By Alexander RUBINSTEIN

Having taken up arms against Russia for a fifth time, Georgian Legion commander Mamuka Mamulashvili has bragged on video about his unit carrying out field executions of captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

While Western media pundits howled about images of dead bodies in the city of Bucha, echoing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy’s accusation that Russia is guilty of “genocide,” they have largely overlooked the apparent admission of atrocities by an avowed ally of the United States who was welcomed on Capitol Hill by senior lawmakers overseeing congressional foreign policy committees.

Having fought in four wars against Russia, and despite allegations that he played a leading role in the massacre of 49 protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014, Mamulashvili has taken multiple trips to the United States, where he received a warm welcome from members of Congress, the New York Police Department, and Ukrainian diaspora community.

In an interview this April, Mamulashvili, was asked about a video showing Russian fighters who had been extrajudicially executed in Dmitrovka, a town just five miles from Bucha. Mamulashvili was candid about his unit’s take-no-prisoners tactics, though he has denied involvement in the specific crimes depicted.

“We will not take Russian soldiers, as well as Kadyrovites [Chechnyan fighters]; in any case, we will not take prisoners, not a single person will be captured,” Mamulashvili said, implying that his fighters execute POWs.

The warlord’s battle dress shirt was emblazoned with a patch reading, “Mama says I’m special.”

Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the “Georgian National Legion” in Ukraine: “Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner.” pic.twitter.com/4GM9nHsOMo

— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) April 6, 2022

“Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner,” Mamulashvili emphasized

Executions of enemy combatants are considered war crimes under the Geneva Convention.

Ukrainian and Georgian Legion fighters celebrate after executing captive Russian soldiers on video

War crimes on the front lines

Western governments continue to block a Russian request for a United Nations investigation into alleged massacres in Bucha, where scores of corpses were photographed following the Russian withdrawal from the city, some with hands bound and shot execution style – as Mamulashvili described doing to prisoners.

While the events in Bucha have become a source of outrage and heated contention, a clear case of war crimes by Ukrainian forces which took place just five miles down the road on March 30 as Russian troops withdrew has received a more muted response despite coverage by the New York Times.

The macabre footage shows Russian paratroopers dead or bleeding out in the road, some with their hands clearly bound — reportedly the handiwork of the Georgian Legion.

Celebrating the ambush’s success, the videographer calls the attention of his fellow soldiers: “Georgians! Belgravia, boys!” Belgravia refers to a nearby housing complex from which some of the non-Georgian fighters presumably hail.

“Look, he is still alive,” one of the fighters says as a Russian writhes in a pool of blood. He was then shot three times at close range.

Oz Katerji, a neoconservative British-Lebanese operative who has generated attention by sending threatening Whatsapp messages to journalists opposed to the US-backed dirty war in Syria, fantasizing about police torturing Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, hysterically heckling former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at an antiwar meeting, and embedding with CIA-backed armed gangs in Syria, wound up at the site of the Russian convoy two days after it was destroyed.

Filming himself against the backdrop of numerous burned out Russian tanks, Katerji tweeted that soldiers told him “they had removed eight Russian corpses from the battlefield yesterday.”

An equally sanitized depiction of the scene was published by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine on Twitter, which compiled shots of the destruction and an interview with a soldier over an intermittent electronic soundtrack.

Ювелірна робота українських захисників на Київщині.

Командир підрозділу розповідає деталі бою, під час якого українські танкісти “прийняли заліки” у російських загарбників

Приємного перегляду pic.twitter.com/uLm4ANgvt5

— Defence of Ukraine (@DefenceU) April 2, 2022

In the original war crimes video, one of the men who gloated at the scene of the killings has been identified as Khizanishvili Teymuraz of the Georgian Legion. Previously, Teymuraz served as a body guard to former Georgian president and Mamulashvili ally Mikheil Saakashvili.

A pet project of Washington neoconservatives, Saakashvili met disgrace after leading a disastrous war of choice against Russia over South Ossetia in 2008. He eventually accepted an offer from Ukraine to serve as governor in Odessa in 2015.

“It is necessary to create chaos on the Maidan”

The most deadly incident during the 2013-14 riots and protests on Kiev’s Maidan Square that eventually led to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was the massacre of 49 demonstrators on February 20, 2014. The incident galvanized international outrage against Yanukovych and weakened his government’s negotiating position. Yet it remains shrouded in intrigue.

During the color revolution on the Maidan, Mamulashvili rallied his old war buddies to take up Ukraine’s cause. Near the central square, his group was reportedly “told to ensure order so that there were no drunks, to maintain discipline and identify rabble-rousers sent in by the authorities.”

Mamulashvili’s former comrades told Russian media that he eventually told them “it is necessary to create chaos on the Maidan, using weapons against any targets, protesters and police — no difference.”

President Vlodymyr Zelensky has described the killings on the Maidan as “the most complicated case in our country,” noting that the crime scene was tampered with and documents have mysteriously disappeared.

International bodies also remain befuddled. While the NATO-funded Atlantic Council think tank has described the matter as “unsolved,” the United Nations has noted that “justice remains elusive.”

Today, some researchers point to Mamulashvili and his Georgian Legionnaires as key suspects behind the mysterious killings. Ivan Katchanovski, a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, is among those who believe Mamulashvili’s allies were likely among those who fired on protesters from buildings over Maidan Square, generating bloodshed that was ultimately blamed on Ukraine’s then-government.

“Testimonies by several Georgian self-admitted members of Maidan sniper groups for the Maidan massacre trial and investigation and their interviews in American, Italian and Israeli TV documentaries and Macedonian and Russian media are generally consistent with findings of my academic studies of the Maidan massacre,” Katchanovski commented to The Grayzone.

While Katchanovski said his academic research did not focus on the involvement of specific individuals in the massacre, he stated that most of the Georgians who testified in the trial revealed their names, passport numbers and border stamps, copies of plane tickets, videos and photos in Ukraine or Georgian military, and other evidence to affirm their credibility. He added that some of their identities were verified by the Ukrainian border guard service and the Armenian and Belarusian authorities for the Maidan massacre trial in Ukraine.

“The Maidan massacre trial in November 2021 admitted and showed as evidence a testimony of one of these Georgians who confessed of being a member of a group of Maidan snipers,” Katchanovski stated.

The US members of Congress that hosted Mamulashvili were either unaware of these allegations or believed the Georgian warlord was simply innocent.

A warlord goes to Washington

As this reporter recently documented for The Grayzone, photos posted by Mamulashvili on his Facebook page show the Georgian hard-man inside the US Capitol rubbing elbows with some of the top figures on the House Foreign Relations Committee.

His hosts included then-Rep. Eliot Engel, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, former Rep. Sander Levin, Rep. Andre Carson, Rep. Doug Lamborn, and former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

Additional photos show him visiting Senate offices, including that of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Kristen Gilibrand, who sits on the Intelligence Committee as well as the Armed Services Committee.

Contacted by phone by this reporter, the offices of Senators Feinstein and Gilibrand have declined to comment on their hosting of the Georgian warlord.

Mamulashvili’s multiple trips to the United States have offered him the opportunity to attend events at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, give talks at Saint George Academy, a Ukrainian Catholic School in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and hold forth in an interview with the Washington office of US government’s Voice of America in 2015. He has even posed for photo ops with officers of the New York City Police Department.

Georgian warlord Mamulashvili with NYPD officers, June 4, 2017

Additional photos show Mamulashvili holding the flag of the Georgian Legion with Nadiya Shaporynska, the founder and president of US Ukrainian Activists, a DC-based non-profit that has lobbied members Congress to take measures against Russia, held daily rallies outside of the White House, and fundraised tens of thousands of dollars to procure supplies for the Ukrainian military and refugees.

In between these trips, Mamulashvili constructed three training bases and recruited hundreds of fighters. Some photos he posted to Facebook show the warlord’s subordinates training children (below) for battle against Russia. The practice of cultivating children for warfare is shared by Ukraine’s more notorious Azov Battalion.

US volunteer with the Georgian Legion details executions, flees after threats

In March, this reporter interviewed Henry Hoeft, a US army veteran who accepted Zelensky’s appeal for foreign fighters and volunteered for the Georgian Legion.

Hoeft told The Grayzone that members of the legion threatened to kill him when he refused to go to the front lines without a weapon. Heft also recalled how Georgian fighters put bags over the heads of two men who blew through a checkpoint and executed them on the spot, accusing them of being spies for Russia.

While Western reporters have presented Mamulashvili as a brave and tactically deft battlefield commander since he entered the fight against Russia in Ukraine, his unit has also received mention in articles over the years on the unsavory figures it has welcomed into its ranks: neo-Nazis, bank robbers and fugitives like Craig Lang, who is wanted in the United States on suspicion of murdering a married couple in Florida.

In the east of Ukraine, where Lang spoke to the media on behalf of the Georgian Legion (then sometimes called the “Foreign Legion”) from the front lines, the Department of Justice and FBI have investigated Lang and seven other Americans for war crimes. The group allegedly took “non-combatants” as prisoners and tortured them, sometimes to death before burial in an unmarked grave.

Mamulashvili’s Facebook page contains an un-captioned photograph of the American fugitive.

As the war in Ukraine intensifies and the US deepens its commitment to escalating it, top foreign policy figures in Washington are wagging a finger at Russia with one hand and literally shaking the hand of Mamulashvili, an avowed war criminal, with the other.

Anthony Blinken is uncomfortable at the podium as he delivers a lengthy speech at NATO while the Ukraine war continues and the West’s response continues to not only confuse the Ukrainian leader but also most people who are struggling to understand how the war has got to where it is today, with the latest massacres shocking the world.

What Blinken didn’t make a mention of was what happened on the same day in 1994, which was the start of the Rwandan genocide – a colossal failure of both the UN and NATO. Blinken spoke about the UN’s decision to suspend Russia from the U.S. Human Rights Council.

The Rwandan Genocide is important to remember as the similarities of the West’s activities in Ukraine today can be compared, in that giants in the UN and NATO like the U.S. remain as pusillanimous as ever towards actually fighting a real war for the rights and principles that they supposedly stand for.

In Rwanda, the CIA-backed English-speaking Tutsis entered the north of the country with a disinformation campaign which installed terror in the hearts of peasant Hutus who took to slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Tutsis with a common farmyard tool. There really isn’t an example of how information or disinformation can play such a decisive role in a war going one way or the other than Rwanda, which the West is entirely responsible for.

When the real killing started in great numbers, the Americans were nowhere to be seen. Clinton, after the PR disaster of Somalia just a few months earlier, pulled back from getting involved in Rwanda and the UN and NATO followed. The UN did have troops in Rwanda but the role of their soldiers is both polemic and ineffective.

On the evening of 6 April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as their plane prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda – sparking the Rwandan genocide.

The parallel with Ukraine is chilling. It’s often forgotten how Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down in 2014, which in many ways was a similar catalyst to the fighting in Ukraine reaching a point, where Russia decided to enter the country and take control on February 24^th of this year.

The West blames Russia for the attack on the civilian airliner although the evidence is not entirely conclusive. The Rwandans themselves (the Tutsi-led government) concluded in 2010 that the missile which shot down the Rwandan president’s plane was almost certainly from the hardcore element of the Hutu army which believed the President had sold them out and brokered a peace, allowing Tutsis to return to Rwanda and make claims on land.

But on the 7^th of April 2022, Anthony Blinken made no historical references as he announced even more sanctions against Russia in a war which America hopes will be dragged out for months, in the belief that this will have an impact on Putin, impacting his ability to remain firm when the negotiations start. It wasn’t only the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide which Blinken decide not to mention (probably not wanting to remind the press pack gathered there of both Bill Clinton’s huge erroneous foreign policy play which led to 800,000 dead), but he also chose not to mention Europe’s failure to stop buying Russian oil and gas, which in many ways means that these countries are actually funding Putin’s operation in Ukraine.

If EU countries can’t actually stop buying Russian oil, then the farce of this war will continue for month and perhaps even years to come. Equally, if America’s role is to continue funding Ukrainian soldiers without genuinely wanting to negotiate peace (as the truth is that Blinken and his colleagues believe that a long war is a winning strategy for them), then all talks of peace and negotiating for it are folly. America got the war that it wanted in Ukraine, which is bite-sized and doesn’t involve the threat to American lives which they have been preparing for since 2014 when their own guy overthrew Russia’s chosen leader. We really shouldn’t be surprised by anything other than Blinken’s ability, rather than Biden’s to “fuck things up”.

As reports of atrocities and human rights violations in Ukraine mount, corroborated by extensive witness testimony and much tangible evidence (and here), it becomes paramount to consider ways and means of punishing instigators, enablers, and direct perpetrators of these outrages. It is equally important to preserve the legal and historical record of thesе crimes and to administer suitable punishments in order to deter other potential war criminals in the Ukrainian theatre. Finally, the purpose of such a Tribunal would be educational, to impress upon that segment of Ukrainian society which had become swayed by extremist Nazi propaganda the enormity of the misconduct perpetrated in their name and in furtherance of a criminal agenda that, actively or passively, deliberately or unwittingly, some of them may have supported. For, unless there is a sober confrontation with these crimes against humanity by Ukrainians vulnerable to the extremist narrative, and as soon as possible, stability and civility will continue to evade Ukraine for a long time to come.

The first step is to set the framework within which Ukrainian war crimes investigations and trials ought to be conducted. It is possible, of course, to entrust this task to the judicial authorities of Donetsk and Lugansk because obviously they have territorial and subject matter jurisdiction. However, for the impartiality and credibility of the proceedings to be preserved, it would be preferable for Ukrainian war crimes investigations and resultant trials to be conducted under the auspices of an international forum, removed as much as practicable from the parties on the ground.

Clearly, a replication of the founding of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague (ICTY) in the 1990s is unlikely in the present case. Setting aside technical issues concerning the legitimacy of such a tribunal under the UN Charter, three out of five governments permanently represented on the Security Council are potential suspects for active collusion with and logistical support extended to direct perpetrators of war crimes in the Ukraine. That makes it extremely improbable that this time round they would agree to the establishment of a similar court. The solution, therefore, must be sought elsewhere.

Taking into account the ongoing decline of the global Western hegemonic system, a process which was greatly accelerated precisely by the political, military, economic, and financial fallout of the Ukraine conflict, it would be advisable to look for another way to elevate the Ukrainian war crimes inquiry to the international level. One possible approach would be to place the matter under the auspices of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. CSTO nations are now effectively the global counterpart to the moribund West-centered “international community” which, in the 1990s, was still able to manipulate the UN in furtherance of its political aims, and to a lesser extent is still able to do that today.

Assuming that CSTO could be a viable option to serve as the supranational patron for the Ukraine war crimes tribunal, the next step would be to carefully define the Tribunal’s remit and to devise its procedural rules to avoid ICTY’s errors. In order to blunt inevitable efforts from the West to discredit the new Tribunal, much of the general language found in corresponding ICTY foundational documents should be utilised, always taking great care to identify and discard those provisions of ICTY Statute and Rules of Evidence and Procedure which are not compatible with best legal practice, and substituting for those provisions universally accepted legal principles.

The next important issue that would have to be dealt with is the staffing of the Ukraine International Criminal Tribunal. Recruitment of judges, investigators, prosecutors, and support staff need not, and in fact should not, be confined to personnel from CSTO states. Persons who satisfy the criterion of professional integrity should be encouraged to participate regardless what country they are nationals of.

The Ukraine Tribunal will also have to select a conceptual framework, a set of main legal principles that it will apply in the conduct of its proceedings. Three major concepts or devices come immediately to mind that have been used by ICTY (the “Mechanism,” which is its successor, is included by reference) to secure often questionable convictions. Those concepts are: Joint Criminal Enterprise, Command Responsibility, and Plea Bargaining.

With the likely exception of the pernicious practices of accepting uncorroborated confessions and plea bargaining, which in the form as applied at ICTY have radically undermined rather than promoted the administration of justice, JCE and Command Responsibility could conceivably be reconfigured and preserved in modified form, at least to the extent that they are not in conflict with the tasks of determining objective facts and administering politically neutral justice. For instance, JCE (detached from some of its more absurd variants invented by ICTY judges specifically to facilitate incrimination and conviction by any means) could be a useful tool not only for linking perpetrators acting with criminal intent and in concert, but also for establishing overarching connections between direct on-the-ground perpetrators and their instigators and supporters from beyond the borders of Ukraine.

Another conceptual issue that inevitably will have to be addressed is the scope of the investigations to be carried out beyond the factual matrix of the particular crimes being adjudicated. There is also the further and related question of the nature of broader historical and contextual evidence that should be considered probative and allowed to be presented in court. From the standpoint of securing justice, ICTY’s performance in that regard has been most unsatisfactory, not to say dismal and flagrantly prejudicial to the accused parties.

That is the case because even when ICTY attempts to apply seemingly sound principles it regularly twists them to serve its politically compromised agenda. Background “evidence” presented by ICTY historical, military, media, and other “expert” witnesses had invariably been geared not to shed light on relevant and probative circumstances but to heap maximum discredit upon the targeted parties. The resulting hugely prejudicial reputational damage, that under normal conditions would be inadmissible in a trial court, was designed to impact not just the individual defendant but, even more importantly, the entire ethnic group (at ICTY, in practical terms that meant the Serbs) the defendant happened to belonged to. A particularly obnoxious example were the attempts of ICTY “expert witnesses” to contextually portray verses of nineteenth century Serbian poet Njegoš as no less than the inspiration for the alleged genocide in Srebrenica.

Hopefully, the Ukrainian Tribunal will not have to resort to such pseudo-academic and pseudo-judicial skulduggery because it will operate scrupulously and above board, without fabricating or shaping facts to fit preconceived conclusions dictated by political controllers. That will be its huge moral and professional advantage.

There is no formal reason why the Ukrainian war crimes Tribunal should not be established within the ambit of the judicial systems of the Donbass republics, because such a court would be dealing primarily with criminal conduct in violation of international humanitarian law as it affected the population of those two entities. But it would carry greater weight and would thus be preferable for the task of investigating, apprehending, trying, convicting, and incarcerating offenders to be entrusted to an international body, backed by the legitimacy of recognised and indisputably sovereign nation-states.

Such an approach would make the Ukraine Tribunal’s factual findings and verdicts unquestionably legitimate, which might not entirely be the case with verdicts issued by some local courts. It would serve also an additional important purpose. It would dovetail perfectly with the emergence of the Fair World Order, intended to replace its relatively short-lived “NWO” counterpart. Taking advantage of the convenient opportunity presented by the current crisis, the Ukraine Tribunal could lay the groundwork for a revitalised system of international criminal law, serving as an essential foundational component of a broadly acceptable, inclusive, and viable future global order.

“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

An important report published this week reveals in extensive detail the shocking scale of war crimes committed by the United States in the Middle East. Thousands of civilian deaths, including children, are documented as a result of aerial bombardments conducted by the U.S. military.

It is crucial to remark that the published survey – while voluminous involving thousands of pages and documents – represents only a fraction of the full scale of mass murder. The research focuses on Syria and Iraq over a three-year period between late 2014 and early 2018. Considering that U.S. forces have been occupying those two countries alone for over a decade and considering American military operations contemporaneously in other nations, one can safely assume that the full scale of murder perpetrated is orders of magnitude greater.

The report known as the Civilian Casualty Files was commissioned by the New York Times. It took five years to compile and tortuous legal wrangling to obtain secret Pentagon files. The survey also involved the authors visiting hundreds of locations in Syria and Iraq to record witness testimonies. A good summary is provided here.

Separately, it has been previously estimated that the U.S. decade-long war in Iraq from 2003 onwards caused over one million deaths. What this latest report provides is granular detail of the countless incidents of violence from airstrikes and drone assassinations. Times, dates, villages, hamlets, towns, families, mothers, fathers and children are named in the atrocities that were carried out. But as noted, while the reported information is huge, it is still only a tiny fraction of the full extent of mass murder.

What is disturbingly clear too is the cold and barbaric logic of the Pentagon chiefs and senior figures in both the Obama and Trump administrations. Sitting president Joe Biden was vice-president in the Obama administrations (2008-2016). Civilian deaths were deemed acceptable as “collateral damage” in the pursuit of military-political objectives. Whole families were knowingly obliterated in a haphazard and vague effort to kill suspected terrorists or simply to extend the writ of U.S. imperial power.

What’s more, the Pentagon and the U.S. government covered up the extent of their psychopathic operations. Not one member of the American military or White House administration has ever been disciplined – even internally – for the rampant criminality.

A more recent incident outside of the published study period cited above would fall into the typical mold. That was the killing of a family of 10, including children, in Kabul during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August. Recall how the Pentagon investigated itself and concluded that no one was to blame for that drone carnage. That case garnered some publicity because the circumstances of a historic U.S. retreat were in the news. Now just imagine how easy it was for the Pentagon to bury other mass murders of civilians that occurred in remote areas of Syria and Iraq.

The published Civilian Casualty Files is substantive evidence for prosecuting U.S. political and military leaders for war crimes. Realistically, this will not happen in the near future, but nevertheless, it is an important archive for future prosecutions and the historical record.

The information is also a devastating exposition of the moral bankruptcy pervading Washington. Thus, a mass-murdering regime in Washington has no authority to lecture, as it arrogantly presumes to do all the time, the rest of the world on human rights and rule of law.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden convened a so-called “Summit for Democracy” for invited world leaders. Biden pointedly excluded Russia and China from the online videoconference, as well as other nations deemed to be “authoritarian” or “undemocratic” by Washington.

It truly is revolting that Washington has such hubris and shamelessness. U.S. governments have systematically waged illegal wars all around the planet involving the destruction of nations and millions of innocent lives. And yet the president of the U.S. has the audacity to pontificate to the whole world about the presumed virtues of democracy, human rights and upholding international law.

This grotesque duplicity and delusion of American leaders is why the U.S. is on a collision course with Russia and China. Washington relentlessly accuses Moscow and Beijing of alleged violations. The tensions being stoked by the United States over Ukraine and Taiwan are pushing the world to the brink of war.

Just this week, President Biden signed into law a ban on imports from China’s western province of Xinjiang. The U.S. accuses China of “genocide” against the minority Uighur Muslim population. Beijing categorically rejects the claims, pointing out that the Uighur population has actually grown over recent years. Beijing says that it takes security measures against radical Uighurs who have been weaponized as part of the U.S. 20-year war in neighboring Afghanistan. In any case, Washington does not provide credible evidence to substantiate its claims. The notable thing is that such lecturing by the United States towards China serves to aggravate tensions which exacerbate other issues over Taiwan and the Olympic Games that Washington is boycotting.

Washington has zero moral authority. It is a criminal regime as its illegal wars and deliberate mass murder demonstrate beyond any doubt.

It should be observed that the Western media largely remained silent this week over the shocking Civilian Casualty Files. The New York Times deserves some credit for publishing the information conducted by outside authors. However, the monstrous scale of criminality has been met with stunning relative silence. That illustrates how the Western media is actually a propaganda system that cannot compute or comment on information that is incongruous with its day-to-day coverage.

The injustice against imprisoned whistleblower Julian Assange should also be highlighted. The mass-murder programs uncovered by the Civilian Casualty Files vindicate Assange and Wikileaks’ earlier publications exposing U.S. war crimes. It is an abomination that Assange is being persecuted and awaiting extradition to the United States where he could be jailed for the rest of his life on fabricated charges of “hacking and espionage”.

The criminality and duplicity of U.S. governments is something to behold in a perverse sort of way. It is astounding that the world is being driven further towards dangerous tensions and possible confrontation by a regime whose record is so nefarious and hypocritical. How is such a gross deception enabled? That is partly due to the function of a Goebbels-like mass media that pretends to publish news instead of propaganda.

Chile’s dictatorship operated over 1,200 detention and torture centres, yet Cuartel Simon Bolivar was its best kept secret until Jorgelino Vergara Bravo, a former errand boy for the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) chief Manuel Contreras, revealed its existence as “the place where  no one got out alive.” Vergara, known as El Mocito, gave testimony which placed the feared Lautaro Brigade as commanding operations at the site, notably extermination and disappearance of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s political opponents.

Among the agents named by Vergara was Adriana Rivas, a former secretary to Contreras who also worked at Cuartel Simon Bolivar. Vergara’s testimony places her as an agent directly participating in torture. “Generally, when Adriana Rivas participated in the torture of the detainees, she beat them with sticks, she kicked them, punched them and also applied an electric current to the political prisoners,” Vergara stated.

In an interview with the Australian news outlet SBS in 2013, Rivas praised the dictatorship and normalized its torture methods, but denied being involved in the proceedings. Torture was necessary, she declared, to “break people.” Her stint with DINA, she said, opened her to new glamorous experiences and meeting influential people.

Rivas had managed to abscond from Chilean justice. She was arrested in 2006 and fled to Argentina while out on bail, after which she escaped to Australia in 2010 where she worked as a nanny in Sydney. As relatives of the disappeared ramped up their quest for justice in Chile, Chileans in Australia also clamoured for Rivas’s extradition, to face justice for her role in the detention, torture and killing of seven political prisoners of the dictatorship: Victor Diaz, Hector Veliz, Fernando Navarro, Reinalda Pereira, Lincoyan Berios, Horacio Cepeda and Fernando Ortiz.

In 2014, Chile requested Rivas’s extradition from Australia. Five years later, Australia was still dragging its feet over whether Rivas was extraditable to face justice for crimes of humanity. Rivas was arrested in 2019 and denied bail.

Rivas is the notoriously outstanding example of how Australia offered safe haven to torturers and victims alike. The narrative, at least for Rivas, is about to change with the latest rejected appeal by the New South Wales Federal Court, which has ruled the former torturer extraditable to Chile.

The former DINA agent has claimed she had no idea of what happened at Cuartel Simon Bolivar. In the latest appeal, her lawyer Frank Santisi argued that since DINA was set up by the dictatorship, it did not constitute an unlawful organization at the time it operated, and that there was no testimony that placed Rivas at Cuartel Simon Bolivar. Vergara’s testimony, however, is adamant on her presence and role at the torture and extermination centre.

Santisi also mentioned Pinochet’s Amnesty Law, which sought impunity for all agents involved in crimes against humanity. However, many DINA agents have been convicted in Chile, including Contreras himself and other prominent torturers. Santisi also argued there was political motivation in Rivas’s extradition. However, the political motivation existed from the crimes against humanity committed against Pinochet’s opponents, and which Rivas is said to have participated in.

Little recourse is now left for Rivas. Her final resort could be an appeal to Australia’s High Court if she can persuade the court that there are “special reasons for it to be heard.”

Australia will find it difficult to keep itself out of the spotlight as regards Chile. It is highly unlikely that there was no prior knowledge of Rivas’s presence in Australia and of who she was. Additionally, the ongoing refusal to declassify documents relating to Australia’s role aiding the CIA in Chile remains a point of contention. With Rivas one step closer to facing the Chilean courts, pressure should be ramped up for further disclosure on Australia’s duplicitous role, and how it might be contributing towards the oblivion and impunity enacted by Pinochet.

The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists.

The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

“But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” The New York Times reports. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”

Journalist Aaron Maté has called the incident “one of the US military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.”

NYT revealed that the US bombed 70 Syrian civilians & covered it up. The Baghuz massacre likely only came to light because of whistleblowers, Pentagon investigator Gene Tate & Air Force lawyer Lt. Col. Dean Korsak, who challenged the cover-up from within. https://t.co/jKDOkOtXyR

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) November 14, 2021

Asked by The Times for a statement, Central Command gave the laughable justification that maybe those dozens of women and children killed in repeated bomb blasts were actually armed enemy combatants:

“This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.”

I mean, how do you even address a defense like that? How do you get around the “Maybe those babies were ISIS fighters” defense?

Reading the report it becomes apparent how much inertia was thrown on attempts to bring the massacre to light and how easy it would have been for those attempts to succumb to the pressure and just give up, which naturally leads one to wonder how many other such incidents never see the light of day because attempts to expose them are successfully ground to a halt. The Times says the Baghuz massacre “would rank third on the military’s worst civilian casualty events in Syria if 64 civilian deaths were acknowledged,” but it’s clear that that “acknowledged” bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

And it really makes you appreciate how much work goes into getting information like this in front of the public eye, and how important it is to do so, and how tenuous the ability to do so currently is.

WTF????

“An American F-15E attack jet dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd [of women and children], swallowing it in a shuddering blast. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.”#WarCrimes https://t.co/2PLLkjvrFz

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) November 14, 2021

Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court’s ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.

The precedent the US government is trying to set with its persecution of Julian Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the US war machine, not just in the United States but around the world. If it can succeed in legally establishing that it can extradite an Australian journalist for publishing information in the public interest about US war crimes, it will have succeeded in legally establishing that it can do that to any journalist anywhere. And you can kiss investigative reporting like this goodbye.

This is what’s at stake in the Assange case. Our right to know what the most deadly elements of the most powerful government on our planet are doing. The fact that the drivers of empire think it is legitimate to deprive us of such information by threatening to imprison anyone who tries to show it to us makes them an enemy of all humanity.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The U.S. has declassified thousands of documents relating to its involvement in the ousting of Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende and the installing of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Australia, on the other hand, continues to guard its classified documents on the pretext of security, drawing a discrepancy between its purported democratic principles and obstructing the public’s right to knowledge. As a country which welcomed Chileans fleeing the horrors of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, as well as harbouring Chilean agents – the most notable case being that of Adriana Rivas – Australia’s political and moral obligation should not be played down.

This month, the Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruled that releasing documents relating to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service’s (ASIS) role in Chile would damage Commonwealth relations. “Protecting our ability to keep secrets – and being seen to do that – may require us to continue suppressing documents containing what may appear to be benign or uncontroversial information about events that occurred long ago,” the ruling partly stated.

In September this year, heavily redacted documents were declassified which confirmed ASIS working with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following petitions signed by a former Australian intelligence officer, Clinton Fernandes, calling upon the government to clarify its role in Cambodia, Indonesia and Chile.

Fernandes had described Australia’s foreign policy complicity with the U.S. as “a profoundly undemocratic, unfriendly act.” Allende, after all, was democratically elected. U.S. interference to bring about the right-wing dictatorship was a strategy to impede other countries from following Chile’s example in democratic revolutionary socialism.

In 1971, ASIS was tasked to open a radio station in Santiago by the CIA through which spy operations were conducted. Australia’s involvement ceased when the newly-elected Labour Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closing down of operations, fearing that any public disclosure would make things difficult in terms of explaining ASIS’s presence. At the same time, Australia was also concerned that its decision would be interpreted as anti-American.

Australia’s decision is baffling, considering the amount of declassification which the U.S., as the main instigator of violence in Latin America, has undertaken. The Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal did not make its proceedings public, thus Fernandes and his lawyer could not counter-argue the decision.

To state there not a sufficient passage of time has passed since Australia’s involvement in the coup stands in contrast with how Chile has proceeded since the democratic transition, where the rewriting of a new constitution spells the possibility of a thorough reckoning with the dictatorship legacy. While the Chilean military still holds on to its files and upholds its secret pact which National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agents are bound to, thus refusing to collaborate with the courts for justice when it comes to locating the disappeared, for example, the Chilean government has been coerced to respond to the people’s call for change, thus ushering in an era where Pinochet’s legacy can be challenged and toppled.

There exists speculation that the Australian government would request permission from the CIA to reveal its role, based upon an agreement between the CIA and ASIS. In the early 90s, Chileans in Australia requested the expulsion of DINA agents living in Australia but were told that the government did not have permission from the CIA to heed the request.

Almost 50 years have passed since Pinochet took power, so what exactly is Australia afraid of? The petition was not calling for a revelation of names, but rather the actions which would shed light on Australia’s role in Chile at the behest of the CIA. Considering the exiled Chileans living in Australia, refusing declassification is a political infringement on their right to memory.

“Ignorance is bliss” my grandmother used to say when I was a child. That is the “American Way” I came to learn especially when the governments and military-intelligence agencies conduct all sorts of crimes against their own people and to other peoples and governments.

My grandmother had a point, because most “common” people accept this daily reality. They have learned to do so by watching what “their” governments do against those who seek information that the powerful wish to hide from us. That is why they want to kill our messenger Julian Assange. That is why they murdered the only U.S. president who challenged the might and will of the “deep state”, namely, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Spectacular Photos Of John F. Kennedy (allthatsinteresting.com)

This article summarizes some of that history and reports new evidence about murderous CIA.

The truth is that the CIA runs United States’ foreign policy covertly, along with the Pentagon and the weapons/oil/minerals industries, which are somewhat more visible. The Establishment knows the “intelligence community” murdered President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, who would have reopened the murder investigation of his brother had he been allowed to win the 1968 presidential campaign. New Evidence Implicates CIA, LAPD, FBI and Mafia as Plotters in Elaborate “Hit” Plan to Prevent RFK From Ever Reaching White House – CovertAction Magazine

The military-industrial complex dominates, Dwight Eisenhower—one of its generals and presidents—told us upon turning over the reins of official power to John Kennedy. Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon delivered its parting gift to Kennedy: Overthrow Cuba’s revolution and its legitimate government with an invasion, starting at the Bay of Pigs, southwest of Havana.

(See chapters 1-6 of my book, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert, for the following information on U.S. aggression against Cuba.

On the day that Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, April 12, 1961, the new president told the media there was no plan to invade Cuba. The day after, CIA’s Operation 40 was launched from Guatemala Fourteen hundred paramilitaries, mostly anti-revolutionary Cuban exiles, sailed on U.S. navy boats to the Bay of Pigs, 200 kilometers southwest from Havana. After just three days, local farmer militia and some military troops, led by President Fidel Castro, defeated the invaders.

Kennedy had refused to send in official U.S. aircraft to rescue the mission and the CIA was livid. It then set up Operation Mongoose, which included sabotage of production centers, food stores, a harbor, and even schools; assassinations of Cubans, including scores (eventually hundreds) of attempts on President Fidel Castro’s life. Later CIA-led operations included the use of chemical and biological warfare, which destroyed food crops, caused the entire loss of all its pigs, and caused diseases with deaths of hundreds of people. (See Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn: Ridenour, Ron: 9780962497513: Amazon.com: Books, especially chapter 4, “Germ Warriors”).

Imagine any government acting that way against the United States! Cuba and its Soviet ally obviously had to protect the Cuban people and its state. Cuba received some Soviet nuclear missiles to discourage an all-out nuclear war, which the Pentagon and the CIA wanted Kennedy to undertake once they learned that missiles were in the process of being assembled for potential use. This led to the October Missile Crisis, October 1962.

Once again, this U.S. president chose to defy the warmongers—the only American president to do so where it really counts, other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had Big Business against him, even to the point of a plot to overthrow him—the same Big Business that helped finance Mussolini’s fascist regime, Franco’s and Hitler’s military. Nazis & America: The USA’s Fascist Past | History Cooperative and Business Plot – Wikipedia (See also chapter eight, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert.)

Three decades later, President Kennedy rejected the Pentagon-CIA nuclear war plan. Instead, he ordered the navy to conduct a blockade to prevent any more Soviet ships from entering Cuba.

When U.S. Navy ships engaged one of four Soviet submarines sailing in international waters on the way to Cuba, the captains of the submarine thought the U.S. had started a war. U.S. naval depth charges had destroy the submarine’s communications. The Russians had no way to contact Moscow or the U.S. ships. They had one nuclear missile and one captain proposed using it. Another captain, Vasili Arkhipov talked him out of it. They surfaced and turned back to Russia as U.S. jets strafed their vessel. No one was killed.

At the Havana Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2002, a key organizer and leader of the non-governmental National Security Archives, Thomas Blanton, called Arkhipov, “the guy who saved the world.”

Vasili Arkhipov. Photo courtesy of M Yarovskaya and A. Labunskaya

Daniel Ellsberg, once a key figure in the Establishment who risked his life to show the world U.S. government-military-CIA crimes against humanity by revealing its own documents, the Pentagon Papers. In 2017, Ellsberg published a whistleblowing book, The Doomsday Machine. Here is evidence that the U.S. has always thought of using nuclear weapons in first strike.

Following the closest call ever to a nuclear Armageddon, President Kennedy resisted being the usual lackey president for big business and its war machine. He started to secretly contact Cuban leadership hoping to find a way out of the aggressive post he inherited. He did the same with the Vietnamese. Kennedy realized that the United States could not win a war against these resilient peoples, not without using nuclear weapons. He also realized that the U.S. could not drop atomic bombs again without retaliation, leading to an eventual nuclear world war.

When Kennedy’s Democrat president predecessor, Harry Truman, was preparing to kill hundreds of thousands Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets already knew the Yankee and British governments were planning to do that and to manufacture additional bombs that could be used against them with the aim of taking over Russia-Soviet’s sovereignty.

Winston Churchill planned “Operation Unthinkable” for a summer 1945 invasion against Soviet controlled Eastern European areas, and to drop nuclear bombs on key Russian cities. Harry Truman developed a similar plan, “Operation Pincher”, on March 2, 1946—U.S. Joint War Plans. (Chapter 10 of The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert.)

Fortunately, for the safety of the world, some people working on the Manhattan Project gave information to the Soviets so they could make their own bombs, which they did by 1949 before the U.S. had made enough new bombs. Given that balance of nuclear power, the U.S. has not used its monstrous nuclear weapons again, other than less holocaust-causing weapons, known as depleted uranium, which the U.S. has used against many countries’ peoples.

The profit-making war-makers’ solution for everlasting growth, and its America Über Alles mission for world power, “eliminated” its key obstacle, President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s gleeful successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, they continued their sabotage, and innumerable attempts to assassinate Cuba’s president and his closest comrades Raul Castro and Che Guevara.

The military-industrial complex needed more troops, more war machinery against the stubborn Vietnamese. Lyndon Johnson concocted the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”. He lied that its ship USS Maddox was attacked, on August 2, 1964, by North Vietnamese ships in Vietnam’s territorial waters. There were no U.S. casualties. Two days later, another “enemy attack” was reported. Johnson got the congress to grant him the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution allowing full war operations without declaring war. The war lasted another 11 years before the Vietnamese finally defeated the U.S. and its South Vietnamese lackeys. The war cost between three and five million peoples’ lives, including about 60,000 American lives over a 15-year period, plus several thousand suicides of depressed troops after returning home.

National Security Agency documents, which became public in 2005, show that the North Vietnamese did not engage either ship. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, a war leader during JFK and LBJ administrations, later admitted it never happened.

Most of us know that the Warren Commission decided beforehand that Lee Harvey Oswald was the patsy for the one-lone-man lie, and therefore he had to be killed, immediately.

Jack Ruby shot Oswald surrounded by police in a police station two days after the president’s assassination. Ruby was connected to the Mafia, operating strip joints in Dallas. He was sentenced to death, which was later overturned. Ruby asked the Warren several times to take him to Washington D.C., so he could speak freely about the assassinations. He told the Commission “my life is in danger here”. “I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here.”

Ruby was taken to a hospital for pneumonia, December 6, 1966. Suddenly he had cancer and died extraordinarily quickly, January 3, one month before granted a new trial.

While the mass media covers up who is actually responsible for many mysterious deaths of important persons, from time to time bits and pieces slip out. Such happened recently in Miami of all places. Ricardo Morales Jr., is a son of Richard Morales, known as “Monkey”—“contract CIA worker, anti-Castro militant, counter-intelligence chief for Venezuela, FBI informant and drug dealer”, wrote the Herald. He spoke recently on Miami’s Actualidad Radio 1040 AM, and to the “Miami Herald”. He added new light to one of the theories of President Kennedy’s assassination.

“The Miami Herald”, and its Spanish kin, “El Nuevo Herald”, headlined Cuban-born Nora Gámez Torres’ blockbuster article, “Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp”. It is rare that Oswald is not named “the” killer. Ricardo “Monkey” Morales told sons he knew Lee Harvey Oswald | Miami Herald; Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp (msn.com) and Ricardo “el Mono” Morales le dijo a sus hijos que conocía a Lee Harvey Oswald | El Nuevo Herald

Morales Jr. said that his father was a sniper instructor in secret CIA camps where Cuban exiles and others trained to invade Cuba, and that he realized in the hours after JFK was murdered that the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been one of his sniper trainees.

“Monkey” Morales told his son that he didn’t believe Oswald had killed Kennedy because he had witnessed him shooting, and said “there is no way that guy could shoot that well.”

Morales also told his two sons that two days before the assassination, his CIA handler told him and his “clean-up” team to go to Dallas for a mission. But after the assassination, they were ordered back to Miami without learning what the mission was about, wrote the “Miami Herald”.

The “Miami Herald” pointed to other serious reports “that a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, including the leader of the organization Alpha 66, Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro, met at a house in Dallas days before the assassination, and that Oswald was seen visiting the house or been in the area. As that theory goes, Cuban exiles, who felt betrayed by Kennedy’s lack of support in the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation and his deal with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis not to invade Cuba, could have planned to kill JFK and blamed Castro so the U.S. would invade the island.”

These claims “point the finger at the CIA, which some observers believe could help explain why President Joe Biden backed off last week on declassifying the remaining documents in the case,” wrote journalist Nofra Gámez Torres.

Although Oswald was basically convicted by the government post mortem, the House Select Committee on Assassinations 1979 report contradicted the 1964 Warren Commission conclusion. “The committee instead concluded that the president was likely slain as the result of a conspiracy and that there was a high probability that two gunmen fired at him,” Gámez Torres referenced.

“The House Select Committee, which also interviewed Morales, said they couldn’t preclude the possibility that Cuban exiles were involved.”

“Whatever happened, Biden’s decision to postpone the declassification of the remaining 15,000 documents linked to the case is once again giving life to the conspiracy theories. Morales’ son believes the documents might never be made public.”

Although Biden had advocated for the release of all JFK murder documents, he suddenly ordered the postponement on October 22. The president claimed that the COVID pandemic caused the delay with the caveat for the “need to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

Republican President George W. Bush signed a law, in 1992, requiring the release of all records concerning JFK’s murder within 25 years—before October 26, 2017. That Democrat President Biden disobeys this law is more evidence that Kennedy’s own party leaders are afraid of the CIA.
Biden’s previous boss, Barack Obama, also went along with the CIA. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, sat with the official president every Tuesday to order who should be droned to death. Brennan also dreamed up the fairy tale Russiagate, that is, that President Vladimir Putin, seeking sovereignty and world peace, is behind every interference to the military-industrial complex mission: America Über Alles.

There might still exist some documents that could point to how the president’s fractured brain disappeared. The Mystery of JFK’s Brain: How Did it Disappear? – Historic Mysteries.

Maybe there is evidence showing that one “magic bullet” could not possibly have first penetrated through Kennedy’s back, puncturing his spine, then twisting around and exiting through the front of his neck smashing part of his brain. Then this same bullet penetrated the front seat into Texas Governor John Connally’s right rib, then exiting the front of his chest, wounding his right wrist, and finally stopping in his left thigh.

Maybe there are even papers that show how 17 eye-witnesses who saw what the Warren Commission was forced to hide from us—that there were shots from different directions—came to be murdered or died suddenly within a short time.

After an extensive search on the Bill Gates-founded Microsoft search machine, I could not find any major medium, other than MSN, that picked up on the “Miami Herald” story about the Morales revelations. Yet many media did report on President Joe Biden’s decision of October 22 to postpone for at least a year (or forever) the release of the remaining 15,000 documents held in secret concerning the murder of John Kennedy.

The British daily “Independent” headlined: “Is Biden blocking JFK records over hidden bombshells?” The “bombshell” being that the Central Intelligence Agency “eliminated the obstacle”.

Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana’s own biography-as-told-to his brother and godson, Double Cross (Warner Books, 1992), named the conspirators and killers. Mobster Giancana had close ties with the CIA when one of them, most likely, shot him in his home on June 19, 1975, the day before he was ordered to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Senate was investigating some of the CIA’s “dirty tricks”. Giancana’s family co-authors are convinced he would not have “double crossed” his cohorts in crime, but they double-crossed him.

This Day in History: June 19th- Giancana’s Demise (todayifoundout.com)

“The Independent” suggests that if the “remainder” of the documents are eventually released, we should not expect that anything revealing the actual murderers will be released: “National Security Act”. Is Biden blocking the JFK assassination files over hidden bombshells? – NewsBreak

That anti-democratic 1917 law protects “intelligence agencies” when they murder people, especially world leaders. This is also the reason why they seek to silence—kill one way or another—Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.

“The Independent” wrote:

“Former Massachusetts Representative Patrick Kennedy said: “I think for the good of the country, everything has to be put out there so there’s greater understanding of our history”. His cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr, called the memorandum “an outrage against American democracy”. [RFK called the Warren Report, a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”]

“We’re not supposed to have secret governments within the government,” said Mr. Kennedy, whose father — Senator Robert Kennedy — reportedly did not believe that Oswald acted alone.”

“Kel McClanahan, an attorney specialising in national security law and information and privacy law who previously served as an associate editor for the American Intelligence Journal, told The Independent that those looking to see everything by the end of next year shouldn’t get too excited.”

Mr. McClanahan predicted that Mr. Biden would follow the bipartisan practice of deferring to intelligence officials’ wishes in keeping some records hidden, despite his December 2022 deadline.

“Unless you have a very strong willed president who will say: ‘I do not care because I am so pro-transparency’, they will defer to their intelligence people,” he said. He added that as time goes on and the Kennedy assassination fades from public memory, the clamour for new revelations will grow dimmer and dimmer.

Author James K. Galbraith wrote about the documents postponement on the website for the Assassination Archives and Research Center. Blog Page (aarclibrary.org)

“In reporting this story, The New York Times reminds us that an exhaustive, ‘yearlong inquiry into the murder led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.’ Oswald, like Kennedy, has been dead for 58 years. If he acted alone, and if an exhaustive inquiry established this fact 57 years ago, what secret could be left? If he acted alone, there were no other guilty parties. Not then, not 29 years later, and not today. The Times distinguishes between ‘researchers and conspiracy theorists.’ One may infer that researchers are those who trust the Warren Commission, whereas conspiracy theorists are those who do not. But apart from those few who have made careers out of defending the Commission against its many critics, why would anyone who didn’t distrust the official story be interested in this case? In fact, as the Times admits, people are interested, with surveys finding that ‘most Americans believe others were involved.’”

“…I take them [Biden and related agencies] at their word: that in their view, a full disclosure of all documents would compromise military, intelligence, and foreign relations. It is not difficult to imagine how. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was a conspiracy. Suppose that the remaining documents, together with those already released, were to establish – or permit private citizens to establish – what most Americans already believe. In that case, it would be obvious that the cover-up involved senior U.S. government officials – including the leaders of the very agencies currently being tasked with reviewing the records. And, as a point of logic, it follows that in every succeeding cohort, under every president, the cover-up has continued. Isn’t that the only plausible way the current interests of those agencies might be damaged?

“The irony is that by withholding the records, the government has already admitted, without saying so, that the Warren Commission lied and that there are vile secrets, which it is determined to protect. It concedes, without saying so, that there was a conspiracy and that there is an ongoing cover-up. If there were not, all the records would have been released long ago. You don’t have to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to see this. Biden’s 2022 deadline will come and go. The song and dance will continue. No one who remembers 1963 will live to see the U.S. government admit the full truth about Kennedy’s murder.”

No U.S. President Can Control the CIA

If the United States’ “Deep State” murdered its own president, there is little else that it would not do. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, the most heavily guarded building in the world, were impossible to achieve without insider collaboration, at the very least.

What the U.S. government told the world about 9/11 is full of lies and impossibilities, just like the “magic bullet”. No steel building, such as the twin towers, has ever collapsed from fire alone. Never. Witnesses close by and inside heard explosions, like demolitions, inside the building.
Thousands of professional architects and engineers know that what we were told is impossible according to physics. Why lie? (See: Is There Any Truth in ‘The 9/11 Truth Movement?’ – 911Truth.Org; and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth | WTC Twin Towers and Building 7 (ae911truth.org)

Following the murder of 3000 people, the Bush government created Homeland Security. This agency oversees all law-enforcement, and allows the arrest of people without cause and hold them indefinitely. It ordered the National Security Agency to create technology that allows it (along with the CIA) to spy on every human being in the world. To stop any semblance of a real free press, it now prohibits all journalists in the world from doing their job to report on “Deep State”/Pentagon crimes against humanity. That is why they had Julian Assange kidnapped and imprisoned, and tried to do the same to Edward Snowden. Due to Wikileaks skill and tenacity, they got Edward Snowden to Russia and into exile, although his destiny was Latin America. Implementing 9/11 Commission Recommendations | Homeland Security (dhs.gov)

The 9/11 attacks is the United States counterpart to Adolf Hitler/Herman Gøring’s Nazis burning of the German parliament, on February 27, 1933, so it could blame the legal Communist Party and Social Democratic Party from continuing to have any influence. They imprisoned 4,000 members of the CP within 24 hours. The Nazi firebombing allowed them to make the Reichstag Fire Decree, “legalizing” the round up and murder of tens of thousands opponents or dissidents, and laid the bases for the Holocaust against millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slaves, and 250,000 physically and mentally handicapped people. The Reichstag Fire | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org). See also BBC’s “Rise of the Nazis” The First Six Months in Power (TV Episode 2019) – IMDb

The Nazi war caused the death of 14.5% of the 190 million Soviet people—27 million people, of them ca. 17 million civilians—plus the loss of 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns and 4.7 million house destroyed. The Nazi war caused the death of 0.32% of U.S. Americans—420,000 people, of them ca. 12,000 civilians. No destruction to its land except at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by Japanese.

The CIA is not SS. In fact, it has more power than any United States president unlike the SS, which was under Hitler. The CIA lies, cheats, steals, murders and tortures just like SS and other Nazi murder institutions did. After WWII, the CIA used Nazi scientists for United States domination, and protected Nazi murderers by bringing them to the U.S., Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Nazis “Arian Superiority” ideology replaced or complemented by, “American Superiority”.

The CIA sought total control over South America (also Central America) through its Operation Condor during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan periods. The CIA provided planning, training, arms, and torture to military juntas and right-wing coup governments that the CIA either supported or put into semi-power. Between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians were murdered, 30,000 “disappeared”, ca. 50,000 imprisoned with many tortured, often repeatedly.

The CIA euphemistically called this “a cooperative effort by the intelligence security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.” Operation Condor, 1968-1989 | National Security Archive (gwu.edu) and Operation Condor – Wikipedia.

“Combating terrorism and subversion” is double speak to cover up for the fact that citizens wish for and struggle for democratic rights of free press and speech; the right to choose their own governments. It is also a classic case of the “intelligence community’s” psychological projection.

The Pentagon and CIA have long used torture themselves and trained others in the use of multi-torture methods. About – SOA Watch and School of the Americas – SourceWatch.

“Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and protecting exponents such as Klaus Barbie,” wrote Jeffrey St. Claire.

Barbie was SS and Gestapo, an insidious torturer—the “Butcher of Lyon—of Jews and French resisters. The CIA protected him and sent him to work for right-wing governments in Bolivia.
See Douglas Valentine’s excellent exposé book on the CIA and its torturing of Vietnamese, The Phoenix Program.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lectured at Texas A&M University, on April 15, 2019. He responded to a question. “When I was a cadet [West Point] our motto was: You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do… [when] I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

That is to say that lying, cheating, stealing (and, of course, constant warring with mass murder and torture) is “the glory of the American experiment”. As this criminal murderer told his story, he laughed and his audience joined him.

President Harry Truman, who created the CIA in 1947, came to the same conclusion as did Pompeo about the CIA but without thinking such behavior was “glorious”. He told his biographer, Merle Miller, that he regretted having created the CIA.

“The CIA doesn’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on…it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody… If I had known what was going to happen, I never would have done [created] it.”

Presented with information that CIA Director Allen Dulles had assisted some French generals and French Nazi sympathizers to overthrow (murder) President Charles de Gaulle, in order to prevent an end to the war against Algeria’s independence, President Kennedy told de Gaulle’s ambassador in Washington, Hervé Alphand, that while he supported de Gaulle he could not vouch for the CIA.

Kennedy told Alphand that, ‘the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.’” (See article by David Talbot, founder of “Salon”, and a CIA biographer).

Republican George W. Bush learned the same lesson regarding the CIA when President Vladimir Putin tried to accommodate the United States government.

“Putin met with [President George W. Bush] several times, and they described themselves as friends. At their first meeting, June 16, 2001, held in Slovenia, Bush said: ‘I looked him in the eye and got a sense of his soul. I could trust him.’” (Chapter 14 of “The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert”.)

Putin looked into Bush’s eyes and saw…- All Hat No Cattle

On the day of the terror attacks in New York, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, Putin and his wife attended their Russian Orthodox Church to light a candle for those killed and injured, and they prayed for them. He told National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that all preexisting hostility between the two countries would be put aside while the U.S. dealt with the tragedy.

Putin even sent arms supplies to the U.S. Northern Alliance ally. He arranged for one of Russia’s close allies, the former Soviet Republic Kyrgyzstan, to let the U.S. military use one of its bases as a spy center and launching pad for flights to and from Afghanistan. The Yankees were there until June 2014. They had moved 5.3 million military personnel (some more than once) in and out of Afghanistan in 136,000 flights.

Two other former Soviet republics assisted. Uzbekistan allowed the U.S. to use a military base with 1,500 troops until 2005. Russia had a military division in Tajikistan, and it allowed the U.S. military to use it, in order to supply weapons and other cargo to its forces in Afghanistan. The U.S. trained some Tajikistan troops.

President Putin even considered joining NATO, but Bush turned that down. Instead, Bush withdrew from the Richard Nixon-signed Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in 1972.

Putin spoke to Oliver Stone about this double standard.

“We assumed that the Cold War was over, that we had transparent relations with the United States, with the whole world, and we certainly counted on support. But instead we witnessed the American intelligence services support terrorists. And even when we confirmed that, when we demonstrated that Al Qaeda fighters were fighting in the Caucasus, we still saw the intelligence services of the United States continue to support these fighters.

“There was one episode. I told President Bush about that, and he said, ‘Do you have any

concrete data [which] specifically does what specifically?’ And I told him, ‘Yes, I do have such data,’ and I showed him, and I even named those persons of the American intelligence services who were working in the Caucasus, including in Baku…they also provided technical support, they helped transfer fighters from one place to another.”

Bush told Putin, “I’ll sort this all out.” This was in 2004-5, and Putin had to wait a long time.

Finally, “the CIA sent us a letter. The response was quite peculiar. ‘We support all the political forces, including the opposition forces, and we’re going to continue to do that.”

Putin told “The Moscow Times” that Russian intelligence had intercepted calls between separatists in the North Caucasus and the U.S. intelligence based in the former Soviet Republic Azerbaijan during the early 2000s, proving that Washington was helping the insurgents.

Putin said that President Bush promised to “kick the ass” (a favorite Bush expression) of the intelligence officers in question. But after the CIA letter came to Russia’s intelligence service, Federal Security Service (FSB), where Putin had been director, no more was heard from Kick Ass Bush.

Putin also told Stone that he thought it was wrong of the U.S. “to impose on other nations and peoples [their] own standards and models… Democracy cannot be imported from outside, it can only be born within society…I think it would be senseless and damaging if the Soviet Union itself was to impose on other peoples and other nations their rules of conduct.”

The problem is the U.S. does not want other peoples to decide how they want to live. It wants America Über Alles. Other than its brutal might, the biggest obstacle for ending this “kiss ass” machine is that the Establishment has captured or stunned most peoples’ minds. They have convinced so many that, yes, “ignorance is bliss”, just like granny cautioned me.

By Antony LOEWENSTEIN, Peter CRONAU

Australia’s independence from Britain has been contested ground since the nation’s birth in 1901 — the first real test being Australia’s decision to send troops to Europe for Britain’s war with Germany in 1914.

Two bitterly fought referenda to allow military conscription were narrowly defeated — Australia’s contribution to the Great War was to remain a voluntary one.

Move forward to 2021 and the relationship is no less controversial. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a new Indo-Pacific military alliance with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in September and awkwardly titled it AUKUS (which as one nave noted, sounds better than USUKA).

In announcing AUKUS, the three leaders loftily claimed to be “guided by our enduring ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order.”

The U.K. in July signaled its re-emergence as a Pacific Ocean force when it announced the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth would lead a fleet of U.K. navy ships to join with the U.S. Navy in leading a flotilla of warships including Australian and Japanese vessels through the South China Sea.

The Australian Defence Department would neither confirm nor deny the precise nature of the maritime exercise. However, on this occasion the fleet kept a wary distance from Chinese-claimed territory.

The U.S. may brandish the world’s most powerful military but it is turning towards its traditional friends as it readies for confrontation, and perhaps conflict, with the rising economic and military powerhouse of China.

The AUKUS treaty saw Australia spectacularly dump its $90 billion contract with France to build Australia’s new submarine fleet, instead announcing a deal to buy U.S. and U.K. technology and build nuclear-powered submarines in Australia.

Although not nuclear armed (yet), the first of the new nuclear submarines will not be ready until as late as 2040. Other elements of the treaty, however, will come into play much sooner. Australia will spend $30 billion on new weaponry, including a suite of long-range missiles for its navy and air force, as well as land-based precision strike missiles, largely sourced or developed in conjunction with the U.K. and U.S.

Britain’s resurgent interest in the Pacific region as a part of its “increased international activism” was announced in March with Johnson stating the strategy will “tilt to the Indo-Pacific, increasingly the geopolitical centre of the world.”

Together with the U.S. “pivot to Asia” outlined by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2011, Australia is becoming a focus of a rapid military build-up.

Australia is in a precarious position as the “tilt” and “pivot” of these major powers’ international activism plays out on the strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific. Australia is hoping it is more than a mere “suitable piece of real estate” adrift in the South Pacific.

The world may have got some insight into the true closeness of the new AUKUS relationship when in a September press conference Boris Johnson referred to Scott Morrison as “prime minister Morris” and Biden forgot his name entirely, referring to him instead as “uh, that fella down under.”

Joint Work on New Weapons

In the 1950s and 60s Britain convinced Canberra to allow it to test its prototype nuclear bombs in South Australia. With a nuclear ascendant U.S., Britain was racing to keep a seat at the nuclear table. Australia on the other hand was hoping that helping Britain would ensure them a “nuclear guarantee”.

Described as safe, the bombs’ fallout from the Maralinga and Emu Field tests contaminated livestock and humans, and fallout carried by winds was detected as far away as Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

British disinterest saw a Royal Commission in 1985 that led to Australia embarrassing the U.K. into helping fund an attempted clean-up of the sites, with works ending in 2000.

As well as nuclear weapons testing, the Australian desert lands of the Anangu indigenous peoples have for 60 years also hosted other weapons development projects, rocket firings and missile tests at the RAAF Woomera Range Complex, near Maralinga.

It was only in 1994 that the Anangu received compensation for injury and damages of the nuclear testing.

Both Britain and the U.S. are now working on new generation nuclear-capable hypersonic missile projects in Australia — Britain’s BAE Systems has Project Javelin and the U.S. is developing SCIFiRE with arms manufacturers Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The RAAF Woomera Range has been the site of BAE Systems development work on its Taranis supersonic stealth bomber drone, though the project has stalled, and on the Mantis, a long-endurance drone.

Airbus is also using Australia in developing the Zephyr solar-powered high-altitude long-endurance pseudo-satellite surveillance drone, designed to supply live vision of combat for up to 40 hours from 20 kms high.

It’s been undergoing test flights in the calm air above Wyndham in Western Australia but has suffered several crashes. The U.K. Ministry of Defence is one of the main customers, if not the only customer, for the Zephyr.

While Australia awaits its own fleet of 12 armed Reaper drones, Britain has been making use of RAAF drone pilots embedded with the RAF conducting missions over Iraq and Syria, piloted from the RAF base at Waddington in Lincolnshire.

Australian pilots began training on Reaper drones in 2015 in the U.S. and flew operational missions for the USAF in its war over Iraq and Syria.

Pine Gap

However, it is the top secret Pine Gap satellite surveillance base — officially titled “Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap” (JDFPG, but known generally to the 800 staff as “the base”) – that is Australia’s greatest contribution to the Five Eyes alliance that also includes Canada and New Zealand.

Located near Alice Springs, it’s a base for the C.I.A., National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office and collects signals and other data from an array of satellites snooping on military, commercial and private communication systems.

Mirrored with the N.S.A.’s base at  RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, it forms a global surveillance net.

Battlefield intelligence used by the U.S. in its “war on terror” has been gathered and analyzed at Pine Gap for use by the U.S. military including in potentially illegal drone strikes in the Middle East that have killed thousands of civilians.

Gough Whitlam giving a speech during the 1972 election campaign. (National Archives of Australia, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Last year, research by professor Jenny Hocking revealed confidential documents from the Australian National Archive that showed the advance notice that Queen Elizabeth had of the plotting by the governor general. The documents also showed a level of encouragement from senior staff of the Palace in the dismissal of the democratically elected prime minister.Pine Gap first attracted public disquiet in 1975 when the then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam threatened to reveal the names of C.I.A. agents involved. He was controversially dismissed by the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General John Kerr, on November 11, 1975.

At the time of the public and political controversy over Pine Gap, the site hosted just eight satellite dishes. Today, the base is quietly undergoing a new expansion with six new dishes being constructed, bringing the total now to 39.

The new dishes, most likely aimed at detecting missile launches, will boost the U.S.’s planning to fight a nuclear war with China.

Australia is tumbling headlong in accepting the rotational basing of U.S. Marines in Darwin — presently 2,500, soon expected to be 5,000 personnel. South of Darwin, near Katherine, the Tindal RAAF base is undergoing a major upgrade of refueling capability and armaments storage, to allow it to host an expanded range of allied military aircraft, including the U.S.’s long-range B-52 bombers.

Nuclear Proliferation

Australia prides itself on being a member of the “rules-based international order,” however it is cooperating with two nuclear weapons states that are breaching the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Britain has announced it is to increase the number of nuclear warheads it has for its Trident submarines, and together with the U.S. is developing new generation hypersonic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere on the globe.

Along with the U.K. and U.S., Australia is a holdout from signing or ratifying the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War. This treaty would prohibit Australia from “provision of assistance to any State” conducting activities ranging from producing, possessing and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, through to possessing the threat to use nuclear weapons.

The Treaty requirements “to prevent and suppress” prohibited activity “on territory under its jurisdiction or control” would see a range of necessary limitations placed on Australia — including, most importantly, a review of the nuclear war-supporting functions of the Pine Gap satellite surveillance base.

War Crimes in Afghanistan

Australian soldiers on foot patrol in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2008. (ISAF, John Collins, U.S. Navy)

The U.K. and Australia have played a key partnership role since the 9/11 attacks but have dealt with the fallout slightly differently. When the Brereton Report, an Australian-government led investigation into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, released its findings in November 2020 the results were devastating.

A four-year inquiry found that 39 Afghan civilians were murdered by Australian forces in 23 incidents in 2009, 2012 and 2013. The Kabul-based Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty uncovered countless more killings by Australian soldiers that went unmentioned in the Brereton Report.

According to the Australian government, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan may potentially hinder ongoing investigations into war crimes though the country is at its most relatively peaceful for decades. It’s hard not to conclude that Australian officials view the Taliban government as a convenient impediment to progressing with any prosecutions.

Nonetheless, the Brereton Report is one of the more comprehensive examinations of any Western army that occupied Afghanistan after October 2001. None of this is to defend the Australian government’s response to the report, which is filled with obfuscation, denial and willful blindness, but it’s still superior to many other comparable nations.

This is despite both Canada and New Zealand having uncovered hard evidence of their own forces committing abuses in Afghanistan and the U.S. escaping scrutiny after pressuring the International Criminal Court for years to only investigate the Taliban and ISIS.

U.S. President Donald Trump granted clemency to U.S. military personnel who killed Afghans. Fox News had encouraged Trump to pardon these men accused of war crimes.

The seriousness of the Brereton Report was reflected in comments by the Afghan-based Independent Human Rights Commission. Its chairperson, Shaharzad Akbar, said that the Australian investigation should push the U.K., U.S. and other occupation forces to examine their role in the death of civilians since 2001.

She particularly stressed that the U.K. “open an independent inquiry to review and investigate the allegation of unlawful killings by U.K. special forces.”

Instead, the British Ministry of Defence said that its “armed forces are held to the highest standards, and the Service Police have carried out extensive and independent investigations into alleged misconduct of U.K. forces in Afghanistan. As of today, none of the historical allegations under Operation Northmoor have led to prosecutions.”

Despite claiming that it was investigating serious allegations of war crimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain failed to find anyone senior worth prosecuting despite mountains of evidence. One soldier was jailed for stabbing a 10-year-old Afghan boy.

Nonetheless, cover-ups and lies were central to Whitehall’s response.

The murder of Afghan civilians was not deemed important enough nor the dogged pursuit by Saiffulah Yar who accused U.K. forces of killing four members of his family in Helmand Province in 2011.

There was important reporting by BBC Panorama and BBC Newsnight though overall the Western media has not covered itself in glory reporting the Afghan war, usually preferring government and military sources to Afghans.

Despite the Chilcot inquiry, with its damning assessment of how former Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed his country into war with Iraq, nobody has been seriously held to account for Britain’s failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fear remains that Australia, despite the Office of the Special Investigator still investigating human rights breaches in Afghanistan, will follow London’s lead and bury or indefinitely delay any potential war crimes trials.

Elite soldier Ben Roberts-Smith is accused of killing Afghan civilians and is currently suing major Australian media reports for daring to report it. The trial has become a proxy war crimes trial while masquerading as a defamation case. It may be the only such trial in the foreseeable future.

Militarized Immigration Policy

Australia’s Manus Island regional immigration processing facility, 2012. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

It’s the militarized immigration policy where Canberra arguably inspires London the most. Australia’s immigration policy is known for its brutal disregard for human rights and sending refugees to remote Pacific Islands for processing. The policy has deep roots in Australia’s settler colonial history.

The so-called Pacific Solution began in 2001 and quickly received bi-partisan support in the Federal Parliament. Forcibly placing vulnerable refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Sri Lanka or elsewhere in overcrowded, hot and dangerous locations was a cruelly effective method of dehumanizing and silencing people, many of whom were escaping wars in countries that Australia was supposedly trying to liberate through occupation.

Despite protests from the European Union and many other liberals around the world, Australia’s refugee policy has become a model for the EU and Britain under the Conservative government.

Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, Dec. 7, 2008. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a right-wing climate denier, set the tone in a 2015 speech when delivering the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London by arguing that Europe should shut its borders completely. “The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in,” he said.

The U.K. Conservatives listened and agreed. In 2020, U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly examined the viability of constructing an asylum seeker detention facility 6,000 kilometers away from Britain, in Ascension Island or St. Helena in the South Atlantic, but eventually decided it was logistically too challenging.

Instead, in 2021 Patel announced that Britain would forcibly push back refugee boats crossing the English Channel, a carbon copy of Australia’s boat turn-back policy which the U.N. estimated in July had resulted in 800 people on 31 boats since 2013 being towed back to potential danger, sinking or death.

In some cases, Australia is credibly accused of covering up actions that led to hundreds of deaths at sea. Australia also stands accused of paying Indonesian people smugglers to keep boats out of Australian waters.

Australia and Britain share a political, ideological and military partnership that transcends partisan bickering. As journalists who have investigated this relationship for years, it’s revealing how little scrutiny is given to it by the establishment media and political elites.

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