Recycling War Criminals

REBECCA GORDON

A barely noticed anniversary slid by on March 20th. It’s been 15 years since the United States committed the greatest war crime of the twenty-first century: the unprovoked, aggressive invasion of Iraq. The New York Times, which didn’t exactly cover itself in glory in the run-up to that invasion, recently ran an op-ed by an Iraqi novelist living in the United States entitled “Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country,” but that was about it. The Washington Post, another publication that (despite the recent portrayal of its Vietnam-era heroism in the movie The Post) repeatedly editorialized in favor of the invasion, marked the anniversary with a story about the war’s “murky” body count. Its piece concluded that at least 600,000 people died in the decade and a half of war, civil war, and chaos that followed — roughly the population of Washington, D.C.

These days, there’s a significant consensus here that the Iraq invasion was a “terrible mistake,” a “tragic error,” or even the “single worst foreign policy decision in American history.” Fewer voices are saying what it really was: a war crime. In fact, that invasion fell into the very category that led the list of crimes at the Nuremberg tribunal, where high Nazi officials were tried for their actions during World War II. During the negotiations establishing that tribunal and its rules, it was (ironically, in view of later events) the United States that insisted on including the crime of “waging a war of aggression” and on placing it at the head of the list. The U.S. position was that all the rest of Germany’s war crimes sprang from this first “crime against peace.”

Similarly, the many war crimes of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — the extraordinary renditions; the acts of torture at Guantánamo, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and CIA black sites all over the world; the nightmare of abuse at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military prison in Iraq; the siege and firebombing (with white phosphorus) of the Iraqi city of Fallujah; the massacre of civilians in Haditha, another Iraqi city — all of these arose from the Bush administration’s determination to invade Iraq.

It was to secure “evidence” of a (nonexistent) connection between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda attackers of 9/11 that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld upped the ante at Guantánamo in his infamous memo approving torture there. The search for proof of the same connection motivated the torture of Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site in Thailand. If not for that long-planned invasion of Iraq, the “war on terror” might have ended years ago.

But Wasn’t That Then?

Fifteen years is an eternity in what Gore Vidal once called “the United States of Amnesia.” So why resurrect the ancient history of George W. Bush in the brave new age of Donald Trump? The answer is simple enough: because the Trump administration is already happily recycling some of those Bush-era war crimes along with some of the criminals who committed them. And its top officials, military and civilian, are already threatening to generate new ones of their own.

Last July, the State Department closed the office that, since the Clinton administration, has assisted war crimes victims seeking justice in other countries. Apparently, the Trump administration sees no reason to do anything to limit the impunity of war criminals, whoever they might be. Reporting on the closure, Newsweek quoted Major Todd Pierce, who worked at Guantánamo as a judge advocate general (JAG) defense attorney, this way:

“It just makes official what has been U.S. policy since 9/11, which is that there will be no notice taken of war crimes because so many of them were being committed by our own allies, our military and intelligence officers, and our elected officials. The war crime of conspiring and waging aggressive war still exists, as torture, denial of fair trial rights, and indefinite detention are war crimes. But how embarrassing and revealing of hypocrisy would it be to charge a foreign official with war crimes such as these?”

Guantánamo JAG attorneys like Pierce are among the real, if unsung, heroes of this sorry period. They continue to advocate for their indefinitely detained, still untried clients, most of whom will probably never leave that prison. Despite the executive order President Obama signed on his first day in office to close GITMO, it remains open to this day and Donald Trump has promised to “load it up with some bad dudes,” Geneva Conventions be damned.

Indeed, Secretary of Defense James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis has said that the president has the right to lock up anyone identified as a “combatant” in our forever wars, well, forever. In 2016, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that any detainee who “has signed up with this enemy” — no matter where “the president, the commander-in-chief, sends us” to fight — should know that he will be a “prisoner until the war is over.” In other words, since the war on terror will never end, anyone the U.S. captures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Niger, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, or elsewhere will face the possibility of spending the rest of his life in Guantánamo.

Recycling War Criminals

Speaking of Mattis and war crimes, there’s already plenty of blood on his hands. He earned that “Mad Dog” sobriquet while commanding the U.S. Marines who twice in 2004 laid siege to Fallujah. During those sieges, American forces sealed that Iraqi city off so no one could leave, attacked marked ambulances and aid workers, shot women, children, and an ambulance driver, killed almost 6,000 civilians outright, displaced 200,000 more, and destroyed 75% of the city with bombs and other munitions. The civilian toll was vastly disproportionate to any possible military objective — itself the definition of a war crime.

One of the uglier aspects of that battle was the use of white phosphorus, an incendiary munition. Phosphorus ignites spontaneously when exposed to air. If bits of that substance attach to human beings, as long as there’s oxygen to combine with the phosphorus, skin and flesh burn away, sometimes right into the bone. Use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon is forbidden under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the U.S. has signed.

In Iraq, Mattis also saw to it that charges would be dropped against soldiers responsible for murdering civilians in the city of Haditha. In a well-documented 2005 massacre — a reprisal for a roadside bomb — American soldiers shot 24 unarmed men, women, and children at close range. As the convening authority for the subsequent judicial hearing, Mattis dismissed the murder charges against all the soldiers accused of that atrocity.

Mattis is hardly the only slightly used war criminal in the Trump administration. As most people know, the president has just nominated Deputy CIA Director Gina Haspel to head the Agency. There are times when women might want to celebrate the shattering of a glass ceiling, but this shouldn’t be one of them. Haspel was responsible for running a CIA black site in Thailand, during a period in the Bush years when the Agency’s torture program was operating at full throttle. She was in charge, for instance, when the CIA tortured Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was waterboarded at least three times and, according to the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture report, “interrogated using the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” (The report provided no further details.)

Haspel was also part of the chain of command that ordered the destruction of videotapes of the torture of Abu Zubaydah (waterboarded a staggering 83 times). According to the PBS show Frontline, she drafted the cable that CIA counterterrorism chief José Rodríguez sent out to make sure those tapes disappeared. In many countries, covering up war crimes would itself merit prosecution; in Washington, it earns a promotion.

More on Trump and Torture

Many people remember that Trump campaigned on a promise to bring back waterboarding “and a whole lot worse.” On the campaign trail, he repeatedly insisted that torture “works” and that even “if it doesn’t work, they [whoever “they” may be] deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.” Trump repeated his confidence in the efficacy of torture a few days after his inauguration, saying that “people at the highest level of intelligence” had assured him it worked.

Trump’s nominee to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state is former Tea Party congressman and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Known for his antipathy to Muslims (and to Iran), he once endorsed calling his Indian-American electoral opponent a “turban topper.”

Pompeo is as eager as Trump to restore torture’s good name and legality, although his public pronouncements have sometimes been more circumspect than the president’s. During his CIA confirmation hearings he assured the Senate Intelligence Committee of what most of its members wanted to hear: that he would “absolutely not” reinstitute waterboarding and other forms of torture, even if ordered to do so by the president. However, his written testimony was significantly more equivocal. As the British Independent reported, Pompeo wrote that he would back reviewing the ban on waterboarding if prohibiting the technique was shown to impede the “gathering of vital intelligence.”

Pompeo added that he planned to reopen the question of whether interrogation techniques should be limited to those — none of them considered torture techniques — found in the Army Field Manual, something legally required ever since, in 2009, President Obama issued an executive order to that effect. (“If confirmed,” wrote Pompeo, “I will consult with experts at the [Central Intelligence] Agency and at other organizations in the U.S. government on whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country.”) Unlike many of Trump’s appointees, Pompeo is a smart guy, which makes him all the more dangerous.

When President Trump lists his triumphs, often the first one he mentions is the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. Gorsuch, too, played a small but juicy role in the Bush torture drama, drafting the president’s signing statement for the Detainee Treatment Act when he worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel back in 2005. That statement officially outlawed any torture of “war on terror” detainees, and yet left open the actual practice of torture because, as Gorsuch assured President Bush, none of the administration’s self-proclaimed “enhanced interrogation techniques” (including waterboarding) amounted to torture in the first place.

Still, of all Trump’s recycled appointments, the most dangerous of all took place only recently. The president fired his national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and replaced him with John Bolton of Iran-Contra and Iraq invasion fame.

Under George W. Bush, Bolton was a key proponent of that invasion, which he’d been advocating since at least 1998 when he signed an infamous letter to Bill Clinton from the Project for a New American Century recommending just such a course of action. In 2002, Bolton, while undersecretary of state for arms control, engineered the dismissal of José Bustani, the head of the U.N.’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was involved in overseeing Iraq’s disarmament process. A former Bolton deputy told the New York Times that Bolton was dismayed because Bustani “was trying to send chemical-weapons inspectors to Baghdad in advance of the U.S.-led invasion.” Presumably Bolton didn’t want the U.N. trumpeting the bad news that Iraq had no active chemical weapons program at that moment.

Nor has Bolton ever forgotten his first Middle Eastern fascination, Iran, although nowadays he wants to attack it (along with North Korea) rather than conspire with it, as President Reagan and he did in the 1980s. He’s argued in several editorials and as a Fox News commentator — wrongly as it happens — that it would be completely legal for the United States to launch first strikes against both countries. Naturally, he opposes the six-nation pact with Iran to end its nuclear weapons program. When that agreement was signed, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Bolton entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It should (but doesn’t) go without saying that any first strike against another country is again the very definition of the initial crime on that Nuremberg list.

Recycling War Crimes

We can’t blame the Trump administration for the decision to support Saudi Arabia’s grim war in Yemen, a catastrophe for the civilians of that poverty-stricken, now famine-plagued country. That choice was made under Barack Obama. But President Trump hasn’t shown the slightest urge to end the American role in it either. Not after the Saudis threw him that fabulous party in Riyadh, projecting a five-story-high portrait of him on the exterior of the Ritz Carlton there. Not after his warm embrace of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman during his recent visit to the United States. In fact, at their joint press conference, Trump actually criticized former president Obama for bothering the Saudis with complaints about human rights violations in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia itself.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to fund and support the Saudi military’s three-year-old war crime in that country, providing weaponry (including cluster bombs), targeting intelligence, and mid-air refueling for Saudi aircraft conducting missions there. The conflict, which the New York Times has called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” has killed at least ten thousand people, although accurate numbers are almost impossible to come by. As of December 2017, the Yemen Data Project had catalogued 15,489 separate air attacks, of which almost a third involved no known military targets and another 4,800 hit targets that have yet to be identified. Hospitals and other health facilities have been targeted along with crowded markets. Government funding for public health and sanitation ended in 2016, leading to a cholera epidemic that the Guardian calls “the largest and fastest-spreading outbreak of the disease in modern history.”

Through the illegal blockading of Yemen’s ports, Saudi Arabia and its allies have exposed vast numbers of Yemenis to the risk of famine as well. Even before the latest blockade began in November 2017, that country faced the largest food emergency in the world. Now, it is in the early stages of a potentially devastating famine caused entirely by Saudi Arabia’s illegal war, aided and abetted by the United States. In addition, Trump has increased the number of drone assassinations in Yemen, with their ever-present risk of civilian deaths.

Yemen is hardly the only site for actual and potential Trump administration war crimes. In response to requests from his military commanders, the president has, for instance, eased the targeting restrictions that had previously been in place for drone strikes, a decision he’s also failed to report to Congress, as required by law. According to Al-Jazeera, such drone strikes in countries ranging from Libya to Afghanistan will no longer require the presence of an “imminent threat,” which means “the U.S. may now select targets outside of armed conflict,” with increased risk of hitting noncombatants. Also relaxed has been the standard previously in place “of requiring ‘near certainty’ that the target is present” before ordering a strike. Drone operators will now be permitted to attack civilian homes and vehicles, even if they can’t confirm that the human being they are searching for is there. Under Trump, the CIA, which President Obama had largely removed from the drone wars, is once again ordering such attacks along with the military. All of these changes make it more likely that Washington’s serial aerial assassinations will kill significant numbers of civilians in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other target countries.

Defense Secretary Mattis has also loosened the rules of engagement in Afghanistan by, for example, removing the “proximity requirement” for bombing raids. In other words, U.S. forces are now free to drop bombs even when the target is nowhere near U.S. or Afghan military forces. As Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee last October,

“If they are in an assembly area, a training camp, we know they are an enemy and they are going to threaten the Afghan government or our people, [Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan,] has the wherewithal to make that decision. Wherever we find them, anyone who is trying to throw the NATO plan off, trying to attack the Afghan government, then we can go after them.”

Under such widened rules for air strikes — permitting them anytime our forces notice a group of people “assembling” in an area — the chances of killing civilians go way up. And indeed, civilian casualties rose precipitously in Afghanistan last year.

And then there’s always the chance — the odds have distinctly risen since the appointments of two raging Iranophobes, Pompeo and Bolton, to key national security positions — that Trump will start his very own unprovoked war of aggression. “I’m good at war,” Trump told an Iowa rally in 2015. “I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way, but only when we win.” With Mike Pompeo whispering in one ear and John Bolton in the other, it’s frighteningly likely Trump will soon commit his very own war crime by starting an aggressive war against Iran.

How the Islamophobia Industry Silences Voices of Dissent

Antonio Perra

How can a conflict started nearly two decades ago still be so central in the public discourse and so relevant for societal dialogue? How can important achievements of foreign policy fail to change the way societies look at certain issues? And why do we struggle so much to look at terrorist attacks as isolated crimes, but find it so easy to ascribe them to an allegedly inherent, ugly side of a religion?

While it is not easy to answer these questions, a vast body of research points at the domestic dimension of the war on terror, and at the way several echo chambers have perpetuated the idea of a cultural incompatibility between Muslims and non-Muslims across the same spatial and temporal scale. In short, what started as a legitimate concern about criminal atrocities against innocent civilians, was soon turned into a broader issue about “Others’” level of adaptability and acquiescence to our liberal nation states and values.

There are many ways through which this narrative was established and standardised. Right-wing media outlets, questionable think tanks, ardently conservative Christian policy-makers, far-right Zionists, and full-blown xenophobic groups, all played a part in shaping the current approach to Muslims’ integration in Western societies, aided in their efforts by the blistering paced globalisation of the 21^st Century and the resulting identity crisis of neoliberal societies. The volatility of the Middle East, the global financial crisis, and the refugee issue, only served as enablers for nothing short of an Islamophobia industry to develop, flourish, and become the key hijacker of interfaith dialogue and peaceful coexistence.

In his important book “The Islamophobia Industry”, Nathan Lean traces the roots of Islamophobia all the way back to the 1970s, when the United States turned away from the USSR and began to look at the oil-rich lands of the Middle East with increasing interest, starting a process of military interventionism which is at the base of the vicious circle of violence that continues to this day. Hawkish advocates of foreign interventionism see in the depiction of Muslims as enemies of state a way to achieve political and economic gains, and to perpetuate a state of fear and mistrust that keeps the industry afloat. This is why Lean contended that until the West “is no longer engaged in military conflicts with Muslim-majority countries for its own political and economic gain, Islamophobia will continue”.

The case for Britain is somewhat different, yet it remains central to understand how and why exactly the fire of Islamophobia is fuelled. While Britain has not been a key player in the Middle East since the 1950s, it has played a crucial role in the war on terror by establishing an exclusive partnership with hard-line Washington policy-makers, stepping out the realm of international law to pursue questionable objectives of foreign policy. However, the war on terror coupled with Britain’s multiculturalism (an almost unique yet essential legacy left by the former British Empire), has produced a crucial paradox. Can Britain cherish and protect its historical multiculturalism and the coexistence of different faiths and believes at a time in which it is a central player in the war against Islamist terrorism?

Having made of Asian, North African, and Middle Eastern Muslims an integral part of the fabric of British society, more should have been done to safeguard the identities of Muslims after 7/7 unveiled the danger of home-grown terrorism and imposed stringent measures of securitisation. For many years, however, society has regrettably closed an eye on the spreading of anti-Muslim narratives because it subscribed to the idea that a fight against terrorism could legitimise a temporary trumping of civil liberties and mutual respect. People’s fear of becoming victims of what was portrayed as nothing short of a holy war, prevailed over any sort of rational assessment of the many problems that liberal and democratic societies would be faced with.

However, it was not entirely society’s fault. For many non-Muslims, 9/11 and 7/7 were an introduction to a phenomenon it simply did not know it existed. For many, the attacks were not related to international affairs, nor did they have a geopolitical backdrop, but were the side of a religion to which they had paid little or no attention to until that point. Ironically, the same reasoning can be applied to the majority of Muslims who profess their faith in peace and harmony, and were as troubled by the new developments as their non-Muslim counterparts. But being such a new phenomenon, it was normal to ask questions, however uncomfortable, about Islam. It was indeed imperative for western societies so eager to adopt a common, global identity to wonder to what extent the religious complexities of nearly two billion Muslims naturally contained the seeds of violence, or whether the localised context that prompted the emergence of more hard-line interpretation of Islam was the main contributor to what was increasingly seen as the “Islamic problem”.

With time, societies’ concerns with Islam and Muslims increased, partly as a result of isolated, extremist actions emerging from the widespread sense of grievance developed after the 2003 war in Iraq, partly as a result of an incessant campaign aimed at creating a fracture between ‘us’ and ‘them’. As argued by Lean, the depiction of Islam as a controversial religion inherently prone to violence, “makes it easier for states to justify foreign policies that benefit them”, which means that for as long as the idea of a moral incompatibility between Islam and the western world is maintained, the justification for foreign invasions will be widespread. As such, it is not a case that cohorts of far-right and pseudo-liberal thinkers who question the whole of Islam as an identity, are also those more in support of military action in the Middle East. Supporting this narrative means being able to justify an aggressive foreign policy in lands mostly seen as backwards, autocratic and dangerous for our liberal way of thinking.

In recent times, British Islamophobia has taken an interesting turn, extending across seemingly opposite sides of the spectrum and bringing under the same anti-Muslim banner a wide array of players. Indeed, while prejudice impacts every aspect of life among British minorities, from education to housing and from representation in the Criminal Justice System to unemployment, three trends have developed within the framework of the alleged clash of civilization that has punctuated interfaith dialogues since 9/11 and 7/7. Specifically, three segments operating across broader society are responsible for perpetuating the idea that Muslims constitute a threat to our way of life.

Far-right Islamophobia, such as that spread by groups such as English Defence League (EDL) or Britain First (BF), is moulded upon visibly illiberal, fascist principles, aimed at pushing an agenda centred upon a cultural retreat and rejection of multiculturalism. While in some countries such as Hungary, Greece, Germany, and Austria, these voices have found a way into the political sphere, in Britain they remain primarily confined at street level – with the exception of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which however has moved away from a hard-line rhetoric about Islam and non-White ethnicities. Much of the success of these groups stems from a shared rejection of ‘the other’, which aides the building of an abstract British identity that swings between a way forward in a globalised age and nostalgic echoes of 19^th Century Britain.

Far-right Islamophobia is undoubtedly the easiest to spot, and the most opposed to. Its vile, violent and barbaric manifestations are diametrically opposed to liberal and inclusive western societies, and while they still retain some appeal across certain segments of British society – particularly those most affected by the global financial crisis – they are broadly condemned in the mainstream.

The results of Far-Right Islamophobia, however, are devastating, as the case of Darren Osborne – the terrorist of the Finsbury Park mosque – proved. In this regard, Far-Right Islamophobia also differs from the other two because it often leads to prosecutable crimes: in 2016/17, the Islamophobic hate crimes recorded by the Metropolitan Police Force amounted to 1,264, a nearly 14% increase from 2015/16.

Way more subtle and equally dangerous, however, is the so-called ‘Liberal’ Islamophobia, which is presented under the mantle of “progressive” Islam – thus able to find consensus among liberal masses – and which is used to advance particular narratives about inherent issues with Islam and Muslims. Organisations such as Tell Mama, or Sara Khan’s Inspire and others, have established themselves as spokespeople for “progressive” Muslims simply by subscribing to the level of religiosity tolerable by broader society, which in turn sets a standard as to what is an acceptable version of Islam. More than that, they also call for scrutiny of the religion and its followers, thus justifying, seemingly from a Muslim’s perspective, concerns about those Muslim communities who hold different views from theirs. It is critical to point out that their success depends entirely on their ability to reject more extreme ideas related to an irreconcilable clash of civilisations and cultures – such as those advanced by Far-Right groups – while simultaneously admitting that there is, in fact, an inherent problem of religion.

It is through the presence of these individuals in the mainstream that the line between extremism and religious conservativism gets blurred. Because society has been taught that conservative religious views can lead to extremism, liberal Muslims are seen as the only ‘type’ of Muslims that can coexist with western societies because, quite ironically, they have fully embraced their liberalism. The presence of these ‘leaders’, enables the thinking that any different religious manifestation should be investigated, scrutinised, and possibly opposed.

One classic example is the issue of the Islamic veil, seen as a remnant of the past and thus irreconcilable in societies that value equal rights and liberalism. Gradually, the hijab, and even more so the niqab, have come to be categorised as signs of overzealous religious devotion, if not full-blown oppression, without ever been seen as the free expression of a woman’s religiosity.

A third dimension of Islamophobia is that of Securitization-driven Islamophobia, which includes Think Tanks that seek to tackle violent and non-violent extremism as part of the broader war on terror agenda. Organisations such as the Quilliam Foundation (QF) or the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) are especially insidious because they borrow elements of both Far-Right and Liberal Islamophobia, masking their own under the banner of necessary efforts to forestall terrorist attacks. While QF and HJS have a different origin – the former was founded by two ex-extremists and the latter by neoconservative pseudo-intellectuals – they share remarkably similar traits in the way they approach the issue of interfaith coexistence and terrorism, while also being dangerously highly influential among policy-makers.

While both QF and HJS are recipients of funds from the International Islamophobia network, as exposed by Spinwatch, they also have repeatedly expressed alarming views that strongly resemble the rhetoric adopted by Far-Right activists. Maajid Nawaz from QF openly declared that “multiculturalism has failed”, and Douglas Murray from HJS went as far as saying that “to have less terrorism the UK needs less Islam”. However, a key enabler of Securitization-driven Islamophobia is that it employs elitists, self-appointed pseudo-experts that masquerade their Islamophobia as an opposition to extremism rather than as an irrational rejection of a specific religious identity. While contributing to spreading divisive and Islamophobic theories, these cohorts of specialists-wannabes do little more than providing an eco-chamber for existing governmental strategies and amplify their powers and scope, regardless of their effectiveness and empirical limitations.

Furthermore, the Securitization-driven Islamophobia is (at times) able to elude accusations of extremism by professing an acceptance of ‘moderate’ forms of Islam. Borrowing from the Liberal Islamophobia, they pass judgement as to what constitutes an acceptable religious behaviour while nonchalantly labelling more conservative forms of religious identities as extreme, and thus in contrast to the western way of life, if not explicitly dangerous.

It is difficult to ascertain whether this Islamophobia spectrum is dominated by a genuine conviction that Islam is a dangerous religion or by economic and political reasons, although it could be reasonably be inferred that the truth lays somewhere in the middle. Indeed, the Islamophobia business is worth $57 million in the United States alone, and the international web of alliances that sustains it – the so-called “Islamophobia Network” – is a self-fuelling machine that relies on fear and misinformation. The economic and political gains of maintaining the Islamophobia industry afloat, however, also depend on the appeal that the industry has in broader society, that is, the extent to which the industry can convince the public that Muslims and Islam are dangerous. The scaremongering campaign is thus capable of instilling genuine concern across society and influencing policies and voting patterns, while simultaneously increasing societal divides by pitting one minority against the other.

The fight against Islamophobia, just as the fight against anti-Semitism or any other form of prejudicial hate, begins by raising awareness of the many faces of those who make profits through fear and bigotry. Acknowledging the existence of a well-orchestrated attempt to create a civilizational struggle is an important step towards a greater ability to defeat prejudice, and an effective antidote against misinformation and stigmatisation.

Even more importantly, recognising the political and economic motivations behind the actions of the Islamophobia network can lead to the deconstruction of the narratives it advances, thus allowing a shift of focus towards what matters the most: mental health issues, foreign policy, isolation, unemployment, socio-economic deprivation and a whole host of other factors that could lead an individual to radicalisation.

Is a New War Against Russia in Ukraine Unfolding Before Our Eyes?

John McMurtry

We are now entering yet another US-UK led war build-up against the cornerstone of Western ideology, the designated Enemy Russia.

As usual there is amnesia of the ever-recurring big-lie pretext, the need for another crisis to keep the two-billion-dollar a day NATO war machine going, the baleful puppet moves of Canada in the process, the crisis of legitimacy of the lead attacker’s government, and the silent diversion from the whole nightmare scenario unfolding by all NATO-member governments, mass media and even ‘peace activist’ organisations.

This time the big-lie pretext is about the alleged poisoning by the Kremlin/Putin of a double-agent, usually a stock move in the espionage entertainments, but here with no evidence of the claimed origin of the lethal nerve-agent, but rather expert denial within British defence and weapons research itself, with devious political word games to get around the absence of any corroborated evidence in familiar denuciations of Russia full of aggression and hate. Not even a death is recorded while US-led nd UK-armed ally forces are still mass-murdering poor civilian Yeminis, drone-murdering endless targets and civilians abroad, continuing on unblamed for the ongoing NATO-executed eco-genocides of Iraq and Libya societies, and on the 19-years anniversary of the mass bombing of, once again a society, Yugoslavia, with the most evolved social infrastructures of health, education, housing and life security in the region.

What this latest war pretext for US and NATO-backed aggression is really about is justifying more war in the Ukraine now that the massive war preparations along all of Russia’s Western borders following the self-declared Nazi-led and proven US- orchestrated and commanded mass-murder coup d’etat in February 2014 . As usual there is amnesia of the ever-recurring big-lie pretext, the need for another crisis to keep the two-billion-dollar a day NATO war machine going, the baleful puppet moves of Canada in the process, the crisis of legitimacy of the lead attacker’s government, and the silent diversion from the whole nightmare scenario unfolding by all NATO-member governments, mass media and even ‘peace activist’ organisations.

This time the big-lie pretext is about the alleged poisoning by the Kremlin/Putin of a double-agent traitor, usually a stock move in the espionage entertainments. Yet here there is no confirmed evidence whatever of the claimed origin of the lethal nerve-agent, but rather expert denial within British defence and weapons research itself that is silence in the press, with devious political word games crafted to get around the absence of any corroborated facts in the familiar denuciations of Russia full of team aggression and hate. Not even a death is recorded while US-led nd UK-armed ally forces are still mass-murdering poor civilian Yeminis, drone-murdering endless targets and civilians abroad, continuing on unblamed for the ongoing NATO-executed eco-genocides of Iraq and Libya societies, and on the 19-years anniversary of the mass bombing of Yugoslavia – once again a socialist society with the most evolved social infrastructures of health, education, housing and life security in the region.

What this latest war pretext for US and NATO-backed aggression is really about is justifying more war in Ukraine now that the massive war preparations along all of Russia’s Western borders following the self-declared Nazi-led and proven US- orchestrated and commanded mass-murder coup d’etat in February 2014 . As always, this US-directed mass murder was reverse-blamed on the ever shifting Enemy face – Russia’s allied but duly elected government of the Ukraine. It was only after this violent-coup Nazi-led and US directed overthrow of the elected government of the very resource-rich Ukraine – “the breadbasket of Europe” and sitting on newly discovered rich fossil fuel deposits – that Russia annexed its traditional territory of the Crimea next to Eastern Ukraine, the latter after the violent coup put under the rule of a US-Nazi-led government until its people fought back with Russia assistance for the now NATO-targeted zones of the new Donetsk and Lugansk republics.

What is new now is that we are about to enter yet another NATO-member war build-up against the cornerstone of Western  ideology, the designated Enemy Russia. As usual there is amnesia of the ever-recurring big-lie pretext, the need for another crisis to keep the two-billion-dollar a day US-led NATO war machine going, the baleful puppet moves of Canada in the process, the crisis of legitimacy of the lead attacker’s UK government, and silent diversion from the whole nightmare scenario unfolding in NATO-member states, mass media and even ‘peace activist’ organisations.

Cui Bono?  

The UK and the US followed by Canada and some of the EU have by expulsion of Russia diplomats prepared the diplomatic way for war in the Ukraine to seize back these lost coup-territories, and it will be in the name of “freedom”, “human rights” and “the rules of civilised nations”. But there is much officially suppressed colour to the warring parties political conflict which reveals who the truly heinous suppressor of human rights is.  Under mass media and corporate-state cover, the US-UK-NATO axis about to make war in Ukraine is doing so under the factually absurd but non-stop pretext of “Russia aggression” constructed out of the double-agent poisoning affair, with the guilty agents and poison having no proof but the ever louder UK-led and NATO-state assertion of it in unison. Yet there is a clear answer to the cui bono question – which party does all this benefit? Clearly once the question is posed, as opposed to completely gagged in the corporate press, Theresa May’s slow-motion collapsing Tory government – now even challenged for its fraudulent Brexit referendum protecting the big London banks from EU regulation – has to have such a war-drum distraction to survive. The old war of aggression pattern reverse-blamed on the official enemy unwinds yet again.

It is revealing in this context how Canada’s government has no such ruler need of war – unless it be its Ukraine-descendent Foreign Minister up front and the very powerful and widely Nazi-sympathizing Ukraine Liberal vote bank and leadership brought to Canada after 1945  to overwhelm the preceding active socialist Ukrainian community in Canada. Canada’s government – not its people – is in any case used to being a puppet regime in foreign affairs as a twice-colonized rule by big business (why the NDP is not allowed to govern unless so subjugated).

The Human Rights Question

In light of all of this suppressed factual background and motive for more war in Ukraine which is unspeakable in the official news, interaction with the United Nations is of revealing interest. While it has been the cover for US-led NATO executed genocidal wars of aggression in the past as in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Korea, the pretexts of ‘human rights’, ‘responsibility to protect’ and ‘stopping communist aggression’, which are in fact always been the spectacular opposite on the ground in terms of diseased, mass-murdered and destituted bodies, these pretexts may not sell well when the background facts are no longer suppressed from public view.

It is worthwhile recalling how Science for Peace leadership used to be against but has since Afghanistan collaborated with these false-pretext wars in sustaining their illusions and thus the war crimes and crimes against proceeding underneath them.

The NATO-executed Ukraine war now being orchestrated is especially revealing in its actual record of ‘protecting human rights’ through ‘international law’ and ‘norms of civilised nations’.  Completely buried in official records is a United Nations resolution n on Ukraine that the US and Canada repudiated on November 20 2015 after the US-led bloody coup d’etat in Ukraine was in full motion of claiming all the vast tracts of land and resources that were Russia-speaking territory in the past.

The resolution was straightforwardly against “Nazi symbols and regalia” as well as  “holocaust denial”. The Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee of the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted for a resolution to enable measures against “the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that facilitate the escalation of modern forms of racism, xenophobia and intolerance”. A total of 126 member-states of the UN voted for it for the second time. Over 100 countries voted for a similar resolution in 2014 including “denial of the holocaust and glorification of the Nazi movement, former members of the Waffen SS organization, including the installation of memorials to them, and post-coup attempts to desecrate or destroy the monuments to those who fought against Nazism in Ukraine during World War II”.

How could any civilised state vote against these United Nations Resolutions for human rights as Canada and the US have done and stood by ever since? Well instituted group hatred of the officially designated enemy can justify anything whatsoever, and does so right into next NATO-executed orgy of war crime and crimes against humanity, again inside Europe itself flaunting reverse-blame lies and slogans as red meat for psychotically trained masses. It is not by accident that Canada’s Foreign Minister is in this near century-old Nazi loyalist vs Russia-speaking conflict was before her appointment the “proud “granddaughter of a leading Nazi war propagandist during its occupation of Poland and Ukraine described as a “fighter for freedom”.

Yet on the other hand, we must not lose ourselves in ad hominemresponsibility. Crystina Freeland, her Canada name, is interestingly propagandist in itself from her birth – Christian Free Land – but not observed in the corporate press. Minister Freeland is only a symptom of something far deeper and more systemically murderous and evil in state-executed unlimited greed and immiserization of innocent millions of people masked as ‘human rights’ , ‘freedom’ and ‘rule of law’ .  Her more sinister double in the US is also a renamed person of the region, Victoria Nuland (read New Land) who orchestrated the whole 2014 mass-murder coup in Ukraine and now tub-thumps on public television for the ‘need to teach Putin and Russia a hard lesson’, aka another war attack by US-led NATO on Russia’s borders.

The difference now is that the absurd pretext and geostrategic mechanisms now in motion beforehand can be seen in front of our eyes – that is, if we can still see through the engineered prism of the US-UK led NATO war machine.  This alone will stop it.

Getting Ready for Nuclear War

Brian Cloughley

John Bolton is to assume the appointment as President Trump’s National Security Adviser on April 9.  On February 28 he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “it is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” which would undoubtedly lead to explosion of at least one nuclear device by whoever might remain alive in the Pyongyang regime after the US attack. In a macabre echo of the alleged link between Iraq and Al Qaeda before the US invasion, Bolton said on March 23 that “Little is known, at least publicly, about longstanding Iranian-North Korean cooperation on nuclear and ballistic-missile technology. It is foolish to play down Tehran’s threat because of Pyongyang’s provocations.”

Link and bomb, and get ready for yet more war.

On August 9, 2017 President Trump tweeted “My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before.”

This declaration of US achievement and nuclear policy was apparently intended to intimidate the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, who tested a nuclear-capable ballistic missile three months later, following which the US president issued an insulting tweet that referred to him as “Little Rocket Man.”  The level of international dialogue and diplomacy sank to yet a new low which was enthusiastically reciprocated by Kim, but Trump gave a rare exhibition of common sense on  November 11, 2017 by asking “When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There [meaning they’re] always playing politics — bad for our country . . .”

How very true, and how much better for the world had such a positive attitude been allowed to flourish along with dialogue.  But then everything went screaming downhill. Along came Washington’s aggressive Nuclear Posture Review which emphasized enlargement of nuclear weapons’ capabilities and followed from the US National Defence Strategy which strongly advocates massive military expansion, naming Russia specifically no less than 127 times, compared with 62 references to North Korea, 47 to China and 39 to Iran.

The bulging muscles of the US military-industrial complex have been nourished by the circus of the “Russiagate” investigations in Washington which attempted to prove that Moscow had organized the 2016 election results by persuading countless millions of people on social media sites that red was blue and Democratic donkeys were really Republican elephants.  Or the other way round.  It was all rubbish, but the US-European anti-Russia campaign was then given enormous impetus by the collapse in England from apparent poisoning of a retired, BMW-driving British spy, a former Russian citizen.

The poisoning was effected by a chemical agent, and blame for the event was immediately laid at Russia’s door. The British foreign minister Boris Johnson is a sad joke, but he’s politically powerful and a threat to the prime minister, Theresa May, so he continues in his post and makes statements such as “Russia is the only country known to have developed this type of agent. I’m afraid the evidence is overwhelming that it is Russia.” The fact that there is no evidence whatever that Russia was involved is ignored, because the western world has been convinced that Russia is guilty of this poisoning — and of countless other things.

The heightened anti-Russia feeling is most welcome to the US-NATO military alliance, which has been energetic in developing its ‘Enhanced Forward Presence’ along Russia’s borders.  Its belligerent posture has been hardening since NATO began to expand in 1997, which was entirely contrary to what had been agreed seven years previously.  As recorded by the Los Angeles Times, “In early February 1990, US leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on February 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, the US could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the US would limit NATO’s expansion.  Nevertheless, great powers rarely tie their own hands. In internal memorandums and notes, US policymakers soon realized that ruling out NATO’s expansion might not be in the best interests of the United States. By late February, Bush and his advisers had decided to leave the door open.”

The door towards Russia’s borders opened on to a welcoming galaxy of nations anxious to enjoy all the financial benefits that would descend upon them from the deep and generous pockets of the Washington-Brussels military machine.  The US and other NATO members rolled forward with missile-armed ships in the Baltic and the Black Sea, with electronic surveillance and command aircraft flying as close as they could to Russian airspace, along with deployment of nuclear-capable combat aircraft and more ground troops in expansion of the Enhanced Forward Presence.

The recent surge in anti-Russia news and comment in almost all US and UK media is a boon and a blessing for the rickety and incompetent NATO alliance, but in responsible circles there is concern about its nuclear posture — and especially that of the United States.

On February 19 Bolton wrote that “Putin’s global aspirations are not friendly to America, and the sooner he knows we know it, the better. It is not enough, however, to file criminal charges against Russian citizens, nor are economic sanctions anywhere near sufficient to prove our displeasure. We need to create structures of deterrence in cyberspace, as we did with nuclear weapons, to prevent future Russian attacks or attacks by others who threaten our interests.”

One of the most disturbing developments is the attitude to the Nuclear Posture Review of many nuclear experts in the West.  As reported by Defence News, “Rebeccah Heinrichs, a nuclear analyst with the Hudson Institute, thinks the Pentagon is on the right path, noting that “if the Russians have a weapon delivery option, they’re putting a nuke on it” at the moment. “Clearly the Russians believe that they could possibly pop off a low yield nuke and we would not have an appropriate response, and our only option would essentially be to end the war rather than go all-in with strategic nuclear weapons. . . “

It may be because I have had some association with nuclear delivery systems and their hideous effects that I take offence at clever little analysts referring to dispatch and detonation of nuclear weapons as “popping off.”  The weapon that would be “popped off” — whatever it might be — would kill hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, and would contaminate vast areas of land.  A “low yield nuke” as it is so lightly dismissed, is not an inconsequential weapon.

A long time ago in Germany I commanded a troop of rocket launchers that were tasked to fire “low yield” Honest John missiles in the event of war in Europe.  We knew these things would cause immense damage because the W7 warhead had a yield of up to 20 kilotonnes — just about that of the Nagasaki bomb that killed about 75,000 human beings.  Sure, our warheads might only have been a fraction of that (we’ll never know), but even then I object to intellectuals saying they might have been “popped off” like modern-day “low-yield nukes,” because we would have died within a few minutes of firing these things, not long after we had killed our thousands of victims, most likely from retaliation but also because the maximum range of our rockets was about 25 kilometers and the fall-out effects would have been pretty swift.

Then you read the pronouncements of such important people as Air Force General John Hyten, the senior US nuclear deliveryman, commanding US Strategic Command, who said on February 28 that “Russia is the most significant threat just because they pose the only existential threat to the country right now. So we have to look at that from that perspective.” Further, ““By the way, our submarines, they do not know where they are, and they have the ability to decimate their country . . .”   Fleshing out that part of the Nuclear Triad came Rear Admiral John Tammen, Director, Undersea Warfare Division, who told Congress on March 26 that his conventional submarines were henceforth going to be carrying nuclear weapons. Fox News reported Admiral Tammen as stating that “The Virginia [Class] submarines can currently fire Tomahawk missiles and torpedoes but by adding nuclear weapons, it would give combatant commanders new options and expand its mission.”

He should get together with Rebeccah Heinrichs, General Hyten and John Bolton.  They could discuss where and how to pop off a weapon that would lead to world destruction.  They are all getting ready for nuclear war, and the threat to the world looms large.

Precarious Communications: Julian Assange, Internet Access and Ecuador

Binoy Kampmark

Being a netizen, to use that popular term of sociological derivation, can be a difficult business. It presumes digital engagement, often of the sharper sort.  To become a fully-fledged member of such citizenry, however, presumes access, a degree of Internet speed and appropriate platforms. Absent those, then different forms of activism must be sought.

Governments and authorities the world over have come to appreciate that either the activity itself is controlled (limiting internet access, for one), or the content made available on the Internet (the Great Firewall of China).  The resonant cliché there is that the one who controls the narrative controls history, or can, at the very least, blind it.

Out of such tensions and tussles comes Julian Assange, a member of that unique breed of cyber insurrectionists, ducking and weaving through the information channels with varying degrees of success. To function as a publishing figure, he requires access to the Internet, a phenomenon that presumes an acephalous society.

For years, his enemy has been the concentration of information in the hands of the few, the greedy sort who horde information from the commonweal as they encourage ignorance.  Publishing classified material has become a form of enlightenment, and it remains a furious debate waged across the political spectrum.

Little wonder, then, that Assange has become a political activist par excellence. If only he were merely, as Britain’s junior minister Sir Alan Duncan would have it, a holed up “miserable little worm.”  Better a worm, retorted Assange to the minister’s remarks in the House of Commons, “a healthy creature that invigorates the soil, than a snake.”

He encourages others to revolt, and promises assistance to the restless.  In March last year, he delighted in queries about the problems posed by the leaked CIA cyberespionage toolkit.  The interest of Silicon Valley firms had been piqued.

“We have decided to work with them,” explained Assange at his online press conference, “to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out.”  Such advice would assist the companies to patch their products and render the task of accessing data by intelligence services more onerous.

Such announcements, not to mention frenzied activity on such social media platforms as Twitter, can only take place by the good grace of his hosts of five years, those staff at the Ecuadorean embassy in London whose patience has, at times, been tested.

The pact between the Ecuadorean state and tenant Assange is hardly one of steel. It more resembles rubber, stretching or narrowing accordingly.  When it has suited Ecuadorean interests to protect a troublesome political celebrity whilst permitting him to niggle the likes of the United States, Assange has been permitted vast, anarchic leeway.

Nick Miroff in the The Washington Post went so far as to deem Ecuador’s initial treatment of Assange as that of one who had won a trophy.  Even as the Ecuador’s Rafael Correa took measures against the press in his country, he would still “poke Washington in the eye and look like a champion for press freedom”.

When still president, Correa dressed it all as a matter of obligation. “Ecuador fulfilled its duty, we gave him sovereign asylum, and finally the Swedish judicial system has closed the file and will not press charges against Assange.”

On Wednesday, the rubbery aspect of the relationship took another shape.  Assange’s access to the internet would be halted.  His digital mischief, it seemed, had gotten out of hand:

“The government of Ecuador warns that Assange’s behaviour, through his messages on social networks, put at risk the country’s good relations with the United Kingdom, the other states of the European Union, and other nations.”

Such interventions tend to be inconsistent and arbitrary. In 2016, when WikiLeaks had emerged as an information guerrilla force of prominence in the US presidential election, the embassy took similar measures to cool the ardour.  Assange had gotten overly zealous, when in fact, he was simply fulfilling his brief. “The government of Ecuador,” came the reasons in 2016 from the Ecuadorean Foreign Ministry, “respects the principles of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations, does not meddle in electoral campaigns nor support any candidate in particular.” Gradual, tentative realignments were taking place in Latin America, and the trophy tenant had lost some lustre.

On that occasion, WikiLeaks had released hacked Democratic National Committee emails and those of Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisor, John Podesta. The US intelligence viewpoint on this was simple and simplistic: Assange had become a proxy of Russian interests. Undue electoral interference had been featured.  Forget, they insisted, on the light darkly shining upon the Clinton stranglehold of the Democrats, and the sordid plotting against Bernie Sanders.

What prompted the latest clipping of Assange’s wings?  Tweets, perhaps, shot through on Monday challenging the British-led account that Russia was directly responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

He had hardly been scurrilously contrarian with his remarks, though the current atmosphere turns tentative questions into howls of dissent.  Odd, he claimed, that the expulsion of Russian diplomats had taken place “over an unresolved event in the UK and that the US expelled nearly three times as many diplomats as the UK”.  While Russia might well have been involved, current evidence in the absence of independent confirmation was unverified and skimpy.

As with any testy relationship marked by a degree of self-interest, partners will squabble.  Compromise will be sought, though this is hardly likely to quell Assange’s insatiable pursuit of activism.  As the latest move suggests, arbitrariness is hard to avoid, and Assange remains a guest.  What matters is whether the reins will continue to be pulled in. Courtesy and good graces tend to shrink in the face of brute politics.