France could be leading the American people down a path toward a nuclear conflict decidedly not in the interests of the American people – or of humanity itself, VIPS warns President Joe Biden.
March 24, 2024
ALERT MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: On the Brink of Nuclear War
Mr. President:
France is reportedly preparing to dispatch a force of some 2,000 troops — roughly a reinforced brigade built around an armored battalion and two mechanized battalions, with supporting logistical, engineering, and artillery troops attached — into Ukraine sometime in the not-so-distant future.
This force is purely symbolic, inasmuch as it would have zero survivability in a modern high-intensity conflict of the scope and scale of what is transpiring in Ukraine today. It would not be deployed directly in a conflict zone, but would serve either as
(1) a screening force/tripwire to stop Russia’s advance; or
(2) a replacement force deployed to a non-active zone to free up Ukrainian soldiers for combat duty. The French Brigade reportedly will be supplemented by smaller units from the Baltic states.
This would be introducing combat troops of a NATO country into a theater of war, making them “lawful targets” under the Law of War.
Such units would apparently lack a NATO mandate. In Russia’s view, however, this may be a distinction without a difference. France appears to be betting – naively – that its membership in NATO would prevent Russia from attacking French troops. Rather, it is highly likely that Russia would attack any French/Baltic contingent in Ukraine and quickly destroy/degrade its combat viability.
In that case, French President Macron may calculate that, after Russian attacks on the troops of NATO members – NATO mandate or not – he could invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter and get the NATO alliance to intervene. Such intervention would likely take the form of aircraft operating from NATO nations – and perhaps include interdiction missions against tactical targets inside Russia.
On Precipice of Nuclear War?
Doctrinally, and by legal right, Russia’s response would be to launch retaliatory strikes also against targets in NATO countries. If NATO then attacks strategic targets inside Russia, at that point Russia’s nuclear doctrine takes over, and NATO decision-making centers would be hit with nuclear weapons.
We do not believe Russia will initiate a nuclear attack against the U.S., but rather would leave it up to the United States to decide if it wants to risk destruction by preparing to launch a nuclear strike on Russia. That said, Russian strategic forces have improved to the point that, in some areas – hypersonic missiles, for example – its capability surpasses that of the U.S. and NATO.
In other words, the Russian temptation to strike first may be a bit stronger than during past crises, and we are somewhat less confident that Russia would want to “go second”.
Another disquieting factor is that the Russians are likely to believe that Macron’s folly has the tacit approval of some key U.S. and other Western officials, who seem desperate to find some way to alter the trajectory of the war in Ukraine – the more so, as elections draw near.
What Needs to Be Done
Europe needs to understand that France is leading it down a path of inevitable self-destruction.
The American people need to understand that Europe is leading them to the cusp of nuclear annihilation.
Since Russian leaders may suspect that Macron is working hand in glove with Washington, the U.S. needs to make its position publicly and unambiguously clear.
And if France and the Baltics insist on sending troops into Ukraine, it must also be made clear that such action has no NATO mandate; that Article 5 will not be triggered by any Russian retaliation; and that the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including those nuclear weapons that are part of the NATO deterrent force, will not be employed as a result of any Russian military action against French or Baltic troops.
Void of such clarity, France would be leading the American people down a path toward a nuclear conflict decidedly not in the interests of the American people – or of humanity itself.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP,
VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard Black, former Virginia State Senator; Colonel, USA (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Judge Advocate General (associate VIPS)
Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer (ret) and former Office Director in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Graham E. Fuller, Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Philip Giraldi, C.I.A., Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq and Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
James George Jatras, former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Senate leadership (Associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, former C.I.A. and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
John Kiriakou, former C.I.A. Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., U.S. Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Douglas Macgregor, Colonel, USA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Ray McGovern, former U.S. Army infantry/intelligence officer & C.I.A. analyst; C.I.A. Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & C.I.A. political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, U.S. Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Pedro Israel Orta, former C.I.A. and Intelligence Community (Inspector General) officer
Scott Ritter, former MAJ, USMC; former U.N. Weapons Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War
Click here to read the same piece as it was originally published by Consortium News.
The original upload is still available above, however YT afterwards imposed viewer restrictions and so Double Down News has re-uploaded its own more sanitised version in which the worst and most graphic images have been blotted out. This uncensored version is embedded below:
Their subsequent upload – the one embedded directly above – has once again been restricted and so on Tuesday 17th, Double Down News applied further censorship to the images shown and have produced this third version below:
David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of the Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and Ireland Correspondent. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
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I have provided a full transcript below with links included.
If anyone is guilty for the bloodshed that’s going on it is the international community, particularly Britain. The international community has given the greenest of green lights to the Israeli Army to do what it wants and that means the freedom to commit war crimes,
You’ll see Western values as they actually operate: raining down bombs on completely innocent Gazan civilians. Whether they’re supporters of Hamas or Fateh; whether they’re civilians; they’re going to die and are dying in their thousands. Where are Western values there?
If there’s blood on anyone’s hands, it’s on those who say Israel has a right to defend itself…
[cut to Joe Biden, UK Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps, former UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, opposition Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, shadow Attorney General for England and Wales, Emily Thornberry, and shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy.]
This is not the whole story. It’s not the defence of Israel, it is the expansion of Israel and it is the creation of an apartheid regime even more severe than the one that happened in South Africa.
Israel says it’s fighting an existential war and it has compared what Hamas did to a holocaust. Half my family died in the Holocaust. There’s no comparison.
From a Palestinian perspective, you have to realise that Israel was the lords, the masters of the land. They controlled all your movements. They controlled how much you ate. They controlled who you married. It’s the one that decides when to attack.
This is a country used to total control over one half of the population and lost that control –and it lost that control wildly.
I’m appalled by some of the things that happened. Desperation turned into savagery and I will use that word about what happened at Kfar Aza [kibbutz], or the music festival that took place where unarmed festival goers were shot like ducks.
These scenes are unknown to the current generation of Israelis and the shock this has produced; the sudden loss of confidence in its star performer, which is his army and its intelligence services cannot be underestimated.
That shock has now turned to anger. That anger has now turned to an unholy desire to kill Gazans…
There’s a Kfar Aza happening every night in Gaza. Women and children buried under rubble. There is absolutely apocalyptic scenes going on there. The Israeli Air Force deliberately targeting blocks, individual families, and wiping them out with precision weapons. And this is happening now to one family after another.
I don’t think Israel, and in particular the Israeli Army, can give people lectures on brutality, particularly directed at children. It happens all the time in the so-called stable peace. There were 34 children killed so far this year by soldiers in the West Bank. So there is butchery and there’s barbarity on both sides.
The problem is what’s taking place in Gaza, which is truly apocalyptic, is done on an industrial scale, and by the time this comes out the death toll will mount and mount.
Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister – the man who said that Palestinians are “human animals” – said Israeli forces will not be held accountable for anything they do. So all the past rules have been torn up and Israel is going for the maximum number of Gazan casualties, and that’s what the international community is allowing Israel to do. They have given Netanyahu the green light and an unlimited time to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
Gazans have tried to break out of their open-air prison before. It happened on the day in which Donald Trump’s son-in-law [Jared Kushner] was signing the ceremony that transferred the official American Embassy to Jerusalem. On that very day, you had Palestinians unarmed who were gunned down demonstrating right next to the fence. They didn’t break out of the fence, they were simply being shot at, rather like ducks with the most sophisticated weapons.
When that demonstration happened, Gazans learned a lesson, that the next breakout that they do would have to be armed.
Hamas is not ISIS
Hamas is very very different from ISIS and actually the two were at war with each other in which there were quite a few dead bodies.
There’s no analytical comparison between Hamas and ISIS and the main difference between them is that although Hamas is an Islamist organisation and offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is a resistance group dedicated to ending the occupation. And this still is a dispute and a conflict over land and not religion.
Having said that, Hamas called its attack on Southern Israel the Al-Aqsa Flood for a reason. Al-Aqsa is being invaded and attacked all the time. Al-Aqsa isn’t just the third holiest site for Islam, it’s also a national symbol for Palestine. This sacred turf is actually being taken away piecemeal and again the West is letting them do this. This was the reason for Hamas saying enough is enough.
But there were lots of other reasons as well. If you can imagine it: 16 years in an open-air prison with the electricity controlled or rationed, food rationed, 60 percent unemployment, settler attacks on Palestinian Villages, protected by the army which Israelis themselves describe as “pogroms”.
[This led to] the total impossibility of a political solution, or even a national unity government, and that suited Israel absolutely fine.
When they were demonstrating about democracy in Israel, no one was talking about the obvious elephant in the room which was an apartheid regime for half of the population; the Palestinian population. Neither left nor right were bothered about it. And that too is an ingredient into what actually happened here, because the message that was being given by Israel to the Palestinians is ‘you don’t matter, we can do it without you, we can control you, and we’ve forgotten about the Palestinian State. No one is interested in it.’
Just days before this attack happened was the imminence of a normalisation deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Netanyahu got up in the United Nations General Assembly waving a map that eradicated Palestine completely and saying:
“We’ll build a new corridor of peace and prosperity that connects Asia through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel to Europe. This is an extraordinary change. A monumental change.” [from 6:30 mins]
Reversing the logic of the last possibility of an agreement on a two-state solution which was in 2002, which was called the Arab peace initiative.
You’ve got Israel that’s turning the screw all the time and encroaching. There are now 700,000 settlers. It’s impossible to put Palestinian State and everyone knows it. But a two-state solution is cynically a policy of all European governments and America. It’s a policy that can’t now possibly exist, and that is the situation that the Palestinians are facing.
Now what Hamas attack has done is to say ‘I’m sorry, we’re here, you cannot ignore us.’ Now, they’ve done it in a brutal way. They have definitely committed crimes against humanity, but the Palestinians who would not necessarily support Hamas at all would say ‘what the hell else do we do?’ And that’s what’s happening all over the place to a new generation of Palestinians, and this is the fundamental problem of Israel thinking; that it can wipe Gaza out.
It can wipe Gaza out. It can kill 10,000 people, 20,000 people. It cannot kill the Palestinian cause.
Hamas is a complicated organisation to describe. It has various wings. There is a faction of Hamas that controls Gaza and there is Mohammed Deif the head of the al-Qassam Brigades named after a Syrian preacher Izz ad-Din al-Qassam who turned to resistance under the British mandate. He was killed by the British in a forest outside Jenin. What the West and Israel permanently misunderstands about the nature of Palestinian resistance was that his name and example lived on.
If Israel now succeeds in eradicating the military leadership the al-Qassam Brigades of Gaza and kills them all, what do you think is going to happen to the memory that they leave behind? Yes, they can level Gaza. They can reduce the whole thing to a pile of rubble. They can kill 100,000 people and they can say ‘job done’. And they can even defeat Hezbollah. But what do you think is going to happen to the memory of all those dead?
In a new generation that will break out with even stronger force in 20 or 30 years time. That’s history. That’s what’s happened before.
Resistance, armed resistance, has been crushed many times. It was crushed in 1948. It was crushed in 1969. It was crushed in 1973. It’s been crushed regularly, and what has happened? Hamas is now much, much stronger than previous iterations of it. So there’s always going to be, whoever you call them, a very strong element of Palestinians who say the only way of changing the situation is by armed resistance until they are involved in proper negotiations and a peace deal, and a calm, and an exchange of prisoners.
But if Israel thinks that they can wipe out Hamas and wipe out the Palestinian resistance, history tells us they are completely wrong. And all we are doing now is setting the seeds for and even more powerful round of resistance in one or two decades to come.
How do we stop the violence? We stop the violence by reversing course. By realising that the Palestinians are people; that there’s always going to be resistance whether it’s Hamas, whether it’s anyone else: whatever they call themselves, they are not going to be chucked off their land. There is not going to be another Nakba. They’re going to stay there whatever, and they’re going to die on that land.
The only way out of this incredible cul-de-sac that we’ve got ourselves into, is to stop giving Israel the green light. Is to enforce negotiations with a broadly representative Palestinian national unity government that allows Palestinians to elect their own leaders, that lifts the siege on Gaza, and lifts the siege on all the other Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank, and that you start a process of sharing the land ‘from the river to the sea’ between the two peoples.
And this has got to be done with a realisation in Israel that there is no end to this until they fundamentally reverse course.
The alternative media in a crisis like this is really important because it provides a different voice to the voice that you’re getting on the BBC, on the ITN, on Sky, that is showing a one-sided horror at what’s going on with Hamas and a blanket support for Israel without really troubling themselves with what’s going on to Palestinian civilians.
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One of the most celebrated quotes from modern cinema comes from the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992). Cross-examined during the court-martial proceedings, Col. Jessep (Jack Nicholson) has been called to testify as a witness by defence lawyer and subordinate Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise), and in a state of growing agitation growls his notorious retort…
Col. Jessup: I’ll answer the question. You want answers?
Lt. Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to them.
Col Jessup: You want answers?!
Lt. Kaffee: I want the truth!
Col. Jessup: You can’t handle the truth!
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The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed cover the tirade by official English language spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo in which the deranged ex-Democratic Party activist threatened journalists and media figures who criticized Ukraine’s war effort with death:
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Barbarians at the gates?
In the West we value liberal democracy and look to our own liberal democracies as the true bastions of modern civilisation. It is an outlook doubtless culturally instilled, and enshrined with it, we were taught to have considerable faith in elected governments, the civil service, our courts of law, and the fourth estate provided by a free and independent press. Historically, we have indeed held faith in all these democratic institutions, which although admittedly flawed, were once revered by a good many or else more generally acknowledged as safeguards and regarded as necessary evils by the rest of us.
However, public trust in liberal democracy and its institutions has suddenly reached an historic low, and as our trust in the extant political systems continues to wane, growing numbers are seeing how the whole edifice of western democracy is currently rotting away from the top down. Commensurate to this, we are witnessing the somewhat abrupt and inexorable decline of western influence across the world; by extension, the troubling vision of a global retreat for “modern civilisation”. To steal a line from Marx and Engels generally quoted in the form of a translation of The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air.”
In response, a schism has been widening between two apparently rival groups: those who are eager to restore public trust in state authorities, political institutions and establishment media, and others whose loss of faith is more final and absolute, and so have turned their backs fundamentally to all of the old organs of state. Both sides, for contrary but comparable reasons, show tendencies of know-all superiority, and meanwhile fall into alternative states of heightened anxiety, depression or worse, paranoia. There is a great deal to fear. In this regard, neither side is mistaken at all.
The one side sees only the unstoppable and merciless encroachment of a soulless and authoritarian state apparatus crushing all individual expression and freedom; the other side dreads an inexorable collapse into chaos and a populist anarchy. So one seeks remedies away from the blaring pronouncements of mainstream authority within receding corners of the internet – for some lost souls any alternative will do – while the other still regularly turns on the nightly news or pores over pages of the broadsheets with occasionally cheers for national security agencies that they once feared and loathed in turn. Both see the darkness coming and so clamber despairing towards any chinks of light.
Superficially this division is between liberal/democratic-statism as opposed to the apparently reactionary forces of nationalist-conservative/libertarianism. In fact, significance differences between the opposing camps are more nuanced, as evidenced by the placement of slashes uniting what would otherwise be competing political orientations within themselves. Nonetheless, this is a broadly accepted portrayal of how the political landscape is being reshaped.
In an attempt to keep this article reasonably brief while also covering a lot of ground, I shall try not to venture off into the weeds and the various related topics that range from Trump’s election victory, the shock Brexit result, Russiagate scandals, the covid response and so on. I have already dealt with all of these subjects extensively – so for readers who want to find analysis and my opinions on each of these matters I refer you to those earlier posts (follow the links provided). Instead, the point is simply to recognise and understand how we have entered such a period of factionalisation resulting in deep political bifurcation and the emergence of two distinct warring factions where – to paraphrase George W Bush – from the liberal perspective, you are either with us or with the enemy.
With this borne in mind, I appreciate that much that follows puts me inside this envisioned enemy camp for many readers on the liberal side. On the other hand, anyone who knows me personally, or who regularly follows this blog, understands that I have no time for Trump, no time for the majority of Brexiteers, no time for the “Covid-deniers” (while I hate the term, I use it for sake of convenience) and no time for the far right and nationalistic politics in general, whether of Putin, Netanyahu and the Likudniks, or the January 6th protesters/rioters. Unapologetically, I remain a Corbynista. And if I were American voter, would today be campaigning for the election of RFK Jr. Quite possibly America’s last remaining hope:
Having swiftly addressed any doubts surrounding my political perspectives and questionable motivation for compiling this post, I now wish to return to the principle matter in hand, and delve headlong into the nitty-gritty. Not to discover the grubby truth of our contemporary political reality in its fullness, but to outline the most incontrovertible and thus strictly speaking non-partisan dirty truths, beginning with the smelliest and most grotesque truth of all. The most gargantuan and gnarliest pachyderm ever stuffed into the tightest corner of the most claustrophobic of rooms: how the ostensible US Commander-in-Chief is utterly incapable of commanding anything whatsoever…
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Joe Biden is incapable of running anything let alone the Free World
Here is Joe Biden on stage in Hanoi, Vietnam during a visit that also marked the end to the underwhelming G20 summit in India:
After bumbling on more or less incoherently from beginning to end for the entire speech, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre eventually interrupted Biden mid-sentence – perhaps fearing what he is about to say next – Biden’s mic was cut and soothing jazz music played over to cover the shock, as the US President forlornly meandered off the stage. Moments earlier, Biden had literally told his audience that he was about to go to bed!
Now here’s the rub. What happened last week in Hanoi has happened in countless places and earlier occasions. The fact is – and this is the first of many irrefutable actualities that many liberals find so hard to swallow – Biden is totally unfit to hold office. He is very obviously not compos mentis.
Moreover, the clear signs that Biden is suffering with some form of senility or dementia had been perfectly evident in the prior months leading up to his 2020 presidential victory and it is even something I have previously discussed on the blog. Yet despite the mounting evidence, the liberal media remained silent and actually rallied to Biden’s electoral cause – doubtless in determined efforts to prevent the re-election of Trump – but presumably as consequence of their own failures in this regard, have consistently covered up evidence of Biden’s steady mental decline.
All of which unavoidably leads to a question of nearly fathomless political importance. The elephant in the room besides Biden’s senility itself: if Joe Biden isn’t running America then who behind the scenes is ultimately pulling the strings? Like you, I do not have any definitive answer to this question. We probably all know who it isn’t however. Sit back down, Kamala Harris! Yet the sheer weight of this question can hardly be overstated, particularly in light of the evidently deteriorating politico-economic situation both on the US domestic front and abroad.
This obvious decline in American leadership is now leading the West as a whole into dire straits, while mainstream denial of the seriousness of the situation once again underlines the deficiencies of the establishment media. Joe Biden’s failing health should never have become a matter for public concern. It should have remained a private family matter. Neither should my next point of contention… but facts do still remain facts. And likewise, all of the issues raised below underscore a central concern, one I have also highlighted many times previously, that the fourth estate effectively died years ago. (Which is sadly a constant refrain on this blog.)
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The Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed in all of its military objectives
In early June, Ukraine launched its long overdue counteroffensive. Back then, fellow Europeans and Americans had been told to expect a rapid and sweeping assault that would cut off the Russian advance entirely as it reached the Sea of Azov, where the battles would culminate with the final liberation of Crimea. But all of these promises were soon forgotten. Instead the Western media has gradually withdrawn its focus from the stalled and evidently failed advancement of Ukrainian troops. And in this instance, no news very definitely means bad news.
Esteemed American political scientist and international relations scholar, John Mearsheimer speaking in a lecture back in June 2015 had already issued a grave caution to the Western powers, saying the US and Europe were “leading Ukraine down the primrose path”:
“What are the implications for Ukraine? This is in many ways the most important part of my talk, and I’ll just take two or three minutes. When I give this talk many people in the West think that there’s sort of a deep-seated immoral dimension to my position, because I’m blaming the West and not Putin who certainly has authoritarian or thuggish tendencies – there’s no question about that – but I actually think that what’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.” 1 [from43:40 mins]
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Almost exactly eight years on, and three months into the counteroffensive, Mearsheimer now updates his stance and expounds upon just how catastrophic the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been [with his original footnotes retained throughout — although the links are not available]:
It is now clear that Ukraine’s eagerly anticipated counteroffensive has been a colossal failure.[1] After three months, the Ukrainian army has made little progress pushing back the Russians. Indeed, it has yet to get beyond the so-called “grey zone,” the heavily contested strip of land that lies in front of the first main line of Russian defenses. The New York Times reports that “In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. and European officials. The toll included some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.”[2] According to virtually all accounts of the fighting, Ukrainian troops have suffered enormous casualties.[3] All nine of the vaunted brigades that NATO armed and trained for the counteroffensive have been badly chewed up on the battlefield.
Nor is Mearsheimer alone in his unvarnished criticism, either prior to the counteroffensive or since. Although it has since become very hard not to acknowledge the basic fact that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is essentially over; its forces suffering unsustainable losses both in terms of equipment supplied by the Nato countries and sheer number of Ukrainian soldiers maimed or killed in action.
In a very recent article candidly entitled “Ukraine ‘in deep trouble’: Some experts say $1B more from US won’t matter”, USA Todayreports that:
Steven Myers, an Air Force veteran, State Department advisory panel member and Russia expert, says the Biden administration “party line” is that Ukraine is winning and that Russia must yield to the West or become a “vassal of China.” Myers says new Ukraine Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, a Blinken pat on the back and the latest aid package won’t dramatically alter Ukraine’s struggle against its far-bigger neighbor.
The same piece continues with an altogether stark assessment of the realities on the ground and the unrealistic prospects of any further Ukrainian advancement:
“There is no effective counterstrategy available to the Ukrainians,” Myers said. “The Ukrainians are in deep trouble.”
Myers told USA TODAY the Ukrainians use “pin pricks” and news about taking back land to demonstrate progress to the West − but are less transparent about the cost in Ukrainian lives.
“They don’t talk about the counterstrikes by the Russians, who don’t care about gaining or holding ground in the kill zone and are experts at laying traps,” he said.
Ukrainian forays into Russian territory usually result in drones smashing high-rise windows in Moscow. A Russian rocket attack Wednesday the eastern Ukraine city of Kostiantynivka struck a downtown market, killing 17 civilians hours after Blinken arrived in Kyiv.
Ukraine and the West badly need an exit strategy, Myers said.
“Europe is in more economic trouble than we are. Germany’s in deep recession,” Myers said. “The Europeans are not going to shoulder more economic burden. They need an off-ramp.”
Again, Myers is not alone in taking this position. As the piece goes on to explain:
Sean McFate, a professor at Syracuse University and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council think tank, aligns with Myers. He supports the change in defense ministers, saying corruption claims forced the issue. But that won’t change the course of the war, he said.
McFate says the U.S. relied on conventional warfare tactics in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan − and lost. Yet the U.S. has not changed tactics in Ukraine, he says. Russia made the same mistakes early in Ukraine with its ill-fated blitz toward Kyiv, McFate told USA TODAY. Now the Kremlin is relying on more modern tools of war, he said, such as controlling information and mercenary troops.
“Things are going nowhere for Ukraine,” McFate said. “Wars are no longer won like World War II by taking the enemy’s land, killing their troops and flying your flag over their capital.”
Click here to read the full article written by John Bacon, published in USA Today on September 7th.
Returning to John Mearsheimer’s analysis in his piece curtly entitled “Bound to Lose”, he summarises “the results so far” of Ukraine’s counteroffensive strategy in these terms:
The counteroffensive has been an abysmal failure, contrary to the expectations of almost everyone in the West. Ukraine has suffered huge casualties and lost large amounts of weaponry in three months of fighting.[47] In the process, its army has yet to reach the first line of Russia’s defense-in-depth; it remains bogged down fighting in the grey zone located in front of Russia’s main defense lines, where, as one Ukrainian soldier put it, “They were just waiting for us…prepared positions everywhere. It was a wall of steel. It was horrendous.”[48] As noted, Western officials report that Ukraine lost about 20 percent of the weapons it employed on the battlefield during the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, which included a good number of the tanks and armored fighting vehicles that the West had provided.[49]
Continuing:
It is now widely recognized that the counteroffensive has failed and there is no serious prospect of Ukraine suddenly achieving success before either the fall rains or Ukrainian leaders shut it down.[54] For example, The Kyiv Independent recently ran a story with the title: “Inching Forward in Bakhmut Counteroffensive, Ukraine’s Hardened Units Look Ahead to Long, Grim War.”[55] Relatedly, The Washington Post published an article on 10 August that emphasized the dark mood in Ukraine: “Two months after Ukraine went on the attack, with little visible progress on the front and a relentless, bloody summer across the country, the narrative of unity and endless perseverance has begun to fray. The number of dead — untold thousands — increases daily. Millions are displaced and see no chance of returning home. In every corner of the country, civilians are exhausted from a spate of recent Russian attacks…. Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are simply not getting any.”[56]
Concluding his latest assessment of what he finally regards as disastrous failure at the level of Western, and specifically, US foreign policy:
It is hard to imagine, for example, the US taking its gunsights off Russia in the foreseeable future. The most likely result is that that the war will go on and eventually end in a frozen conflict with Russia in possession of a significant portion of Ukrainian territory. But that outcome will not put an end to the competition and conflict between Russia and Ukraine or between Russia and the West.
Click here to read John Mearsheimer’s full article entitled “Bound to Lose” published on his Substack on September 2nd.
Trickles of truth are very, very slowly gathering into streams. But if these streams of information ever seem likely to turn into a flood, then we can be quite sure that the establishment media will do their best to distract us with other news of events home and abroad. Distraction from unpalatable facts has become their forte.
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The war in Ukraine is not a Hollywood battle of good against evil
Ukraine is a divided nation. The western half, which is Ukrainian speaking, looks towards Europe; the Eastern half speaks Russian and prefers to keep its distance from the West. The opposition has been mostly portrayed as pro-EU (even when much of the sentiment is actually anti-Russia) and thus pro-democracy, which is a deliberate and calculated over-simplification.
Unfortunately for the people of Ukraine, the location of their homeland is key to winning what Arthur Conolly, an intelligence officer and captain of the British East India Company’s Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, once called “The Great Game”, and what Zbigniew Brzezinski nearly two centuries later alluded to as “The Grand Chessboard”. Brzezinski helpfully subtitling his 1998 book of the same name, “American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”. In other words, the neo-con “Pax Americana” but by another name, with Brzezinski’s preferred approach more cloak-and-dagger than the full frontal assault of the PNAC crazies.
The major strategy of this updated quest for global hegemony (“The New Great Game” as some have called it), is again little different than during the days of Arthur Conolly: to seize control of Eurasia. And just as ‘the game’ itself hasn’t significantly altered in two centuries nor have the main competitors changed much either. Back in Conolly’s time, it was Britain in one corner against Russia in the other; nowadays America sits in for the UK.
In this pursuit of global dominion, the Ukraine is a vital stronghold. Firstly, it is located approximately at the hub of the Eurasian landmass. But additionally, Ukraine currently provides Russia with access to the Black Sea; the principal base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet being at Sevastopol – likewise, in Syria, the Russian fleet has its naval base at Tartus ensuring access to the Eastern Mediterranean. So capturing Ukraine weakens Russia militarily too, and would help in another way, therefore, to edge the world closer to Brzezinski’s stated goal of “American primacy”.
It is not by chance that Sevastopol, the second largest port in Ukraine, is located on one of the most well-known peninsulas in the world; that of the Crimea. A tongue of land jutting into the Black Sea and, like the rock of Gibraltar, of huge strategic importance. And no accident that the Crimea shares its name with an even more famous war. A war against the Russians between the years 1853–56 that is remembered, in part, for the real humanitarian courage of nurses like Florence Nightingale, but mostly because of gung-ho military campaigns such as the Battle of Balaclava (October 25th 1854) which featured that suicidally reckless charge of the Light Brigade. Old-time military madmen commanding the six hundred to ride “into the valley of Death.”2
Conolly didn’t live to hear about the shambolic pawn sacrifice at Balaklava; part of a failed attempt to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, which was already Russia’s principal naval base on the Black Sea. Identified as a British agent, he had been executed a decade before – beheaded in a square in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. So Conolly was himself a victim of the Great Game, just as were more innocent and forgotten thousands, losing their lives in campaign after campaign, of which the Crimean War was one brief episode. And the scars of this centuries’ long face-off between empires have never healed, instead the wounds are routinely reopened. Indeed, that earlier age of imperialism never ended but has skilfully reinvented itself: the significant difference between old imperialism and more swanky neo-imperialism being one of image. In the modern world running up your flag above a defeated territory is no way to win respect or curry favour whether at home or abroad.
The above passages are reproduced almost verbatim from an extended article written and published back in February 10th 2014 in the midst of the Euromaidan uprising and prior to the coup that ensued. The post is entitled “The New Great Game: ‘Pax Americana’ from Syria to Uzbekistan to the Ukraine.”
Shortly afterwards, I penned a follow-up article entitled “never let a good Ukrainian crisis go to waste…” published on April 22nd in which I quote Zbigniew Brzezinski’s exact formulation of US geostrategy in which he states more precisely how US primacy ultimately hinges on gaining control over Ukraine:
In truth, the game never changed. And sadly it is a game (at least to those currently holding power) – as Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading geopolitical strategists, makes clear not least with the title of his notorious book on Eurasian geostrategy, “The Grand Chessboard”. In it he wrote:
In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.3
This neo-imperialist game is much the same as the older imperialist game, in which only the strategies have been updated. It is about control of territory, of energy resources, of financial systems, and it has (and always did) amount to a series of proxy wars against the competing interests of competing powers. Traditionally Russia has been the great adversary, but now there is China too. So the Cold War that officially concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989… ended only in name. With the Ukrainian crisis (or should that be “Ukraine Crisis”) the chill that remained has become considerably icier. Treacherously so. But our military-industrial-financial complex needs perpetual war just to keep the racket going, or, when that ceases to be an option (as it now has), to maintain the illusion of an imminent threat against us. Bin Laden is dead, so a new Cold War is just the ticket. On top of which, as Brzezinski also explained in his book:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
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Ukraine is still full of Banderites, many also holding vital positions of power
Ukrainian journalist and exiled antiwar dissident Ruslan Kostaba has been jailed and brutally attacked by ultranationalists for his years of opposition to his government’s war in the Donbas that began in 2014, and his calls for peace with Russia.
A fortnight ago he spoke to The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal about the growing movement in Ukraine against escalating the war, and the price his countrymen face for attempting to escape the war:
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Here is a screenshot taken from the recent England international against Ukraine that was played in Poland:
Behind the goal there are three centrally placed banners. The middle one is darker and harder to resolve, but if you look carefully you will notice the word Azov, which instantly provides a clue. On either side, however, the banners are far easier to recognise. They are Ukrainian flags centrally embossed with the Azov Brigade emblem. Except that’s not quite correct. Strictly speaking the official badge of the Azov Brigade is different and this is the emblem of its former incarnation the Azov Battalion which existed prior to its widely publicised de-Nazification and subsequent rebranding for Western consumption:
To quote directly from the current Wikipedia entry (from which the image is drawn), this older design features “a combination of a mirrored Wolfsangel and the Black Sun, two symbols associated with the Wehrmacht and SS, over a small Tryzub. Since 2015, it is no longer in use as a symbol of the regiment.” [All links retained]
These old Azov banners immediately caught my eye as I was watching the game. How can it be, I wondered, that Ukrainian fans are able to roll out unambiguously Nazi emblems and no-one appears either to notice or care.
To put this into context, when Celtic fans raised Palestinian flags during a game, the flags were promptly removed and the club afterwards fined by UEFA. The football authorities generally clampdown on political displays of this kind, unless apparently… well, unless implicitly it sanctions them. Because this is generally what happens whenever Ukrainian nationalists unfurl their Nazi paraphernalia, as they are frequently in the habit of doing; the authorities just turn a blind eye to their own regulations, as did the production team and commentators working for the otherwise aching progressive Channel 4 throughout the two and a half hours of its live broadcast of the match.
Or here is another recent example that happened in London in response to an antiwar demonstration. An event that provided the opportunity for a different cohort of Ukrainian nationalists to fly literal Nazi flags directly opposite a World War II memorial:
How can this ever be permitted? Yes certainly, I am a firm advocate of freedom of speech, but flying a Wolfsangel – a variant of the Swastika – in central London in the close vicinity of a war memorial is a clear provocation… Is nobody else offended by any of this?
As veteran investigative journalist, war correspondent and ardent peace activist John Pilger wrote in an extended piece published on May 1st:
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias’ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Click here to read John Pilger’s full article entitled “There is a war coming shrouded in propaganda. It will involve us. Speak up” published on May 1st.
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The coming war with the rest of the world
While Britain’s political class is distracted by a Downing Street party, the world is at the most dangerous strategic juncture since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
These are the sobering thoughts of Daily Telegraph’s International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, as expressed in the opening paragraph in his latest article entitled “The West’s nightmare: a war on three fronts”.
Under the strapline “There has never been a more unsettling strategic landscape in my lifetime – we must turn our attention to the prospect of conflict”, the same piece then continues:
The West faces escalating threat of conflict on three fronts, each separate but linked by unknown levels of collusion: Russia’s mobilisation of a strike force on Ukraine’s border, China’s “dress rehearsal” for an attack on Taiwan, and Iran’s nuclear brinksmanship.
Each country is emboldening the other two to press their advantage, and together they risk a fundamental convulsion of the global order.
You have to go back yet further to find a moment when Western democracies were so vulnerable to a sudden change in fortunes. Today’s events have echoes of the interlude between the Chamberlain-Daladier capitulation at Munich in 1938 and consequences that followed in rapid crescendo from Anschluss to the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Click here to find Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article published on December 9th behind The Telegraph paywall.
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, regular columnist Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Hoover fellow at Stanford University teamed up with Oleksiy Honcharuk, former Ukrainian Prime Minister under current President Volodymyr Zelensky, and member of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center in an article headlined “The best response to Russia’s threats is a closer relationship with Ukraine”, which states:
Since 1939, the specter of an all-out conventional war in Europe between two major militaries has never been greater.
Click here to read the full article published by the Washington Post on Dec 1st.
It is quite easy, of course, to write off commentators like Evans-Pritchard and McFaul as alarmists, since what they are speculating on – even forecasting – is more or less unthinkable. War with Russia. War with Iran. War with China. War with all three simultaneously! This is absolute madness, and nothing good could possibly come from a war with any of these three rising powers.
However, if we accept Evans-Pritchard’s account this build up to the terrifying potential of full-fledged global conflict becomes very nearly inevitable, as an unavoidable response to the expansionism of Putin and Xi and/or the belligerence of the Iranians. To have stood by and done nothing, he compares directly with appeasement of Nazism – all three rivals to western hegemony duly compared to the most wicked and unassuageable enemy of humanity in modern times. Such unabashed reduction ad Hitlerum is always deemed permissible when enemies under scrutiny are ours!
Passages taken from another article this time published back on December 17th 2021 as Russian troops assembled on the borders of Ukraine and while many in the West – myself included – still held out hope of a peaceful resolution.
Provocatively entitled “the coming wars with Russia, China and Iran – why the stakes are raised in the last days of the unipolar order”, the opening conflict – the now admitted US proxy war against Russia (see the brief Grayzone report below) – is well underway. Meanwhile, as the Nato-led Ukrainian counteroffensive falters and in the West some are seeking ways to freeze the conflict, another proxy war in Syria is brewing once again and meanwhile the major hawks in Washington, led by the deeply ensconced neocon faction, are already turning attention back toward China.
Warning: The Grayzone report below is based on entirely on mainstream news footage, however there is an image shown in the original report that is unusually graphic at about 1:40 mins.
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My article closes with a reminders of parallel historical events and ends with a defiant peace proposal; a conclusion that has become more pertinent today than when I wrote it almost two years ago:
America’s long-term geostrategic repositioning through the stealth expansion of Nato directly up to the borders of Russia and China is now combined with its ever more bellicose political posturing. Repeatedly under the threat of attack, loose defensive alliances have tightened between Russia, China and Iran, so a coordinated response becomes all the more likely. Should the West or Israel (with US consent) take the decision to declare “pre-emptive” war against any one of the three sovereign powers, the realistic expectation is wider war. Given the probable magnitude of a three-pronged retaliation and the genuine potential for a thermonuclear exchange, the prospect of wars against Russia, China and Iran is therefore absolutely unthinkable.
A century ago a detached and callous ruling class led a largely innocent and unwitting generation into the bloody technological hellhole of no-man’s land to slaughter one another for the glory of king and country and, importantly, for the sake of empire. Back then and ever since, we have rightly talked of “lions led by donkeys”. Astonishingly, the donkeys are back in charge again, except that this time around besides an imbecilic and unprincipled political class, we also have an atrophied antiwar opposition, a moribund fourth estate and an endlessly diverted populous, so the worry is that we may be dealing with donkeys virtually all the way down.
So forgive me when I hammer this point: war is in the air again, and not just any old war. WAR with Russia! WAR with Iran! WAR with China! WAR with all three simultaneously!
I make no apologies for my vulgar use of capitals. We all need to shout about this. What’s the alternative?
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Concluding thoughts
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I am not a pessimist by nature but my unconscious is now screaming on a nightly basis. I wake up regularly with visions of war. Last night I witnessed an entire flotilla of British warships being blown apart by unseen incoming missiles, and I feared to turn around and see the rising flames and smoke of mushrooms clouds. Then I woke up.
Is my unconscious being hysterical? That’s a rhetorical question in case you thought otherwise.
But I continue writing because I really do believe there is a chance to end this nightmare. We just need to accept the truth – to handle it fully – and take appropriate action. We need to talk to one another honestly again about the threat of nuclear annihilation, as we did during the Cold War days when I was a child. We need to acknowledge the dire truth about our political leadership and the unstated imperialist drive to maintain Western supremacy. If we cannot finally accept that a multipolar world is rising then we are doomed, because the only alternative is war – a war of such terrific ferocity and unimaginable scale that little if anything will survive the cataclysm. In the event, none of us will be able to handle the truth of what has occurred.
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Updates:
Col. Doug Macgregor has become one of the fiercest critics of US foreign policy and an outspoken advocate for a peaceful resolution of the war in Ukraine. A fortnight ago he gave an interview for the Swiss German-language media outlet Die Weltwoche in which he outlined the already disastrous failures of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the escalating danger of the hawks in Washington doubling down on China:
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In another recent discussion uploaded on Friday 22nd, Brian Berletic of The New Atlas spoke to Garland Nixon and Dr. Wilmer Leon about US political interference around the world and how the youth are specifically targeted. They compared strategies in different regions and considered the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in Taiwan in the context of how events have unfolded in Ukraine:
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On Thursday 21st, Judge Andrew Napolitano spoke with former British diplomat, Alastair Crooke, who is also founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organisation that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West.
They discussed the poor international reception to Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest statements at the United Nations framed within the broader context of rising domestic pressure on Joe Biden and in light of growing revelations of Ukraine’s exhausted and spent counteroffensive “that has achieved nothing at all and has decimated the army”:
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On the same day, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou of The Duran reviewed Antony Blinken’s speech delivered at John Hopkins University on September 13th and what they sardonically describe as the Blinken Doctrine. How on the one hand Blinken concedes the unipolar moment has ended and American power is significantly weakened, on the other he now calls for unrestrained belligerence towards American’s principle geopolitical rivals Russia and China:
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Additional:
Embedded below is an interview I gave with podcaster Richard Cox that was recorded about a month ago. We began with a discussion of the origins of the conflict and how the original victims of the war when it started in Donbass have never been given a voice in the Western media. We also considered the likely outcomes as the military offensive already appeared to have stalled and the possible long-term consequences of backing the Ukrainian ultranationalists and its extreme right-wing paramilitary groups:
“I think the facts are quite clear on this: that the west is responsible; and my aim is that the main deep causes – the aim of the United States and its European allies – is to peel Ukraine away from Russia’s orbit and incorporate it into the West. Our basic goal has been to make Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia’s border and Russia says, “this ain’t happening. Period. End the story. And we will do everything we can to make sure it does not happen. That’s the deep cause… [from 10:45 mins]
What are the implications for Ukraine? This is in many ways the most important part of my talk, and I’ll just take two or three minutes. When I give this talk many people in the West think that there’s sort of a deep-seated immoral dimension to my position, because I’m blaming the West and not Putin who certainly has authoritarian or thuggish tendencies – there’s no question about that – but I actually think that what’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.
And I believe that the policy that I’m advocating which is neutralizing Ukraine and then building it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side, and Nato on the other side, is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians. What we’re doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We’re encouraging the Ukrainians to think that they will ultimately become part of the West because we will ultimately defeat Putin and we will ultimately get our way. Time is on our side. And, of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this and the Ukrainians are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians and instead want to pursue a hardline policy. Well, as I said to you before, if they do that the end result is that their country is going to be wrecked.” [from43:40 mins]
2 As then- poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson famously commemorated the incident in a narrative poem of the same title.
3 Extract from The Grand Chessboard, Chapter 2 “The Eurasian Chessboard”, p. 40, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in 1997. It is available at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski
Reprinted in full below is an open letter authored by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) with signatories including former CIA counterterrorism officer and whistleblower, John Kiriakou; former FBI special agent and whistleblower, Coleen Rowley; former CIA officer, Philip Giraldi; former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern; and former UN weapons, Scott Ritter; among others (the complete list is at the end of their letter) for the attention of US President Joe Biden. The letter concludes: “Simply stated, it is not possible to ‘win the war against Russia’ AND avoid WWIII.”
All emphasis provided by capitals, bold and italics has been retained from the original.
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ALERT MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY (VIPS) SUBJECT: Leopards vs. the Russian Bear
Decisions in an Intelligence Vacuum
Dear President Biden:
We are aware that the just-reported decision to send Abrams tanks to Ukraine responds to Berlin’s coy insistence that ”you go first.” Now Leopard tanks from Germany and other allies will also be sent. Trouble is that those few that make it into Ukraine will be late to the party.
What your advisers should have told you is that none of the newly promised weaponry will stop Russia from defeating what’s left of the Ukrainian army. If you have been told otherwise, replace your intelligence and military advisers with competent professionals – the sooner the better.
Poorly Served
It has long been clear that you have not been adequately briefed on two issues of major importance: (1) the war in Ukraine, and (2) the strategic partnership between Russia and China. We chose this genre of “ALERT MEMORANDUM” because we want to prepare you for a major shock. Russia’s winter offensive is about to roll over the Ukrainian army. At that point, unwelcome choices will have to be made. Off-ramps must be sought – again, the sooner the better.
Your intelligence advisers seem blissfully unaware of what is coming. Still less do they appear able to offer you options to head off further disaster for Ukraine without still more dangerous escalation. As for China, the partnership with Russia is now so close that there is now a risk of a two-front war with two strong nuclear powers strongly supporting each other against the U.S.
Escalation Dominance
President Obama conceded, in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, that Russia has escalation dominance in Ukraine, adding that Ukraine is a core interest of Russia but not of the US Thus, he warned, “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.” Moreover, Obama’s warning came several years before the Russia-China entente took the solid shape it enjoys today.
Several of us undersigned were intelligence officers during Vietnam 55 years ago, when the Vietnamese Communists mounted a fierce country-wide offensive at Tet (late Jan. – early Feb. 1968). Earlier, smiley-face intelligence reporting from the military in Saigon left policymakers totally unprepared for the debacle. Recrimination was so widespread and bitter that President Johnson announced the following month that he would not run again for president.
VIPs’ Record on ‘Fixed’ (Corrupted) Intelligence
Twenty years ago, before the US/UK attack on Iraq, we warned President George W. Bush repeatedly that ‘justification’ for such an attack was based on false intelligence. (See, for example, “Today’s Speech By Secretary Powell At The UN” and “Iraq Intel: Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth.”) Five years later, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, releasing the bipartisan conclusions of a 5-year committee investigation, summed them up with these words:
“In making the case for war, the [Bush] Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”
‘Nonexistent’! Ponder that. Manufactured, fraudulent. In our Feb. 5, 2003 Memo on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech, we warned that the unintended consequences of an attack on Iraq were likely to be catastrophic. We also urged President Bush to widen the circle of his advisers “beyond those clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason.”
President Biden, please consider widening your circle now. Bring in new blood, with proven experience and the ability to weigh things dispassionately and understand the perspectives of other countries.
Ukraine: No Compelling Reason
The issuances of your current top intelligence advisers rival those of Bush’s and Cheney’s fixers in disingenuousness. Their statements run from dishonest to naïve (see below). They betray a woeful lack of understanding of Russia’s strategic concerns and its determination to use its formidable military power to meet perceived external threats. The statements also reflect abysmal ignorance regarding how US behavior has led willy-nilly to a profound shift in the world correlation of forces in favor of Russia and China – to include making them military allies in all but name.
CIA Director William Burns was to be the proverbial ‘adult in the room.’ And yet we hear him promoting the notion that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.” Burns was US ambassador 15 years ago when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the US what to expect if Ukraine became a member of NATO. To his credit – back then – in a Feb. 1, 2008 cable to Washington titled “Nyet Means Nyet: NATO Enlargement Redlines,” Ambassador Burns reported:
“NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership … . “In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”
So much for “unprovoked.”
Intelligence Illusions
A review of statements made last month by CIA Director William Burns and National Intelligence Director Avril Haines turned up the following:
On Ukraine:
“What we see, at least at CIA, is a reduced tempo in fighting … as winter sets in. The Russian military is badly battered now.” (WB)
“We’re seeing kind of a reduced tempo … and sort of a slow-down … And we expect that likely to be what we see in the coming months. … And then once you get past winter … what will the counteroffensive look like … we actually have a fair amount of skepticism as to whether or not the Russians will be, in fact, prepared for that. … I think more optimistically for the Ukrainians in that timeframe.” (AH)
“We see shortages of ammunition … They [the Russians] are quite quickly [burning through military stockpiles of munition] … I mean it’s pretty extraordinary and our own sense is that they are not capable of indigenously producing what they are expending at this stage … their precision munitions are running out much faster.” (AH)
On China:
“Well, I think Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have formed a pretty close partnership over recent years. A few weeks before Putin launched his invasion in Ukraine, when they met at the Winter Olympics in Beijing, they proclaimed a friendship without limits. There actually are some limits to that partnership … (WB)
Comment: In VIPs’s view, more important by far is that Putin got Xi Jinping’s tacit approval for invading Ukraine when the Beijing Olympics were over. Whatever “limits” Burns has in mind pale in significance compared with Xi’s willingness to give Putin, essentially, a waiver on China’s bedrock Westphalian principle of non-interference.
“China continues to play sort of both sides of this game, right? I mean they are continuing to work with Russia on a variety of things. They continue to do things like have meetings. … We don’t see anything that is determinative of military assistance. But there are things on the margins that concern us.” (AH)
Comment: On the margins? The tectonic shift to a two-against-one in the triangular superpower correlation of forces is deemed “on the margins” – not worth mentioning?
Putin: ‘This Is Simply Crazy’
Speaking on Oct. 27 at the Valdai International Discussion Club, President Putin questioned the sanity of those who would “spoil relations with China at the same time they are supplying billions-worth of weapons to Ukraine in a fight against Russia. …
“Frankly, I do not know why they are doing this. … Are they sane? It seems that this runs completely counter to common sense and logic … This is simply crazy. … Such irrational actions are rooted in arrogance and a sense of impunity.”
An Off-Ramp on Ukraine?
Also at Valdai on Oct. 27, Putin dropped a broad hint that, as the Russian army moves west, Moscow might agree to halt before taking Odessa, in return for concessions from US/NATO/Ukraine. A coy Hungarian journalist told Putin he was planning to visit Odessa. “Should I apply for a Russian or Ukrainian visa two years from now?” he asked.
We wonder if your advisers have told you of these remarks by Putin in response. (A missed opportunity?)
Odessa can be an apple of discord, a symbol of conflict resolution, and a symbol of finding some kind of solution to everything that is happening now. It is not a question of Russia. We have said many times that we are ready to negotiate … But the leaders of the Kiev regime have decided not to continue negotiations with the Russian Federation. It is true that the final word belongs to those who implement this policy in Washington. It is very easy for them to solve this problem: to send the appropriate signal to Kiev that they should change their position and seek a peaceful solution to these problems. And that will do it.
We don’t think Russia wants to occupy all, perhaps not even most, of Ukraine. In return for flexibility on the part of Washington/Kiev, we suggest the Russians might consider stopping their advance at the Dniepr River and try to arrange talks to create some kind of demilitarized zone from Odessa northward roughly along the Dniepr. This would leave Ukraine with access to the sea. It may not be too late to follow up on Putin’s late-October hint at Valdai. What’s to lose?
All possible off-ramps should be explored seriously. The alternatives are all quite grim.
Bottom Line
Russia is not only determined to prevail but has the means to prevail in Ukraine – the infusion of arms form the West notwithstanding. Paraphrasing President Obama, Russia sees an existential threat in Ukraine, while Ukraine poses no serious threat to the US It is a fact of life that nuclear powers do not tolerate existential threats on their border. And there is zero evidence to support the charge that “after Ukraine, Putin will go after other European countries.” The old Soviet Union is dead and gone. R.I.P.
Nor can Putin be dismissed as paranoid. He has heard from the lips of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin:
“One of the US’s goals in Ukraine is to see a weakened Russia. … The US is ready to move heaven and earth to help Ukraine win the war against Russia.”
Can the US achieve Austin’s goal? Not without using nuclear weapons.
Thus, there is a large conceptual – and exceptionally dangerous – disconnect. Simply stated, it is not possible to “win the war against Russia” AND avoid WWIII. It is downright scary that Defense Secretary Austin may think it possible. In any case, the Kremlin has to assume he thinks so. It is a very dangerous delusion.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP,
VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY (VIPs)
Richard H. Black, Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Graham E. Fuller, Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq and Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, former CIA and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Pedro Israel Orta, former CIA and Intelligence Community (Inspector General) officer
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ, USMC; former UN Weapons Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War
Click here to read the same piece published by antiwar.com under the headline “Leopards vs. the Russian Bear” on January 26th.
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Additional:
Yesterday [January 27th] Medea Benjamin of Code Pink spoke to RJ Eskow on The Zero Hour about the escalating Russia-Nato proxy war over Ukraine and the way ahead to peace:
“We see the world through a one-way mirror, in which ‘we’ are moral and benign and ‘they’ are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.” — John Pilger
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In an address to the Trondheim World Festival in Norway given on September 6th, John Pilger charts the history of power propaganda and describes how it appropriates journalism in a ‘profound imperialism’ and is likely to entrap us all, if we allow it.
The article below is an edited transcript published by John Pilger on his official website on September 8th:
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.
She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. ‘Yes, especially them,’ she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.
Are we? Or do we live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.
‘US foreign policy,’ he said, is ‘best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.’
In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this: ‘The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.’
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the ‘hypnosis’ he referred to was the ‘submissive void’ described by Leni Riefenstahl.
‘It’s the same,’ he replied. ‘It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.’
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called ‘forever wars’: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are – not that Joe Biden’s theft of $7billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan – and 30 seconds to its starving people.
At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war.
It says: ‘Nato’s enlargement has been an historic success’.
I read that in disbelief.
A measure of this ‘historic success’ is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kyiv that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.
In recent years, American ‘defender’ missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s ‘promise’ to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.
Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.
Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.
On the same day, Russia invaded – according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
On 25 April, the US Defence Secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation – the word he used was ‘weaken’. America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.
Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no ‘buts’ – except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs ‘nationalists’.
‘The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,’ said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, ‘is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.’
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed ‘news monitors’ (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.
Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.
In less than a decade, a ‘good’ China has been airbrushed and a ‘bad’ China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’
The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which ‘we’ are moral and benign and ‘they’ are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.
The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.
When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. ‘Defenestrated’ is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important ‘papers of record’, he was celebrated.
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Biden called him a ‘hi-tech terrorist’. Hillary Clinton asked, ‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange – the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it ‘mobbing’ — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, Counter Punch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
(This article is an edited version of an address to the Trondheim World Festival, Norway, on 6 September, 2022)
Click here to read the same article as it originally appears on John Pilger’s official website.
And here to read the same republished by Counterpunch.
“If Twitter had existed in 2002, oh boy I would have been banned for taking the position I did about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Think about that for a second. I’m not saying that I’m right today, I mean I believe I’m right, but my point is if Twitter applied the same standard that they’re using today to silence voices of dissent regarding the war in Ukraine then I would have been banned for telling the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. And if anything should send the shockwave through people about how stupid and counterproductive this Twitter policy is, it’s that they would have banned the only guy – not the only, but one of the few people out there telling the truth. Is that really the policy you want, Twitter? Is that really the policy you want? I think the answer is no. It should be no.” [from 34:50 mins]
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter puts into clearer perspective the dangers posed by the massive ongoing clampdown by social media platforms on freedom of speech after he was temporarily banned on Wednesday from Twitter on the spurious charge of “harassment” – reinstated within 24 hours in response to an anti-censorship outcry and immediate calls for the lifting of his suspension.
The circumstances behind his own ban, Ritter explains below in an extended interview speaking with independent journalist Richard Medhurst. The relevant section is transcribed beneath the embedded video (providing a permanent record in the event that Youtube subsequently removes the content.)
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Curiously, on the same day as Ritter’s ban, NBC published a story that candidly admitted “Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying intelligence as part of an information war against Russia… even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid”. Specifically, the article reveals:
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
The fact that the chemical weapons story was unadulterated bunkum should not have surprised anyone who has been following world events during recent decades. Indeed, the entire “war on terror” was ignited by almost precisely this same lie. Moreover, the asinine, since entirely baseless, ‘intelligence claims’ of forthcoming Russian false flags is something I promptly debunked on this site.
Meanwhile, this peculiar piece of US State Department propaganda scantily dressed up as “journalism” tells us that all of the disinformation, the ‘fake news’, and the straight up mainstream lies are perfectly fine:
Observers of all stripes have called it a bold and so far successful strategy — although not one without risks.
If we had a free and independent press, of course, then there would be huge political risks in perpetrating such glaring lies; ones that come with democratic accountability. But as we see from the lack of widespread media reaction to these quite startling admissions, the truth as such has become largely irrelevant – something Scott Ritter returns to in his interview pointing out that:
“They don’t want the truth. They’re trying to shape perception. They’re trying to manipulate information to create a perception that is being manipulated to achieve a policy objective. So the truth, or the search for truth, becomes the enemy, and therefore it must be shut down.”
Twitter won’t be taking down any accounts that are linked to those who deliberately propagated the misinformation and/or lies formally acknowledged by the NBC article. Those lies remain accessible and having been validated by the ‘fact-checkers’ will very likely continue to spread in spite of these latest retractions – and so too all future lies. In the meantime, anyone who dissents from the official narrative, irrespective of its own self-confessed unreliability, can expect to be marginalised, shadow-banned and sooner or later deplatformed altogether.
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Here is a transcript of the relevant segments of Scott Ritter’s conversation with Richard Medhurst, beginning with Ritter’s account of the tweet he posted that led to his suspension:
“Even though Twitter is not the centre of the universe, I think it has the potential of being a very good platform for the exchange of ideas at 288 characters per go. I take it seriously, meaning that if I’m going to put a tweet out there with my name on it’s, you know… when you get involved in politics I don’t want to be someone (I have worked too long and too hard to be someone) that if I speak on an issue, on a subject, I want to be taken seriously; I want to be someone that people say, you know, he’s assiduous with his facts. It doesn’t mean I’m always right but it means I always try to be right. You know when you’re engaged in complicated issues it’s not so much about being right, it’s about being motivated to promote the pursuit of truth.
“And sometimes the pursuit of truth is accomplished best when you put out an idea, an interpretation, an assessment that challenges the mainstream media or the mainstream direction and forces people to say ‘hmm, let me think. Let me put on my thinking cap.’ And then they come up with their own opinion. Their opinion may differ from yours, which is a success, because they have empowered themselves with knowledge and information derived from their own work; they’re not parroting something somebody told them. And to me it’s that process of debate, dialogue and discussion that makes democracies viable; makes functional democracies possible. And so I view Twitter as a mechanism that encourages this process.
“So if I’m going to put a tweet out there about a serious non-cat or non-dog issue, I’m going to make sure that I’ve researched it, especially on a topic like Bucha and war crime. I can guarantee you that before I wrote down about the Ukrainian national police being the perpetrators of numerous crimes, that I researched the subject – that I dug into various images and videotapes of the dead people; I assessed it using whatever forensic evaluation that one can on something like this; and I saw, for instance, that many of the bodies had the green dry ration packaging of the Russian ration box. It’s a ration pack: the Russian soldiers can get them, but they’ve also been used extensively to support civilians in need. You see the Russians in their trucks handing them out.
“I also noticed that many of the bodies had the white armbands on that signify people who are not a threat to Russia and that the people that didn’t have the white armbands had their hands bound behind their backs using the material that looked awfully like armbands that are no longer on their on their shoulder. So just the first brush if someone said ‘okay, what is this scene telling you?’ The scene is telling me that these are pro-Russian, or Russian sympathisers, or people who have interacted with Russia; people who have been the benefactors of Russian humanitarian aid, and people who are heading in the direction of Russian troops.
“And so then you have to say ‘okay, who killed them?’ Well, I don’t know by looking at those pictures, but if you’re pro-Russian, or Russian sympathetic, equipped with humanitarian aid provided by Russia, the odds are that the Russians didn’t kill them. Now, that’s not enough now to jump to the Ukrainian national police, though that’s just setting the stage. The initial thought. But now I get the Russian orders – the orders from the Russian high command are to minimise civilian death, minimise damage to civilian infrastructure – so I see the commander’s intent going down to the Russian soldier normally will be translated into actions that reflect that intent. So if I’ve got some pro-Russian people coming at me, I’m not going to kill them. That’s the intent.
“What about the Ukrainians? We have the exact opposite. We have the Ukrainian government calling anybody who collaborates with Russia to include receiving these humanitarian care packages are now classified as collaborators and in the specific instance of Bucha, we have the Ukrainian national police issuing a bulletin speaking of ‘the cleansing of collaborators’ from Bucha on 1st April. We have a senior Ukrainian government official female issuing instructions via social media telling the citizens of Bucha that there is a police action taking place, a cleansing operation: stay in your [homes], stay indoors, don’t panic, she repeats this over and over and over again. And then we have videotapes that show these Ukrainian national police, including some who are directly affiliated with Azov happily hunting down and shooting people. So now when I look at all this data I have to say it’s more than likely that the Ukrainians are the perpetrators, because we have intent from their commanders saying treat all pro-Russian collaborators as the enemy; we have an instruction from the national police to carry out a cleansing operation; and then we have videotape of the cleansing operation taking place which involves gunfire from a Ukrainian national policeman towards civilians who aren’t wearing the blue armband.
“So if I were compelled to make a decision based upon this albeit incomplete data – because I still (if this was going to go to a court) would need some forensic data to back it up – but the first brush is Ukrainian national police have done this. Now why did I feel compelled to tweet because normally I wouldn’t tweet with incomplete data like this – because, you know, it implies I’m drawing a conclusion that normally I would like to associate a lot more hard facts behind before I put my name on it. But the Ukrainian national police are promulgating a story that says the Russians did it. The Ukrainian government is putting forth a story that said the Russians did it. The western media is putting forward a story that said the Russians did it. And then Joe Biden got out and said the Russians are doing it; they’re war criminals. And so I felt compelled to put a counter narrative out there saying ‘no it’s the Ukrainian national police who have committed these crimes and Biden – and the reason why I picked on Biden soon after he gave that speech (that announcement, the Pentagon came out and said ‘hey buddy, we can’t corroborate anything the Ukrainian government say… we’re not saying it’s false, but we’re saying we can’t say it’s true.’ So the President of the United States is out ahead of its intelligence, meaning he’s speaking – I won’t use the word – it’s coming out from an orphan citizen’s mouth.
“So therefore I felt obliged to say (and again I did the research): these words don’t come lightly. I looked up the Nuremberg tribunal. I looked up what a crime against humanity was. I looked for similar cases that were prosecuted against the Nazis, similar to what I believe the Ukrainian national police did, and they constitute crimes against humanity. So that’s what I said. I also looked up there’s a lot of Nazis that were hung by the neck until dead who never pulled a trigger, who never signed a document ordering death, but they were perpetrators, they were collaborators, they’re co-conspirators, because of the actions they took. And one of the things is to shift blame away, to try and minimise the impact of the crimes, which is exactly what Joe Biden was doing. So I used my words very carefully selected from the Nuremberg tribunal based upon parallel cases that were prosecuted as war crimes and so I didn’t take it lightly. When I said this about Biden, it’s because Biden’s actions mimic those actions that were condemned as war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal.
“Everything there was carefully researched. I mean literally that tweet took me about 30 minutes to research. I don’t know how many people spend 30 minutes to write a 288 character tweet but I do that all the time. So I’m doubly shocked that they decide to pick that tweet and say you’re violating standards, and in my appeal – and I wrote a lengthy appeal – and I broke it down just as I explained to you. Everything in that thing is fact-based.” [from 19:30 mins]
On Wednesday night’s edition of “On Balance With Leland Vittert”, investigative journalist Aaron Maté was asked to speak about the massacre of civilians in Bucha allegedly by Russian troops and gave reasons for why he believes a fully independent investigation is now needed:
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“It should be that when the United States says something, the world should say ‘yep believe them 100% because they’ve been right every time before. The United States always tells the truth.’ Right now the United States opens its mouth, if I were a betting man I would bet that they’re lying – you know if Vegas took that bet I’d be a rich man, because all the United States knows how to do is lie. We don’t know how to tell the truth anymore, because it’s all a game of public perception, shaping perception. We’re afraid of reality. Sometimes reality is complex. Sometimes reality is nuanced. Reality isn’t black and white. It’s grey. That’s okay. Just tell the truth. People are smart enough once they receive the information to understand what the right thing to do is. You really don’t have to explain it. You just have to be honest with people; trust them, empower them with the information, and they will, by and large, tend to make the right decision. But we don’t trust anybody. We want to manipulate everything.”
Richard Medhurst: “Do you think that’s why they banned you from Twitter? Why they’re banning others – because you tell the truth and they’re afraid of people finding out?”
“Well, you know I have to be careful by saying ‘I tell the truth.’ I want to tell the truth, but you know this isn’t a situation like Iraqi WMD where I was literally empowered with a near totality of the information, so that when I said something you could take it to the bank. On the issue of Ukraine, I try to research it. I try to think it through. I try to put it through various tests. I want it to be the truth. I’m truthful in the way that I present it. But the last thing I want to leave with people is that when I say something about Ukraine that it carries the same weight as a claim I would make, for instance, about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. With WMD, if I said it you could bank on it. It was right. With Ukraine, it’s an opinion. It’s an assessment. I could be right. I think I’m right. I want to be right. But I could be wrong.
“So I don’t think that they fear the absolute correctness of my analysis, because I’m not in a position to be absolutely correct. What they fear is the consequences of allowing me to present my data and my thinking, and the consequences of allowing you to do what you do. The consequences of allowing George Galloway to do what he does. And Chris Hedges to do what they do. Because it’s not that all of us have, you know, we don’t have absolute say over what truth is. I mean I don’t think you’re arrogant enough to say that everything that comes out of your mouth is 100% accurate and truth. You want to be accurate. You want to be truthful, but you know, you do the best you can, and I think people respect that. And if you stumble, people say ‘okay, stumble, but you didn’t do it with ill intent, you did it because you were trying to pursue the truth.’
“But that’s the problem. Is that you’re trying to pursue the truth. You’re trying to do the right thing. You’re trying to inject integrity. You’re trying to inject honesty into a process, which we know they don’t want that. We know, based upon the quote you put up there in the statement made, they don’t want the truth. They’re trying to shape perception. They’re trying to manipulate information to create a perception that is being manipulated to achieve a policy objective. So the truth, or the search for truth, becomes the enemy, and therefore it must be shut down.
“They’re not shutting me down because I have a corner on the market for absolute 100% accuracy. No, they’re shutting me down because I dare challenge what they’re putting out there, and they fear me because my process is actually one that has far more integrity when it comes to the pursuit of truth than their process. Their process isn’t the pursuit of truth, it’s the pursuit of an outcome based upon the manipulation of data. And frankly speaking, it is the easiest thing to pick apart. I mean proving American lies is very easy if you’re assiduous with the pursuit of fact-based evidence. They fear this and that’s why they shut down my Twitter account. That’s why they’ll go after yours.” [from 1:32:00 mins]
Available for free on Youtube and embedded below for as long as it remains uploaded, here is the documentary “Ukraine on Fire” directed by Igor Lopatonok and produced by Oliver Stone, who also conducted the interviews for the film.
Framed within a broad historical context, the film reminds us of Nazi collaboration during WWII before bringing us sharply up to date with the 2004 Orange Revolution, followed by the bloody events of the 2013–4 Maidan culminating in the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, the onset of civil war in the Donbass and the tragic downing of MH17.
Peaceful at the outset and covered throughout by western media as a people’s revolution, we are reminded of how the Maidan became increasingly violent before climaxing in a coup d’état staged by far-right groups that was partially scripted by the US State Department.
In efforts to consolidate power, ultranationalist elements newly ensconced within the government then cracked down on pockets of anti-Maidan activists, some of whom gathered to protest outside a trade union building in Odessa. The massacre that ensued has received scarcely any attention in the West although it hugely inflamed growing tensions within the population of ethnic Russians and immediately accelerated the self-declared secession of the eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Watching the events unfold today, it is staggering to see so many of the central protagonists from eight years ago still in place – Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden and of course Vladimir Putin. History doesn’t repeat, the film reminds us (quoting Mark Twain), but it rhymes.
Drawing to its close, the film takes us back to the first Cold War with the ever-present threat of major escalation between nuclear powers, asking if the events in Ukraine have laid the ground for a new Cold War. For this alone it could hardly be more prescient:
Note that Vimeo has since deplatformed the video upload linked to above, however, the film is also available on other platforms including Rumble and Odysee.
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. […]
Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.
From a classified US diplomatic cable dated February 1st 2008 addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State subsequently released by Wikileaks and featured in Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges’ latest article “Chronicle of a war foretold”.
Chris Hedges writes:
The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness. The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.
Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable.
The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.
I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.
Click here to read Chris Hedges full article published by Scheerpost on February 24th.
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Yesterday Independent journalist Katie Halper invited Chris Hedges to talk about the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his experience on the ground reporting from Eastern Europe during the fall of the Soviet Union. They were also joined by Phyllis Bennis of the Institute of Policy Studies who helped found the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and whose books include Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terror (2003):
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Embedded below is a short statement from former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn released today by Double Down News:
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Update and correction:
The upload of the Katie Halper show above does not include any contribution from Phyllis Bennis although she did appear in the original livestream broadcast. I shall endeavour to find the full interview and append it to this post and meanwhile I have decided to include an excerpt of Bennis’ latest article below:
If we start the clock in February 2022, the main problem is Russia’s attack on Ukraine. If we start the clock in 1997, however, the main problem is Washington pushing NATO — the Cold War-era military alliance that includes the United States and most of Europe — to expand east, breaking an assurance the U.S. made to Russia after the Cold War.
Many foreign policy experts and peace advocates have called for ending the anachronistic alliance ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But NATO remains and has only encroached toward Russia further, resulting in new NATO countries — bristling with NATO arms systems — right on Russia’s borders.
Russia sees that expansion — and its integration of neighboring countries into U.S.-led military partnerships — as a continuing threat. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. But in the past the U.S. and other NATO members have urged its acceptance, and Russia regards Ukraine’s drift toward the West as a precursor to membership.
None of that makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine legal, legitimate, or necessary. President Biden was right when he called Russia’s war “unjustified.” But he was wrong when he said it was “unprovoked.” It’s not condoning Putin’s invasion to observe there certainly was provocation — not so much by Ukraine, but by the United States.
In recent weeks, the Biden administration made important moves towards diplomacy. But it undermined those crucial efforts by increasing threats, escalating sanctions, deploying thousands of U.S. troops to neighboring countries, and sending tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine — all while continuing to build a huge new U.S. military base in Poland just 100 miles from the Russian border.
Click here to read the article by Phyllis Bennis entitled “Respond to Putin’s Illegal Invasion of Ukraine with Diplomacy not War” published on February 25th by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF).
Facebook is not averse to censorship. Indeed, it has already been in the business of censoring political content for many years. Here is journalist Chris Hedges speaking out against its social media censorship twelve months ago:
Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Poststory about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter locking the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. This overt censorship is emblematic of the widening and dangerous partisan divide within the US media. News and facts are no longer true or false; they are divided into information that either hurts or promotes one political faction over another.
While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organisations, including publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post along with the major tech platforms that disseminate news. The division of the press into warring factions shreds journalistic credibility, creating a world where facts do not matter, and where a public is encouraged to believe whatever it wants to believe.
The statement above provided the introduction to Chris Hedge’s interview with fellow journalist Matt Taibbi on his RT show On Contact broadcast on the eve of the US Presidential election [Oct 31st, 2020]. The show is also embedded above and you can click here to read an annotated transcript I posted a few days later under the title “Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi on true ‘fake news’ and the monopolised censorship of the tech giants”.
The company has come in for a fair amount of criticism over the years for taking down perfectly innocuous content – everything from photos of classical statues to the famous picture of a napalmed child in Vietnam.
Now, users whose content has been taken down will be notified and given the chance to ask for a review; reviews will normally be carried out within 24 hours.
The policy will initially apply only to nudity or sexual activity, hate speech and graphic violence, says [VP of global product management Monika] Bickert.
But, she adds, “We are working to extend this process further, by supporting more violation types, giving people the opportunity to provide more context that could help us make the right decision, and making appeals available not just for content that was taken down, but also for content that was reported and left up.” 1
At that time and in response to Facebook’s announcement of its policy, the ACLU cautioned against this corporate censorship drive and clampdown on free speech:
If Facebook gives itself broader censorship powers, it will inevitably take down important speech and silence already marginalized voices. We’ve seen this before. Last year, when activists of color and white people posted the exact same content, Facebook moderators censored only the activists of color. When Black women posted screenshots and descriptions of racist abuse, Facebook moderators suspended their accounts or deleted their posts. And when people used Facebook as a tool to document their experiences of police violence, Facebook chose to shut down their livestreams. The ACLU’s own Facebook post about censorship of a public statue was also inappropriately censored by Facebook.
Facebook has shown us that it does a bad job of moderating “hateful” or “offensive” posts, even when its intentions are good. Facebook will do no better at serving as the arbiter of truth versus misinformation, and we should remain wary of its power to deprioritize certain posts or to moderate content in other ways that fall short of censorship. 2
In the same article, I also highlighted a fresh censorship drive that had been launched by Facebook back in October 2018:
People need to be able to trust the connections they make on Facebook. It’s why we have a policy banning coordinatedinauthentic behavior — networks of accounts or Pages working to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing. This year, we’ve enforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate, including in the US, the Middle East, Russia and the UK. But the bulk of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook is spam that’s typically motivated by money, not politics. And the people behind it are adapting their behavior as our enforcement improves.
The statement continues:
Topics like natural disasters or celebrity gossip have been popular ways to generate clickbait. But today, these networks increasingly use sensational political content – regardless of its political slant – to build an audience and drive traffic to their websites, earning money for every visitor to the site. And like the politically motivated activity we’ve seen, the “news” stories or opinions these accounts and Pages share are often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate. This is why it’s so important we look at these actors’ behavior – such as whether they’re using fake accounts or repeatedly posting spam – rather than their content when deciding which of these accounts, Pages or Groups to remove.
Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action. 3
Click here to read the Facebook statement in full.
This clampdown was reported on by the Guardian in an article entitled “Facebook accused of censorship after hundreds of US political pages purged”, which included an interview with two disabled veterans, one of whom stated that:
“I don’t think Facebook wants to fix this… I think they just want politics out, unless it’s coming from the mainstream media.”
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It is noteworthy, I think, that yesterday [Oct 27th] – a day that happens to coincide with the reopening of Julian Assange’s extradition trial – I received a new message from pressure group Avaaz. It reads [with all highlights retained from original]:
A brave whistleblower just leaked secret Facebook documents… and they’re shocking!
They show that Facebook knew. It knew that human traffickers used their platform to lure women into sexual slavery. It knew that it was being used to incite violence against minorities, which had already fueled death and displacement in the past. It knew that divisive lies and extremism were being promoted to millions all over the world. And it knew its systems were removing less than 1% of violent content.
Facebook knew all this. And yet, the whistleblower said, it has put “profits before people”.
As I say, it is interesting how the timing of this latest Avaaz campaign on the back of “whistleblower” Frances Haugen has coincided with the trial of the single most prominent whistleblower in the world today, Julian Assange.
I contend, however, for a variety of reasons I shall come to, that Frances Haugen is not a real whistleblower at all. After all, genuine whisteblowers lose their jobs, or still worse, they finish up in prison. And they always, more or less by definition, have something new to disclose.
Chelsea Manning is a real whistleblower. Likewise John Kiriakou, who exposed the use of waterboarding and served time in jail, and former UK ambassador Craig Murray, who testified to the UK’s complicity in the horrific torture of Uzbek dissidents (presenting evidence of victims boiled alive) and consequently lost his job and his health (today he languishes in prison after falling foul of unrelated charges).
There are countless examples of real whistleblowers, and arguably the most exceptional is Julian Assange himself, held in conditions described by the UN as “torture” inside max security HMP Belmarsh and facing extradition to the US for espionage.
As Jonathan Cook wrote in an article entitled straightforwardly “Haugen Isn’t Really a ‘Facebook Whistleblower’” at the beginning of this latest saga:
There are clues that Haugen’s “whistleblowing” may not be quite what we assume it is, and that two different kinds of activities are being confused because we use the same word for both.
That might not matter, except that using the term in this all-encompassing manner degrades the status and meaning of whistleblowing in ways that are likely to be harmful both to those doing real whistleblowing and to us, the potential recipients of the secrets they wish to expose.
The first clue is that there seems to be little Haugen is telling us that we do not already know – either based on our own personal experiences of using social media (does anyone really not understand yet that Facebook manipulates our feeds through algorithms?) or from documentaries like The Social Dilemma, where various refugees from Silicon Valley offer dire warnings of where social media is leading society.
We did not call that movie’s many talking heads “whistleblowers”, so why has Haugen suddenly earnt a status none of them deserved? (You can read my critique of The Social Dilemma here.)
My latest: Netflix's The Social Dilemma, featuring Silicon Valley whistleblowers, seeks to explain how Google and Facebook have pushed our societies to the brink of collapse.
The alarm is justified – but the film is able to tell only half the story https://t.co/YZhrcFx3P8
Cook then correctly acknowledges that the immediate and prominent attention Haugen has received from both liberal media outlets and within political circles (especially on “the left” – i.e., Democrat rather than Republican) “does not mean that she is not drawing attention to important matters” (emphasis is mine), before adding:
But it does mean that it is doubtful that “whistleblowing” is a helpful term to describe what she is doing.
This is not just a semantic issue. A lot hangs on how we use the term.
A proper whistleblower is trying to reveal the hidden secrets of the most powerful to bring about accountability and make our societies more transparent, safer, fairer places. Whistleblowing seeks to level the playing field between those who rule and those who are ruled.
At the national and international level, whistleblowers expose crimes and misdemeanours by the state, by corporations and by major organisations so that we can hold them to account, so that we, the people, can be empowered, and so that our increasingly hollow democracies gain a little more democratic substance.
But Haugen has done something different. Or at least she has been coopted, willingly or not, by those same establishment elements that are averse to accountability, opposed to the empowerment of ordinary people, and stand in the way of shoring up of democratic institutions.
Jonathan Cook continues:
Our “Facebook whistleblower” is not helping to blow the whistle on the character of the power structure itself, or its concealed crimes, or its democratic deficit, as Manning and Snowden did.
She has not turned her back on the establishment and revealed its darkest secrets. She has simply shifted allegiances within the establishment, making new alliances in the constantly shifting battles between elites for dominance.
Which is precisely why she has been treated with such reverence by the 60 Minutes programme and other “liberal” corporate media and feted by Democratic party politicians. She has aided their elite faction over a rival elite faction.
Click here to read Jonathan Cook’s article published by Counterpunch on October 12th in full.
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Digging a little deeper, journalist Alexander Rubinstein reveals more about Haugen’s sudden emergence as the purported source of the leak quickly christened “The Facebook Files”. He writes:
Haugen first appeared in September 2021 as the supposed source of a leak called “The Facebook Files.” She was immediately hailed as a “modern US hero” in the media for secretly copying tens of thousands of internal Facebook documents and releasing them to the Wall Street Journal, which published a series of nine articles based on the documents.
The WSJ initially kept its source anonymous, rolling out the series two weeks before Haugen came forward in an October 3 interview with 60 Minutes. On camera, she complained that Facebook was “tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.”
“Ethnic violence including Myanmar in 2018 when the military used Facebook,” narrated 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, to “launch a genocide.”
When pressed by 60 Minutes about what motivated her to leak the documents, Haugen answered vaguely: “at some point in 2021, I realized I’m going to have to do this in a systematic way and I have to get enough [so] that no one can question that this is real.”
Yet Haugen first divulged company information before 2021. In the final installment of the Journal’s series, the outlet revealed that Haugen first sent an encrypted text to one of their reporters on December 3, 2020.
That same article, published the day the 60 Minutes interview aired, reported that Haugen “continued gathering material from inside Facebook through her last hour with access to the system. She reached out to lawyers at Whistleblower Aid [more on this organisation below], a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that represents people reporting corporate and government misbehavior.”
Doors have been promptly flung open on both sides of the Atlantic, with Frances Haugen ushered to give testimony before lawmakers across Europe and in America. Having spoken with MPs in France and Britain as well as two members of the European Parliament on October 3rd, Haugen was also called on October 5th to testify before a Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection.
But who is Frances Haugen anyway? Well, this is you will learn from her current Wikipedia entry (all links retained):
After graduating from college, Haugen was hired by Google, and worked on Google Ads, Google Book Search, a class action litigationsettlement related to Google publishing book content, as well as Google+.[7] At Google, Haugen co-authored a patent for a method of adjusting the ranking of search results.[11] During her career at Google, she completed her MBA, which was paid for by Google.[7]While at Google, she was a technical co-founder of the desktop dating app Secret Agent Cupid, precursor to the mobile app Hinge.[12][10][13]
She then moved to Google’s tech rival Facebook and became product manager on the newly-formed “threat intelligence unit” which comprised some 200 fellow employees. Rubinstein picks up the story again:
At Facebook, Haugen claimed she worked as product manager on a “threat intelligence unit” at the company. “So I was a product manager supporting the counter-espionage team,” she claimed to Sen. Sullivan. Part of her job included “directly work[ing] on tracking Chinese participation on the platform,” she claimed. Further, she alleged that Iran used the platform to conduct “espionage” on the platform.
“I’m speaking to other members of Congress about that,” Haugen acknowledged. “I have strong national security concerns about how Facebook operates today.”
As journalist Kit Klarenberg reported, the little-known Facebook “threat intelligence unit” where Haugen claimed to have worked is staffed by former CIA, NSA, and Pentagon operatives. Those who work at the unit must have “5+ years of experience working in intelligence (either government or private sector), international geopolitical, cybersecurity, or human rights functions,” according to a job posting.
Yet Haugen’s now-deleted blog and Twitter account feature no political content, nor does her resume.
In short, Frances Haugen’s profile has the telltale signs of an intelligence operative, while this latest tranche of document leaks has all the hallmarks of a limited hangout. Equally, and set alongside Haugen’s somewhat exceptional employment history, there are related questions that arise once we delve into the legal body that represents her, an organisation called Whistleblower Aid:
[T]he outfit was founded by a national security lawyer, Mark Zaid, who has been accused of ratting out his client, CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, to his employers in Langley. Zaid is joined by a former State Department official and government-approved whistleblower, John Tye [more below], ex-CIA and Pentagon official Andrew Bakaj, and veteran US government information warrior, Libby Liu, who has specialized in supporting color revolution-style operations against China.
John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower jailed for exposing the agency’s role in the serial torture of terror suspects, commented to The Grayzone, “Mark Zaid presents himself to the public as a whistleblower attorney, however, he is anything but. Instead, he has betrayed his clients and come down on the side of prosecutors in the intelligence community. He is not to be trusted.”
Kiriakou continued, “My own personal belief is that he is the intelligence community’s preferred ‘whistleblower’ attorney because he’s willing to place their interests over his clients.”
Whistleblower Aid bills itself as “a pioneering, non-profit legal organization that helps patriotic government employees and brave, private-sector workers report and publicize their concerns — safely, lawfully, and responsibly.”
But is this group truly the whistleblower protection outfit it claims to be?
In fact, Whistleblower Aid appears to have been modeled as a sort of anti-Wikileaks organization. “Whistleblower Aid is not Wikileaks,” the “vision” page of the former organization insists. On another section of its website, it states, “No one should ever send classified information to Whistleblower Aid. Whistleblower Aid will never assist clients or prospective clients with leaking classified information.”
Coming back to Avaaz’s email (see extract above): after vaingloriously promoting itself with claims such as “Avaaz has helped force Facebook’s shame onto the agenda of legislators across the world”, their latest message goes on remind us of the other threats we may face by not censoring online content:
We’ve seen, time and again, what devastating real-world consequences social media can have. In Myanmar, the military turned Facebook into a tool for ethnic cleansing, spreading hatred that fueled a bloodbath. In Palestine and Israel, viral lies are further inflaming the conflict. And all over the world, it’s become a Covid-conspiracy hotbed, with doctors warning against an ‘infodemic’ of fake news.
Nobody does overwrought rhetoric quite like Avaaz! (emphasis in keeping)
But seriously, does anyone actually believe social media is to blame in any way whatsoever for inflamed tensions between Palestine and Israel? If so, how? Surely it has a great deal more to do with the illegal occupation, the bombing of Gaza, the indiscriminate shooting of peaceful protesters and the daily oppression of Israel’s apartheid regime; none of which, judging by the campaigns it most actively promotes, Avaaz has any serious concern about.
And precisely what constitutes “a Covid-conspiracy hotbed”? Or put differently, how can social media firms be regulated to police every question relating to the risks, treatments (including vaccines), and importantly, the unknown origins of the pandemic? For that matter, and besides Avaaz and some in the media, who is issuing such dire warnings about a supposed ‘infodemic’ – doctors, which doctors? The fact is that a great many doctors and other medical experts are actively engaged in this vitally important debate and are very thankful to have access to public platforms across the internet.
Here is comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore pointing out how Facebook’s so-called “independent fact checkers” – i.e., anonymous corporate gatekeepers – have just flagged up research in a published and peer-reviewed scientific study by Harvard scientists [warning: strong language]:
Intriguingly, Alexander Rubinstein’s own fact check into the background of ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen uncovers another link to Avaaz, since it transpires that “government-approved whistleblower”, John Tye – who, as mentioned above, was co-founder and chief disclosure officer of Whistleblower Aid, the legal nonprofit organisation assisting Haugen – had previously worked there too:
Shortly before leaving Avaaz, Tye responded to criticism of the billionaire-backed group’s advocacy for a [Syria] no-fly zone, writing “thousands and thousands of people will die, for years to come, if we turn away and wring our hands.”
Time and time again, we’ve seen Facebook fail to address the rampant disinformation, extremism, discrimination, and hate on their platforms. Join us on Thursday as we rally on Capitol Hill to demand Congress #InvestigateFB: https://t.co/AoFpqSN75Qpic.twitter.com/LyvapuDIOw
As I explained at greater length in an extended article from March 2015, the term “no-fly zone” is both a misnomer and a euphemism. In fact it is a straightforward demand for sustained military intervention necessitating air strikes. By calling for “no-fly zones” Avaaz was deliberately helping to manufacture consent for US military intervention that sought regime change both in Libya and Syria.
But then, as Rubinstein points out, when it comes to these nonprofit wheels within wheels, they are all turning in much the same direction – ‘the nonprofit-industrial complex’:
Like his former client-turned-legal partner, Mark Zaid has clamored for ramped up US intervention in Syria, tweeting to then-President Trump “what are you going to do about Syria? It’s your problem now, We can’t stand by and let innocent people continue to be slaughtered.”
Click here to read Alexander Rubinstein’s full article entitled “Facebook ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen represented by US intelligence insiders” published by The Grayzone on October 21st.
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Which brings us to the billion dollar question: who really benefits from Haugen’s “disclosures”? Another independent journalist, Glenn Greenwald, sets out the case carefully in his own recent article published on Substack:
There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopoliesin violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. […]
But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers.
He continues:
Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties. […]
The canonized Facebook whistleblower and her journalist supporters are claiming that what Facebook fears most is repeal or reform of Section 230, the legislative provision that provides immunity to social media companies for defamatory or other harmful material published by their users. That section means that if a Facebook user or YouTube host publishes legally actionable content, the social media companies themselves cannot be held liable. There may be ways to reform Section 230 that can reduce the incentive to impose censorship, such as denying that valuable protection to any platform that censors, instead making it available only to those who truly allow an unmoderated platform to thrive. But such a proposal has little support in Washington. What is far more likely is that Section 230 will be “modified” to impose greater content moderation obligations on all social media companies.
Far from threatening Facebook and Google, such a legal change could be the greatest gift one can give them, which is why their executives are often seencalling on Congress to regulate the social media industry. Any legal scheme that requires every post and comment to be moderated would demand enormous resources — gigantic teams of paid experts and consultants to assess “misinformation” and “hate speech” and veritable armies of employees to carry out their decrees. Only the established giants such as Facebook and Google would be able to comply with such a regimen, while other competitors — including large but still-smaller ones such as Twitter — would drown in those requirements. And still-smaller challengers to the hegemony of Facebook and Google, such as Substack and Rumble, could never survive. In other words, any attempt by Congress to impose greater content moderation obligations — which is exactly what they are threatening — would destroy whatever possibility remains for competitors to arise and would, in particular, destroy any platforms seeking to protect free discourse. That would be the consequence by design, which is why one should be very wary of any attempt to pretend that Facebook and Google fear such legislative adjustments.
Taking the helicopter view, we might properly regard the tech giants and their billionaire owners as rivals only in the way the five mafia families of The Godfather are rivals. When they are not fighting turf wars, they are working hand in glove and functioning as vital components of the national security state which protects all of their interests as it maintains the status quo.
As Greenwald concludes:
There are real dangers posed by allowing companies such as Facebook and Google to amass the power they have now consolidated. But very little of the activism and anger from the media and Washington toward these companies is designed to fracture or limit that power. It is designed, instead, to transfer that power to other authorities who can then wield it for their own interests. The only thing more alarming than Facebook and Google controlling and policing our political discourse is allowing elites from one of the political parties in Washington and their corporate media outlets to assume the role of overseer, as they are absolutely committed to doing. Far from being some noble whistleblower, Frances Haugen is just their latest tool to exploit for their scheme to use the power of social media giants to control political discourse in accordance with their own views and interests.
Click here to read Glenn Greenwald’s full article entitled “Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor” published on October 5th.
3 From a Facebook announcement entitled “Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook” written by Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy and Oscar Rodriguez, Product Manager, posted by Facebook on October 11, 2018. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/removing-inauthentic-activity/
We, as prisoners, or detainees, we weren’t just the victims at Guantánamo. There are also guards and camp staff, were also victims of Guantánamo itself. You know, that war situation or condition brought us together and proved that we’re all human and we share the same humanity, first.
This is the verdict of Mansoor Adayfi, who had been abducted as a teenager, imprisoned, interrogated and tortured, kept in solitary confinement, force-fed, and finally released without charge from the CIA gulag of so-called ‘black sites’. Speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, he continues:
Also, Amy, a simple question: What makes a human as a human, make Amy as Amy, make Mansoor as Mansoor, makes the guys in there as individual and person, you know? What makes you as a human, and uniquely, is your name, your language, your faith, your morals, your ethics, your memories, your relationships, your knowledge, your experience, basically, your family, also what makes a person as a person.
At Guantánamo, when you arrive there, imagine, the system was designed to strip us of who we are. You know, even our names was taken. We became numbers. You’re not allowed to practice religion. You are not allowed to talk. You’re not allowed to have relationships. So, to the extent we thought, if they were able to control our thought, they would have done it.
So, we arrived at Guantánamo. One of the things people still don’t know about Guantánamo, we had no shared life before Guantánamo. Everything was different, was new and unknown and scary unknown, you know? So, we started developing some kind of relationship with each other at Guantánamo between — among us, like prisoners or brothers, and with the guards, too, because when guards came to work at Guantánamo, they became part of our life, part of our memories. That will never go away. The same thing, we become part of their life, become memories.
Before the guards arrived at Guantánamo, they were told — some of them were taken to the 9/11 site, ground zero, and they were told the one who has done this are in Guantánamo. Imagine, when they arrive at Guantánamo, they came with a lot of hate and courage and revenge.
But when they live with us and watch us every day eat, drink, sleep, get beaten, get sick, screaming, yelling, interrogated, torture, you know, also they are humans. You know, the camp administration, they cannot lie to them forever. So the guards also, when they lived with us, they found out that they are not the men we were told they’re about. Some of them, you know, were apologizing to us. Some of them, we formed strong friendships with them. Some of them converted to Islam.
The military rules is cruel. And they treat those guards as a product, not humans, you know? Even those guards, when they — some of them went to tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. When they came back, we saw how they changed. When I grew up and became my thirties, when they used to bring younger guards, I looked at them as like younger brothers and sisters, and always told them, like, “Please, get out of the military, because it’s going to devastate you. I have seen many people change.”
Adayfi, the author of the new memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, says Guantánamo was not only constructed as a prison and torture site but reminds us how under the direction of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, it was used as a US research lab for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (EIT) and other forms of unusual punishment of detainees. Moreover, when army captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, had courageously spoken out against these crimes, he was in turn falsely accused of stealing classified documents, denounced and punished as a collaborator:
I remember, the first time I talked to James Yee, I was taken to the interrogation room, stripped naked, and they put me in a — we call it the satanic room, where they have like stars, signs, candles, a crazy guy come in like white crazy clothes reciting something. So, they also used to throw the Holy Qur’an on the ground, and, you know, they tried to pressure us to — you know, like, they were experimenting, basically. When I met James Yee, I told him, “Look, that won’t happen with us that way.”
James Yee tried to — he was protesting against the torture at Guantánamo. General Miller, the one who was actually developing enhanced interrogation technique, enhanced torture technique, saw that James Yee, as a chaplain, is going to be a problem. So he was accused as sympathizer with terrorists. He was arrested, detained and interrogated. This is American Army captain, a graduate of West Point University, came to serve at Guantánamo to serve his own country, was — because of Muslim background, he was accused of terrorism and was detained and imprisoned. This is this American guy. Imagine what would happen to us at that place.
So, when they took James Yee, we protested. We asked to bring him back, because the lawyers told us what happened for him after like one year. We wrote letters to the camp administration, to the White House, to the Security Council, to the United Nations — to everyone, basically.
Today Mansoor Adayfi works as the Guantánamo Project coordinator at CAGE, an organization that advocates on behalf of victims of the ‘war on terror’. Wearing an orange scarf during the interview, he says he likes to wear orange – inside the camp he had been told by a psychologist then whenever he saw the colour, it would traumatise him again, to which his response was, “No, this is part of my life, and I will never let Guantánamo change me.” Adayfi and his fellow inmates also found solace in music and painting:
People who were at Guantánamo, they were artists, singers, doctors, nurses, divers, mafia, drug addicts, teachers, scholars, poets. That diversity of culture interacted with each other, melted and formed what we call Guantánamo culture, what I call “the beautiful Guantánamo.”
Imagine, I’m going to sing now two songs, please. Imagine we used to have celebrate once a week, night, to escape away pain of being in jail, try to have some kind of like — to take our minds from being in cages, torture, abuses. So, we had one night a week, in a week, to us, like in the block. So, we just started singing in Arabic, English, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi, French, all kind of languages, poets in different languages, stories. People danced, from Yemen to Saudi Arabia, to rap, to all kind. It’s like, imagine you hear in one block 48 detainees. You heard those beautiful songs in different languages. It just — it was captivating.
However, the interrogators took it as a challenge. We weren’t challenging them. We were just trying to survive. This was a way of surviving, because we had only each other. The things we brought with us at Guantánamo, whether our faith, whether our knowledge, our memories, our emotions, our relationships, who we are, helped us to survive. We had only each other.
Also, the guard was part of survival, because they play a role in that by helping someone held sometimes and singing with us sometimes. We also had the art classes. I think you heard about the — especially in that time when we get access to classes, we paint. So, those things helped us to survive at that place.
Hope also. Hope, it was a matter of life or death. You know, you have to keep hoping. You know that place was designed just to take your hope away, so you can see the only hope is through the interrogators, through Americans. We said, “No, it’s not going to happen that way.” So we had to support each other, try to stay alive.
Click here to read the full transcript or watch the interview on the Democracy Now! website.
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Additional: the case of Abu Zubaydah, the first post-9/11 CIA torture victim
On Wednesday [Oct 6th] The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case brought by Abu Zubaydah, the Guantánamo prisoner who was the first subject of the CIA’s torture programme. Zubaydah’s legal team has spent years trying to obtain testimony from two psychologists, Drs James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who helped the CIA design and implement his torture, and the Biden administration is continuing the Trump’s administration strategy to keep key information about Zubaydah’s torture in Poland classified despite the fact that the two psychologists are willing to testify:
On Thursday, Democracy Now! spoke with Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Joe Margulies, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Raymond Bonner, who has long followed the case – the segment is embedded above.
Raymond Bonner, who assisted Alex Gibney in making a new documentary, The Forever Prisoner, about the case, provides the background story on how Abu Zubaydah – the first terrorist suspect captured after the 9/11 attacks – was quickly rendered to a secret site in Thailand, where he was then subjected to relentless bouts of torture:
Soon after he got there is when James Mitchell and then Bruce Jessen showed up and began the interrogation. And as Joe just pointed out, it was very interesting yesterday in the argument to hear, and Justice Barrett included, talking straight about torture. What happened to Zubaydah was torture. There was none of this euphemisms like EITs, you know, enhanced interrogation techniques. And he was the guinea pig, in a way. This is where Mitchell designed the program and tested the program of torture.
You know, Amy [Goodman], it’s always struck me that a lot is made of the 83 times he was waterboarded. If you read what was done to him, read in the government cables that were sent at the time, I mean, to me, the waterboarding was almost benign. I mean, they kept him sleepless. They put him in a small coffin-sized box for hours, overnight. He couldn’t move. They hung him by the cell bars with his feet dangling off the ground. I mean, it got to the point it was so bad, that Mitchell would just snap his fingers, and Zubaydah would act, would get onto the waterboard. I mean, what they did to him was far worse, in my view, than waterboarding.
And then, when journalists started to get onto the story about a secret prison — and you’ve got to remember, this was back in 2002, and we didn’t know about secret prisons and black sites. And when they found out about it and started to ask questions, then the CIA moved him to Poland, and quietly, of course, secretly, which leads to the case, as Joe has described, that’s in the Supreme Court, that was heard in the Supreme Court yesterday.
But if I could say one more thing about yesterday’s argument, in addition to the three points Joe raised, I was gobsmacked when they started asking the lawyers about Zubaydah’s habeas petition. Fourteen years ago — Justice Roberts asked about it, too: “Well, hasn’t he filed a habeas petition?” Yes, he has — 14 years ago. And Joe Margulies was his lawyer then. Fourteen years, and the court has yet to rule on his habeas petition. And it’s — “unprecedented” is always dangerous to say, because somebody will find a case that’s taken longer than 14 years. But it’s just staggering that for 14 years you have had two judges have now had the case in the D.C. District Court, the federal court in Washington, D.C., and they’ve yet to rule.
You know why? The cables are there. Because in 2002, Mitchell and the CIA interrogators in Thailand sent a cable to Washington saying, “We’re about to do these EITs,” the torture of this guy. “He might die,” they said. “He might die. And if he does, we’re going to cremate him. And if he doesn’t, we want assurances that he will never be in a position to tell his story.” And Langley cabled back: “You have the assurances of everyone here that he will be held incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” And that is exactly what is happening. We’re never going to hear from Abu Zubaydah. I would be stunned if he’s allowed to testify.
After this spell in Thailand, Zubaydah had then been transferred to a ‘black site’ located somewhere in Poland. His lawyer, Joe Margulies picks up the story:
What Ray describes is exactly right, but what he’s describing is the torture that took place in Thailand, which was the first black site. Abu Zubaydah was the first person thrown into a black site, the first person to have his interrogation, quote, “enhanced.” And we know a fair amount about what happened to him at Thailand.
But we don’t know what happened to him in Poland. We know that, in testimony, James Mitchell described it, just said that Abu Zubaydah was treated very shabbily. But he uses those kind of euphemisms for the most grotesque torture. And that’s all he says. But no one has ever questioned him about what went on in Poland. The Polish prosecutor knows where the site was. He knows when it operated. But inside the cell, he doesn’t know. There were only three people there. It was Abu Zubaydah, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. And they won’t let Abu Zubaydah testify. So if we’re going to get at what happened there, we have to get it from James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who, I should say, are perfectly willing to provide this testimony. When we sought their testimony in this case, they said, “We have no objection. We’re happy to tell you. We’re happy to sit down for a deposition.” It was the United States government that intervened and said, “No, their testimony is a state secret, and you can’t have any of it.”
The other thing I would want to observe — it’s important to remember this — even Mitchell and Jessen, when they were torturing him in Thailand, after six days of virtually 24-hour-a-day torture, they decided that they were done, that they had emptied the content of his head. And they had concluded that they had gotten all the information they needed from him, or all the information he had left — he had to give. And they cabled that to CIA headquarters in Langley. And Mitchell believes it was Jose Rodriguez who cabled back — someone in the Alec Station — who, in James Mitchell’s words, “You guys are a bunch of pussies. You’ve got to continue this. Blood is going to be on your hands if there’s another attack. Keep torturing him.” And so they did, for another two weeks. And what they eventually concluded is that Abu Zubaydah was telling the truth all along. Contrary to what they believed when they started torturing him, he was not a member of al-Qaeda. He had no involvement with the planning for 9/11. He’s never been a member of al-Qaeda. He is ideologically opposed to al-Qaeda, which is what he had been saying. And they eventually concluded that that was true.
The suppression of information relating to this case as well as the denial of justice continues under Biden, just as it did under Trump. As Margulies says:
Our litigation began during the Trump administration. And the Trump administration sought the review in the United States Supreme Court, and there was the passing of the baton between Trump and Biden, while the case was pending. And the Biden administration picked up the Trump administration’s argument and doubled down on it. So, there’s no — there’s no window. There’s no air between the two administrations.
Click here to read the full transcript or watch the same interview at the Democracy Now! website.
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Lotfi al-Arabi El Gherissi was also tortured and detained for 13 years without charges
The United States repatriated Lotfi al-Arabi El Gherissi, to Tunisia on June 15, 2015, after 13 years in custody without charges or trial. El Gherissi, 52, here recounts being severely beaten with batons, threatened with an electric chair, subjected to various forms of water torture, and being chained by his arms to the ceiling of his cell for a long period. He has received no compensation or support for his wrongful detention or the torture he endured. At the time of filming in October 2016, he was destitute, unable to work, and experiencing the consequences of serious physical and emotional trauma that he says is a direct result of his treatment in US custody:
wall of controversy 