Month: May 2014

If you are an Antiwar.com reader like me, you are no doubt fed up with the lies, both of commission and omission, that pour out of the NYT, NPR and lesser mainstream media outlets, when it comes to Ukraine.

And if you are like me, you are worried over the political health of your many friends, who are swallowing the journalistic poison put out by the Mainstream Media. So here is a quick antidote with suggestions for a longer term cure.

The antidote is a 39 minute interview with Stephen Cohen, emeritus Professor at Princeton and NYU, a scholar on Russia, whose word is good as gold. It can be found here. More often than not, getting people to open up to new ideas is a matter of the source rather than the arguments. Who says something often outweighs what is said. And Cohen is an unimpeachable source, coming from the halls of the Ivy League and the author of many books and articles including Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold WarandThe Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin.

This interview is part of a continuing series with Cohen on the unfolding crisis in Ukraine on the John Batchelor Show. They can all be found here. I chose the one above, even though it is not the most recent, because it is a great summary leading up to the recent elections in Ukraine. Read it first. The most recent at the time of this writing is here.

At this point one may also recommend for continuing health a daily dose of RT.com ("Russia Today"), which gives coverage of the unfolding crisis in one or two brief stories or videos a day. We can challenge friends and ourselves to read these accounts from the "other side," to compare them to the mainstream media which inundates us daily and to decide for ourselves which rings truer. (The ever pompous John Kerry is horrified and outraged, his basal state it would seem, by the specter of Americans reading RT and, worse, deciding for ourselves what is true!)

Once the ice is broken with your friends by the Cohen interview, they will be prepared for the next step. You can now convince them to ascend to the journalistic heights of Antiwar.com where daily, accurate coverage and penetrating analysis by Justin Raimondo and many others will greet them. The final step is for you and them to donate to Antiwar.com so that these Olympian heights can endure. We owe no less to humanity with our nation now threatening to plunge the entire world into war in its unnecessary confrontation with Russia, China and Iran.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

In a memoir published this year, the CIA’s former top legal officer John Rizzo says that on the last day of 2005 a panicky White House tried to figure out how to prevent the distribution of a book by New York Times reporter James Risen. Officials were upset because Risen’s book, State of War, exposed what – in his words – “may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA.”

The book told of a bungled CIA attempt to set back Iran’s nuclear program in 2000 by supplying the Iranian government with flawed blueprints for nuclear-bomb design. The CIA’s tactic might have actually aided Iranian nuclear development.

When a bootlegged copy of State of War reached the National Security Council, a frantic meeting convened in the Situation Room, according to Rizzo. “As best anyone could tell, the books were printed in bulk and stacked somewhere in warehouses.” The aspiring censors hit a wall. “We arrived at a rueful consensus: game over as far as any realistic possibility to keep the book, and the classified information in it, from getting out.”

But more than eight years later, the Obama White House is seeking a different form of retribution. The people running the current administration don’t want to pulp the book – they want to put its author in jail.

The Obama administration is insisting that Risen name his confidential source – or face imprisonment. Risen says he won’t capitulate.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation calls the government’s effort to force Risen to reveal a source “one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades.”

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says: “The pursuit of Risen is a warning to potential sources that journalists cannot promise them confidentiality for disclosing Executive Branch criminality, recklessness, deception, unconstitutional policies or lying us into war. Without protecting confidentiality, investigative journalism required for accountability and democracy will wither and disappear.”

Continue reading “An Assault From Obama’s Escalating War on Journalism”

Orchestrating a military coup against a demcoratically elected government, leading a junta that killed thousands of protesters and has sentenced many more to death for organizing those protests, Egypt’s incoming president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is worried people think he’s “too soft,” and gave a harsh statement on his incoming regime in a television interview and leaked comments associated with it.

“I’m not leaving a chance for people to act on their own,” Sisi declared, going on to promise he would forcibly turn Egypt into a “first-class nation.”

“People think I’m a soft man. Sisi is torture and suffering,” declared Sisi, who among other things, vowed to send troops to people’s houses to install energy efficient lightbulbs as a way of solving the nation’s fuel shortage.

Sisi styles himself as a paternal autocrat, and seems to view Egypt’s economic problems as personal failings on the part of individuals, promising longer work days and less pay as a path to modernity. “I will not sleep and neither will you,” he vowed in the interview.

It should go without saying after killing thousands of people, but Sisi promised he will brook no dissent, saying that the people who oppose his ban on public protests “want to destroy Egypt.” Terrifyingly, while being straightforward about his intentions, Sisi remains something of a media darling in the US, as a “tough on terror” strongman.

Jeju Island, South Korea – For the past two weeks, I’ve been in the Republic of Korea (ROK), as a guest of peace activists living in Gangjeong Village on ROK’s Jeju Island. Gangjeong is one of the ROK’s smallest villages, yet activists here, in their struggle against the construction of a massive naval base, have inspired people around the world.

Since 2007, activists have risked arrests, imprisonment, heavy fines and wildly excessive use of police force to resist the desecration caused as mega-corporations like Samsung and Daelim build a base to accommodate U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines for their missions throughout Asia. The base fits the regional needs of the US for a maritime military outpost that would enable it to continue developing its Asia Pivot strategy, gradually building towards and in the process provoking superpower conflict with China.

"We don’t need this base," says Bishop Kang, a Catholic prelate who vigorously supports the opposition. He worries that if the base is completed, Jeju Island will become a focal point for Far Eastern military struggle, and that this would occur amid accelerating military tensions. "The strongest group in the whole world, the military, takes advantage of National Security ideology," he continues. "Many people make money. Many governments are controlled by this militarism. The military generals, in their minds, may think they are doing this to protect their country, but in fact they’re controlled by the corporations."

Jeju Islanders cannot ignore or forget that at least 30,000 of their grandparents and great grandparents were slaughtered by a U.S.-supported Korean government intent on crushing a tenacious democracy movement. The height of the assault in 1948 is referred to as the April 3 massacre, although the persecution and murderous suppression lasted many years. The national government now asking sacrifices of them has rarely been their friend.

Continue reading “A Pivot on the Peace Island”

Speaking Thursday at a State Department dinner, Secretary of State John Kerry said of Nigeria that “only the United States is there offering the assistance to help find those young woman,” adding “other countries, not only aren’t they invited, but they did not even offer.”

Kerry’s comments aimed to brag about the US “leadership” position globally, while presenting American intervention as not only effective but uniquely welcome.

There are a lot of problems with that, but lets first address the most obvious: the facts aren’t true. Several nations are aiding Nigeria in the search, including Britain, France, and Israel. China has also offered to help.

When presented with the facts, the State Department insisted Kerry only meant Russia and China, and meant to show that “we are the partner of first resort to many countries.”

While the Obama Administration’s massive foreign aid budget and willingness to look the other way has indeed made it the “partner of first resort” for many governments, particularly those like Nigeria with egrigous human rights records, the notion that this makes them uniquely welcomed by the people in the areas of those interventions simply isn’t true. A cursory look at places like Yemen and Pakistan, the top US “parntership” targets, show record levels of anti-US sentiment that continue to grow worse with every new fiasco they perpetrate therein.