Month: March 2014

If you quickly survey the media coverage and political rhetoric surrounding the Ukraine crisis, you find there is nothing easier than to condemn Russia for its opportunistic and illegal incursions into Ukraine’s sovereign territory of Crimea. And this is correct: it is very easy to see these acts as unfair and unlawful. Russian troops, deceitfully hiding identifying marks, occupied Ukrainian police and military posts and basically took control of the territory before pushing for a referendum. That the referendum was strongly in favor of Russia is a separate issue. (If the U.S. did what Russia did, non-interventionists here would no doubt condemn it.)

Since it’s so easy to condemn these Russian moves, Americans, quick to take their government’s side, have whitewashed the very real problems with the new U.S./Western-backed regime in Kiev.

It hasn’t been a complete whitewash. You can find honest acknowledgement in the mainstream. In Foreign Policy, for example, Andrew Foxall and Oren Kessler write, “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists.”

Ukraine is home to Svoboda, arguably Europe’s most influential far-right movement today…Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok is on record complaining that his country is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia,” while his deputy derided the Ukrainian-born film star Mila Kunis as a “dirty Jewess.” In Svoboda’s eyes, gays are perverts and black people unfit to represent the nation at Eurovision, lest viewers come away thinking Ukraine issomewhere besides Uganda.

Svoboda began life in the mid-90s as the Social-National Party (a name deliberately redolent of the National Socialist Party, better known as Nazis), with its logo the fascistWolfsangel. In 2004, the party gave itself an unobjectionable new name (Svoboda means “Freedom”) and canned the Nazi imagery, and in the subsequent decade has seen its star swiftly rise.

Today, Svoboda holds a larger chunk of its nation’s ministries (nearly a quarter, including the prized defense portfolio) than any other far-right party on the continent. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister represents Svoboda (the smaller, even more extreme “Right Sector” coalition fills thedeputy National Security Council chair), as does the prosecutor general and the deputy chair of parliament — where the party is the fourth-largest. And Svoboda’s fresh faces are scarcely different from the old: one of its freshmen members of parliament is the founder of the “Joseph Goebbels Political Research Centre” and has hailed the Holocaust as a “bright period” in human history.

The new government in Ukraine, as the FP report notes, is chalk full of Svoboda members. The video below depicts Svoboda MPs and their lackeys attacking the head of Ukraine’s state TV company and demanding he resign. It looks like a scene of mafia bullying from a Martin Scorsese film.

Despite this, U.S. commentary largely hails the democracy that has come to Ukraine post-Yanukovych. Writing in The National Interest, professor of political science at Colorado College David Hendrickson explains that “The big problem with this narrative is that the United States and its western and Ukrainian allies did in fact do something very wrong.”

They broke a vital democratic norm—to wit, that in democracies the transfer of power occurs as a result and in the aftermath of elections or, in extremis, impeachments. There is simply no consciousness in the West that the revolution was brought about by illegal means. Yet it most emphatically was so. Power was seized, not transferred. In this tit for tat contest with Russia, we have focused exclusively on the tit; we have just as resolutely ignored the tat that preceded it.

Now, I’m all for people tearing down their own oppressive governments. But when U.S. policy starts to side with unscrupulous right-wing factions in some other country that has nothing to do with us, it’s a big problem. U.S. policy is anti-Russia. It is Russia’s geo-political designs in its traditional sphere of influence in eastern Europe that Washington opposes. Translated into policy, as always, this manifests into unacceptable, nefarious, interventionist meddling. It needs to stop.

After the killing of Osama bin Laden, Pakistan vehemently denied any knowledge that the most wanted terrorist operative in the world had lived in a protected compound in Abbottabad just a few short miles from Pakistan’s military academy. Nobody really believed them. Senior U.S. officials would, when asked by the press, give the Pakistani government a verbal licking, but only in vague terms that declined to confirm what seemed obvious to everyone: that Pakistan did know of bin Laden’s hideout there.

New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who spent more than a decade reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan has pretty well confirmed that Pakistan not only knew of bin Laden’s presence, but actively protected him. More than that, the U.S. government knows they knew, and the Pakistanis know they know they knew.

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Contrary to depictions of bin Laden being holed up in this compound hiding from the world, he went about freely: “Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints.” And here’s the real whammy:

In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought Musharraf had arranged to hide Bin Laden in Abbottabad. But he had no proof and, under pressure, claimed in the Pakistani press that he’d been misunderstood. Finally, on a winter evening in 2012, I got the confirmation I was looking for. According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when I learned this, and I remember gasping, though quietly so as not to draw attention. (Two former senior American officials later told me that the information was consistent with their own conclusions.) This was what Afghans knew, and Taliban fighters had told me, but finally someone on the inside was admitting it. The desk was wholly deniable by virtually everyone at the ISI — such is how supersecret intelligence units operate — but the top military bosses knew about it, I was told.

Gall criticizes Washington’s “failure to fully understand and actively confront Pakistan on its support and export of terrorism.” That’s clearly true, and not just on the bin Laden thing, but the fact that Pakistan supports militant groups the U.S. has been fighting against in Afghanistan for 12 years. But more than failing to confront Pakistan on these issues, the U.S. sends billions of dollars to Islamabad every year. The U.S. pays them as they hold and protect the guy who masterminded the 9/11 attacks; protects them by playing dumb when asked about their collusion.

According to former CIA intelligence officer and Antiwar.com contributor Phil Giraldi, Pakistan may have even been implicated in the 9/11 attacks, or at least had foreknowledge of them. There are 28-pages in the 9/11 Commission Report regarding Saudi Arabia’s connections to the 9/11 hijackers that remain classified, at the request of our own government.

“A true accounting of what took place is long overdue and, one might add, it should not stop with the Saudis,” Giraldi writes. “Some of the hijackers spent considerable time in Pakistan prior to 9/11 and it is unlikely that the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) would have missed their presence or the opportunity to recruit them as sources.”

So really: how demented is U.S. foreign policy that it pays, arms, and diplomatically protects extremist regimes which support militants who wish to attack the U.S.? What’s going on?

[h/t emptywheel]

Over at PolicyMic, Eileen Shim cites a recent report from Reporters Without Borders that names the U.S. in its annual “Enemies of the Internet” list:

Reporters Without Borders did not name entire governments on its list, but rather focused on the individual agencies that censor the Internet. Last year’s revelations regarding the National Security Agency (NSA)’s spying schemes have landed the U.S. on the list for the first time.NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks regarding the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have also introduced the U.K. agency to the list for the same reasons.

“The NSA and GCHQ have spied on the communications of millions of citizens including many journalists. They have knowingly introduced security flaws into devices and software used to transmit requests on the Internet. And they have hacked into the very heart of the Internet using programmes such as the NSA’s Quantam Insert and GCHQ’s Tempora. The Internet was a collective resource that the NSA and GCHQ turned into a weapon in the service of special interests, in the process flouting freedom of information, freedom of expression and the right to privacy,” the report said.

It added that the NSA and GCHQ’s surveillance operations were all the more troubling because they were located in “democracies that have traditionally claimed to respect fundamental freedoms”; because these tactics have been so effective for the U.S. and the U.K., “they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information.”

Here’s the map illustrating the “Enemies” list (on their site, it is interactive):

The United States also made headlines upon the release of Reporters Without Borders’ other well-known list, the World Press Freedom Index, because it slipped 13 places in the ranking to 46.

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any laws that abridge “the freedom of  speech, or of the press.” The Fourth Amendment commands that the people’s right to privacy “against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” and that no warrants to rifle through our shit shall issue without probably cause of specificity. Meanwhile, the government is virtually criminalizing journalism at the margins and using the Internet to destroy our privacy.

How much longer can Americans repeat their masturbatory mantras about “the land of the free” when our government’s rankings for critical things like press and Internet freedoms continue to plummet?

The short documentary news pieces from Vice News on the situation in Crimea have been very enlightening, as reporter Simon Ostrovsky is on the ground and speaking to real people, instead of the uninformed punditry we hear on both U.S. and Russian propaganda outlets. They are very interesting. Here are the latest two.

Vice President Joe Biden, who has been traversing Europe in the aftermath of the pro-Russian referendum in Crimea, announced on Tuesday that the U.S. “may consider rotating units of its ground and naval forces through the [Baltic] region for training exercises.”

This is meant as a show of force ostensibly to demonstrate America’s military commitment to Europe in the face of Russian assertiveness and military incursions in Ukraine. I also heard Fox News panelists this morning demand the Obama administration send warships to the Black Sea to show Putin who is boss.

Let’s make one thing clear: these useless military exercises and demonstrations of force do absolutely nothing to alter the reality or Russia’s strategic calculations. They are essentially for domestic consumption, to satisfy political hardliners who are attacking the president for being too weak.

They also hold the odious pretense that America owns the world and that Russian gains in its traditional sphere of influence represent a defiance of Uncle Sam, ruler of planet Earth.