“To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulative evil of the whole.” – Judges of the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials.

By Scott RITTER

When it comes to the legal use of force between states, it is considered unimpeachable fact that in accordance with the intent of the United Nations Charter to ban all conflict, there are only two acceptable exceptions. One is an enforcement action to maintain international peace and security authorized by a Security Council resolution passed under Chapter VII of the Charter, which permits the use of force.

The other is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter, which reads as follows:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

A plain-language reading of Article 51 makes it clear that the trigger necessary for invocation of the right of self-defense is the occurrence of an actual armed attack — the notion of an open-ended threat to security does not, by itself, suffice.

Prior to the adoption of the U.N. Charter, the customary international law interpretation of the role of pre-emption as applied to the principle of self-defense was Hugo Grotius,th century Dutch legal scholar who, in his book De Jure Belli Ac Pacis (“On the Law of War and Peace”) declared that “war in defense of life is permissible only when the danger is immediate and certain, not when it is merely assumed,” adding that “the danger must be immediate and imminent in point in time.”

Grotius formed the core of the so-called “Caroline Standard” of 1842, (named after a U.S. ship of that name which had been attacked by the British navy after aiding Canadian rebels back in 1837) drafted by then U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster. It supported the right of pre-emption or anticipatory self-defense only under extreme circumstances and within clearly defined boundaries.

“Undoubtedly,” Webster wrote, “it is just, that while it is admitted that exceptions growing out of the great law of self-defense do exist, those exceptions should be confined to eases in which the ‘necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’”

Until the adoption of the U.N. Charter in 1945, Webster’s criteria, borrowing heavily from Grotius, had become Black Letter Law regarding anticipatory action in international law. However, once the United Nations was established and the U.N. Charter sanctified as international law, the concept of pre-emption or anticipatory self defense lost favor in customary international law.

George Ball, deputy under-secretary of state for President John F. Kennedy, made the following famous remark about the possibility of a U.S. attack on Cuba in response to the deployment of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles on Cuban territory in 1962. As it was being discussed in the White House Situation Room, Ball said: “A course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor…It’s…it’s the kind of conduct that’s such that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.”

Oct. 29, 1962 Executive Committee of the National Security Council meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Cecil Stoughton, White House, in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

The Ball standard guided the administration of President Ronald Reagan when, in 1983, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Israel claimed that “in removing this terrible nuclear threat to its existence, Israel was only exercising its legitimate right of self-defense within the meaning of this term in international law and as preserved under the U.N. Charter.”

The Reagan administration ultimately disagreed, with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkparick saying, “our judgement that Israeli actions violated the Charter of the United Nations is based on the conviction that Israel failed to exhaust peaceful means for the resolution of this dispute.” Kirkpatrick, however, noted that President Reagan had opined that “Israel might have sincerely believed it was a defensive move.”

The American argument dealt with the process of the Israeli action, namely the fact that Israel had not brought the problem before the Security Council as required by Article 51. In this, the U.S. drew upon the judgement of Sir Humphrey Waldock, the head of the International Court of Justice, who in his 1952 book, The Regulation of the Use of Force by Individual States in International Law” noted:

“The Charter obliges Members to submit to the Council or Assembly any dispute dangerous to peace which they cannot settle. Members have therefore an imperative duty to invoke the jurisdiction of the United Nations whenever a grave menace to their security develops carrying the probability of armed attack.”

After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the United States was able to assemble a diverse international coalition by citing not only Article 51, which provided a somewhat weak case for intervention based upon self-defense and collective security, but also Security Council resolution 678 passed under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. That authorized the use of force to evict Iraq from Kuwait. Regardless of where one stood on the merits of that conflict, the fact is, from the standpoint of international law, the legality underpinning the U.S. and coalition use of force was rock solid.

The aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military campaign to liberate Kuwait, however, lacked such clarity. While Kuwait was liberated, the Iraqi government was still in place. Since Resolution 678 did not authorize regime change, the continued existence of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government posed a political problem for the United States, whose president, George H. W. Bush, had likened Saddam Hussein in an October 1990 speech to the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler, requiring Nuremburg-like retribution.

US Misuse of Ceasefire Resolution

The Security Council, under pressure from the United States, passed a ceasefire resolution, 687, under Chapter VII, which linked the lifting of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq for invading Kuwait to the verified disarmament of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) under the auspices of U.N. weapons inspectors.

The U.N. disarmament process was troubled by two disparate undercurrents. The first was the fact the Iraqi government was an unwilling participant in the disarmament process, actively hiding material, weapons, and documentation pertaining to banned missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear programs from the inspectors.

This active program of concealment constituted a de facto material breach of the ceasefire resolution, creating a prima facia case for the resumption of military action for the purpose of compelling Iraq into compliance.

The second was the reality that the United States, rather than using the disarmament process authorized by the Security Council to rid Iraq of WMD, was instead using the sanctions triggered by continued Iraqi noncompliance to create the conditions inside Iraq to remove Saddam from power.

The weapons inspection process was only useful to the United States if it furthered that singular objective. By the fall of 1998, inspections had become inconvenient to U.S. Iraq policy.

In a move carefully coordinated between the U.N. inspection team and the U.S. government, an inspection-based confrontation was orchestrated between U.N. inspectors and the Iraqi government, which was then used as an excuse to withdraw the U.N. inspectors from Iraq. The U.S. government, citing the threat posed by Iraqi WMD in an inspection-free environment, launched a three-day aerial bombardment of Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox.

Neither the U.S. nor the U.K. (the two nations involved in Operation Desert Fox) had received authority from the U.N. Security Council prior to taking military action. There is no specific legal authority that would allow either the U.S. or Britain to act in a unilateral fashion regarding the enforcement of a Chapter VII resolution such as 687. While the Security Council would obviously be able to authorize compelled compliance (i.e., the use of force), no single nation nor collective possesses unilateral enforcement authority, making Operation Desert Fox an illegal act of aggression under international law.

The U.S. has sought to get around this legality by crafting a case for military action under the rubric of the “right of reprisal”, with the act of Iraq being in material breach of its obligations under resolution 687 serving as the justification for reprisal. To argue what by most accounts is a tenuous case, however, the strike in question would have to be limited to targets that could be exclusively defined as being related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The fact that the U.S. and U.K. struck a plethora of sites, none of which were related to the manufacture or storage of WMD, undermines the legitimacy of any justification under a claim of reprisal, making Operation Desert Fox an unauthorized (i.e., illegal) use of military force.

Deterrence

U.N. weapons inspectors in central Iraq, June 1, 1991. (UN Photo)

One of the purposes alleged to justify an action under the “right of reprisal” was the notion of deterrence, namely that by carrying out a limited reprisal in response to a documented material breach of a Chapter VII resolution, the U.S. and UK would be deterring Iraq from any future acts of non-compliance.

One of the key aspects of deterrence in defense of the law, however, is the need for the act upon which deterrence is derived being itself legitimate. Given that Operation Desert Fox was, prima facia, an illegal act, the deterrence value generated by the action was nil.

The inability to craft a valid deterrence policy produced the opposite of what had been intended — it emboldened Iraq to defy the will of the Security Council under the misguided conclusion that its constituent members were impotent to act against it.

In 2003 the administration of President George W. Bush proved the Iraqis wrong.

Having failed to implement a viable doctrine of military deterrence when dealing with Iraq’s unfulfilled obligations under Security Council resolutions, the U.S. crafted a new approach for resolving the Iraqi problem once and for all—the doctrine of pre-emption.

This doctrine was first articulated by President Bush in his June 2002 address to West Point, where he declared that while “in some cases deterrence still applied, new threats required new thinking … if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

On Aug. 26, 2002 Vice President Dick Cheney specifically linked Bush’s embryonic doctrine of pre-emption to Iraq, declaring at a convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars that:

“What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness…deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator or the two working together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.”

Certified Pre-Emption

In early September 2002 the Bush administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS), which certified as official U.S. policy the principle of pre-emption. It noted that the Cold War-era doctrines of containment and deterrence no longer worked when dealing with a post-9/11 threat matrix which included rogue states and non-state terrorists.

“It has taken almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat,” the NSS stated.

“Given the goals of the rogue states and terrorists, the U.S. can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker…and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

The NSS went on to offer a legal argument for this new doctrine. “For centuries international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of pre-emption on the existence of an imminent threat — most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air forces preparing to attack.”

According to the NSS, the concept of immediacy as a pre-condition for the legitimate employment of anticipatory self-defense had to be adapted to the new kinds of threats that had emerged. “The greater the threat,” the NSS declared, “the greater is the risk of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively.”

The new Bush Doctrine of pre-emption was not well received by legal scholars and international relations specialists. As William Galston, at the time a professor of public policy for the University of Maryland, observed in an article published on Sept. 3, 2002,

“A global strategy based on the new Bush doctrine of preemption means the end of the system of international institutions, laws, and norms that we have worked to build for more than half a century. What is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental shift in America’s place in the world. Rather than continuing to serve as first among equals in the postwar international system, the United States would act as a law unto itself, creating new rules of international engagement without the consent of other nations.”

Galston’s words were echoed by then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who shortly after the NSS was published declared that the notion of pre-emptive self-defense would lead to a breakdown in international order. For any military action against Iraq to have legitimacy under the U.N. Charter, Annan believed, there needed to be a new Security Council resolution which specifically authorized a military response.

The U.S. and U.K. did, in fact, seek to secure such a resolution in early 2003, but failed. As such, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003 under the sole authority of the U.S. doctrine of pre-emption, “was not in conformity with the U.N. charter,” according to Annan, who added “From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal.”

As the de facto first test case of the new American doctrine of preemption, the U.S. would have benefitted from having been proven right in the major threat assumptions which underpinned the need for urgency. History has shown that the major threat issue — that of Iraqi WMD, was fundamentally flawed, derived as it were from a manufactured case for war based on fabricated intelligence.

Likewise, the so-called nexus between Iraq’s WMD and the al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of 9/11 turned out to be equally as illusory. The doctrine of pre-emption carries with it a high standard of proof; about Iraq, this standard was not remotely met, making the 2003 invasion of Iraq illegal under even the most liberal application of the doctrine.

Ukraine

Putin announcing military operation against Ukraine on Feb. 24. (AP screenshot)

Concerns that any attempt to carve a doctrine of pre-emption out of the four corners of international law defined by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter would result in the creation of new rules of international engagement, and that that would result in the breakdown of international order were realized on Feb. 24.

That is when Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a “special military operation” against Ukraine for the ostensible purpose of eliminating neo-Nazi affiliated military formations accused of carrying out acts of genocide against the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass, and for dismantling a Ukrainian military Russia believed served as a de facto proxy of the NATO military alliance.

Putin laid out a detailed case for pre-emption, detailing the threat that NATO’s eastward expansion posed to Russia, as well as Ukraine’s ongoing military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass.

“[T]he showdown between Russia and these forces,” Putin said, “cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.” NATO and Ukraine, Putin declared,

“did not leave us [Russia] any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today. In these circumstances, we have to take bold and immediate action. The people’s republics of Donbass have asked Russia for help. In this context, in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with permission of Russia’s Federation Council, and in execution of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, ratified by the Federal Assembly on February 22, I made a decision to carry out a special military operation.”

Putin’s case for invading Ukraine has, not surprisingly, been widely rejected in the West. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Amnesty International declared, “is a manifest violation of the United Nations Charter and an act of aggression that is a crime under international law. Russia is in clear breach of its international obligations. Its actions are blatantly against the rules and principles on which the United Nations was founded.”

John B. Bellinger III, an American lawyer who served as legal adviser for the U.S. Department of State and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, has argued that Putin’s Article 51 claim “has no support in fact or law.”

While Bellinger notes that Article 51 does not “impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations,” he hastens to note that Ukraine had not committed an armed attack against Russia or threatened to do so.

Bellinger is dismissive of Russia’s claims to the contrary, noting that “Even if Russia could show that Ukraine had committed or planned to commit attacks on Russians in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Article 51 would not permit an action in collective self-defense, because Donetsk and Luhansk are not U.N. member states.”

While the notion that a lawyer who served in an American presidential administration which crafted the original doctrine of pre-emption used to justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would now be arguing against the application of that very same doctrine by another state would seem hypocritical, hypocrisy alone does not invalidate Bellinger’s underlying arguments against Russia, or the claims put forward by its president.

Unfortunately for Bellinger and those who share his legal opinion, a previous U.S. presidential administration, that of William Jefferson Clinton, had previously crafted a novel legal theory based upon the right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.

The Clinton administration argued that this right was properly exercised under “normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member.” NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it was, in fact, dominated by the United States, claimed such a status.

While the credibility of the NATO claim of “anticipatory collective self-defense” collapsed when it transpired that its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide that created, not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity, turned out to be little more than a covert provocation carried out by the C.I.A. for the sole purpose of creating the conditions for NATO military intervention.

While one may be able to mount a legal challenge to Russia’s contention that its joint operation with Russia’s newly recognized independent nations of Lugansk and Donetsk constitutes a “regional security or self-defense organization” as regards “anticipatory collective self-defense actions” under Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed thousands of people.

Moreover, Russia claims to have documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the Russian-led “special military operation.” [OSCE figures show an increase of government shelling of the area in the days before Russia moved in.]

Finally, Russia has articulated claims about Ukraine’s intent regarding nuclear weapons, and in particular efforts to manufacture a so-called “dirty bomb”, which have yet to be proven or disproven. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a reference to seeking a nuclear weapon in February at the Munich Security Conference.]

The bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self defense, devised originally by the U.S. and NATO, as it applies to Article 51 which is predicated on fact, not fiction.

While it might be in vogue for people, organizations, and governments in the West to embrace the knee-jerk conclusion that Russia’s military intervention constitutes a wanton violation of the United Nations Charter and, as such, constitutes an illegal war of aggression, the uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground.

consortiumnews.com

By Diana JOHNSTONE

In the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, British royal circles enjoyed watching fierce dogs torment a captive bear for the fun of it.  The bear had done no harm to anyone, but the dogs were trained to provoke the imprisoned beast and goad it into fighting back.  Blood flowing from the excited animals delighted the spectators.

This cruel practice has long since been banned as inhumane.

And yet today, a version of bear baiting is being practiced every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale.  It is called United States foreign policy. It has become the regular practice of the absurd international sports club called NATO.

United States leaders, secure in their arrogance as “the indispensable nation,” have no more respect for other countries than the Elizabethans had for the animals they tormented. The list is long of targets of U.S. bear baiting, but Russia stands out as prime example of constant harassment.  And this is no accident.  The baiting is deliberately and elaborately planned.

As evidence, I call attention to a 2019 report by the RAND corporation to the U.S. Army chief of staff entitled “Extending Russia.” Actually, the RAND study itself is fairly cautious in its recommendations and warns that many perfidious tricks might not work.  However, I consider the very existence of this report scandalous, not so much for its content as for the fact that this is what the Pentagon pays its top intellectuals to do: figure out ways to lure other nations into troubles U.S. leaders hope to exploit.

The official U.S. line is that the Kremlin threatens Europe by its aggressive expansionism, but when the strategists talk among themselves the story is very different.  Their goal is to use sanctions, propaganda and other measures to provoke Russia into taking the very sort of negative measures (“over-extension”) that the U.S. can exploit to Russia’s detriment.

The RAND study explains its goals:

“We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.”

Clearly, in U.S. ruling circles, this is considered “normal” behavior, just as teasing is normal behavior for the schoolyard bully, and sting operations are normal for corrupt FBI agents.

This description perfectly fits U.S. operations in Ukraine, intended to “exploit Russia’s vulnerabilities and anxieties” by advancing a hostile military alliance onto its doorstep, while describing Russia’s totally predictable reactions as gratuitous aggression.  Diplomacy involves understanding the position of the other party.  But verbal bear baiting requires total refusal to understand the other, and constant deliberate misinterpretation of whatever the other party says or does.

What is truly diabolical is that, while constantly accusing the Russian bear of plotting to expand, the whole policy is directed at goading it into expanding!  Because then we can issue punishing sanctions, raise the Pentagon budget a few notches higher and tighten the NATO Protection Racket noose tighter around our precious European “allies.”

For a generation, Russian leaders have made extraordinary efforts to build a peaceful partnership with “the West,” institutionalized as the European Union and above all, NATO. They truly believed that the end of the artificial Cold War could produce a peace-loving European neighborhood. But arrogant United States leaders, despite contrary advice from their best experts, rejected treating Russia as the great nation it is, and preferred to treat it as the harassed bear in a circus.

The expansion of NATO was a form of bear-baiting, the clear way to transform a potential friend into an enemy. That was the way chosen by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and following administrations.  Moscow had accepted the independence of former members of the Soviet Union.  Bear-baiting involved constantly accusing Moscow of plotting to take them back by force.

Russia’s Borderland

An unpaved road to Lysychansk, Lugansk, March 2015. (Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Ukraine is a word meaning borderlands, essentially the borderlands between Russia and the territories to the West that were sometimes part of Poland, or Lithuania, or Habsburg lands.  As a part of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine was expanded to include large swaths of both.  History had created very contrasting identities on the two extremities, with the result that the independent nation of Ukraine, which came into existence only in 1991, was deeply divided from the start.  And from the start, Washington strategies, in cahoots with a large, hyperactive anti-communist anti-Russian diaspora in the U.S. and Canada, contrived to use the bitterness of Ukraine’s divisions to weaken first the U.S.S.R. and then Russia.  Billions of dollars were invested in order to “strengthen democracy” – meaning the pro-Western west of Ukraine against its semi-Russian east.

The 2014 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew President Viktor Yukanovych, solidly supported by the east of the country, brought to power pro-West forces determined to bring Ukraine into NATO, whose designation of Russia as prime enemy had become ever more blatant. This caused the prospect of an eventual NATO capture of Russia’s major naval base at Sebastopol, on the Crimean peninsula.

Since the Crimean population had never wanted to be part of Ukraine, the peril was averted by organizing a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voted to return to Russia, from which they had been severed by an autocratic Khrushchev ruling in 1954.  Western propagandists relentlessly denounced this act of self-determination as a “Russian invasion” foreshadowing a program of Russian military conquest of its Western neighbors – a fantasy supported by neither facts nor motivation.

Appalled by the coup overthrowing the president they had voted for, by nationalists threatening to outlaw the Russian language they spoke, the people of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence.

March 2015: Civilians pass by as OSCE monitors the movement of heavy weaponry in eastern Ukraine. (OSCE, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Russia did not support this move, but instead supported the Minsk agreement, signed in February 2015 and endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution. The gist of the accord was to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine by a federalization process that would return the breakaway republics in return for their local autonomy.

The Minsk agreement set out a few steps to end the internal Ukrainian crisis. First, Ukraine was supposed to immediately adopt a law granting self-government to eastern regions (in March 2015). Next, Kiev would negotiate with eastern territories over guidelines for local elections to be held that year under OSCE supervision.  Then Kiev would implement a constitutional reform guaranteeing eastern right. After the elections, Kiev would take full control of Donetsk and Lugansk, including border with Russia.  A general amnesty would cover soldiers on both sides.

However, although it signed the agreement, Kiev has never implemented any of these points and refuses to negotiate with the eastern rebels.  Under the so-called Normandy agreement, France and Germany were expected to put pressure on Kiev to accept this peaceful settlement, but nothing happened. Instead, the West has accused Russia of failing to implement the agreement, which makes no sense inasmuch as the obligations to implement fall on Kiev, not on Moscow.  Kiev officials regularly reiterate their refusal to negotiate with the rebels, while demanding more and more weaponry from NATO powers in order to deal with the problem in their own way.

Meanwhile, major parties in the Russian Duma and public opinion have long expressed concern for the Russian-speaking population of the eastern provinces, suffering from privations and military attack from the central government for eight years. This concern is naturally interpreted in the West as a remake of Hitler’s drive to conquest neighboring countries.  However, as usual the inevitable Hitler analogy is baseless. For one thing, Russia is too large to need to conquer Lebensraum.

You Want an Enemy?  Now You’ve Got One

Germany has found the perfect formula for Western relations with Russia: Are you or are you not a “Putinversteher,” a “Putin understander?” By Putin they mean Russia, since the standard Western propaganda ploy is to personify the targeted country with the name of its president, Vladimir Putin, necessarily a dictatorial autocrat.   If you “understand” Putin, or Russia, then you are under deep suspicion of disloyalty to the West.  So, all together now, let us make sure that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND Russia!

Russian leaders claim to feel threatened by members of a huge hostile alliance, holding regular military manoeuvers on their doorstep?  They feel uneasy about nuclear missiles aimed at their territory from nearby NATO member states?  Why, that’s just paranoia, or a sign of sly, aggressive intentions.  There is nothing to understand.

So, the West has treated Russia like a baited bear.  And what it’s getting is a nuclear-armed, militarily powerful adversary nation led by people vastly more thoughtful and intelligent than the mediocre politicians in office in Washington, London and a few other places.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his Deep State never wanted a peaceful solution in Ukraine, because troubled Ukraine acts as a permanent barrier between Russia and Western Europe, ensuring U.S. control over the latter.  They have spent years treating Russia as an adversary, and Russia is now drawing the inevitable conclusion that the West will accept it only as an adversary.  The patience is at an end. And this is a game changer.

First reaction: the West will punish the bear with sanctions!  Germany is stopping certification of the Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline.  Germany thus refuses to buy the Russian gas it needs in order to make sure Russia won’t be able to cut off the gas it needs sometime in the future.  Now that’s a clever trick, isn’t it!  And meanwhile, with a growing gas shortage and rising prices, Russia will have no trouble selling its gas somewhere else in Asia.

When “our values” include refusal to understand, there is no limit to how much we can fail to understand.

To be continued.

consortiumnews.com

20 February 20 Al Jazeera Inside Story show, highlights the differences over the situation in Donbass.

On this show, Mychailo Wynnyckyj represents a loud nationalist anti-Russian voice having the support of Matthew Bryza. The two state a series of questionable claims about supposed Russian violations, while finding no fault on the Kiev regime side. (I’ve discussed Bryza’s prior anti-Russian comments he stated on Al Jazeera.)

Wynnyckyj misrepresents the order of what the Minsk Protocol calls for. Outnumbered, Andrei Kortunov diplomatically refutes Wynnyckyj on that point. Later on in the show, Wynnyckyj repeats his misinformation on that particular.

Wynnyckyj misrepresents Putin’s stance towards Ukraine. In point of fact, post-Soviet Russia exhibited content with Ukraine not being in NATO or CSTO.

Al Jazeera Inside Story host Mohammed Jamjoom, says the Minsk Protocol isn’t legally binding. He doesn’t give a specific to support that contention. The Minsk Protocol has UN approval, with all of the leading Western powers paying lip service to it.

Wynnyckyj brought up the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, recognizing Ukraine’s Soviet drawn boundary in exchange for it giving up its nuclear arsenal. According to a German source (as well as some others), the Budapest Memorandum isn’t legally binding.

I respectfully believe that the likes of Kortunov and Fyodor Lukyanov are better suited in a more academically formal setting. It has been awhile since Mark Sleboda (or someone with his combined knowledge, moxie and shared general perspective) has appeared on Al Jazeera. Dmitry Babich is another of the good options out there. On a February 21 France 24 telecast of The Debate, Babich intellectually pastes the anti-Russian blowhard Craig Copetas.

Last week, there was a UN Security Council meeting on the Minsk Protocol. Thereafter, it became clearer that the Kiev regime and its Western backers want to continue going thru the motions in the form of not getting it implemented. Note the non-sanctioning of the Kiev regime, for not having started implementation of the Minsk Protocol, seven years after its signing.

Hence, another option has now come into play with the Russian government’s independence recognition of the rebel Donbass area. The prior non-Russian independence precedents set with northern Cyprus and Kosovo make it quite hypocritical for necons, neolibs and flat-out Russia haters to single out Moscow.

Back in 1999, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken had no problem with the Clinton Administration led NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia (then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro), because Belgrade refused to sign the Rambouillet Accords. That diktat favors paving the way for Kosovo to separate from Serbia. BTW, Serbia and the contested territory of Kosovo aren’t NATO members.

In stark contrast to the Rambouillet Accords (favoring Kosovo independence, over it remaining an autonomous part of Serbia), the Minsk Protocol calls for Donbass remaining in Ukraine on an autonomous basis. This settlement plan constitutes the best hope for Ukraine maintaining much of its Soviet drawn boundary. The Kiev regime is influenced on the notion of a centralized Ukraine, where the Russian language is restricted and an anti-Russian historical narrative dominates.

As I’ve previously noted in my January 11 and February 9 WABC Talk Radio appearances, terms like “Russian aggression” and the 1990s era utilized “Serb aggression” are propagandistically and culturally biased in application. Western mass media doesn’t​ say “US aggression” and “Israeli aggression” when these two countries pursue the military option. This observation isn’t intended to poke at the US and Israel. Rather, to highlight the gross hypocrisy out there.

Contrary to Texas Congressman Colin Allred and numerous others, Kiev regime controlled Ukraine isn’t a democracy. Moreover, Russia has more in common with the US than North Korea.

At last week’s UN Security Council discussion on Donbass, Blinken noted his family’s WW II suffering at the hands of the Nazis. He omitted that the US and Ukraine were the only two UN delegations voting against a General Assembly resolution denouncing the glorification of Nazism.

eurasiareview.com

By Joe LAURIA

The United States and Russia again clashed at the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, with the U.S. repeating its alarmist message that Russia is poised to invade Ukraine at any time.

The incessant U.S. accusation of Russian aggression against Ukraine was accompanied by reports Thursday by OSCE monitors of more than 500 explosions at the line of confrontation in the Donbass region of Ukraine.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin, who chaired the council meeting as this month’s president, said 122,000 Ukrainian military forces were lined up at the front with Donbass with the possible intention of launching an offensive against the two breakaway provinces there.

That figure was not mentioned by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken who came to New York to again insist that up to 150,000 Russian troops “on the border” of Ukraine are still poised to invade.

What advantage an invasion would give Russia is unknown even to Blinken, who told MSNBC before the meeting, that he had no idea. “That’s an excellent question,” he said. “Ask Putin.”

Nevertheless, Blinken laid out a highly detailed scenario. It’s from a State Department speechwriter, not a Hollywood scriptwriter. Ignoring Vershinin’s plea not to abuse the dignity of the Security Council to further inflame tensions with empty war rhetoric, Blinken began:

“We must address what Russia is doing right now to Ukraine.

Over the past months, without provocation or justification, Russia has amassed more than 150,000 troops around Ukraine’s borders, in Russia, Belarus, occupied Crimea. Russia says it’s drawing down those forces. We do not see that happening on the ground. Our information indicates clearly that these forces – including ground troops, aircraft, ships – are preparing to launch an attack against Ukraine in the coming days.

We don’t know precisely how things will play out, but here’s what the world can expect to see unfold. In fact, it’s unfolding right now, today, as Russia takes steps down the path to war and reissued the threat of military action.”

In fact, no Russian official has issued such a threat, at least not publicly, unlike the daily barrage of U.S. threats against Iraq before it launched a real, old word invasion and occupation. Blinken says the U.S. doesn’t “precisely” know “how things will play out,” but then he lays out precisely what the “world can expect to see.” So do they know or don’t they?

What follows is the same story the State Department tried to sell to the press, which was shot down when one reporter demanded evidence to back it up. There was no evidence presented at the Security Council on Thursday either. There was no Adlai Stevenson moment, when the American ambassador in 1962 showed the council satellite images of Soviet missiles in Cuba (which were really there.)

“First, Russia plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack. This could be a violent event that Russia will blame on Ukraine, or an outrageous accusation that Russia will level against the Ukrainian Government. We don’t know exactly the form it will take. It could be a fabricated so-called ‘terrorist’ bombing inside Russia, the invented discovery of a mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians, or a fake – even a real – attack using chemical weapons. Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing or a genocide, making a mockery of a concept that we in this chamber do not take lightly, nor do I do take lightly based on my family history. …

Second, in response to this manufactured provocation, the highest levels of the Russian Government may theatrically convene emergency meetings to address the so-called crisis. The government will issue proclamations declaring that Russia must respond to defend Russian citizens or ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

Next, the attack is planned to begin. Russian missiles and bombs will drop across Ukraine. Communications will be jammed. Cyberattacks will shut down key Ukrainian institutions. After that, Russian tanks and soldiers will advance on key targets that have already been identified and mapped out in detailed plans. We believe these targets include Russia’s capital –Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million people.”

The certainty with which Blinken and other U.S. officials speak when it comes to this “invasion” is highly suspicious — unless they know something they aren’t saying: such as the date of the Kiev government’s offensive, designed to provoke the invasion they are so certain will happen.

Start of ‘Invasion’ Story

Russian FM Sergei Lavrov and Blinken on Jan. 21 in Geneva discuss Russian treaty proposal. (Ruptly screenshot.)

The U.S. began in November to portray the Russian troop deployment as an invasion force and since has worked its message into a crescendo of daily warnings of an imminent attack.

In Spring 2021, Russia made a similar deployment near the Ukraine border and yet there were no Washington cries of invasion then. So what changed?

This time the Russian troop movement coincided with Moscow presenting draft treaty proposals to the U.S. and NATO drawing a deep redline after decades of objecting to the Western military alliance moving ever closer to Russia, a country that was invaded by and defeated the largest European powers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

The U.S. reacted to these bold proposals by changing the subject. They moved from the defensive to offense with a supreme distraction: the maniacal mantra of “the Russians are coming.”

NATO routinely carries out military deployments and exercises near Russia’s borders. Moscow never screams “invasion” when U.S. war planes practice cruise missile strikes at the Russian frontier.

Instead Russia presented proposals that would see:

• NATO roll back forward troop deployments from former Warsaw Pact states, now NATO members;

• NATO would not admit Ukraine and Georgia as members and

• The U.S. would remove long-range missiles in Romania and Poland and not deploy new ones in Ukraine.

The U.S. and NATO have so far rejected the Russian draft treaties out of hand, except on the missile issue, which Washington is ready to negotiate (Joe Biden has promised not to deploy missiles in Ukraine.) The New York Times could not stop itself from mocking Russia on Thursday with a story, which it seems just to have discovered, headlined, “On the Edge of a Polish Forest, Where Some of Putin’s Darkest Fears Lurk: A U.S. missile facility in Poland is at the heart of an issue animating the Kremlin’s calculations over whether to go to war against Ukraine.”

Instead of withdrawing forward NATO deployments from Eastern Europe, the U.S. delivered a slap in the face by sending more NATO troops to the east.

This was supposed to be in response to the alleged Russian threat to Ukraine, where no U.S. or NATO troops are being deployed. Instead hundreds of millions of dollars in NATO lethal aid is being sent instead, supposedly for defense, but which Vershinin said could be intended instead for an offensive that could potentially set a trap for Russia.

In Blinken’s scenario, “The government will issue proclamations declaring that Russia must respond to defend Russian citizens or ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Next, the attack is planned to begin.”

If Russian regular units enter Donbass to protect ethnic Russians and Russian citizens there from the offensive, that would be the invasion the U.S. is screaming about. It would unleash the “mother of all sanctions,” as a U.S. Senate sanctions bill against Russia has been called.

A New Architecture

Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron in Moscow, Feb. 7 (Kremlin Photo)

The Russian treaty proposals are Moscow’s demands to no longer put up with the expansion of a military alliance that post-Cold War had become an offensive arm of the Pentagon, already used against Russian allies in Belgrade and Tripoli.

Russia is seeking a new security architecture in Europe that would include Russian interests, an idea that was discussed at the end of the Cold War but which never came to be.

Only China and France joined Russia at the Security Council in referring to the overall European security issue.

Blinken said last month NATO had never been so united. Blinken may never have been so untruthful. As military analyst Scott Ritter laid out in Consortium News, the divisions within NATO are deep and deepening over the Ukraine question.

The U.S. must surely be nervous about France and Germany speaking so often with Moscow with a view to possibly pursuing their own interests, which are different from Washington’s.

Nicolas de Riviere, Paris’ U.N. Envoy, told the council:

“France is convinced that de-escalation is possible, through dialogue and diplomacy. This is the sense of the efforts led by President Macron, in coordination with the German Chancellor. We are ready to engage in this dialogue. Not only with regard to the conflict in Donbass – that is the work we are doing in the Normandy format – but also on issues of security and stability in Europe, in accordance with the fundamental principles laid down in the United Nations Charter and in the founding documents of the OSCE, namely the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe.”

As a basis for its draft treaties, Russia cited the Helsinki Final Act, which says that one country cannot secure its security interests at the expense of another’s.

The U.S. still does not, or can not, see that its behavior is bringing forth its worst nightmare: driving Moscow and Beijing together. Until this month, China had never gotten involved publicly with European disputes.

But Zhang Jun, China’s U.N. Envoy, told the Security Council:

“China supports all efforts conducive to easing the tensions, and notes the recent diplomatic engagement between the Russian Federation with France, Germany and other European countries at the leaders level. A negotiated, balanced, effective and sustainable European security mechanism will serve as a solid foundation for lasting peace and stability across Europe.”

Zhang also criticized NATO expansion and condemned the U.S. for continuing a “Cold War mentality”:

“Everything happens for a reason. NATO enlargement is an issue that cannot be overlooked when dealing with the current tensions related to the Ukraine. NATO’s continuous expansion in the wake of the Cold War runs counter to the trend of our times, that is to maintain common security. One country’s security cannot be at the expense of the security of others. By the same token, regional security should not rely on muscling up or even expanding military blocs. This applies as much to the European region as to other regions of the world. There is one country that refuses to renounce the Cold War mentality.”

High Drama for Western Media

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin, chairs the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine. (UN Photo/Mark Garten)

The high point scripted by Blinken for his media allies was when he challenged Vershinin to declare that Russia had no intention of invading. Since Blinken thinks the Russians are lying no matter what they say, it was a pure piece of political theater, which he had earlier accused Russia of. Blinken said:

“So let me make this simple. The Russian Government can announce today – with no qualification, equivocation, or deflection – that Russia will not invade Ukraine. State it clearly. State it plainly to the world. And then demonstrate it by sending your troops, your tanks, your planes back to their barracks and hangars and sending your diplomats to the negotiating table. In the coming days, the world will remember that commitment – or the refusal to make it. I yield the floor.”

Take that!

Adlai Stevenson he is not. (Blinken left his satellite images home as Ukrainian intelligence itself said they showed no proof of an imminent Russian invasion.)

Eventually Vershinin gave himself a right to reply, saying Russian officials at various levels had given such assurances.

Mocking ‘Invasion Day’

Russian officials and media have been having a grand time mocking the changing dates, even hours, of when “U.S. intelligence” has told the media the Russian invasion would begin. (Reuters has a 24/7 video stream from the Maidan in Kiev – in case something happens.)

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “15 February 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed,”insisting that the West has been “shamed and destroyed without firing a single shot.”  Zakharova then asked for updates so that she could plan her vacation.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. (Russian Foreign Ministry)

Blinken is keenly aware of such ridicule:

“Now, I am mindful that some have called into question our information, recalling previous instances where intelligence ultimately did not bear out. But let me be clear: I am here today, not to start a war, but to prevent one. The information I’ve presented here is validated by what we’ve seen unfolding in plain sight before our eyes for months.

And remember that while Russia has repeatedly derided our warnings and alarms as melodrama and nonsense, they have been steadily amassing more than 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, as well as the capabilities to conduct a massive military assault.

It isn’t just us seeing this: Allies and partners see the same thing. And Russia hasn’t only been hearing from us. The international chorus has grown louder and louder. If Russia doesn’t invade Ukraine, then we will be relieved that Russia changed course and proved our predictions wrong. That would be a far better outcome than the course we’re currently on. And we will gladly accept any criticism that anyone directs at us.”

Minsk Accords

Russia called the meeting Thursday to mark the seventh anniversary of the Security Council’s endorsement of the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015.

The agreements would bring an end to the war that began in 2014 with the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev that (with the help of neo-nazis) toppled the democratically-elected president. His election had been certified by the OSCE. The pro-Kiev government and the U.S. calls this the Maidan Revolution. The American, French, Russian, Egyptian, Iranian, German and a host of other revolutions overthrew monarchies and dictators, not elected officials. That’s an unconstitutional change of government — a coup.

The largely ethnic Russian enclaves of Luhansk and Donetsk on the Russian border declared independence from Ukraine as a defense of their democratic right to have voted for a president. They did not want to be ruled by U.S.-installed leaders that were trying to outlaw the Russian language and who had allied with far-right, anti-Russian extremists.

Crimea held a referendum and rejoined Russia rather than live under an illegal government. But Luhansk and Donetsk, though some asked for it, were not accepted into Russia. Instead Moscow backed the Minsk agreements, which Kiev also signed. It would give autonomy to those two provinces while remaining part of Ukraine. Russia has been complaining since then that Kiev has never been serious about implementing the agreements and instead plan to take back the provinces by force.

President Zelensky speaking to the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine:

“We have learned to contain external threats. It is time we begin offensive actions aimed at securing our national interests. Our citizens are united in wanting their territory returned” pic.twitter.com/iumwOKNEZ5

— Murad Gazdiev (@MuradGazdiev) January 24, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin has steadfastly stuck with Minsk and refused entreaties from the Donbass provinces to join Russia. Sensing that an offensive may be close, the Duma passed a resolution on Tuesday calling on Russia to recognize the province’s independence from Ukraine, which would kill Minsk.  Vershinin pushed back against several U.S.-allied council members who tried to make something of this resolution, saying it was only a recommendation to Putin. “It is important to prevent such issues from becoming the subject of consideration in the Security Council, otherwise we will react to all decisions by all parliaments of the world,” he said.

The OSCE officials who addressed the Security Council on Thursday said there had been 530 explosions at the line of confrontation between the government and the breakaway provinces. On the previous day the OSCE monitoring teams’ daily report cited 128 ceasefire violations.

The report on Thursday’s incidents won’t be out until Friday. It may indicate that the offensive has begun. Most important will be how much the report indicates on which side of the confrontation line the most violations occurred. If most came from the non-government controlled areas the U.S. will try to frame it as a provocation to draw return fire and prompt a Russian intervention.  If most violations came from the government side, it could be indication of an offensive beginning, perhaps meant to draw Russia in.

Russians may mock the moveable invasion dates now. But if a major offensive begins, a larger war may be unavoidable.

consortiumnews.com

By Joe LAURIA

Tensions in U.S.-Russia relations soared yet higher on Monday as the two powers voiced polar opposite positions on events surrounding Ukraine and European security at the U.N. Security Council.

The U.S. and its allies on the council painted a stark picture of an outlaw Russia threatening to invade Ukraine, while Russia sought to zoom out to the larger picture of Western threats to Russia’s security.

Russia attempted to have the “provocative proposal” by the U.S. to hold the meeting stopped by calling for a procedural vote on the agenda, arguing that Washington was engaging in “megaphone diplomacy” and wanted to “whip up” the same “hysteria” about “so-called Russian aggression” in the Security Council that it had been whipping up through the media.

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia pointed out that even Ukraine’s president had asked the U.S. not to stir up panic. “Ukraine talked of the lack of a threat from Russia,” Nebenzia said. “We should not use the rostrum of the Security Council to push forward the propaganda of our colleague,” meaning the American ambassador.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield answered Nebenzia by saying the meeting was “not about antics and not about rhetoric,” and also “not about the U.S. and Russia, but peace and security about one of our member states.” She said the U.S. had spent $5 billion since 2014 so that Ukraine would be “prepared” for a Russian invasion.

Russia lost the vote to stop the meeting from going ahead.

The US Speaks

Thomas-Greenfield at Security Council debate on Ukraine Monday. (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

Thomas-Greenfield told the council that “Russia’s actions strike at the very heart of the U.N. Charter. This is as clear and consequential a threat to peace and security as anyone can imagine.”  She said, “Russia’s aggression today not only threatens Ukraine. It also threatens Europe. It threatens the international order.”

The U.S. ambassador said if the Security Council “stands for anything, [it] stands for the principle that one country cannot simply redraw another country’s borders by force, or make another country’s people live under a government they did not choose.”

As any student of recent history or any astute newspaper reader understands, the United States, with its long history of coups, including by military invasions and occupations, has made many “country’s people live under a government they did not choose.”

Thomas-Greenfield portrayed Russia’s proposed treaties with the U.S. and NATO to create a new “security architecture” for Europe as being “extensive new demands and aggressive rhetoric” paired with “Russia’s military buildup.”

“Russia has threatened to take military action should its demands not be met,” she said, though Russia has said nothing of the kind. Moscow declared that should its treaty proposals be rejected, and so far they have, it would have no choice but to answer with “appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures.”

These have been falsely portrayed by U.S. officials as an invasion of Ukraine, but could instead be deployments of new missiles in Europe, or even in Venezuela or Cuba, which could reach the U.S. the way U.S. missiles can now reach Russia from Europe (with greater speed than an ICBM from the U.S.)

Russia has not engaged in the kind of rhetoric about Ukraine that the U.S. did, for instance, in the lead up to the invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003 in which Baghdad was threatened on a daily basis by U.S. leaders.

“This is an escalation in a pattern of aggression that we’ve seen from Russia again and again,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “In 2014, Russia illegally invaded and seized Crimea.”  This is a statement widely believed, but it ignores that Russian troops never invaded Crimea from Russia, it had troops legally stationed at its base there; not one shot was fired; and the Crimean people voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia.

Thomas-Greenfield then accused Russia of shunning diplomacy, when it was Russia who asked for diplomatic meetings with the U.S. in Geneva and NATO in Brussels. “Russia could, of course, choose a different path: the path of diplomacy,” she said. “In recent weeks, the United States, along with our European allies and partners, and other nations around the globe concerned by Russia’s threat to Ukraine, have continued to do everything we can to resolve this crisis peacefully,” as Washington and its loyal media beat the drums of war.

Projecting its own propaganda onto Russia, the U.S. representative said: “Russian military and intelligence services are spreading disinformation through state-owned media and proxy sites. And they are attempting, without any factual basis, to paint Ukraine and Western countries as the aggressors to fabricate a pretext for attack.”

Russia Answers

Nebenzia at Security Council on Monday. (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

Nebenzia responded by saying that Russia is witness to a “very unusual situation” even in “these crazy times.”

“Relocation of troops within our own national territory, which happened many times before on a larger or smaller scale and was never regarded hysterically,” he said, “as well as the relocation of military personnel … stationed in their garrisons rather than at the Ukrainian-Russian border, is considered by our American and Western colleagues as a confirmation of [an] allegedly planned military campaign … of Russia against Ukraine that is about to start in the next couple of weeks if not days.”

Nebenzia added: “At the same time, they provide no proof to back such grave allegations.” The U.S. has released satellite photographs of Russian military installations on Russian soil, with no indication of how close to Ukraine they are.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the press on Friday that Ukrainian intelligence interpreted the satellite images differently than the U.S. and saw no readiness for invasion.

Nebenzia said: “Our Western colleagues say that de-escalation is needed, but they are the first to build up tension, enhance rhetoric and escalate the situation. Talks about an imminent war are provocative per se. It might seem you call for it, want it and wait for it to come, as if you wanted your allegations to come true.”

He refuted Thomas-Greenfield’s assertion that Russia has threatened an invasion. “No Russian politician or public figure has uttered any threat about a planned invasion of Ukraine,” Nebenzia said.  And then the Russian ambassador pointed out what no one else in the chamber would, least of all Thomas-Greenfield.

“Had it not been for our Western colleagues who provoked and supported a deadly unconstitutional coup in Ukraine in 2014 that gave power to nationalists, radicals, Russophobes and Nazis, Russia and Ukraine would have lived as good neighbors engaged in mutually beneficial cooperation up until this day,” he said.

“Someone in the West, however, seems to hate such a scenario. What happens today is another attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and Ukraine,” Nebenzia said.  He then described post-coup Ukraine:

“Ukrainians are brainwashed to cultivate Russophobic and radical sentiments. They are taught to believe that Ukraine’s radiant future depends on whether it seeks EU and NATO membership rather than whether it tries to improve relations with neighbors. The Russian language, which is native to a significant (if not major) part of Ukrainians is banned, a division of church is being provoked, and those who sided with Hitler during WW2 killing Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, are worshipped as heroes.”

He said Russia’s “Western colleagues” didn’t care about Ukrainians but only to divide Ukraine from Russia in order to weaken Russia. The U.S. had falsely linked cries about a Russian invasion to Russia’s treaty proposals to the U.S. and NATO, he said.

“As for our security-related demands, they are much broader,” Nebenzia went on. “Ukraine’s non-accession to NATO and non-deployment of foreign troops at Ukraine’s territory constitute only a small portion of much-needed arrangements that could considerably improve the military and political situation in Europe, and in the whole world.”

Turning the tables on the U.S., the Russian ambassador asked the council which country was the real threat to international peace and security:

“The maneuvers that the United States undertook to convene this meeting look especially inadequate and hypocritical against the fact that it is Americans who have record rates of military presence outside their national territory. American military officers, advisers, and weapons (including nuclear) are often located thousands of kilometers away from Washington. To say nothing of the fact that American military [ad]ventures claimed dozens and hundreds [of thousands] of  lives of people in the countries to which they were bringing peace and democracy.

The United States repeatedly (i.a. in the recent years) used force against other states without Security Council consent. Their toolkit includes unilateral sanctions and coercive measures, as well as threats that they regard as a verdict of some sort of Supreme Court and try to make everyone deliver on them.

As reported by American experts, 84 out of 193 UN member states have been subjected to US occupation or aggression to some degree. In the course of 20^th and 21^st centuries, American troops have been deployed in one way or another in 191 states.

According to open-sourced data from the Internet, the United States maintains approximately 750 military bases in more than 80 states of the world. The total number of US military servicemen abroad amounts to 175 thousand, more than 60 thousand of them are deployed in Europe. The US military budget in 2020 stood at 778 billion dollars, whereas the Russian – at only 61 billion dollars, which is 12 times less. All these examples are clear and concrete threats to the international peace and security.”

In a right of reply, Thomas-Greenfield said she was “disappointed” by Nebenzia’s “false equivalency” — the stock line from the Cold War, which says it is false to equate U.S. behavior with the aggression of others. “There are no plans to weaken Russia,” she said. “Welcome Russia as a responsible member of the international community,” which means, of course, following the Washington Consensus.

Nebenzia then replied that he had not heard one word from Thomas-Greenfield about the Minsk agreements “and that is very indicative.”

Ukraine Speaks

Kyslytsya at Security Council on Monday. (UN Photo/Evan Schneider)

Eyes were on Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, in light of Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials’ statements last week rebuffing America’s war propaganda that a Russian invasion of their country was “imminent.” Would he make similar statements in front of the U.S. ambassador on a world stage?

He would not make his remarks before Nebenzia, who moments before the Ukrainian was to speak said he had an appointment with the U.N. secretary general and left the chamber.  The snub clearly ruffled Kyslytsya.

His remarks were more aggressive towards Russia than Thomas-Greenfield’s with no hint of his president’s position. It was as if Zelensky had not made the remarks he just had three days earlier.  In fact Kyslytsya tried to say that the Russian ambassador had made it all up.

“It’s important that Ukraine’s voice is heard today in the Security Council and is not lost in translation when [the] position of my country has been ‘delivered’ by a foreign ambassador in Russian,” he said. “My leadership speaks its own language, has its own ambassadors, and spokespersons. Hence there is no need to interpret the words of Ukrainian officials.”

Except that is precisely what Kyslytsya did. He said nothing of what Zelenksy and other Ukrainian officials had made clear:  that Ukraine has no fear of imminent invasion and that the U.S. and its allies had essentially made it all up.

Breaking with his president, Kyslytsya raised the alarm: “The fact is that nowadays about 112 thousand Russian troops have been amassed around Ukraine’s borders and in Crimea, and together with the maritime and aviation components their number reaches about 130 thousand troops.”

He went on:

“On 26 January, the Russian fleet started another military drill in the Black Sea with involvement of frigates, patrol ships, missile ships, assault landing ships and minesweepers. This reminds us of the ongoing heavy militarization of the temporarily occupied Crimea, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov by Russia, which poses a serious threat to Ukraine, all littoral states and the wider region. … The question is why all these Russian forces are there? …

Today we have heard from the Russian side that they do not intend to launch a war against my country, although one should rather speak about launching a new phase of the Russian aggression.

It is very important message as we still lack credible explanations by Russia of its actions and military movements. Based on experience we cannot believe Russian declarations but only practical moves on withdrawal of troops from the border.”

Why did Kyslytsya totally ignore what Zelensky had said? U.N. ambassadors directly report to their foreign ministers, not their presidents. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is a hardliner. Last month he condemned Germany for refusing to send weapons to Ukraine. “The German partners must stop undermining unity with such words and actions and encouraging Vladimir Putin to launch a new attack on Ukraine,” he tweeted.

And Kubela protested “the categorical unacceptability” of the now former chief of the German navy’s remarks that the idea of a Russian invasion was “nonsense.”

There may well be a power struggle going on between Kuleba and Zelensky, causing the foreign minister to go rogue.  There is also the possibility that the U.S. has put enormous pressure on Zelensky to retreat from his remarks. The blogger Moon of Alabama has speculated that the Americans could soon “replace” Zelensky as president.

Thomas-Greenfield was interviewed on National Public Radio on Tuesday:

QUESTION:  But I’ve got to ask you, you know Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also complained about U.S. warnings saying it has needlessly caused a panic that puts Ukraine’s economy at risk. What do you make of that?

AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Well, you know, the Permanent Representative, the Ambassador from Ukraine, was at the meeting yesterday, and he reaffirmed our concerns and Ukraine’s concerns about the situation on their border. And we have met with the President, we’ve met with the Foreign Minister, and I think you had the foreign minister on your line this morning –

QUESTION: – Mary Louise Kelly spoke with him yesterday on “All Things Considered.”

AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Yes. And he said that they absolutely agree. He confirmed there were more than 100,000 troops on the border. Their messaging is different from ours, as he noted, but the goals are the same.

Video of the full council meeting.

France Wimps Out

France was in a similar position to Ukraine: its president had called last month in a speech to the European Parliament for a new security arrangement in Europe that would include Russia. That was reiterated in two phone calls Emmanuel Macron made to Vladimir Putin over the past five days.  At the same time, France has agreed to send its forces to Eastern Europe in the midst of the crisis.  Would French ambassador Nicolas de Rivière make reference to Macron’s position? Non.

He characterized the Russian deployment inside its own territory as “threatening” and called for “the non-use or threat of use of force; and the freedom of States to choose or change their own security arrangements. They are neither negotiable nor subject to revision or reinterpretation.”  That is the U.S. and NATO line that rejects Russia’s security demand that Ukraine not join NATO and that NATO membership near Russia be rolled back.

Rivière then said what several U.S. allies on the council repeated: “The notion of a sphere of influence has no place in the 21st century.” This is a rejection of Russia’s desire for a security buffer from what it sees as an aggressive West. It also flies in the face of the U.S. Monroe Doctrine, which is still alive and well in Latin America, and even of France’s continual involvement, both politically and militarily, in their former African colonies.

Between NATO and Russia

Martin Kimani, Kenya’s U.N. envoy, said what is clear to anyone who is not under the spell of the U.S.: that “the main issue in this crisis is between NATO and Russia.”

Kimani said: “Where there are disputes we support patient diplomacy as the first, second and third options.”  He said “when it involves major powers there  must be comprise. NATO and Russia have an opportunity to resolve their differences.”

The Kenyan envoy warned about a “new age” of “containment, provocation and proxy action.”

“We experienced that,” he said. “The Cold War deeply damaged our Africa. When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.”

Gabon’s ambassador, Michel Xavier Biang, denounced the “alarming rhetoric of war” and pointed out what the Ukrainian ambassador would not, namely that the “Ukrainian president said to refrain from whipping up panic.”

Brazil’s permanent representative, Ambassador Ronaldo Costa Filho, said: “Brazil … highlights the need for good-faith in order to address legitimate security concerns of all parties, including Russia’s and Ukraine’s.”

Mexico was skeptical of Russia, saying, “It was encouraging to hear from the Russian representative that he reiterated there is no planned invasion. Well how good it would be if that is the case. But that is a unilateral declaration.”

China Asks, ‘What War?’

As Russia’s most important ally, China’s U.N. ambassador, Zhang Jun, said: “Some countries led by the U.S. have claimed that there is a looming war in Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly stated that it has no plans to launch any military action. And Ukraine has made it clear that it does not need a war. Under such circumstances, what is the basis for the countries concerned to insist that there would be a war?”

Zhang said that “at a time when dialogue and negotiations are underway, and concrete progress has yet to be made, the holding of such an open meeting by the council is clearly not conducive to creating a favorable environment for dialogue and negotiations, nor is it conducive to defusing the tensions.”

Zhang also called for Russia’s concerns about NATO to be respected:

“The expansion of NATO is a problem difficult to circumvent in handling the current tension. NATO is the product of the Cold War, and NATO expansion epitomizes bloc politics. We believe that the security of one country should not?be achieved at the expense of the security of other countries. Still less should regional security rely on strengthening or even expanding military blocs. Today in the 21st century, all parties should completely abandon the Cold War mentality and come up with a balanced, effective and sustainable European security mechanism through negotiations, with Russia’s legitimate security concerns being taken seriously and addressed.”

Britain and Norway Back US to the Max

Norway’s ambassador Mona Juul at the council on Monday. (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

On mop up duty, NATO members Norway and Britain reinforced what the U.S. had said. Mona Juul, Norway’s envoy, perhaps went even further, calling Russia’s proposals on NATO “unrealistic demands that threaten European security.” She said: “Russia has accused NATO of creating tensions. NATO is a defensive and voluntary organization.”

It is an organization that has ventured far outside its European theater of operations to launch aggressive actions against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as conducting drills simulating attack near Russia’s borders.

As America’s most loyal ally, British Ambassador James Kariuki said: “In the best case scenario, the scale of the Russian forces assembled on three sides of Ukraine is deeply destabilizing. In the worst case, it is preparation for a military invasion of a sovereign country.”

He said: “Russia denies that its forces are posing a threat to Ukraine. But yet again we see disinformation, cyber-attacks and destabilizing plots directed against an independent, democratic country.”

The council also heard from Albania, Lithuania and Poland, whose remarks were dismissive of Russia having interests of its own in the matter.

consortiumnews.com

Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer’s integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can’t say the words “Belarus,” “Myanmar” or the Chinese tennis star “Peng Shuai” fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime. PEN America only stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government, which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank, for the literary group’s annual World Voices festival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end PEN America’s partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories included Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louis Erdrich, Russel Banks, Cornel West, Junot Díaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.

PEN America is typical of the establishment hijacking of an organization that was founded and once run by writers, some of whom, including Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, I knew. Nossel is a former corporate lawyer, listed as a “contributor” to The Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as Vice President of US Business Development for Bertelsmann.  Nossel, who has had herself elevated to the position of the CEO of PEN America, also worked under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, including on the task force assigned to respond to the WikiLeaks revelations. I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New York City and resigned from the organization, which that same year had given me its First Amendment Award, to protest Nossel’s appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership which I accepted.

Nossel and PEN America have stated that the prosecution of Assange raises “grave concerns” about press freedom and lauded the decision by a British court in January 2012 not to extradite Assange. Should Nossel and PEN America have not taken this stance on Assange it would have left them in opposition to most PEN organizations around the world. PEN Centre Germany, for example, made Assange an honorary member. PEN International has called for all charges to be dropped against Assange.

But Nossel, at the same time, repeats every slanderous trope and lie used to discredit the WikiLeaks publisher facing extradition to the United States to potentially serve a 175-year sentence under the Espionage Act. She refuses to acknowledge that Assange is being persecuted because he carried out the most basic and important role of any publisher, making public documents that expose the multitudinous crimes and lies of empire. And I have not seen any direct appeals to the Biden administration on Assange’s behalf from PEN America. “Whether Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out here,” Nossel said. But, as a lawyer who was a member of the State Department task force that responded to the WikiLeaks revelations, she understands it is not immaterial. The core argument behind the U.S. effort to extradite Assange revolves around denying him the status of a publisher or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the status of a press publication. Nossel parrots the litany of false charges leveled against Assange including that he endangered lives by not redacting documents, hacked into a government computer and meddled in the 2016 elections, all key points in the government’s case against Assange. PEN America under her direction has sent out news briefs with headlines such as: “Security Reports Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy into a Command Post for Election Meddling.” The end result is that PEN America is helping to uncoil the rope to string up the WikiLeaks publisher, a gross betrayal of the core mission of PEN.

“There are some things Assange did in this case, or is alleged to have done, that go beyond what a mainstream news outlet would do, in particular the first indictment that was brought about five weeks ago focused specifically on this charge of computer hacking, hacking into a password to get beyond the government national security infrastructure and penetrate and allow Chelsea Manning to pass through all of these documents. That, I think you can say, is not what a mainstream news outlet or a journalist would do,” Nossel said on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on May 28, 2019.

But Nossel did not stop there, going on to defend the legitimacy of the US campaign to extradite Assange, although Assange is not a US citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US based publication. Most importantly, left unmentioned by Nossel, is that Assange has not committed any crimes.

“The reason that this indictment is coming down now is because Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for years trying to escape his extradition request,” she said on the program. “He faces an extradition request to Sweden where he has been charged with sexual assault and now this huge indictment here in the US and that proceeding will play out over a long period. He will make all sorts of arguments about why he faces a form of legal jeopardy that should immunize him from being extradited, but there are extradition treaties. There are legal assistance treaties where countries are able to prosecute nationals of other countries and bring them back to face charges when they have committed a crime. This is happening pursuant to that. There are US nationals who are charged and convicted in foreign courts.”

WikiLeaks released U.S. military war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. The material was given to WikiLeaks in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, then private first class Pfc. Bradley Manning. Assange has been accused by an enraged U.S. intelligence community of causing “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” Mike Pompeo, who headed the CIA under Donald Trump, called WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service” aided by Russia, rhetoric embraced by Democratic Party leaders.

Assange also published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and earned the eternal hatred of the Democratic Party establishment. The Podesta emails exposed the sleezy and corrupt world of the Clintons, including the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and identified both nations as major funders of Islamic State [ISIL/ISIS]. They exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. They exposed Clinton’s repeated dishonesty. She was caught telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy while publicly promising financial regulation and reform. The cache showed that the Clinton campaign interfered in the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, assuming he would be the easiest candidate to defeat. They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate and her role as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

The Democratic Party, which blames Russian interference for its election loss to Trump, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers. Hillary Clinton calls WikiLeaks a Russian front. James Comey, the former FBI director, however, conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary, and Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”

“A zealous prosecutor is going to look at someone like Assange and recognize that he’s a very unpopular figure for a hundred different reasons, whether it’s his meddling in the 2016 elections, his political motivations for that, or the blunderbuss nature of these disclosures,” Nossel said on Leher’s program. “This is not a leak that was designed to expose one particular policy or effectuate a specific change in how the US government was going about its business. It was massive and indiscriminate, while in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals. I was actually working at the State Department during the WikiLeaks disclosure period, and I was briefly on a task force to respond to the WikiLeaks disclosures and there was really a sense of alarm about individuals whose lives would be in danger, people who had worked with the US, provided information, human rights defenders who had spoken to embassy personnel on a confidential basis. There is a problem of over classification, but there is also good reason to classify a lot of this stuff and they made no distinction between that [which] was legitimately classified and not.”

Any group of artists or writers overseen by a CEO from corporate America inevitably become members of an updated version of the Union of Soviet Writers where the human rights violations by our enemies are heinous crimes and our own violations and those of our allies are ignored or whitewashed. As Julian Benda reminded us in “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” we can serve privilege and power or we can serve justice and truth. Those, Benda warns, who become apologists for those with privilege and power destroy their capacity to defend justice and truth.

Where is the outrage from an organization founded by writers to protect writers about the prolonged abuse, stress and repeated death threats, including from Nossel’s former boss, Hillary Clinton, who allegedly quipped at a staff meeting, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” (and didn’t deny it later) or from the CIA which discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange?  Where is the demand that the trial of Assange be thrown out because the CIA through UC Global, the security firm at the embassy, secretly taped the meetings, and all other encounters, between Assange and his lawyers, obliterating attorney-client privilege? Where is the public denunciation of the extreme isolation that has left Assange, who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, in precarious physical and psychological health? Where is the outcry over his descent into hallucinations and deep depression, leaving him dependent on antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine? Where are the thunderous condemnations about the ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, where he has had to live without access to sunlight, exercise and proper medical care? “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancé Stella Morris said of the stroke. Where are the demands for intervention and humane treatment, including an end to his isolation, once it was revealed Assange was pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall? Where is the fear for his life, especially after “half of a razor blade” was discovered under his socks and it was revealed that he called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day”? Where is the call to prosecute those who committed the war crimes, carried out the torture and engaged in the corruption WikiLeaks exposed? Not from PEN America.

Melzer in his book “The Trial of Julian Assange,” the most methodical and detailed recounting of the long persecution by the United States and the British government of Assange, blasts those like Nossel who blithely peddle the lies used to tar Assange and cater to the powerful.

When Assange was first charged, he was not charged with espionage by the United States. Rather, he was charged with a single count of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” This charge alleged that he conspired with Manning to decrypt a password hash for the US Department of Defense computer system. But as Melzer points out, “Manning already had full ‘top secret’ access privileges to the system and all the documents she leaked to Assange. So, even according to the US government, the point of the alleged attempt to decode the password hash was not to gain unauthorized access to classified information (‘hacking’), but to help Manning to cover her tracks inside the system by logging in with a different identity (‘source protection’). In any case, the alleged attempt undisputedly remained unsuccessful and did not result in any harm whatsoever.”

Nossel’s repetition of the lie that Assange endangered lives by not redacting documents was obliterated during the trial of Manning, several sessions of which I attended at Fort Meade in Maryland with Cornel West. During the court proceedings in July 2013 Brigadier General Robert Carr, a senior counterintelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the US Department of Defense, told the court that the task force did not uncover a single case of someone who lost their lives due to the publication of the classified documents by WikiLeaks. As for Nossel’s claim that “in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals” she should be aware that the decryption key to the unredacted State Department documents was not released by Assange, but Luke Harding and David Leigh from The Guardian in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

When the ruling class peddles lies there is no cost for parroting them back to the public. The cost is paid by those who tell the truth.

On November 27, 2019, Melzer gave a talk at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to dedicate a sculpture by the Italian artist Davide Dormino. Figures of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, cast in bronze, stood on three chairs. A fourth chair, empty, was next to them inviting others to take a stand with them. The sculpture is called “Anything to Say?” Melzer stepped up onto the fourth chair, the hulking edifice of the US Embassy off to his right. He uttered the words that should have come from organizations like PEN America:

For decades, political dissidents have been welcomed by the West with open arms, because in their fight for human rights they were persecuted by dictatorial regimes.

Today, however, Western dissidents themselves are forced to seek asylum elsewhere,  such as Edward Snowden in Russia or, until recently, Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian  embassy in London.

For the West itself has begun to persecute its own dissidents, to subject them to draconian punishments in political show trials, and to imprison them as dangerous terrorists in high-security prisons under conditions that can only be described as inhuman and degrading.

Our governments feel threatened by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian  Assange, because they are whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights activists who have provided solid evidence for the abuse, corruption, and war crimes of the powerful, for which they are now being systematically defamed and persecuted.

They are the political dissidents of the West, and their persecution is today’s witch-hunt, because they threaten the privileges of unsupervised state power that has gone out of control.

The cases of Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are the most important test of our time for the credibility of Western rule of law and democracy and our commitment to human rights.

In all these cases, it is not about the person, the character or possible misconduct of these dissidents, but about how our governments deal with revelations about of their own misconduct.

How many soldiers have been held accountable for the massacre of civilians shown in the video “Collateral Murder”? How many agents for the systematic torture of terror suspects? How many politicians and CEOs for the corrupt and inhumane machinations  that have been brought to light by our dissidents?

That’s what this is about. It is about the integrity of the rule of law, the credibility of our  democracies and, ultimately, about our own human dignity and the future of our children.

Let us never forget that!

Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture

The tenuous return to power of the Democratic Party under Joe Biden, and the specter of a Republican rout of the Democrats in the midterm elections next year, along with the very real possibility of the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, or a Trump-like figure to the presidency, has blinded human rights and press groups to the danger of the egregious assaults on freedom of expression perpetrated by the Biden administration. The steady march towards heavy handed state censorship was accelerated by the Obama administration that charged ten government employees and contractors, eight under the Espionage Act, for disclosing classified information to the press. The Obama administration in 2013 also seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters to uncover who leaked the information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot. This ongoing assault by the Democratic Party has been accompanied by the disappearing on social media platforms of several luminaries on the far right, including Donald Trump and Alex Jones, who were removed from Facebook, Apple, YouTube. Content that is true but damaging to the Democratic Party, including the revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop, have been blocked by digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Algorithms have since at least 2017 marginalized left-wing content, including my own.  The legal precedent set in this atmosphere by the sentencing of Assange means that anyone who possesses classified material, or anyone who leaks it, will be guilty of a criminal offense. The sentencing of Assange will signal the end of all investigative inquiries into the inner workings of power. The pandering by press and human rights organizations, tasked with being sentinels of freedom, to the Democratic Party, only contributes to the steady tightening of the vice of press censorship. There is no lesser evil in this fight. It is all evil. Left unchecked, it will result in an American species of China’s totalitarianism capitalism.

ScheerPost via counterpunch.org

On the occasion of International Human Rights Day which was marked on December 10, the UN pledged to accelerate the implementation of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), without taking into consideration the various global inequalities which make generic implementation impossible.

The UN’s “Common Agenda Framework” which was published in September 2021 is one example of how the UN glosses over the international law violations emanating from within its institutions to portray a deceptively humanitarian agenda. Indeed, Covid19 has provided the UN with the opportune background from which it can cast itself as devoted to humanitarian causes.

“In our biggest shared test since the Second World War, humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough,” the report summary commences. Was the UN really unaware of the systematic discrimination and inequalities rampant in the world as a result of its imperialist policies, and did it really need Covid19 to notice the discrepancies between the exploiter countries and the exploited populations?

Recovery from the pandemic, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “must be an opportunity to expand human rights and freedoms, and to rebuild trust.” Has Guterres started considering how restrictions upon free movement since Covid19 have ushered in new levels of discrimination, thus encroaching upon human rights and freedoms. Not to mention withholding of scientific information from the public, even as Guterres emphasises the importance of supporting science.

A recent Reuters report provided much needed insight on how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as it stipulated that the full disclosure on Pfizer vaccines for the general public would take until the year 2097, by which time most people who took the vaccine, as well as doctors and scientists involved, would have passed away, thus eliminating any possibility of justice while cultivating perpetual impunity. Has Guterres considered such a breach of fundamental rights? Prioritising science must also be supplemented by prioritizing the public’s right to scientific information.

Covid-19 has exposed different forms of oblivion, which the UN is well versed in. Now that the international organisation has a framework from which to promote its generic SDGs, it stands to reason that the UN can cultivate further oblivion and impunity for itself. The Common Agenda Framework, in the same manner as the SDGs, places no context to what the UN purportedly seeks to achieve. Which means that the UN will continue to neglect tackling the root of the problem, which is that the organization is founded upon protecting the supremacy of former colonial powers, and it can do so without risk despite a reputation in tatters, for what can hold the UN accountable for maintaining the cycle of human rights violations?

Will the UN assume responsibility for failing to protect civilians as governments waged war and plunder? How about the UN troops involved in human rights violations, including sexual violence, while supposedly on a mandate to protect civilians? Not to mention the politics the UN involved itself in, such as the UN Oil for Food program in Iraq which further impoverished Iraqi people, or the resolution which paved the way for NATO’s invasion of Libya in 2011. Or how about the UN’s approval of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine, which it protects at all costs because it is too intrinsically involved in the human rights violations against the Palestinian people? Democratic values, indeed.

If one departs from the premise that the UN safeguards human rights, it can be said that the institution has definitely failed its mandate. However, human rights are merely a veneer for the UN. On International Human Rights Day, the UN should have pondered its role in aiding and abetting human rights violators instead of promoting its unsustainable development goals. After all, sustainability requires accountability, and the UN has set itself above the consequences of scrutiny.

Yet another non-binding UN General Assembly has passed, granting Palestinians permanent sovereignty over their natural resources, even as Israel has absolute dominion over their territory. The draft resolution, titled “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources,” is a perfect example of how the UN glosses over Israel’s colonial violence by refusing to take action, preferring to enact non-binding resolutions which do nothing to protect the Palestinian people’s political rights and their territory.

The resolution demands Israel ceases its exploitation and theft of Palestinian land, while noting all other Israeli violations on Palestinian territory, such as the Apartheid Wall, settlement expansion, destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, as well as the impact of Israel weapons in Gaza. With the passing of such a detailed resolution, it would stand to reason that the UN takes measures against Israel’s colonial violence, rather than call upon Israel to halt its damage. The latter is a futile request, and the UN knows Israel will not abide by the non-binding resolution, in which case it is pertinent to ask why the international institution keeps score of each violation only to mete out some symbolic recognition of Palestinian rights which has so far failed to translate into political value for the Palestinian people.

Palestine’s Permanent Observer to the UN Riyad Mansour described the resolution as confirming the international community supporting full rights for Palestinians. Similarly the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki declared that the resolution affirmed Palestinian people’s rights over their territory and called upon the UN to implement international resolutions. Which is where Palestine, as usual, will hit a dead end. The UN’s complicity in Israel’s colonial expansion is the primary reason why non-binding resolutions have taken the place of political resolution for Palestinians.

Does the UN need reminding of how it failed Palestinians since the passing of the 1947 Partition Plan? Or of how its defence of Israel’s security narrative directly ties in to the Palestinian people’s experience of loss, to the point that non-binding resolutions are necessary to remind the world that Palestinians have political rights? Only the periodic reminders mean nothing if the UN refuses to face Israel’s war crimes and international law violations.

Unfortunately, the PA has long supported this disastrous status quo, in which the gap between non-binding resolutions and Israel’s expansion is becoming irreconcilable.

EU diplomats recently visited occupied East Jerusalem, in a visit organised by the Israeli non-governmental organization Ir Amin. The NGO explained the consequences of Israel’s settlement expansion, including forced displacement and the rupture between Palestinian villages and Jerusalem, which is Israel’s next aim.

Yet, at an international level, Israel’s violations are considered separately, with barely ever a connection between one violation and its precedents. If the UN was truly against human rights violations, it would put its research to good use, as well as consistently draw attention to the fact that the earlier colonization process is ongoing.

The PA is also guilty of the same process, preferring to focus on each violation separately rather than take into account how Israel’s actions are collectively contributing to Palestine’s territorial loss.

While shedding light on the cumulative effect of Israel’s violations, the recent UNGA non-binding draft resolution holds no sway over international chastisement of Israel, let alone enforcing punitive measures. Israel’s impunity has been crafted by the UN, in a parallel manner to how the UN facilitated Palestine’s territorial loss. The resolution is no cause to celebrate; rather it is an affirmation of how the international community’s complicity resulted in these belated affirmations that do nothing to reinstate the Palestinian people’s political rights.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

The world has many crises, and probably the most heart-rending is that of desperately miserable refugees who have been forced to flee from their homes. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, is a saintly body and does its best to care for those it can access. Its latest report indicates that there are now over 84 million people displaced by conflict, barbaric persecution and climate change disasters.

On November 11 Filippo Grandi, the head of UNHCR, issued a plea for greater assistance from rich countries, saying that “the international community must redouble its efforts to make peace, and at the same time must ensure resources are available to displaced communities and their hosts.” Unfortunately most of the international community couldn’t care less about refugees, as evidenced by reaction to recent agonising events such as Poland’s inhumane treatment of the thousands attempting to enter from Belarus, whose President is quite as cruel and pitiless as the Polish authorities who have repelled so many of them.

The BBC noted that as refugees “are summarily expelled from Poland and Belarus refuses to allow them back in, people are finding themselves stranded and freezing in Poland’s forests. Several have died of hypothermia.” But who cares? Certainly not such officials as the head of Poland’s National Security Council, Pawel Soloch, who said on November 8 that he expected “attacks on our border to be renewed by groups of several hundred people” overnight. “Attacks”? By unarmed, frozen, desperate, pathetic exiles who wish only for decency, understanding and support?

And in the waters of the freezing, stormy English Channel, there are similar hideous dramas of which the latest involved the capsize of a boat trying to travel from France to England, causing the death of 17 men, seven women and three adolescents – two boys and a girl. One of the women was pregnant.

The figures strike a chord of bleakness, but not in the hearts of such as the poisonous Priti Patel, the United Kingdom’s minister for home affairs, responsible for refugee matters, who is a proven liar (for which she was dismissed by then Prime Minister Theresa May) and bully of her subordinates (“Standards chief Sir Alex Allan found that Ms Patel had broken the code governing ministers’ behaviour but Prime Minister Boris Johnson rejected his findings, saying he did not think Ms Patel was a bully and had ‘full confidence’ in her”.)

Patel’s lack of compassion was demonstrated by her statement about “illegal immigration” in early November, when she declared that refugees seeking to start a new life were mainly cheats. She claimed that in the previous year “70% of individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants. They are not genuine asylum seekers.” What is strikingly ironic, of course, is that “in the 1960s, her parents emigrated to the UK” from Uganda. And in an October 2012 media interview Patel affirmed that “coming from a country where you’re persecuted means that you want to work hard and to contribute to the society where you end up. You become patriotic because you make your new country your home, and, as a result, you live and play by its values.” Quite right. But it seems that the flint-hearted Patel is no longer prepared to give anyone a chance to do that.

As reported on November 21 Patel’s latest trick to punish refugees is to detain them on England’s beaches and then have them “soaked, shivering and traumatised… bundled on to buses and driven almost 500 miles – a journey of eight to nine hours – to an immigration detention centre called Dungavel” in Scotland.

The British government’s combination of intolerance, malice and incompetence concerning refugees is appalling, but it’s nothing new. A recently published book by an Afghan refugee, Abbas Nazari, called After the Tampa, tells us a great deal about the Australian government’s even worse treatment of the stricken and helpless. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on November 26, “When the Taliban were at the height of their power in 2001, Abbas Nazari’s parents were faced with a choice: stay and face persecution in their homeland, or seek security for their young children elsewhere. The family embarked on a harrowing journey from the mountains of Afghanistan to a small fishing boat in the Indian Ocean, crammed with more than 400 other asylum seekers. When the boat started to sink, they were saved by a cargo ship, the Tampa. However, one of the largest maritime rescues in modern history quickly turned into an international stand-off, as Australia closed its doors to these asylum seekers.”

The Australian government’s actions were not only contrary to international law and the Charter of the United Nations, they were sickeningly amoral and had the aim of winning the impending national election for the Liberal Party whose leader at the time, John Howard, and his servile slimy acolytes merit the deepest contempt for their conduct. If there is indeed a Hell, they deserve its flames for eternity. As recounted in the Sydney Morning Herald the Captain of the Norwegian freighter Tampa, Arne Rinnan (a man with more moral and physical courage in his little fingers than these politicos have in their entire anatomies), “defied orders from Canberra to stay away from Australian waters with his cargo of 433 rescued asylum seekers, many of them in urgent need of medical attention, and proceeded towards Christmas Island, the tiny Australian territory below Java. It ended, after heavily armed SAS troops seized control of the ship, with John Howard introducing retrospective legislation giving his government the power to remove the Tampa, and any similarly unwelcome vessels in the future, irrespective of the circumstances or the consequences.”

Nazari’s description of the assault on the ship by armed special forces troops, covered in black from head to toe, is spine-chilling. There was absolutely no need for these people to carry weapons, because the wretched refugees certainly had none. These swaggering military louts put the fear of death into children who had been terrified by Taliban savages. We have no way of assessing to what extent the mental health of the refugees was damaged by Prime Minister Howard’s cynical re-election antics, but one person not affected was Abbas Nazari, who was fortunate enough to be taken, aged seven, with his family to New Zealand, rather than consigned to the Australian-run refugee concentration camp on Nauru island, 4,500 kilometres north east of Australia, where detention conditions were appalling. (An Amnesty International representative observed that “having worked in most of the world’s conflict zones over the last 15 years, I thought I had learned enough about suffering, injustice and despair. But what I saw and heard on Nauru will haunt me forever.”)

It is amazing and most gratifying that Nazari’s personal success, achieved through his innate intelligence and sheer hard work, includes selection as a Fulbright Scholar which is an achievement that should be brought to the attention of Priti Patel, who is so determined to deny asylum to refugees who she alleges are “economic migrants”.

In yet another Patel irony, it was noted on November 23 that the British government’s scheme to attract Nobel and other laureates to settle in Britain and contribute to its economy had failed completely, with not a single applicant having come forward, in spite of Patel’s declaration that her “point-based” immigration rules are intended to “attract the best and brightest based on the skills and talent they have, not where they’ve come from.”

Patel and her best and brightest colleagues in countries such as Australia, Belarus and Poland (and many, many others) have not a scrap of compassion for the tens of millions of destitute despairing refugees displaced from their homelands. The world is facing a terrible humanitarian crisis — but is also at risk of having future generations suffering from routine endorsement of governments devoid of decency, morality and simple humanity.