The true origins of the two World Wars have been deleted from all our history books and replaced with mythology. Neither War was started (or desired) by Germany, but both at the instigation of a group of European Zionist Jews with the stated intent of the total destruction of Germany. The documentation is overwhelming and the evidence undeniable. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)
That history is being repeated today in a mass grooming of the Western world’s people (especially Americans) in preparation for World War III – which I believe is now imminent.
Before Antony Blinken can become Secretary of State, Senators must approve. And before that, they must ask questions. Here are some suggestions for what they should ask.
1. Second to the war on Iraq, which of the disasters you’ve helped facilitate do you most regret, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, or something else? And what have you learned that would improve your record going forward?
2. You once supported dividing Iraq into three nations. I’ve asked an Iraqi friend to draw up a plan to divide the United States up into three nations. Without yet seeing the plan, what is your initial reaction, and which state do you most hope to not end up with?
3. The trend from the Bush years to the Obama years to the Trump years is now one of moving away from ground wars in favor of air wars. This often means more killing, more injuring, more making people homeless, but an even higher percentage of that suffering on the non-U.S. side. How would you defend this trend if you were teaching children about morality?
4. Much of the U.S. public has been clamoring for an end to endless wars. President-Elect Biden has promised an end to endless wars. You’ve suggested that the endless wars shouldn’t really be actually ended. We’ve seen both President Obama and President Trump take credit for ending wars without ending them, but surely that legerdemain cannot succeed forever. Which of these wars do you support immediately and actually in the ordinary sense of the word ending: Yemen? Afghanistan? Syria? Iraq? Somalia?
5. You cofounded WestExec Advisors, a company that helps war profiteers get contracts, and serves as a revolving door for unscrupulous individuals who get rich from private money for what they do and whom they get to know in their public jobs. Is war profiteering acceptable? How would you perform your job differently in government if you anticipated being hired by a peace organization afterward?
6. The U.S. government arms 96% of the world’s most oppressive governments by its own definition. Is there any government on earth other than North Korea or Cuba that should not be sold or given deadly weapons? Do you support Congresswoman Omar’s bill to stop arming human rights abusers?
7. Should the State Department function as a marketing firm for U.S. weapons companies? What percentage of the State Department’s work should be devoted to selling weapons? Can you name a recent war that has not had U.S. weapons on both sides?
8.The U.S. and Russian governments are loaded up with nuclear weapons. The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than ever before. What will you do to scale back the new Cold War, re-join disarmament agreements, and move us away from nuclear apocalypse?
9.Some of my colleagues will not be satisfied until you’re as hostile toward China as toward Russia. What will you do to help them relax and think more wisely about playing around with the future of life on earth?
10. What would be one example of a situation in which you would choose to become a whistleblower?
Before Avril Haines can become Director of National Intelligence, Senators must approve. And before that, they must ask questions. Here are some suggestions for what they should ask.
1. What are the most extreme measures that should be considered in extreme situations to protect open democratic government?
2. Would those, excuse me, would, reclaiming my time, would those measures not be more extreme than refusing to confirm for high office someone like yourself who opposes open democratic government, for example by censoring the vast majority of this Senate’s report on torture, and overruling the CIA’s own Inspector General to refuse to discipline CIA agents who hacked into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee to sabotage an investigation of torture, choosing instead to award medals to those criminals?
3. When should and when should not torturers be prosecuted? And when should they be supported, as you supported Gina Haspell to fail upward into the position of CIA director?
4. According to Newsweek, you used to be summoned in the middle of the night to help decide what man, woman, or child (along with anyone too close to them) ought to be blown up with a missile. According to CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, you regularly approved of proposed drone murders. There are people in this room who have done vastly more harm to some other countries than some of the children you helped kill ever did to anyone. Which countries should have the right to use armed drones around the world and which should not, and why?
5. You co-authored the May 22, 2013, “presidential policy guidance” that claimed to justify illegal killings with missiles. You did away with the presumption of innocence, the indictment, the trial, the conviction, and the sentencing. You abolished the United Nations Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.S. Constitution, the War Powers Resolution, and the various national laws around the globe on murder. This whitewashing of human incineration helped largely replace the policies of incarceration and torture with that of murder. Could you please give us 30 seconds of disgusting platitudes on the topic of your respect for the rule of law?
6. A report by the CIA found its own drone program “counterproductive.” Admiral Dennis Blair, the former Director of National Intelligence said that while “drone attacks did help reduce the Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, they also increased hatred of America.” According to General Stanley McChrystal: “For every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.” Lt. Col. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of the war on Afghanistan, blurted out his opposition to what he’d been doing on his last day of doing it. Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “We’re seeing that blowback. If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.” In the view of Sherard Cowper-Coles, Former U.K. Special Representative To Afghanistan, “For every dead Pashtun warrior, there will be 10 pledged to revenge.” We’ve seen a drone war on Yemen held up as the ultimate success, before it predictably devolved into the worst humanitarian disaster in years. How does the drone murder policy that you’ve been a part of hold up on its own terms?
Before Neera Tanden can become Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Senators must approve. And before that, they must ask questions. Here are some suggestions for what they should ask.
1. You supported an attack on Libya that proved fraudulently marketed, illegal, and catastrophic in results, after which you argued in an email to your colleagues for trying to force Libya to pay via oil profits for the privilege of having been bombed. You wrote that this would be a good solution to a U.S. budget deficit. One of your colleagues replied that such a policy might create a financial incentive for attacking more countries. What countries, if any, would you most favor attacking and then billing for the service?
2. Reclaiming, thank you, reclaiming my time, what criteria do you think one should use if one were to select the countries most appropriate to attack and then bill for it?
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 26, 2020
David Swanson was to speak at a conference in Florence, Italy, on April 25, 2020. The conference became a video instead. Below is the video and text of Swanson’s portion. As soon as we receive the video or text of the whole, in Italian or English, we will post it at worldbeyondwar.org. The video aired on April 25 on PandoraTV and on ByoBlu. Details on the full conference are here.
Sadly, Giulietto Chiesa, director of Pandora TV, died a few hours after attending this conference on live-streaming. Giulietto’s last public participation was his presenting the portion of the conference that concerned Julian Assange and his father John Shipton’s interview.
Swanson’s remarks follow.
____________________________
Text of this video:
This conference against war on Liberation Day in Italy, April 25, 2020, has been in the works for many months and was to be real-world. I was to see all of you in Florence. My heart aches for that not happening and for the reasons why, although being forced online and into refraining from burning jet fuel was always the better choice for the earth.
I’m recording this on March 27, 2020, almost a month early, to allow proper translation and preparation, perche’ il mio italiano e’ diventato bruttissimo. I cannot know what will be happening in the world a month from now. One month ago I might have been talking about the similarities between Michael Bloomberg and Silvio Berlusconi. Now I have the great pleasure of hoping you’ve never heard of Michael Bloomberg – who spent $570 million on advertisements to make himself U.S. president, and people didn’t care. That’s the best and possibly only encouraging news I can offer you from the United States, where people obey news broadcasters ever more like lemmings, as long as their directives are labeled news and not advertisement.
While I cannot see the future, I can see the present and the past, and they offer some clues. In 1918 the flu spread like mad from the trenches, and the newspapers predicted joy and rainbows, except in Spain where the truth was permitted, a mistake that was rewarded with labeling the disease the Spanish Flu. And a giant pro-war parade was planned in Philadelphia with U.S. troops just back from the war. Doctors warned against it, but politicians decided it would be just fine as long as everyone was instructed not to cough or sneeze. Predictably, the doctors were right. The flu spread wildly, including quite possibly to Woodrow Wilson, who during the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles lay sick in bed instead of taking part or even pretending to attempt to restrain French and British vengeance. The resulting treaty, of course, had wise observers predicting World War II on the spot. Now Western culture so adores World War II that an Italian beauty queen a few years back was mocked for saying that was the era of the past she’d have liked to live in – as if she could have said any other. Yet World War II might not have happened if people had listened to doctors in 1918 or to countless other wise pieces of advice over the years.
Now doctors and other health workers and all of the workers who keep necessary operations running in our societies are performing heroically and being ignored again. And we’re watching the warnings play out in agonizingly slow motion. But, looked at a different way, it’s like watching climate change or the nuclear threat play out on fast-forward. It’s been popular to imagine for decades that if things would just get a little bit worse or impact people more directly, then everyone would wake up and act sensibly. Coronavirus largely proves that wrong. Protecting ecosystems, ceasing to eat meat, investing in healthcare, or letting doctors set health policy are still considered crazy ideas even as the bodies pile up, just like going off fossil fuels and disbanding militaries are considered crazy ideas. People like buying stuff and eating meat and voting for sociopaths – would you take away those basic pleasures just so your children could live?
The U.S. government is throwing more money at its military with which to fight coronavirus, using the nonsensical excuse that only the military has the resources to do it, even as the military hoards resources needed by the public. War rehearsals and even wars are being paused and scaled back, but only as temporary measures, not as any shifting of priorities. You can read in the U.S. media both proposals that NATO declare war on the coronavirus and that NATO is a leading contender for the next Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile the Russiagate madness that the Democratic Party used to create an intentionally unsuccessful impeachment trial of Trump has blocked any possible opposition to NATO and removed the possibility of trying Trump for serious crimes ranging from wars to sanctions to abuse of immigrants to instigating racist violence to profiting from pandemics. And a leading advocate of the wars of the past generation, Joe Biden, is being marketed as the designated loser in the next election. Already we’re hearing that one shouldn’t change horses during an apocalypse. Already Trump is being declared, as if it were a good thing, a war-time president because of the disease he’s helping to spread, completely oblivious to all the actual wars he’s been waging since the day he inherited them from Obama and Bush. Awareness of climate collapse trails far, far behind awareness of coronavirus, while awareness that the nuclear doomsday clock is almost at midnight is virtually nonexistent. U.S. corporate news articles reassure us that the coronavirus has not yet impacted U.S. readiness to destroy all life with nuclear weapons. Almost a month ago I wrote about how ironic it would be if the coronavirus began shutting down parts of the war machine; now of course that has been happening – only without any recognition of the irony.
There are openings that we can use to push things in a better direction of course. As people watch U.S. senators profiting from the deaths of U.S. citizens they can come to recognize the routine practice of profiting from the deaths of people in other countries. Ceasefires could prove so preferable to wars that they are extended beyond the crisis that creates them. U.S. bases could be understood as bringing to nations around the world, not only war and the poisoning of water and the localized scourge of drunkenness and rapes, but also contagious and deadly diseases. Already we’ve seen the European Union violate U.S. sanctions against Iran. That could become the norm. The new plague could make people aware of what European diseases, in combination with the equivalents at the time of war and sanctions, did to the indigenous people of North America, which could lead to a complete rethinking of our approach to the earth. The breakdown of our current systems in the face of a disease could be made to aid the transition to systems that don’t drive us toward the twin dangers of nuclear war and climate disaster. And Joe Biden could retire for any number of reasons. By the time you hear these words, the Emperor could be standing naked in the piazza. More likely he’ll be wearing a few gold-plated rags.
I had always wanted “We will be Italy” to mean we will have beautiful architecture and countryside and farmers’ markets and wonderful food and warm friendly people and decent levels of leftist activism and government. Now “We will be Italy” is a reference to coronavirus and to the trends that of course suggest that the United States has chosen to be much worse than Italy.
On this Liberation Day in Italy 75 years ago, U.S. and Soviet troops met in Germany and hadn’t been told they were at war with each other yet. But in the mind of Winston Churchill they were. He proposed using Nazi troops together with allied troops to attack the Soviet Union, the nation that had just done the bulk of the work of defeating the Nazis. This was not an off-the-cuff proposal. The U.S. and British had sought and achieved partial German surrenders, had kept German troops armed and ready, and had debriefed German commanders on lessons learned from their failure against the Russians. Attacking the Russians sooner rather than later was a view advocated by General George Patton, and by Hitler’s replacement Admiral Karl Donitz, not to mention Allen Dulles and the OSS. Dulles made a separate peace with Germany in Italy to cut out the Russians, and began sabotaging democracy in Europe immediately and empowering former Nazis in Germany, as well as importing them into the U.S. military to focus on war against Russia.
Let’s celebrate the ending of World War II but not the waging of it. Certainly not the waging of it by nations like the United States that led the refusal to accept the Jews at conferences like Evian, that financially supported Nazism and fascism, and that chose not to bomb Auschwitz while the King of Saudi Arabia was opposing the migration of too many Jews to Palestine.
Let’s recognize the tales of benevolent occupation and spreading of democracy to Italy found in books like A Bell for Adano as precursors to the occupations of today and as part of a politics that actually stifled movements for more decent policies in Italy 75 years ago.
One hundred years ago the United States would have led in public opposition to jumping into someone else’s war. Now that honor goes to Italy and Greece, according to a Pew study in February, and the U.S. government is mad at the Greeks and Italians. The U.S. public should be learning from them.
Italy needs a different sort of liberation now. It needs the doctors sent by Cuba and not by Cuba’s large neighbor. I think even in Italy on April 25 we should look to the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal that ended a dictatorship and Portuguese colonization of Africa with almost no violence.
When I saw that the actor Tom Hanks had coronavirus, I immediately thought of Inferno, the movie starring Tom Hanks, not the book. As in virtually all movies, Hanks had to save the world individually and violently. But when Hanks actually came down with a contagious disease in the real world, what he had to do was follow proper procedures and play his bit role to avoid spreading it further, while encouraging others to do the same.
The heroes we need are not to be found on Netflix and Amazon, but are all around us, in hospitals and books. They’re in The Plague by Albert Camus, where we can read these words:
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
There really only is one
option when it comes to nuclear weapons, and that is to do everything we can to
abolish them before they abolish us. New York City Council will be voting on
January 28, 2020, to do its part by voting on two measures that already have
enough sponsors to give them veto-proof majorities.
One is a bill that will create an “advisory committee to
examine nuclear disarmament and issues related to recognizing and reaffirming
New York city as a nuclear weapons-free zone.”
The second is a resolution that “calls upon the New York City Comptroller
to instruct the pension funds of public employees in New York City to divest
from and avoid any financial exposure to companies involved in the production
and maintenance of nuclear weapons, reaffirms New York City as a Nuclear
Weapons Free Zone, and joins the ICAN Cities Appeal, which welcomes the
adoption of and calls on the United States to support and join the Treaty on
the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”
The “whereas” clauses that
lead up to the statement above are specific to New York City, but could be
modified for any location on earth. They include these:
“Whereas, Catastrophic
humanitarian and environmental consequences would result from any nuclear
detonation in New York City and could not be adequately addressed; eliminating
nuclear weapons remains the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are
never used again under any circumstances; and . . .
“Whereas, New York City has
a special responsibility, as a site of Manhattan Project activities and a nexus
for financing of nuclear weapons, to express solidarity with all victims and
communities harmed by nuclear weapons use, testing and related activities;”
The resolution makes clear
that divestment will be no mere formality:
“Whereas, According to the
2018 report compiled by Don’t Bank on the Bomb, 329 financial institutions
around the world including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase
among others have invested through financing, manufacturing or production of
nuclear weapons with BlackRock and Capital Group, the highest contributors
among United States based financial institutions, with their investments
totaling $38 billion and $36 billion respectively; and
“Whereas, The pension system
for the City of New York retirees has significant investments in these
financial institutions and other companies involved in producing key components
for and maintaining nuclear weapons through equity holdings, bond holdings, and
other assets, according to the annual report issued by the New York City
Employees’ Retirement System;”
A large coalition of
organizations has been supporting the resolution and bill that are now
scheduled for a vote. Alice Slater, a Board Member of World BEYOND War, and the
UN Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, will be one of numerous
individuals testifying on January 28th. The following is her prepared
testimony:
I am so deeply grateful and
thankful to each one of that has sponsored this pending legislation, Res. 976
and Int.1621. Your willingness is laudable in showing the world that the New
York City Council is stepping up to the plate and taking historic action to
support the recent global efforts to finally ban the bomb! Your resolve to use
the power and clout of New York City to call on our US government to sign and
ratify the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons(TPNW) and to work
for the divestment of NYC pensions from investments in nuclear weapons
manufacturers is so greatly appreciated.
South Korea cannot choose to
make peace with North Korea without the consent of a foreign power that keeps
thirty thousand troops in South Korea, makes South Korea pay much of the cost
of housing them, commands the South Korean military in war, holds veto power at
the United Nations, and is not accountable to the International Criminal Court
or the International Court of Justice.
The same foreign power has
troops in almost every nation on earth, significant bases in about half the
nations on earth, and the earth itself divided up into command zones for
control and domination. It dominates outerspace for military purposes, and
global finances for the purpose of extracting wealth from places with high
levels of poverty. It builds bases where it wants, and installs weapons where
it wants — including illegally placing nuclear weapons in various countries.
For that matter, it violates laws when and where it wants.
Supposedly neutral nations
like Ireland, nonetheless, allow the U.S. military to use their airports, and —
for that matter — allow U.S. police to search everyone in Dublin airport before
they fly to the United States. Many things can be questioned and condemned in
Irish corporate media, but not the U.S. military and its use of Ireland. Some
of the relevant corporations, such as those controlling billboards near Shannon
Airport, are actually based in the United States.
The siege
of the US Embassy in Baghdad ended after a force of US Marines arrived and
dozens of militia members and their supporters withdrew from the compound.
Washington blames Iran. RT America’s Sayeh Tavangar has the latest developments
(0:53). The Pentagon is starting
off 2020 with a massive budget-higher than it was at the peak of the Korean and
Vietnam wars. Investigative journalist David Swanson joins In Question to
discuss (4:50). Tech giant Google is
claiming it developed an artificial intelligence system that can detect the
presence of breast cancer more accurately than human doctors. Legal and media analyst Lionel weighs in (13:34).
West Point Professor Tim
Bakken’s new book The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure
in the U.S. Military traces a path of corruption, barbarism, violence,
and unaccountability that makes its way from the United States’ military
academies (West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs) to the top ranks of the
U.S. military and U.S. governmental policy, and from there into a broader U.S.
culture that, in turn, supports the subculture of the military and its leaders.
The U.S. Congress and
presidents have ceded tremendous power to generals. The State Department and
even the U.S. Institute of Peace are subservient to the military. The corporate
media and the public help maintain this arrangement with their eagerness to
denounce anyone who opposes the generals. Even opposing giving free weapons to
Ukraine is now quasi-treasonous.
Within the military,
virtually everyone has ceded power to those of higher rank. Disagreeing with
them is likely to end your career, a fact that helps explain why so many
military officials say what they
really think about the current wars just after retiring.
But why does the public go
along with out of control militarism? Why are so few speaking out and raising
hell against wars that only 16% of the
public tell pollsters they support? Well, the Pentagon spent $4.7 billion
in 2009, and likely more in each year since, on propaganda and public
relations. Sports leagues are paid with public dollars to stage “rituals that
are akin to worship,” as Bakken appropriately describes the fly-overs, weapons
shows, troop honorings, and war hymn screechings that precede professional
athletics events. The peace movement has far superior materials but comes up a
little short of $4.7 billion each year for advertising.
Speaking out against war can
get you attacked as unpatriotic or “a Russian asset,” which helps explain why
environmentalists don’t mention one of the worst polluters, refugee aid groups
don’t mention the primary cause of the problem, activists trying to end
mass-shootings never mention that the shooters are disproportionately veterans,
anti-racist groups avoid noticing the way militarism spreads racism, plans for
green new deals or free college or healthcare usually manage not to mention the
place where most of the money is now, etc. Overcoming this hurdle is the work
being taken on by World BEYOND
War.
L’Italia dovrebbe fare amicizia con il pubblico degli
Stati Uniti e del mondo cacciando le basi militari statunitensi.
Di David
Swanson
Alla
fine degli anni ’80, quando ero un adolescente e uno studente di scambio a
Bassano del Grappa, amavo l’Italia per le stesse ragioni per cui l’amo ancora,
ragioni che includono le bellezze naturali, quelle create dall’uomo, e la
bellezza umana.
Ho
trovato gli italiani in generale amichevoli, gentili, generosi, amorevoli,
divertenti, umili, autocritici, e intelligenti. Potrebbe anche avermi aiutato
un po’ il fatto che quando dicevo agli altri giovani che ero degli Stati Uniti,
in genere pensavano fosse una cosa fantastica. Gli anziani dicevano che gli
Stati Uniti avevano salvato l’Italia dal nazismo.
Non
sapevo abbastanza per rispondere che il governo e le élite statunitensi avevano
alimentato l’ascesa del nazismo, che aveva attinto ai finanziamenti di Wall
Street, alle leggi sulla segregazione degli Stati Uniti, ai programmi di
eugenetica degli Stati Uniti, ai campi statunitensi per i nativi americani, e
al sostegno del governo degli Stati Uniti.
Non
sapevo abbastanza per sottolineare che l’idea degli Stati Uniti come salvatori
veniva mantenuta viva per l’incapacità di ritirare le truppe statunitensi
dall’Italia, perché dovevano restare allo scopo di aggredire altri paesi per
tutt’altre ragioni che salvare le persone dal nazismo.
Remarks August 6, 2019, at Hiroshima to Hope in Seattle, Washington
How do we honor victims? We can remember them and appreciate who they were. But there were too many of them, and too many unknown to us. So, we can remember a sample of them, examples of them. And we can honor the living survivors, get to know and appreciate them while they are still alive.
We can remember the horrific way in which those killed were victimized, in hopes of manipulating ourselves into doing something serious about it. We can remember those who were instantly vaporized, but also those half-burnt, partially melted, those eaten out from the inside by maggots, those who died slowly in excruciating pain and in the presence of their screaming children, those who died from drinking water they knew would kill them but who were driven to it by thirst.
And then, when we are ready to take action, when we have built up a righteous anger, what is it we should do? We should not, of course, commit some new atrocity under the banner of cosmic balance. Nuking Washington D.C. or spray painting Harry Truman’s grave would not honor anyone in any way. Instead of resorting to magical means of undoing the mass killing, we have to face up to the fact that we cannot in any way whatsoever undo it. We cannot bring back those slaughtered in Japan 74 years ago. We cannot bring back any of the millions murdered in that war or any of the millions murdered in any of the wars since.
But here’s the good news. There are many things that are commonly thought of as just as impossible or more so than bringing back the dead which we most certainly can do. And they are things that I believe honor the victims in the most profound way imaginable.
The key to understanding this is that, apart from feedback loops set in motion by environmental destruction, anything — absolutely anything — created by humans can be uncreated by humans, can be replaced by something radically different by humans.
After the bombings that did not end the war, after the Soviet invasion, after the war finally did end, a system of victors’ justice was established in which war was for the first time prosecuted as a crime, but only if you’d lost it. An international system of government was created which, this time around, the United States joined, but it was a system that made the biggest war makers and weapons dealers more equal than everybody else. The veto power at the UN Security Council is not an immutable genetic or physical or mystical inheritance. It’s words on a computer screen. The International Criminal Court does not have to prosecute only Africans in the way in which an apple that detaches from a tree has to move downward, but rather in the way in which the U.S. House of Representatives had to oppose ending the Korean War until this past month when it started supporting ending the Korean War.
The same body, which I usually refer to as the House of Misrepresentatives, also this past month passed a requirement that every foreign U.S. base be justified as benefitting U.S. security. If that were to be followed through on, the U.S. would not become able to undo the injustice inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it would be compelled to cease inflicting injustice on Okinawa.
Seventy-three countries have signed and 23 ratified a new treaty banning nuclear weapons. Every country on earth except the United States has signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Most countries on earth, unlike the United States, are party to the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights optional protocols, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention Against Torture optional protocol, and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, and the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, and the International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing, and Training of Mercenaries, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, and the Principles of International Cooperation in the Detection, Arrest, Extradition, and Punishment of Persons Guilty of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, and the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the Land Mines Convention.
The First Gulf War back in 1990 was a big huge success. One of the things it accomplished was a major U.S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia. Muslims around the world were outraged. Bombs were repeatedly set off at Khobar Towers where troops were stationed. In 1998 Osama Bin Laden declared:
“For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. . . . The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”
In 2001, the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed and the Pentagon damaged. A year and a half later, the United States removed most of its troops from Saudi Arabia, leaving some behind with various excuses and under various euphemistic labels. When Barack Obama was president, the CIA opened a drone base in Saudi Arabia from which to murder people in Yemen with missiles from robotic airplanes. This, of course, stabilized Yemen which has known peace and prosperity ever since, or something. Now, in 2019, the United States is sending more troops into Saudi Arabia again.
What could go wrong?
Well, let’s state the obvious in order to move on to stating the obvious. Killing people is insane and evil. Religion is insane and evil (except yours, dear reader). Killing people because of your religion is insane and evil. Nothing whatsoever, no insane and evil killing, can justify any other insane and evil killing.
Now, moving on to the obvious, let me quote from Peace Science Digest: “Deployment of troops to another country increases the chance of attacks from terror organizations from that country. Weapons exports to another country increase the chance of attacks from terror organizations from that country. 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks are conducted to encourage foreign occupiers to leave the terrorist’s home country.”
I’m not aware of a foreign terrorist threat, attempt, or action against the United States, in which a motivation was stated, where that motivation was anything other than opposition to U.S. military imperialism. Statistically, religion doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. If you occupy another country, people get mad — with or without religion.
This is part of a broader picture of counter-productive self-defeating masochism. Terrorism has predictably increased during the war on terrorism (as measured by the Global Terrorism Index). 99.5% of terrorist attacks occur in countries engaged in wars and/or engaged in abuses such as imprisonment without trial, torture, or lawless killing. The highest rates of terrorism are in “liberated” and “democratized” Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist groups responsible for the most terrorism (that is, non-state, politically motivated violence) around the world have grown out of U.S. wars against terrorism.
So, why did I say that the war that launched all of this was a big huge success? Well, it depends on your perspective.If the goal is to sell weapons, putting more troops into Saudi Arabia is brilliant. If the goal is to provoke more violence and get more wars going, nothing could be better. If the goal is persuading people that you are attacking their religion and will listen to nothing other than violence, everything seems right on course. You’re winning. Pretty soon, as Trump promised, a lot of us are going to be truly sick of all this winning.
In the year 2000, the CIA gave Iran (slightly and obviously flawed) blueprints for a key component of a nuclear weapon. In 2006 James Risen wrote about this “operation” in his book State of War. In 2015, the United States prosecuted a former CIA agent, Jeffrey Sterling, for supposedly having leaked the story to Risen. In the course of the prosecution, the CIA made public a partially redacted cable that showed that immediately after bestowing its gift on Iran, the CIA had begun efforts to do the same for Iraq. Now in 2019, Sterling is publishing his own book, Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower.
I can only make sense of one reason why the CIA hands out blueprints for nuclear bombs (and in the case of Iran planned to deliver actual parts as well). Both Risen and Sterling claim that the goal was to slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Yet we now know that the CIA had no solid knowledge that Iran had any nuclear weapons program, or if it had one how advanced it was. We know that the CIA has been involved in promoting the false belief that Iran is a nuclear threat since the early 1990s. But even assuming that the CIA believed Iran to have a nuclear weapons program in 2000 (which the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate would later claim had been ended in 2003), we have not been offered any explanation of how providing flawed blueprints could have been imagined to slow such a program down. If the idea is supposed to be that Iran or Iraq would simply waste time building the wrong thing, we run up against two problems. First, they would likely waste vastly more time if working without plans, as compared to working with flawed ones. Second, the flaws in the plans given to Iran were obvious and apparent.
When the former-Russian assigned to deliver the blueprints to the Iranian government immediately spotted the flaws in them, the CIA told him not to worry. But they didn’t tell him that the flawed plans would somehow slow down an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Instead they told him that the flawed plans would somehow reveal to the CIA how far along Iran’s program was. But how that would happen has never been explained either. And it conflicts with something else they told him, namely that they already knew how far along Iran was and that Iran already had the nuclear knowledge that they were providing. My point is not that these assertions were true but that the slow-them-down rationale was not attempted.
One never wants to underestimate incompetence. The CIA knew next to nothing about Iran, and by Sterling’s account was not seriously trying to learn. By Risen’s account, around 2004 the CIA accidentally revealed to the Iranian government the identities of all of its agents in Iran. But incompetence does not seem to explain a consciously thought-out effort to distribute nuke plans to designated enemies. What does seem to explain it better is the desire to point to the possession of those plans, or of the product of those plans, as evidence of a hostile threat of “weapons of mass destruction,” which, as we all know, is an acceptable excuse for a war.
That we are not entitled to find out, even 20 years later, whether giving nuke plans to Iran was incompetence or malevolence, or to ask Bill Clinton or George W. Bush why they approved of it, is itself a problem that goes beyond incompetence and into the realm of anti-democratic tyrannical governance by secret agencies.
We have no possible way of knowing a complete list of countries the U.S. government has handed nuclear weapons plans to. Trump is now giving nuclear weapons secrets to Saudi Arabia in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, his oath of office, and common sense — though we must, of course, defer to the wisdom of Nancy Pelosi and recognize that nothing Trump does could possibly be impeachable. The silver lining is that whistleblowers on giving nukes to the Saudis have apparently been listened to by certain members of Congress who have gone public with the information. Whether the difference is the individuals, the committees, the sides of Capitol Hill, the party in the majority, the party in the White House, the involvement of the CIA, the general culture, or the nation being given the keys to the apocalypse, the fact is that when Jeffrey Sterling went to Congress to reveal the giving of nukes to Iran, Congress Members either ignored him, suggested that he move to Canada, or — with horrible timing — died before doing anything.
Discurso do Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin, na manhã do dia 24 de Fevereiro de 2022
Discurso do Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin, Tradução em português
Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin: Cidadãos da Rússia, Amigos,
Considero ser necessário falar hoje, de novo, sobre os trágicos acontecimentos em Donbass e sobre os aspectos mais importantes de garantir a segurança da Rússia.
Começarei com o que disse no meu discurso de 21 de Fevereiro de 2022. Falei sobre as nossas maiores responsabilidades e preocupações e sobre as ameaças fundamentais que os irresponsáveis políticos ocidentais criaram à Rússia de forma continuada, com rudeza e sem cerimónias, de ano para ano. Refiro-me à expansão da NATO para Leste, que está a aproximar cada vez mais as suas infraestruturas militares da fronteira russa.
É um facto que, durante os últimos 30 anos, temos tentado pacientemente chegar a um acordo com os principais países NATO, relativamente aos princípios de uma segurança igual e indivisível, na Europa. Em resposta às nossas propostas, enfrentámos invariavelmente, ou engano cínico e mentiras, ou tentativas de pressão e de chantagem, enquanto a aliança do Atlântico Norte continuou a expandir-se, apesar dos nossos protestos e preocupações. A sua máquina militar está em movimento e, como disse, aproxima-se da nossa fronteira.
Porque é que isto está a acontecer? De onde veio esta forma insolente de falar que atinge o máximo do seu excepcionalismo, infalibilidade e permissividade? Qual é a explicação para esta atitude de desprezo e desdém pelos nossos interesses e exigências absolutamente legítimas?
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