Author: Dave LIndorff

Flash! The US has re-invaded Iraq!

The actual invasion has been a two-month-long stealth process, beginning in mid-July, when President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama ordered some 800 US troops sent to that country in response to the growing battlefield success of fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a group initially trained and funded covertly by the US, which intended for ISIS to topple Syria’s leader Bashar al Assad, only to have the group decide it wanted to attack Iraq and behead US journalists instead.

This force of 800, which at the time was said to be “assessing and advising” Iraqi forces as the Iraqi military battled ISIS, was then enlarged by the addition of another 130 “advisors” who were sent to northern Iraq a month later on August 13, and finally by another influx of 20 Marines flown in to Mt. Sinigar and finally by 350 troops flown in yesterday under cover of darkness, allegedly to “protect” the US Embassy compound in Baghdad.

That brings the total of US troops known to have invaded Iraq this summer to 1300, which slightly more than the 1000 troops that the US claims Russia has secretly slipped over the border into Ukraine to invade that embattled country of 54 million.

So now we supposedly have two invading armies invading countries in western Eurasia — Russia in eastern Ukraine and the US in Iraq — though the US has been fighting much more aggressively with the use of attack drones and aerial bombardment as well as ground troops.

Neither country has admitted that it has invaded a sovereign country, though the evidence is clearly otherwise, at least in the case of the US in Iraq. (In the case of Russia’s “invasion,” the evidence is scant, either because it doesn’t exist or because the Russians are just so good at stealth invasions nobody’s seen them.)

As this photo of US troops preparing to fly back into Iraq from Kuwait show, the US stealth re-invasion of that country is underway. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in contrast has been much stealthier, with photo evidence hard to find. The best stuff on offer provided by the US has been alleged satellite images of Russian equipment said to be over the border, but as these look more like screen shots of videogames, they are not very convincing. Perhaps the US should be taking lessons from the Russians about stealth techniques.

On a trip to Europe for a two-week stay in Finland, my wife and I at one point found ourselves seated next to a congenial 30-something guy, dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt. He said he was US Army major.

Initially, our conversation revolved around his little kids, and his complaint about how often he was sent out on “short assignments” in Europe far away from home. He also mentioned being somewhat hard of hearing after having been sent out on 250 missions in Iraq as a soldier in the cavalry, where he had been the gunner on a stryker armored vehicle. (He explained that he couldn’t wear ear protectors despite the constant loud roar of the heavy vehicle’s engine, “because you have to hear when you’re taking fire, and also to be able to communicate with the other guys inside the vehicle.”)

He was voluble, but discreet when it came to his current Army role, saying only that he had been reassigned from cavalry to “international relations,” which he later explained meant “handling relations” between US military forces and various countries’ militaries in the “European Theater.” He said he had become particularly busy since the beginning of the “Ukraine crisis,” but wouldn’t go into detail about what he was busy doing.

One could make an educated guess. Looking at the bulging muscles on this guy’s arms, shoulders and chest, it seemed clear that this was not a someone who just who sat at conferences and talked across tables discussing protocol. More likely, he was Special Forces in some training capacity.

In any event, his regular travels, which he said had him flying back and forth from the US to assignments in Europe almost every other week, make suggest that the US has ramped up in its military activities in Europe.

Later, in Finland, I made a road trip from the southern city of Kuopio to northern Lapland above the Arctic Circle, to report on arctic climate change. Just before reaching the Arctic Circle on my first evening on the road, I came on two young people, a man and a woman, who were hitchhiking. Being a long-time hitchhiker myself, and deeply in karmic debt as a driver, I immediately pulled over and invited them to hop in.

Ukrainian mothers in an anti-conscription protest against the Kiev government, and destruction as separatist rebels on a demoralized Ukrainian military
 

The US corporate media are awash in fevered articles and news stories about a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine, as though it was 1938, with German troops marching into Sedetenland and Austria. But let’s step back and look at what’s going on, calmly and rationally.

Ukraine, the eastern half of which country has historically been a part of Russia (the western part having in the past been a part of Poland), is in truth an ethnically and geographically divided “nation,” composed of Ukrainians, the majority of whom live in the western part of the country, and ethnic Russians who, while a minority within the whole of Ukraine, are a majority in the eastern part of the country.

After the last elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was driven out of office and out of the country in a putsch earlier this year, financed and backed politically by the United States, the new post-putsch government in Kiev begin instituting or threatening to institute laws that were viewed as threatening and repressive by the Russian minority in the east — things like restrictions on the use of Russian language, for example. As a result, the Ukrainian Russians rebelled, declaring their several regions to be autonomous republics. In Crimea, where Russians are the overwhelming majority of the population, a snap election was held on whether to leave Ukraine altogether, and rejoin Russia. It passed overwhelmingly, with over 90% of voters opting for reunion with Russia. (similar votes were also held, against Russia’s advice, in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, with similar results.)

Russia’s parliament agreed to annex Crimea, which not incidentally hosts Russia’s only southern naval base (it was at the time being rented to Russia by Ukraine on a long-term lease).

Subsequently, the Ukrainian government (under strong pressure from the US, including a secret visit by the head of the CIA) launched a military campaign, increasingly violent and bloody, to put down the rebellion in the “autonomous” regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, as well as in the cities of Odessa and Miriupol. After some 2200 civilians had been killed by indiscriminate Ukrainian shelling, rocket bombardments and aerial bombing of eastern cities by the Ukrainian airforce, and by armed fascist thugs in Odessa and Miriupol, with the outgunned separatist rebel forces being pushed back into the centers of the of Lugansk and Donetsk, where their situation looked increasingly desperate, Russia has apparently responded. It did this either by a direct intervention of Russian troops and armor, as claimed by the Ukrainian government, or, more likely, by allowing or encouraging Russian volunteers to cross the border and join the fight, as claimed by Russia. The result, either way, has been a rout of Ukrainian forces, who are now in almost full retreat.

Russia’s increased support for the separatist forces in the east, and the Ukrainian military’s abject collapse in the face of the separatist counteroffensive, has US officials, and the once war-mongering US corporate media, apoplectic. The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! America needs to act!

An entire village in the majority Russian-speaking Lugansk region, leveled by Ukrainian military shelling
 

Kuopio— Finland can be a shock to a visitor from America. The cities are clean, the highways and byways are smoothly paved and pothole-free despite the punishing winter climate faced by a country that straddles the Arctic Circle, schools look shiny and new, and it’s hard to see anyone who looks destitute.

It’s also incredibly hard to spot a police car or a police officer. Indeed, despite my spending two weeks in Finland earlier this month, including driving over 2000 miles from the city of Kuopio to the upper reaches of Lapland and back, I never saw one law enforcement officer, except at the Helsinki airport on my way home, when an elderly tourist from Turkey insisted that an airport cop accompany him to the tax rebate desk so he could file a complaint about the alleged misconduct of a woman behind the counter (the officer gently explained to the man that the law only provided for rebates of the value added tax to tourists for their purchases of goods valued at over 100 Euros, not for services).

It’s not that Finland doesn’t have its share of crimes, including violent crimes, but police are not swarming the streets, they don’t carry semi-automatic rifles on patrol, and they are even polite when they make arrests. When the teenage son of a friend of ours in Finland was caught with friends one evening a year or so ago smoking marijuana in a playground, the police simply called his parents, who came in and were advised to reprimand him and talk with him about the seriousness of taking drugs. There was no arrest or appearance before a judge, no fine, and no handcuffing.

One evening in Rovaniemi, a city in the south of Lapland, I found myself in a kabob joint, watching a Finnish TV reality cop show while I ate. Man, was it boring! Two cops joked in their patrol van. Eventually they happened on what appeared to be a young prostitute being propositioned by a young man. They pulled over and got out, not even putting their flashing lights on. Strolling up to the pair, they were all smiles. They questioned the two, informed them that they were engaging in an activity that was illegal, and told them to move along. Nobody was arrested. Nobody was yelled at. Then, still joking, they went back on patrol. Next they encountered a young man wearing (gasp!) a hoodie. Although he had a dark complexion, indicating he was part of that tiny minority of people in this country where 99.5% of the citizens are white, their approach was again polite. When they questioned him about why he was hanging around a closed shop, he tried to leave. At that point, the two cops each grabbed an arm, but there was no roughing him up, no slamming him face first on the ground with a one cop’s knee in his back, no punching or kicking. They just held him firmly and led him over to the van. In the US, that arrest would have looked totally different, and the suspect would have sustained at a minimum facial injuries and back injuries, plus he would have been cuffed. If a suspect receiving such abuse in the US were to try to resist at all, the consequences could be far worse — perhaps even death at the hands of the officers via choke hold or bullet.

Compare that reality program to the US, where the latest filming of the reality police show, “Cops!,” resulted in the police fatally shooting one of the video crewmembers filming them. They were reportedly firing at a fleeing suspect who had (allegedly) shot at them with a toy air pistol that fires harmless BB-sized plastic balls. Shooting fleeing suspects is illegal in Finland and in the US, unless the suspect is armed and poses a risk to the officers or others, but there is rarely a prosecution of police in the US who do this, even when they kill a kid.

Two weeks and thousands of driving miles in Finland, without seeing a single cop (try that in the US)
 

Carl von Clausewitz once called war “the continuation of politics by other means.” Turning that on its head, China’s brilliant diplomat, the revolutionist Chou En-lai, said “Diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.”

America, through the decades of the Cold War, but especially since the inception of the Bush/Cheney administration, and continuing during the two terms of current President Barack Obama, has largely eschewed diplomacy altogether, in favor of war, says David Swanson.

A long-time labor and peace activist, Swanson, the author of the book War No More: The case for abolition, and of the website War IsACrime.org, was the guest on ThisCantBeHappening’s radio program “This Can’t Be Happening!” on Wednesday’s show on the Progressive Radio Network.

He and host Dave Lindorff attempted to count the number of places around the globe where the US is either technically at war (by sending in attack drones to bomb targets inside countries without permission) as in Pakistan and Somalia, is committing acts of war, as in the case yesterday of a US Coast Guard vessel firing a shot at an Iranian boat in the Persian Gulf or in Iraq, where US planes are bombing ISIS targets, or is pushing for or preparing for war, as in Ukraine or Syria. They found the number too high to tally.

Swanson argues forcefully that no US military adventures or military threats are legal or moral, but also argues that Russia likewise has no legal or moral right to send its forces into eastern Ukraine to defend ethnic Russians against brutal attack by the Ukrainian military.

While Lindorff argues that at least in the Ukraine, Russia will probably have to, and indeed should, send in its military to defend areas under indiscriminate attack by Ukrainian rockets, cannons and aerial bombardment, both he and Swanson agree that the various crises around the globe are largely of US making, and that this obsession by US policymakers with exacerbating local conflicts, selling and donating arms to conflict regions, often to both sides, has to be ended.
 

To hear this interview, click here or on the image below.

Peace activist David Swanson, US Coast Guard cutter on 'routine' patrol in the Persian Gulf, and war in eastern Ukraine

With the US continuing to push its submissive European “allies” towards an ever more confrontational stance against Russia over the crisis in Ukraine (a crisis initially provoked by the US itself through CIA and State Department actions that led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government), the world appears headed towards a dangerous renewed Cold War between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

A central part of that campaign by Washington has been the effort to blame the downing of Malaysian Flight 17, which killed all 298 passengers and crew, on Russia, or failing that, on pro-Russian separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. This campaign has used innuendo, falsified evidence and, weirdly, spurious and sometimes absurd “evidence” circulating in various social media — all of which which people like Secretary of State John Kerry and president Obama himself have tried to say “prove” that Russia, or at least a Russian-provided high-altitude BUK anti-aircraft missile, was responsible for the downing.
 

But increasingly, critics, including analysts within the CIA, have been throwing cold water on that theory. Suspiciously, the US, which had a spy satellite located directly over the Malaysian plane at the very time of the shoot-down, and which certainly has detailed photographic images of exactly what happened, has offered no a single photo to prove its contention that a missile was fired from territory under rebel control.

Meanwhile, there are multiple claims that the CIA — and perhaps the National Security Agency too — have evidence that it was Ukrainian forces, not separatists, who shot down the plane, either using one of the several dozen BUK launchers that they are known to possess themselves, or by two Ukrainian attack fighters that were known to be tailing the Malaysian commercial jet shoot it down with machine gun fire and/or air-to-air missiles. Significantly, a Canadian investigator with the international team sent to collect and examine pieces of the crashed airliner, has said he saw holes that appeared caused by heavy 30 mm machine-gun fire –the type of ammunition used by the fighter jets — in a section of the front of the Boeing jet, as well as in both sides. Such holes in the nose and both sides of the doomed plane could not have all been caused by the projectiles released by a BUK missile, which would have all hit the plane from one direction — reportedly normally from a location beneath the plane.

A week ago, this reporter interviewed Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst with 27 years of experience at the agency, about the Ukraine crisis, on ThisCantBeHappening!’s weekly radio show that airs each Wednesday at 5 pm Eastern Time on the Progressive Radio Network (PRN.fm). McGovern says on that program that sources he knows who are still at the CIA say that the agency has refused to back the US claim that separatists or Russia were behind the shoot-down of Flight 17.

To hear analyst McGovern’s interview, click here or click on the photo below:
 

Retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern and a section of Flight 17's cockpit panel, showing multiple large-calibre bullet holes
 

Click here to join the campaign to comply with the UN resolution demanding a genuinely independent inquiry into the shooting down of Flight 17.

The apparent murder by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, of Mike Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black youth who was shot a number of times while he was allegedly on his knees with his hands up in the air, pleading “Don’t shoot, I’m not armed,” is exposing everything that is wrong with policing in the US today.

The Ferguson Police Department, reportedly nearly all white (50 of 53 officers), patrols a St. Louis suburban community that is 70 percent African-American, a situation that is already a recipe for disaster in a nation that is drenched in racism–and all too typical in communities across the country. The Ferguson PD has also been reportedly employing the kind of aggressive policing — arresting people over minor infractions — that can quickly escalate into violent confrontations. In this case, it appears Brown’s offense was jay-walking and perhaps talking back to the police officer — the first being a citation offense, and the second not even illegal.

When this shooting happened, instead of immediately attempting to calm things down, the Ferguson Police Department went all paramilitary, sending massive numbers of up-armed cops in military gear, backed by police dogs, into the community. They also brought in armored vehicles, reportedly equipped with heavy machine guns mounted on top, which at one point were trained on protesters but fortunately not fired. (Hundreds of police departments in communities like Ferguson across the country now have such surplus military equipment, showered on them for free by the US Department of Homeland Security.) Ferguson cops responded to understandable community protests with tear gas and, later, with solid wooden and rubber bullets designed to hurt and injure but not kill (though clearly at close range there is always that danger). Several more people have already been shot by police, leaving them in critical condition.

Adding to community outrage is the refusal by police to release the name of the officer responsible for killing Brown, or even to release the initial report of his autopsy — both the kind information that would be readily available were the shooter not a police officer.

What’s wrong here? So many things that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Confronting the 'enemy' in Ferguson, Missouri — an iconic image of militarized police that has gone viral since the police slaying of 18-year-old Mike Brown

The sickness of present-day Israel, on display over the past horrible month of the one-sided slaughter of nearly 2000 Palestinians (including over 400 children) in the fenced-in ghetto of Gaza, has finally reached its nadir with the ugly case of the deliberate Israeli Defense Force murder of captured IDF 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin.

According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, once it was determined that Goldin had been captured by Hamas fighters in the Gaza town of Rafah, the IDF initiated what it calls the “Hannibal Protocol” — the deliberate liquidation of the captive — to prevent his being used as a hostage to win concessions from Israel in future truce negotiations with the Palestinians. One reason for the almost instantaneous and ruthless Israeli decision to kill Goldin rather than attempt to rescue him, is that this captured soldier had the misfortune of being related to Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, making him a valuable prize indeed for Hamas.

And so began a massive bombardment of the entire residential area where Goldin was captured.

As Haaretz reports in an editorial about this case of deliberate sacrifice of an IDF officer, headlined “What Happened in Rafah?”, the ensuing high-explosive blitz on the area didn’t just kill Goldin, but also indiscriminately killed over 150 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including many women and children. Indeed, the paper states that the IDF “…shelled and bombed houses and their inhabitants indiscriminately, and as they tried to flee homes, hit them with shells and bombs in the streets.” The fatal bombing of a targeted UN-operated school in Rafah, which was condemned by the US government and by UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who called it a “criminal act and a moral outrage,” was part of that Hannibal Protocol action.

Now recall that President Obama was quick to label the Hamas capture of Goldin “barbaric.”

The trouble is, having rather absurdly deployed that term to characterize the capture by Hamas fighters of an Israeli soldier who was at the time reportedly exploring a tunnel and trying to capture or kill enemy fighters, though, what then does Obama — what indeed does any person — call the indiscriminate slaughter of 150 civilians in the interest of eliminating one of one’s own captured soldier?

Blown away by the IDF's Operation Hannibal: 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin and a UN school filled with refugees seeking shelter

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says that John Brennan, the director of the CIA who has finally admitted that he lied when he angrily and repeatedly insisted that the agency did not spy on staff members of the Senate committee charged with oversight US intelligence agencies, “has a lot of work to do,” before she can forgive him for lying to and spying on her committee.

Not really. The truth is Feinstein and her committee have a lot of work to do. If Brennan does not resign, or get forced out of his job, immediately, his work is done. That is to say, he will have succeeded in fatally wounding what’s left of the democratic, Constitutional government that traces its roots back to 1776.

The undermining of American democracy has a long history, but the process accelerated mightily after World War II, with the creation of the CIA, the National Security Agency and other three-letter intelligence organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency and more recently the Department of Homeland Security.

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, it became the accepted wisdom that to “defend” American freedom, it was necessary to create a secret government run by spooks and bureaucrats who answered only to the president and to a select few members of Congress, most notably the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Tossed aside was Ben Franklin’s warning: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,”

Rare indeed have been the occasions when that committee has actually exercised any real authority over the CIA or the other intelligence agencies, but as poor a job as the Congress has done in reining in secret government over the last 65 years, it has gotten worse since 9-11, when intelligence agencies were given essentially carte blanche to spy not just on suspected terrorists but ordinary American citizens, and not just those suspected of crimes, but all of us.

Now, we’ve reached this moment of truth, when the committee finally did do some actual investigating into the behavior of the CIA with regard to illegal rendition and torture of people suspected of terrorism or of plotting terrorist acts against the US. In response to the committee’s efforts to actually look into secret illegal CIA activities, Brennan’s spooks began spying on and monitoring the activities of those Senate investigators, who work directly for the people that the US public elects to act on their behalf. Even worse, the agency concocted fake evidence which it brought to the US Office of Attorney General, seeking to have criminal charges brought against those same staffers.

The faces of Unchained Secret Government: CIA Director John Brennan and Intelligence Director James Clapper

The wind has suddenly been knocked out of sails of those critics of Social Security and Medicare in Washington — Republican and Democrat — who have for years been warning direly that the two programs were going bust. Suddenly their favored “rescue” plans for these crucial programs — turning to a stingier way of calculating the annual inflation adjustment, raising the retirement age, and even reducing benefits for Social Security, and cutting benefits for Medicare — don’t make sense to anyone.

Thanks to an improved jobs picture, a marked slowdown in health care cost inflation and other factors, the latest annual Trustees Report from the Social Security Administration paints a picture of a much improved situation. As things stand now, this report says the Trust Fund that was built up, starting back in the early 1980s, to cover the anticipated increase in benefit payments to the wave of Baby Boomer retirees, will not be exhausted until 2033, which happens to be about the time that the last Baby Boomers born in 1964 will be retiring, and when the wave of 78 million Boomer retirees will be starting to shrink as early boomers born in the late 1940s and 1950s begin to die off (the oldest Boomers, born in 1946, will be 87 in 2033).

The Medicare Trust Fund, too, is looking much better. As recently as last year, it was being projected to run out in 2026, but now it looks like it will still have a positive balance in 2030.

What this means is that actually shoring up these two programs so that they will be fully funded and able to pay full retirement benefits to retirees and health benefits to all those on Medicare, should be much easier than and less painful to all concerned than the voices of doom in Washington have been threatening.

For example, just eliminating the cap on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax, currently set at 6.2% for employers and 6.2% for employees, but only on the first $113,400 of income, so that all income becomes subject to the tax, including the income of millionaires and billionaires, would fully fund the program way out past 2075, when the last Baby Boomer have long moved on to that great Woodstock in the sky.

We need a new mass movement and new marches on Washington to improve Social Security and Medicare