facing a big problem in growing wheat in the plain east of the village as we are prohibited from working there by the occupation army, but now is the season for planting seeds. We must plant quickly, otherwise it will be too late.” Wheat is very important and is a basic crop for the villagers, he said. “We must grow it.” This was confirmed by Rabie, who pointed out that he had bought wheat and barley seeds, but did not know whether he would be able to plant them or not.
The Israeli destruction of the olive groves unmasks a fact that not many in the West know about; it’s often heard that Israelis hold dual US citizenship, but we don’t hear so much about Palestinian Americans. It is estimated that between 45-60,000 Palestinian Americans live in the occupied West Bank, according to Reuters. However, this does not stop Israel from targeting them. They are treated by the apartheid state as Palestinians and have no “American” privileges. For instance, Israel prevents Palestinian Americans from entering the US from the West Bank, an apparent violation of a recent agreement in which citizens from the US and Israel can travel to the other country without a visa. According to Rabie, most of the residents of Turmus Ayya hold dual Palestinian and US citizenship, but the US government doesn’t provide any protection to the farmers. “Some villagers who hold American citizenship contacted the US Embassy and asked for protection to work on our own land. But the embassy said that it could only assist in securing travel to the United States. This would mean displacing us from our land in Turmus Ayya.”
Although the Biden administration has declared the intention to deny visas to violent settlers, Rabie doubts that it will happen. “This was only propaganda. Biden’s true position was clear when he said that if there was no Israel, the US would have to create one. This shows Washington’s collusion with Israel.”
Abla Lafi believes that the goal of Israeli “harassment” is to seize the Palestinian land close to the illegal settlements that were established on stolen land which contains olive trees that have been cultivated for hundreds of years. “They have no right or ownership over it,” she insisted. “We inherited the land from our ancestors and we should not be prevented from entering it. Although it is more difficult this year, we have been facing this same problem every year since the establishment of the first settlement, which I remember was Shilo, in 1978, when I was 14 years old. At the beginning, there were mobile homes and the road leading to them ran through our village. The roads were built on lands confiscated from Qaryut and Turmus Ayya, after which they began to spread like a cancer and descended from the hilltop on to our land in the plain and spread to the nearby villages.”
More settlements were built, such as Rachel, Adei Ad, Amichai and other random outposts inhabited by terrorists known as the hilltop youth, she added. “They began terrorising the people, shooting, destroying property and blocking the roads. Before those settlements were built, when I was a child, we used to live peacefully, plough and plant. I have beautiful memories of the different seasons of figs, olives and wheat that we used to grow.”
Rabie confirmed that settler crimes, the confiscation of land and the cutting down and burning of olive trees in his and other villages, have been carried out constantly by settlers and the Israeli army even before Israel’s latest war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The most ferocious attack by settlers happened on 21 June this year, when hundreds of settlers stormed the village killing Omar Qutain, burning dozens of houses and cars, and hundreds of olive trees and wheat fields, destroying the village. The Israeli army stood and watched, but did not intervene.
No indictment has been filed against anyone, and this is not an exceptional case. According to Yesh Din, out of a thousand cases regarding acts of violence committed by settlers between 2005 and 2021, 93 per cent were closed without an indictment.
“These attacks did not and will not stop farmers from continuing to work on their land,” said Rabie. “If we stop cultivating the land, the Israeli authorities will exploit that to claim that the land is no man’s land, confiscate it and give it to the settlers. They did this before.”
This was a reference to Israel’s use in 1979 of an Ottoman land law of 1858 which stipulates that if private land is not cultivated for three years in a row it becomes state property. “At which point Israel hands it over to the settlers.”
Abla Lafi is determined that these Israeli attacks and policies will not discourage Palestinian farmers from cultivating their land. “I love my land and I love the fertile plain. This is the land that was watered by the sweat of the farmers and the blood of the martyrs who fell defending it: Joda Awad shot dead by the Israeli army in 1988, and Khamis Abu Awad, who was killed by a settler in 1993 while ploughing the land. Minister Ziad Abu Ain was also martyred in the plain defending the land and so was, most recently, Omar Al-Qotain this summer. We cannot give up on the land that many died to defend. We will pass it on to our children.”
Ukraine joins NATO’s Arctic projects against Russia
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | DECEMBER 19, 2023
In a plea earlier this month to Republicans not to block further military aid to Ukraine, US President Joe Biden warned that if Russia is victorious, then President Vladimir Putin will not stop and will attack a NATO country. Biden’s remark has drawn a sharp rebuke from Putin when he said, “This is absolutely absurd. I believe that President Biden is aware of this, this is merely a figure of speech to support his incorrect strategy against Russia.”
Putin added that Russia has no interest in fighting with NATO countries, as they “have no territorial claims against each other” and Russia does not want to “sour relations with them.” Moscow senses that a new US narrative is struggling to be born out of the debris of the old narrative on Ukraine war.
To jog memory, on 24 February, during a White House press conference on the first day of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, Biden said western sanctions were designed not to prevent invasion but to punish Russia after invading “so the people of Russia know what he (Putin) has brought on them. That is what this is all about.”
A month later, on 26 March Biden, speaking in Warsaw, blurted out, “For God’s sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.” These and similar remarks that followed, especially from Britain, reflected a US strategy for regime change in Moscow, with Ukraine as the pivot.
This strategy dates back to the 1990s and was actually at the core of the expansion of NATO along Russia’s borders, from the Baltics to Bulgaria. The Syrian conflict and covert activities of US NGOs to foment unrest in Russia were offshoots of the strategy. At least since 2015 after the coup in Kiev, CIA was overseeing a secret intensive training programme for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. Succinctly put, the US set a trap for Russia to get it bogged down in a long insurgency, the presumption being the longer the Ukrainians can sustain the insurgency and keep Russian military bogged down, the more likely is the end of the Putin regime.
The crux of the matter today is that Russia defeated the US strategy and not only seized the initiative in the war but also rubbished the sanctions regime. The dilemma in the Beltway narrows down to how to keep Russia as an external enemy so that the West’s often fractious member states will continue to rally under US leadership.
What comes to mind is a sardonic remark by Soviet Academician Georgy Arbatov who was advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, to an elite group of senior US officials even as the curtain was coming down on the Cold War in 1987: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you -– we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”
Unless black humour in this cardinal truth is properly understood, the entire US strategy since the 1990s to rebuff the efforts of Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and early Putin to establish non-adversarial relations with the West cannot be grasped.
Put differently, if the US’ post-cold war Russia strategy has not worked, it is because of a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, Washington needs Russia as an enemy to provide internal unity within the western alliance, while on the other hand, it also needs Russia as a cooperative, subservient junior partner in the struggle against China.
The US hopes to draw down in Ukraine and stave off defeat by leaving behind a “frozen conflict” which it’s free to revisit later at a time of its choice, but in the meanwhile, is increasingly eyeing the Arctic lately as the new theatre to entrap Russia in a quagmire. The induction of Finland into NATO (and Sweden to follow) means that the unfinished business of Ukraine’s membership, which Russia thwarted, can be fulfilled by other means.
After meeting Biden at the White House last Tuesday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky headed for Oslo on October 13 on a fateful visit to forge his country’s partnership in NATO projects to counter Russia in the Arctic. In Oslo, Zelensky participated in a summit of the 5 Nordic countries to discuss “issues of cooperation in the field of defence and security.” The summit took place against the backdrop of the US reaching agreements with Finland and Sweden on the use of their military infrastructure by the Pentagon.
The big picture is that the US is encouraging Nordic countries to get Ukraine to participate in strengthening NATO’s Arctic borders. One may wonder what is the “additionality” that a decrepit military like Ukraine’s can bring into NATO. Herein hangs a tale. Simply put, although Ukraine has no direct access to the Arctic, it can potentially bring in an impressive capability to undertake subversive activities inside Russian territory in a hybrid war against Russia.
In a strange coincidence, the Pentagon recently prepared the Starlink satellite system for use in the Arctic, which was used by Ukrainian military for staging attacks on the Crimean Bridge, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and strategic assets on Russian territory. The US’ agreement with Finland and Sweden would give the Pentagon access to a string of naval and air bases and airfields as well as training and testing grounds along the Russian border.
Several hundred thousand Ukrainian citizens are presently domiciled in the Nordic countries who are open to recruitment for “an entire army of saboteurs like the one that Germany collected during the war between Finland and the USSR in 1939-1940 on the islands of Lake Ladoga,” as a Russian military expert told Nezavisimaya Gazeta recently.
Russia’s naval chief Admiral Nikolai Evmenov also pointed out recently that “the strengthening of the military presence of the united NATO armed forces in the Arctic is already an established fact, which indicates the bloc’s transition to practical actions to form military force instruments to deter Russia in the region.” In fact, Russia’s Northern Fleet is forming a marine brigade tasked with the fight against saboteurs to ensure the safety of the new Northern Sea Route, coastal military and industrial infrastructure in the Arctic.
Suffice to say, no matter Ukraine’s defeat in the US’ proxy war with Russia, Zelensky’s use for the US’ geo-strategy remains. From Oslo, Zelensky made an unannounced visit on December 14 to a US Army base in Germany. Analysts who see Zelensky as a spent force had better revise their opinion — that is, unless the power struggle in Kiev exacerbates and Zelensky gets overthrown in a coup or a colour revolution, which seems improbable so long as Biden is in the White House and Hunter Biden is on trial.
The bottom line is that Biden’s new narrative demonising Russia for planning an attack on NATO can be seen from multiple angles. At the most obvious level, it aims to hustle the Congress on the pending bill for $61 billion military aid to Ukraine. Of course, it also distracts attention from the defeat in the war. But, most important, the new narrative is intended to rally the US’ transatlantic allies who are increasingly disillusioned with the outcome of the war and nervous that US involvement in Europe may dwindle as it turns to Indo-Pacific.
When Putin reacts harshly that Biden’s new narrative is “absurd”, he is absolutely right insofar as Russia’s focus is on things far more important than waging a senseless continental war in Europe. After all, it was one of the founding fathers of the USA, James Monroe who said that a king without power is an absurdity.
Ex-US Airman on Depleted Uranium: ‘I Saw Disfigured Newborns & My Dad Dying From Cancer’
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 19.12.2023
It is only a matter of time before Ukraine uses depleted uranium ammunition on the battlefield, if it hasn’t already. The United States and United Kingdom sent the radioactive shells to the Zelensky regime earlier this year, and the rounds have been spotted in warehouses near the frontlines.
Following the costly failure of their “summer counteroffensive,” the Ukrainian military has begun desperately searching for “wonder weapons” to restore their battlefield fortunes.
Announcing the provision of DU rounds to Ukraine, Washington insisted in September that there’s nothing to worry about: the wonder-weapon is somewhat toxic, but overall harmless and fine. Rafael Grossi, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general, joined the chorus, asserting to the public that there are “no significant radiological consequences” from the use of depleted uranium shells.
These are barefaced lies, according to Damacio A. Lopez, a US Air Force veteran who founded the International Depleted Uranium Study Team and co-founded the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW).
“He [Grossi] is part of the team, part of the team that promotes this project, use of these weapons, he is part and parcel of the superpowers that use it and making excuses for it and trying to convince the public that this is not a problem, as they do repeatedly here in this country. You asked what the people thought about this. Well, they haven’t been getting accurate information. And I tried my best to get that information out in Uranium Battlefields and go in and talk to all these countries and try to explain what was going on.”
Damacio was one of the first Americans who raised the red flag about the disastrous consequences of the weapons. Since 1985, he has been seeking a global ban on depleted uranium arms, which are still not covered by international chemical or nuclear conventions, despite DU’s toxicity and radioactivity.
Sinister Black Cloud Over Socorro
Damacio was born in Socorro, a town in southern central New Mexico along the Rio Grande. Back in 1945, the Trinity nuclear test rocked the Jornada del Muerto Desert, only 36 miles southeast of his hometown. Damacio was only two years at that time, but later he became curious about radiation hazards.
The Trinity blast wasn’t the only US nuclear experiment in the region. In 1985, when Lopez visited his parents in Socorro during the Christmas holidays, the first thing he heard on his arrival was the sound of very loud explosions less than two miles from his house. Explosions occurred regularly, making dishes rattle and causing cracks in the walls. But even more alarming was a dark black cloud hovering over the town after the blasts.
“This was disturbing. And it wasn’t just my family. It was all the families in Socorro. From the middle of Socorro, the city park, to where the explosions had taken place, is two miles. That’s up. And the prevailing winds come over the community every time one of these bombs goes off. And of course, people were very concerned about what was going on. And my Mom asked me to look into this. And so I did. I contacted the Board of Regents of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, who are responsible for these explosions. Because they had been testing different kinds of weapons there since 1946.”
Lopez went to a Board of Regents meeting and asked about the explosions and dark clouds of smoke. But in response, he only got evasive answers.
Still, his efforts bore some fruit: one morning, he found five mysterious boxes in the front yard of his Socorro house. When he opened them, he found documents shedding light on the ongoing disaster.
“Well, those boxes were full of information about depleted uranium and testing in Socorro, and their ideas and what they were doing. And it went way, way back, before 1972, explaining the development of these weapons and what they were trying to do and the different kinds of weapons they were experimenting with, like cluster bombs instead of using metal or tungsten or titanium. They would try depleted uranium and see how that worked. So they were doing these kinds of preliminary testing, along with two other laboratories in New Mexico, plus laboratories outside of New Mexico. They were all working together. And I saw all this information. It wasn’t just about Socorro. It was about worldwide testing with what was going on in Europe and who was testing these weapons and what kind of weapons they were testing.”
He learned that the black cloud that he saw was radioactive and chemically toxic dust ejected into the atmosphere by depleted uranium blasts.
Damacio decided to dig deeper. He knew that the exposure to nuclear materials could lead to health problems, so he went to the Health Department in Santa Fe and sought information about Socorro’s residents. The records gave him the shivers: over past years, the community’s health problems had piled up, with the number of cases of hydrocephalus, cancer, and birth defects higher than in the other counties around the state.
This gruesome discovery prompted him to start researching the effects of depleted uranium contamination.
Horrific Effects of Exposure to Depleted Uranium
“I have a brother who’s bent over, and when he speaks, and he’s 10 years younger than me, something’s wrong with his spine,” Damacio said. “And his body is kind of flopped over. And when he looks at you, he looks like a turtle. He’s way down like this, and looks up. I mean, he’s normally about 5 ft 6 in. And now he looks like he’s about 4 ft. It’s a horrible sight. His teeth are all rotten. He’s the one who lives right next to the facility. You know, here’s the facility right here.
Here’s my house. And here is a town. There’s a fence between us and it says ‘Keep out, government property.’ And so our family is very close, one of the closest homes to this facility.”
“My dad ended up dying from cancer,” the activist continued. “And it was a sad situation for us. And like I said earlier, the people there, when they realized the truth about what was going on, instead of saying, ‘Oh, we want to stop this,’ no, they’re saying, ‘What? What can we do to survive? How can we survive this thing?’ And well, they couldn’t leave. So they just stay. And over the years, refusing sometimes to even acknowledge the dangers around them, because I believe they have no other choice. And it’s dehumanizing for people to be in that situation.”
In the late 1990s, Damacio was invited to Iraq by the nation’s authorities to speak at a conference on the depleted uranium weapons used in the country by the US during the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991). In 1993, Lopez and his fellows published the book Uranium Battlefields Home and Abroad: Depleted Uranium Use by the US Department of Defense, looking into DU testing sites in the US and the Pentagon’s use of the weapons abroad. The US and its allies unleashed over 300 tons of DU in Iraq.
“Well, when I went to Iraq and I told the people, I want to see if what’s happening here is happening there as well. So I’m not only the victim, but I’m also a researcher and I want to have accurate information. I just don’t want to take other people’s word for things. And I don’t, and I never have. Maybe at the very beginning of my discovery I did that. But since then, I want to see the people involved in these situations.”
“I found a lot of [health] related issues. At that conference that I went to, I learned a lot of things and I was one of the speakers at this conference. And so I was able to get studies from these medical people who had done a lot of studies on the people in Iraq and birth defects, cancers. These were the top things that were going on in their country, and some of the cancers were the same cancers, the same cancer that my father died from. And a lot of other people in the town were having problems in Socorro with birth defects. So I was able to go into hospitals in Iraq to see for myself the people who were victims.”
But the greatest shock for Damacio was Iraqi children who were born after the US bombing campaign. When he recalls them, he cannot hold back his tears.
“In one particular hospital I was able to see many, many children with birth defects that were so severe that it was so hard for me to think of them as even human.”
“I’m talking about very, very serious birth defects. Can you imagine walking into a place and seeing a child with one eye and his forehead? It’s like not even human. And I met this little boy. He was three years old. He was with his mother and he had a big head, hydrocephalus. And one eye was turned up and his other eye was turned down. He was skin and bones. He was three years old, couldn’t weigh more than 20 pounds. And his head was huge. Little tiny, tiny legs. It’s almost skin and bone. And the mother was holding him and wiping the blood from his mouth. And as I was leaving the hospital, tears started streaming down my face. I couldn’t control it. It was so, so bad.”
The little boy looked listless. Damacio thought for a moment that the toddler couldn’t see or hear. “And as I was leaving the room, I heard the little boy scream out: ‘Mama, mama!’ And it sent chills through my entire body.”
If Damacio were told at the time that the US government would throw another thousand tons of depleted uranium on Iraq in just three weeks during the Second Gulf War, it would have stopped the researcher’s heart.
Geiger Counter Never Lies: DU Weapons are Radioactive
Lopez suspected that these hideous birth defects and the spike in cancer cases were caused by depleted uranium’s radioactivity and toxicity. Preparing for his Iraq trip, he took his Geiger counter. The radiation detector “could identify alpha, beta, and gamma, and could identify whether it was depleted uranium or something more hot than depleted uranium,” according to the researcher.
While in Baghdad, Damacio visited the Amiriyah shelter, which was subjected to a US aerial attack that killed over 400 civilians, including children, on February 13, 1991.
“It was quite a sight when I was looking at the blood and hairs of the people on the walls and the children. And then there was an area where they had all their pictures. I was there with the Japanese delegation in this particular visit. And for them, it was common – it was not common, but they knew this well about the shadows on the wall and the hair and the blood from what happened in their country when they were bombed. So they understood all this.”
“Eyewitnesses told me, more than one said to me: ‘Damacio, what happened here is… I saw this projectile. I saw this large Tomahawk cruise missile making curves around streets.’ And then, when they got to the Amiriyah shelter, they went up high, came straight down in the middle of the shelter that had three stories, three feet of concrete between the stories to protect the people in there. In this case, children. There were more than 600 kids and school kids in that shelter at this time. The missile came down from the middle of the shelter, went through, went all the way down to the bottom of the shelter, and then went into a deep hole there. I saw all this, and they’re watching it.”
Lopez decided to find remnants of projectiles used during the US bombing of Baghdad and other areas and make measurements. He knew that typically, natural background radiation levels could range between five and 60 counts per minute, or a little more. Anything higher than that meant potential radioactive contamination.
“I found in one of the facilities in Baghdad after going to the Amiriyah shelter, there was an exhibition, there was a big building and they had picked up all the war remnants that they had found. One of them was partially, about three quarters, a Tomahawk cruise missile. And I had my detector and I checked it out. It was about a hundred counts per minute, which was an indication that there was radiation within this Tomahawk cruise missile.”
Then he travelled to a site on the border between Kuwait and Iraq, dubbed the “Highway of Death,” where thousands of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles were pierced and burned by DU munitions fired by US A-10 Warthogs. There, he got readings of about 100-120 counts per minute on the holes of the damaged tanks. Lopez also collected small pieces of metal as samples that showed a reading of 600 counts per minute.
“And I happened to find several projectiles, 30 millimeters, that had missed the target and hit the ground and bounced. And they were intact. So I checked them out with my detector, thinking I’m going to get 600 counts per minute. I was getting 2,500 per minute on these projectiles, so high that my radiation detector wouldn’t go any higher than in its capabilities. And it would go ‘u-u-u-u,’ could have been higher than 2,400 counts per minute. And the only conclusion I could draw from that is that nuclear waste from nuclear facilities was being mixed with what was so-called depleted uranium. And this became even more alarming.”
DU Weapons are Made of Radioactive Waste
Lopez tried to find out why the US had decided to use depleted uranium for its ammo in the first place.
Damacio’s book Uranium Battlefields Home and Abroad: Depleted Uranium Use by the US Department of Defense explains that DU is a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process by which the fissionable isotope uranium-235 (U235) is extracted from natural uranium for subsequent use as fuel for nuclear reactors.
Natural uranium, a silvery-grey metal, contains 0.7% U235, 99.3% U238, and a small amount of U234 by mass. After producing 85 kilograms of enriched uranium, one would get 915 kg of U238, or depleted uranium.
The Pentagon argues that U238 retains “only” 60% of natural uranium’s radioactivity and emits alpha particles, which have low penetration depth and can be stopped by skin. Inside the body, however, alpha-emitters can be extremely harmful, damaging sensitive living tissue. After the explosion of DU projectiles, microscopic and light uranium dust can travel with the wind, be inhaled, swallowed, or enter the body through a wound, later causing cancer and chromosome damage.
One should bear in mind that depleted uranium is radioactive waste that should be disposed of, Lopez pointed out in his book. However, almost all DU tails have been saved by the US government since the early 1940s. Moreover, they can be purchased for commercial use, according to the researcher. To date, the US has accumulated a massive storage of DU amounting to over 700,000 metric tons.
Why Do Pentagon and Defense Contractors Like DU So Much?
Lopez explained that from a military standpoint, the most important property of DU is its great density, relatively low cost of fabrication, and availability. The material is used for tank armor and projectiles of different sizes.
Highly-dense DU munitions easily pierce tanks and other armored vehicles. While tungsten carbide projectiles are capable of doing the same, DU is cheaper, more accessible, and offers greater margins for US military firms.
On the other hand, turning spent uranium into bullets and shells has become an “ingenious” solution for the US nuclear industry on how to “dispose” of radioactive waste, Lopez said in his book. So, as money talks, the US’ testing and use of DU weapons continue unabated, according to the activist.
But has the Pentagon ever been aware of the long-lasting hazard related to DU projectiles?
The US Department of Defense’s internal memos, leaked to the press in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, indicate that the Pentagon knew. But why would it use the toxic and radioactive substance nevertheless?
A March 1, 1991 document shows the US DoD’s attitude to DU weapons use in a nutshell. Authored by US Lieutenant Colonel M.V. Ziehmn at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico, the memo reads:
“There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU [sic] on the environment.
Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal.”
The memo went on by saying: “If DU penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed),” adding “we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after action reports [sic] are written”; otherwise the US may lose “a valuable combat capability.”
Why Are the Pentagon and White House Keeping DU’s Deadly Effects Secret?
The documentary Uranium 238: The Pentagon´s Dirty Pool (2009), used by Lopez’s International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) as part of its international campaign to prohibit DU, said that the Pentagon is in denial about DU munitions potentially leading to carcinogenic diseases, birth defects, and environmental contamination.
The US Defense Department has even invented a sort of “DU diplomacy” to reassure the world community and American citizens that there is nothing to worry about, according to the ICBUW. Meanwhile, the US has not only failed to inform affected nations – Iraq, Bosnia, Serbia, Syria – about the DU hazard, but also repeatedly exposed American soldiers to the toxic and radioactive waste. Per the documentary, DU weapons in all but name are a “dirty bomb” – a mix of explosives and radioactive material – used by terrorists. Yet somehow DU rounds are still called “conventional weapons.”
One could easily imagine that if the US government admits DU’s hazardous effects, the weapon would be banned, influential defense contractors would be stripped of their profits, and Washington would be slapped with a heap of legal cases with compensation demands.
And the US is not the only country that uses depleted uranium as a weapon, as some of its NATO allies also do, according to Lopez.
“[The US keeps DU’s deadly effect secret], for the same reason all the other countries that have the weapon kept secret, as much as they can keep it secret, it is because they know they’re violating international laws, international conventions on weapons, and they know that they’re going to have to pay the price someday, and they may end up with charges of violations of international laws. And so they’re trying to protect themselves. And at the same time, they want to continue to keep the weapon because they’re afraid other countries have weapons too,” Lopez concluded.
NATO troops directly involved in Ukraine conflict – Russia
RT | December 19, 2023
Several NATO member states have boots on the ground in the Ukraine conflict, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has claimed. He alleged that Western military personnel are operating certain weapons systems, and that hundreds of satellites belonging to the US-led military bloc are providing Kiev with surveillance.
Speaking at a meeting of Defense Ministry officials on Tuesday, where President Vladimir Putin was also present, Shoigu stated that “NATO service members are directly operating air defense systems, tactical ballistic missiles, and multiple launch rocket systems” in Ukraine. He cited radio intercepts featuring English and Polish speakers. According to the minister, Western officers are also playing an active role in preparing Ukrainian military operations as well as training troops, both in their home countries and in Ukraine.
Russian officials have repeatedly warned that ever-deepening Western involvement in the conflict unnecessarily increases the chances of a direct military confrontation between NATO and Moscow.
The Russian defense chief went on to claim that more than 5,000 foreign fighters have been killed since hostilities broke out in February 2022, with 1,427 Polish, 466 US, and 344 UK nationals among them.
“Working in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ interest are 410 NATO military and dual-purpose space devices,” Shoigu estimated.
He also lauded Russia’s defense industry for ramping up production in the past 18 months and helping prevent ammunition shortages on the front lines. “Despite the sanctions, we are manufacturing more high-tech weaponry than NATO countries,” Shoigu continued.
The minister concluded by stating that “as of today, the Russian army is the best-prepared and most combat-ready in the world, armed with cutting-edge weapons tested in combat.”
Putin insisted at the same meeting that the West’s efforts to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia have failed.
Speaking to the Ukrainian branch of US state-run broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) on Friday, Kiev’s former ambassador to the UK, Vadim Prystaiko, claimed that Britain is developing plans to potentially deploy troops to Ukraine.
The diplomat, who was fired after criticizing Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, went on to suggest that while Western officials will deny any such plans, foreign deployments are still possible under certain circumstances.
Will political West transfer $300 billion of stolen Russian assets to Kiev regime?
By Drago Bosnic | December 19, 2023
When the political West insists on the so-called “rules-based world order“, it’s perhaps the most laughable claim of our time, as this supposed “international community” doesn’t abide by its own rules and laws which formally state that private property is protected. The nominally capitalist power pole has no problem using what it usually calls a “communist practice” of illegal confiscation of the said property. In the aftermath of the special military operation (SMO), the United States and its numerous vassals and satellite states illegally froze hundreds of billions in Russian foreign exchange (forex) reserves. Estimates vary, but the most commonly cited number amounts to approximately $300 billion in assets.
The original idea was to cause an artificial default in Russia. In turn, this was supposed to result in massive financial destabilization. Namely, when a country defaults, it disposes of (or ignores, depending on the viewpoint) its financial obligations towards its creditors. The immediate consequence for the country is a reduction in its total debt and a reduction or even cessation of payments on the interest of that debt. A credit rating agency then takes this into account in its gradings of capital, interest, extraneous and procedural defaults, and failures to abide by the terms of bonds or other debt instruments. In short, the country in question becomes a geoeconomic pariah, which then affects its diplomatic standing.
Precisely this was what the political West wanted to ensure for Russia. With no access to its forex reserves, Moscow was expected to bleed dry financially, forcing it into a default that would then isolate the country and make trading with it not just hard, but nearly impossible. This geopolitical tool has been the mainstay of non-kinetic segments of Western hybrid warfare against the world for well over half a century now. And it might work against small to medium-sized countries. However, the Eurasian giant is neither of those. Russia is an energy superpower and a net exporter of natural gas, oil, rare earth metals and nonmetals, fertilizer, food and many other commodities that are absolutely essential to the world.
It’s also an industrial power that produces heavy machinery, chemical products, manufacturing tools, etc. Trying to isolate such a country is simply impossible. What’s more, even much smaller and less powerful countries targeted by US sanctions are finding ways to circumvent them, simply because others need their commodities. This is true for Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Syria and even North Korea, which bore the brunt of Western sanctions before the SMO. Rather schizophrenically, even the political West itself is trying to find ways to circumvent its own sanctions. Still, it’s trying to make Russia’s life as difficult as possible by attempting to turn it into a failed state or at the very least making it look like one.
All this accomplishes little more than propaganda “wins”, effectively serving only for optics purposes. Thus, the US-led power pole is now trying to find other uses for frozen Russian forex reserves. Namely, according to the Financial Times, G7 is moving closer to approving a plan that would funnel approximately $300 billion in stolen Russian assets to the increasingly cash-strapped Kiev regime. According to the FT’s own admission, the proposal constitutes “a radical step that would open a new chapter in the West’s financial warfare against Moscow”. The troubled Biden administration is yet to announce that this is their official stance, but FT posits that American officials are “actively engaging G7 countries to see it through”.
“A US official said Washington was engaged in active conversations on the use of Russian sovereign assets and believed there was a short timeline to make a decision,” the FT report reads, adding: “They suggested it could be discussed at a possible G7 leaders’ meeting to coincide with the second anniversary in February of Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine.”
In other words, the “exclusive club” of closest Anglo-American vassals and satellite states is being given instructions on how to handle their own financial and foreign policy, including the theft of other countries’ forex assets. As previously mentioned, the sanctions warfare has not only been a miserable failure, but has also backfired. Thus, the political West is trying to hurt Russia by not only stealing its reserves, but also illegally transferring them to the Neo-Nazi junta. The obvious goal is to “adequately” substitute US funding that is now virtually guaranteed to run out thanks to the peculiarities of America’s political system, as the growing Republican-Democrat divide turns into an even bigger headache for the Kiev regime.
Apart from the halt in Washington DC’s financing, the EU is also having major issues in finding consensus about continued support for the Neo-Nazi junta. Namely, last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban blocked another “aid” package worth €50 billion. This happened on the same day Budapest abstained from a vote on starting formal EU membership talks with the Kiev regime. It can be argued that Brussels is its last chance to stay afloat financially, although this is virtually guaranteed to break Europe’s already flailing economy. In other words, the political West is risking the dismantling of its entire financial system and stability for the sake of the Neo-Nazi junta that is bound to lose anyway.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
US Escalation in the Red Sea – A Lose/Lose Proposition
By Russell Bentley – Sputnik – 19.12.2023
The latest escalation in world military affairs, the situation in the Red Sea and Yemen, has the real potential to eclipse both the war in Ukraine and the invasion of Gaza, both in terms of military and economic impact, on a global scale.
The hubris and abject idiocy of US plans to open yet another conflict that they cannot hope to win, and that cannot lead to anything but the destruction of the world economy can only be described as criminally insane.
In a recent letter to “Dear America”, the Houthi leaders wrote, “A desperate plea for reflection. The consequences are dire, and the responsibility lies with the guardians of the American dream. Beware, for the path you tread upon carries weighty consequences, reverberating across oceans and continents. Choose wisely…” The choice is between demanding an end to the Gaza humanitarian tragedy or escalating the conflict into a war that will have global consequences. The US has already announced its intention to choose the latter. It is a choice for which the American people, if they allow it to happen, will suffer gravely.
The US and UK have moved at least 24 combat ships into the seas off the coast of Yemen, ostensibly “to protect global shipping lanes”. This is a lie. The Houthis have clearly stated that, one, that they are only targeting ships serving Israeli interests, and that all other shipping is under no threat, and two, that they are willing to cease all military operations against Israeli shipping as soon as Israel stops its attacks on Gaza and the West Bank.
It is ONLY Israeli shipping that is under threat, and it is ONLY Israeli shipping that US and UK naval forces are deployed to protect. But by escalating the situation in the Red Sea, they are putting at risk ALL shipping passing through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, which accounts for 12% of all global trade and 30% of all container shipping, as well as about 8% of world trade in both oil and LNG, for a total annual value of over a trillion US dollars.
As things stand now, only Israel-linked shipping is at risk, and even that risk can be completely eliminated by the cessation of Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. But if the US attacks Yemen, the Houthis will respond, and they do have the capability to sink US Navy ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. And once that happens, the Red Sea becomes an active war zone, and then, all bets are off, along with all shipping in the Red Sea, and 12% of all global trade. Think about it…
US Navy and allies deployment in the Middle East © Russel Bentley
The economies of the EU nations are already in serious decline. The US national debt stands at over $33 TRILLION, and the era of the US dollar’s reserve currency status in global trade is closing fast. A 12% overnight decline in global trade would almost certainly lead these economies into economic depression equivalent to the Great Depression of almost 100 years ago. As I have said many times before, economic war and military war are two sides of the same coin. The Houthis have a major economic advantage based on their geography to influence and even threaten global economic activity, and have proven their ability and willingness to use it. And it is by no means certain that the Western armada assembled along the Yemeni coast can even defeat the Houthis militarily without unacceptable and unsustainable losses.
According to Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Houthis are known to possess two types of larger anti-ship ballistic missiles: The Asef, which has a 450km range, and the Tankil,which has a range of 500km. These missiles can travel at speeds up to Mach 5, and carry warheads of between 300 to 500 kg. (By comparison, Chinese anti-ship missiles with 600 kg warheads have been dubbed “Aircraft Carrier Killers”.) The range of these missiles allows the Houthis to cover not only the southern third of the Red Sea, but all of the Gulf of Aden and much of the Arabian Sea as well. With the exception of the USS Indianapolis and the USCG ships in the Gulf of Oman, all of the US/UK naval ships in the graphic above are already within range of Houthi missiles.
After almost ten years of civil war against the Yemeni government backed by the US and a Saudi-led coalition, the Houthis remain an undefeated and powerful fighting force, still in control of about 20% of Yemen, in the northern and western parts along the Red Sea. Though a recent ceasefire was brokered by China and based on Saudi – Iranian rapprochement, the situation in Yemen remains volatile, exacerbated by Israel’s recent attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. With the US threatened escalation, the global military and economic risks increase by orders of magnitude.
The Houthis demands are clear and precise: Stop the attacks on Palestinians, and the threats to Israeli shipping will cease. Escalate, and the Houthi response will be asymmetrical and world-changing. To any who might scoff at the idea of a rebel army in an impoverished 3rd world country being able to take on the US military, I would simply remind them of the fact that the US has failed to achieve any meaningful victory in any of the wars it has started over the last 30 years.
The choice is clear – either end the Palestinian tragedy, or unleash a global catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. The US government has announced its ill-advised decision to choose the latter option. It is up to all good people in the world, and US citizens in particular, to prevent this global and suicidal miscalculation from taking place, or suffer the consequences.
Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis
By Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | December 17, 2023
Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.
The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists.
The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill her job, while demands by billionaire pro-Israel donors and politicians for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay have grown by the day. Both stand accused of refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, even though no such calls have taken place on their campuses.
Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the forces orchestrating the carefully choreographed, heavily-funded campaign to crush Palestine solidarity activism on campus.
The law firm leading the assault on the universities has included David Friedman, the former ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump, among its partners. Until 2021, this firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, was registered with the US Department of Justice as a foreign agent on behalf of an Israeli principal.
The firm’s clients include associates of a jailed Ukrainian billionaire who bankrolled neo-Nazi militias, along with a who’s who of corporations accused of defrauding and even killing consumers.
Meanwhile, the “Jewish student” witnesses who set the stage for the attacks on Magill and her fellow university presidents at the House Antisemitism Committee were employed on at least a semi-professional basis by Israeli lobbying cutouts.
They included Jonathan Frieden, a Harvard Law student who moonlights as president of Alliance for Israel; MIT graduate student Talia Khan, the president of MIT Israel Alliance; and Bella Ingber, co-president of NYU’s Students Supporting Israel.
Israel lobbyist moonlighting as UPenn student calls for Covid-style lockdowns on Palestine protests
The most harrowing — and clearly questionable — claims furnished during the December 5 congressional hearings came courtesy of Eyal Yakoby, an Israeli-American senior at UPenn.
“Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve… read the statement, ‘Ninety-percent of pigs are gas chambered!’ on the pavement as I walked to class,” Yakoby moaned.
The most likely explanation for the appearance of this phrase on UPenn’s Locust Walk was not the presence of chalk-wielding neo-Nazis but rather, that of animal welfare advocates, who were presumably calling attention to the fact that most pigs are killed by slaughterhouses which employ a grotesque method of gas inhalation exposed by activists in late 2022.
“‘You’re a dirty little Jew and you deserve to die’ are not words said by Hamas, but by my classmates and my professors,” Yakoby claimed during a December 5 press conference convened by the House GOP leadership. Oddly, he neglected to name a single student or UPenn employee responsible for such inflammatory remarks.
Conjuring up images of a campus overwhelmed by Hamas-linked hatemongers, Yakoby seemed to call for imposing Covid-era lockdowns on students protesting Israel’s blood-drenched assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
“During Covid, strict guidelines governed everything from class attendance and graduation walks,” he said. “But now, when students and faculty defy policies to intimidate Jewish students, where is the same resolute enforcement?”
Lawsuits target top US campuses with flimsy, unprovable allegations
Just hours after his appearance alongside members of Congress, Yakoby filed a lawsuit against UPenn, claiming the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to respond to antisemitism.
Yakoby’s lawsuit was filled with dubious, highly politicized accusations, including complaints about the chanting of “antisemitic slurs” such as “Intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea.”
A closer examination of other incidents described in the lawsuit against Penn reveals a great number of them appear to have been seriously exaggerated or manufactured out of whole cloth.
The most ‘threatening’ episode described by the Yakoby, for example, consists of a man who “threateningly approached him” and “yelled ‘fuck you.’” As a result of this experience — and the agony apparently endured when the plaintiff observed other students removing posters showing Israeli captives — the suit claims that “Yakoby missed his next two classes” because he was “shaken by these escalating acts of hate.”
The vast majority of claims of overt antisemitism appear to consist of statements by students and professors who criticized the state of Israel but generally took pains to distinguish between the political ideology of Zionism and the religion of Judaism.
Elsewhere, the lawsuit accuses professors of antisemitism because they questioned now-debunked Israeli atrocity propaganda about the October 7 attacks, including a demonstrably false claim by Yakoby that the “killing of 40 [Israeli] babies” by Palestinian militants had been “confirmed.”
Many of the alleged incidents described as “assaults” fail to meet basic evidentiary standards, leaving the court with no option but to take the plaintiffs’ word that the contents of the complaint happened as described.
Claims that a Jewish student was taunted with exhortations to “keep walking you dirty little Jew,” for instance, are typical of the highly suspect claims found throughout the lawsuit.
Indeed, no proof of this alleged interaction was provided, nor did the plaintiff’s provide even a vague sketch of the assailant’s identity. Instead, the entire emphasis is placed on the supposed lack of “sympathy” subsequently shown to the student by a professor who decided not to award her an “extension on her class lecture note assignment.”
The plaintiffs also took aim at Palestinian academic and poet Refaat Alareer, who had been invited to a literary festival at Penn before being murdered in a December 6 Israeli strike described by human rights monitors as a “targeted assassination.”
The demands of the pro-Israel activists include “terminating deans, administrators, professors and other employees” who they say are “responsible for the antisemitic abuse permeating the school, whether because they engaged in it or permitted it; suspending or expelling students who engage in such conduct… the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” and “compensatory, consequential, and punitive [financial] damages.”
Israel lobbyists are also targeting America’s most expensive campus, New York University, leveling a litany of flimsy and unprovable antisemitism allegations to extract heavy financial damages, including a full refund of tuition. Bella Ingber, who also featured prominently at the House Republican press conference, is a leading face of the NYU lawsuit.
During the Republican presser, Ingber compared conditions at NYU to life under the German Nazi Reich.
“Since Oct. 7,” Ingber said, “the unmistakable anti-Semitism that I have experienced on campus is reminiscent of the Jew-hatred I’ve heard about from my grandparents, Holocaust survivors who experienced first-hand the deafening silence of their neighbors in Poland and Germany when the Nazis first rose to power.”
The plaintiffs of the Israel lobby-led lawsuit “request that a judgment be entered in each of their favor, and against NYU” which would see the university “terminating deans, administrators, professors and other employees responsible for the antisemitic abuse permeating the school, whether because they engaged in it or permitted it… suspending or expelling students who engage in such conduct,” and “compensatory and punitive damages.”
In other words, the lawsuit seeks campus-wide regime change, replacing any and all administrators with those willing to take instructions from the Israel lobby.
“Bibi Netanyahu’s guys in the Trump White House” lead legal assault on campus speech
If the language of the NYU lawsuit sounds familiar, that is because it was brought by the same high-powered corporate legal firm presiding over the legal action against UPenn: Kasowitz Benson Torres, best known for its work on behalf of former President Donald Trump. The firm’s leadership has been aptly described as “Bibi Netanyahu’s guys in the Trump White House.”
The law firm was known as Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman until 2017, when its partner, David Friedman left to become US Ambassador to Israel. Friedman has been credited with working alongside former presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to pressure Trump into adopting more radically anti-Palestinian positions.
The firm was founded in 1993 by attorney Marc Kasowitz, who gained national notoriety for his work representing Big Tobacco, describing himself as one of the “most feared lawyers in the United States.” Though reports describe him as a strong Trump ally and a go-to source for the former president, financial disclosures show Kasowitz and his wife have donated thousands of dollars to Democratic politicians as well, including former President Barack Obama, current President Joe Biden, and Sen. Chuck Schumer. Also employed by the firm is former Sen. Joe Lieberman, a hardcore neoconservative who now serves as chairman of the pro-war United Against a Nuclear Iran. While in Congress, Lieberman advocated for moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as far back as 1995.
A quick glance at Kasowitz Benson Torres’ recent handiwork reveals a lengthy track record of defending Goliath from David. For example, its website boasts of successfully defending Comcast against a class-action lawsuit by angry customers. Other high-profile clients include Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva, best known for causing the ongoing worldwide shortage of a vincristine — a crucial drug in treating most types of childhood cancers with no known substitute — after it deemed production insufficiently profitable.
In 2019, the firm signed on to represent the US-based co-defendants of notoriously-corrupt Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who now languishes in a Kiev prison and is known for bankrolling current president Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian military’s neo-Nazi Azov Regiment. Ukrainian financial giant Privatbank maintains that Kolomoisky and his associates defrauded the bank out of billions of dollars.
A year later, Kasowitz Benson Torres was required to register as a foreign agent with the US Justice Department after agreeing to represent an Israeli real estate developer specializing in building luxury condos for ulra-Orthodox Jews living in illegal settlements.
This November, The Grayzone revealed a leaked letter signed by David Friedman and delivered to NYU administrators in advance of the lawsuit. The letter demanded NYU establish a position dedicated to “combating antisemitism,” and disband student clubs dedicated to Palestine activism.
Now, the law firm’s crusade to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists is spreading across the country. This November, two of the firm’s partners revealed that the legal team plans similar suits for Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley, accusing them all of “deliberate indifference” to the supposed plight of Jewish students.
US pressures Saudi Arabia to postpone imminent peace deal with Yemen
The Cradle | December 18, 2023
The US is exerting pressure on Saudi Arabia to delay the signing of a peace agreement with Yemen and instead join an expanded maritime protection task force to confront Yemeni attacks against Israeli-linked ships in the Red Sea.
According to a report by Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, a draft peace deal between Sanaa and Riyadh has been finalized. It could be signed before the end of the year, potentially ending a NATO-backed war that has decimated the Arab world’s poorest country for eight years.
“Saudi Arabia is going through a difficult test between two options […] Either it will emerge from the Yemeni quagmire under a roadmap agreed upon with Sanaa, or it will submit to US dictates and join the international maritime coalition, and this means remaining vulnerable to [western] blackmail,” the Al-Akhbar report details.
Despite the pressure from Washington, the kingdom is reportedly “continuing on the path to peace” and is working to “speed up” the completion of the peace agreements to avoid “further obstruction by the Emiratis or local agents.”
Saudi and Yemeni negotiators have given their final comments on the agreement. The revised version was recently delivered to UN special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, who has started coordinating an official peace ceremony.
According to Al-Akhbar’s sources in Riyadh and Sanaa, the peace deal includes the complete lifting of a land, sea, and air blockade imposed on Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition, a “consensual mechanism” to pay the salaries of public employees, and the free export of oil from Saudi-controlled regions.
“The ball is in Riyadh’s court, which is under US pressure to delay the signing and enter into a war alliance against Yemen in the Red Sea,” Al-Akhbar highlights, adding that UAE-backed forces are also looking to derail the peace process.
A peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Yemen would significantly hamper US efforts to deploy an international naval task force to the Red Sea to protect Israel’s maritime trade.
“The force, provisionally entitled Operation Prosperity Guardian, is due to be announced by the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, when he visits [West Asia],” UK daily The Guardian reported on 17 December.
The US war chief is set to visit Israel later this week to meet with senior officials. According to the British outlet, western officials believe Washington has secured the involvement of Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, and Bahrain.
For the past several weeks, the Yemeni armed forces have been launching attacks on Israeli-linked commercial vessels attempting to cross the Bab al-Mandab Strait south of the Suez Canal.
In response, five of the world’s largest shipping companies have announced a complete cessation of activities in the vital sea route. These are Hong Kong-based OOCL, France’s CMA CGM, the Danish Maersk, the German Hapag-Lloyd, and the Italian-Swiss-owned Mediterranean Shipping Co.
Finland’s new ‘defense’ deal with US eerily reminds of similar one with Nazi Germany
By Drago Bosnic | December 18, 2023
Ever since NATO formally (re)started the (New) Cold War, it has been expanding its military presence all across Europe, effectively escalating its crawling aggression on the continent. The obvious target – Russia. The belligerent alliance is determined to create a new “frontline” on Moscow’s western borders, this time by drastically increasing American military presence in Finland. Namely, last week, Helsinki announced that it will sign a bilateral “defense” cooperation agreement with the United States, allowing the latter to station troops and store weapons in Finland. During a news conference in Helsinki on December 14, the Nordic country’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen stated that Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen will sign the so-called Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) on December 18 (today).
“The pact is very significant for Finland’s defense and security,” Häkkänen was quoted by Euronews, adding: “It bears a very strong message in this time. The United States is committed to our defense.”
The DCA will allow American troops to access 15 military areas and facilities in the entirety of Finland, ranging from a key southern naval base and inland air bases to a vast remote army training area in Lapland in the north. Interestingly, Finnish officials admitted that American troops are allowed a permanent presence and regular exercises in the country, but they insist that “there are no plans to establish permanent US military bases in Finland”. These two claims are extremely contradictory, not to mention the fact that such deployments contribute nothing to Finnish security. On the contrary, this can only attract the attention of Russia, which otherwise would’ve never considered Finland a threat. The Nordic country of 5,6 million shares a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia, nearly tripling the line of direct NATO-Russia contact.
Along with the Baltic states, it’s also the European Union’s external border with Russia. The troubled bloc itself is militarizing and effectively unifying with NATO, cementing Europe’s position as a mere pendant of America’s geopolitical strategy of so-called “containment”. Other countries on the continent have similar bilateral agreements with the US, including the neighboring Sweden, while Denmark (already a NATO member) is very likely to do the same. The obvious question arises, why are Finland and Sweden doing this? Will they feel safer with American and other NATO troops stationed in their military facilities? It’s quite obvious that the belligerent alliance has always been an auxiliary extension of the Pentagon and this has been the case since NATO’s unfortunate inception 74 years ago, as well as its subsequent expansion.
Thus, an increase in American military presence in Finland should always be observed from the perspective of US expansionism, as the world’s most aggressive country keeps moving its “defense” infrastructure ever closer to the borders of its geopolitical adversaries. This has been the case in the (First) Cold War and it’s no different nowadays when Washington DC is pushing one European country after another into a broader anti-Russian coalition that now includes the entire EU. The US is also trying to do the same by constituting a near carbon copy of NATO in the Pacific in a virtually identical step, only aimed against China. The formal admission of Finland back in April and the current military expansion are just steps toward the so-called “globalization” of NATO, a terrifying prospect for the security of the world.
It could be argued that Finland was never truly neutral, not even during the (First) Cold War and particularly not since it entered the EU. It has always been packed with US/NATO intelligence assets, although this has escalated significantly in the last several decades. Since then, the country has essentially become a NATO member in all but name. Helsinki directly broke from its formal neutrality when it decided to acquire F-35 fighter jets from the US in late 2021. The Pentagon has direct access to everything the F-35’s sensors can detect, meaning that Finland would be sharing key military data with the US regardless of whether it was a NATO member or not. On the other hand, as I argued back in early April, being a direct member means that the Nordic country is virtually guaranteed to see the deployment of American offensive weapons.
The details of the latest “defense” deal are yet to be revealed, but it can only be expected that it will involve much more than simple infantry deployments. For Russia, this is particularly concerning, as Finland and Estonia, now both NATO members, are in close proximity to St. Petersburg, its second most important city. The stationing of any US offensive weapons such as cruise missiles and nuclear-capable fighter jets would deeply destabilize the otherwise largely stable region. There’s also a quite eerie historical dimension in all this. Namely, Helsinki is essentially repeating the same mistake it made over 80 years ago when it joined the Axis led by Nazi Germany. Now when it’s among “old friends” once again, maybe the Nordic country should dust off the history books and pay very close attention to how this ended the last time.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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US murdering 1 million Iraqis is democracy, Iran giving yogurt to Iraq is “domination”
By Ali Salaam | American Herald Tribune | July 31, 2017
The New York Times, owned by the Zionist Jewish supremacist Ochs-Sulzberger family, has no problem with Iraqi suffering as long as Iran is not the one behind it.
The Iraq War was a genocide of the Iraqi people by Zionist supremacists in the Bush administration. Over 1 million innocent people were killed based on a lie. American soldiers died in an Israeli war and now an average of 22 soldiers commit suicide every day because their consciences cannot cope with the fact they committed crimes in an illegal war that served no purpose other than to benefit Israel, not America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, once said “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Paul Wolfowitz had his sights on Iraq since his time in the first Bush administration. Former Israeli official and Bush administration official Richard Perle had his eyes on Iraq since at least his authorship of the Clean Break white paper. The Zionist regime had their eyes on Iraq since the 1980s when strategist Oded Yinon wrote his white paper in support of dividing the Arab-Muslim world along ethnic and sectarian lines. The global Zionist lobby has had their eyes on Iraq since Theodor Herzl stated that Eretz Israel’s true borders go from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. … continue
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