Month: August 2014

Early today we reported, on the basis of reports from other media outlets and a confirmation by Nineveh Governor Atheel Nujaifi, that the Mosul Dam, the largest hydroelectric dam in Iraq, was seized by ISIS from Kurdish forces. The following image appears to have been the basis of the story.

Liz Sly from the Washington Post was the first to suggest the story may not have been true, showing photos taken earlier in the day of Deputy Kurdish Premier Qubad Talabani at a conspicuously unconquered Mosul Dam.

Eventually, someone on Twitter “confessed” to having fabricated the original image, and provided an identical photo, same shadows and same angle, without the guy or the tiny little ISIS flag on top of the dam. Even the cloud passing by and the shadows are the same.

We don’t claim to know the truth about what’s going on at the Mosul Dam any more than anyone else, but this underscores a need to be increasingly skeptical about the stories coming out of the area. This is particularly true of stories emerging from Kurdistan (where the governor had fled), as the Kurdistan government is openly lobbying the US into a war against ISIS, and may push false narratives that advance that effort.

Antiwar Republican Congressman Justin Amash won a very contentious primary challenge from Brian Ellis, who was supported by the GOP establishment for Michigan’s 3rd district. Amash, who was significantly outspent, won with 57% of the vote.

Amash has been a leader of the libertarian caucus of the GOP House members. He has led the fight against NSA surveillance and for protection of privacy. He has fought against US intervention and military aid across the board.

This past Friday, Amash was one of only 8 House members to vote against additional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome defense system.

Amash is the first Palestinian-American member of the US Congress.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has an article about Justin Amash’s victory speech: “Justin Amash’s absolutely amazing victory speech.”

The world awaits with bated breath to see if the interim truce negotiated by US Secretary of State John Kerry will lead to a long-term ceasefire. But if US mediation is to be sincere and effective, the American government needs to take Hamas off its terrorist list and allow Hamas to be fully represented at the table.

For the past month, Secretary Kerry has been traveling around the the Middle East trying to negotiate an end to the violence. He has had ongoing discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. He consults regularly with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He’s convened with the governments of influential countries in the region, such as Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar. But there’s one glaring omission in his efforts as mediator: he doesn’t talk directly to Hamas, which has been on the US terrorist list since 1997.

Conflict Resolution 101 says "negotiate with all relevant parties." Senator George Mitchell, who successfully brokered the Good Friday Accord in Northern Ireland, said that serious negotiations were only possible once the British stopped treating the Irish Republican Army as a terrorist organization and began dealing with it as a political entity. The Turkish government learned this lesson more recently. After decades of fighting the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided to remove the PKK from the terrorist list and began direct negotiations with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan – a move that has given new life to the peace process.

You can’t presume to be a mediator and then exclude one key party because you don’t like them. That lesson surely applies to Gaza. If the position of Hamas is only heard through intermediaries, Hamas is much more likely to refuse the outcome. Look at Kerry’s July 15 ceasefire proposal. It was negotiated with the Israeli government, and Netanyahu boasted about Israel’s willingness to accept the proposal. But Hamas was never consulted and actually heard about the "take it or leave it" proposal via the media. Little wonder they rejected it. Former UN rapporteur Richard Falk called Kerry’s efforts "a diplomatic analogue to the theater of the absurd."

Continue reading “Conflict Resolution 101: Talking With Hamas”

Well, look, there’s no doubt that a robust, interventionist foreign policy on behalf of certain principles, ideals or international rules is not a tradition that most countries embrace. And in the 20th century and in the early stages of the 21st century, the United States continues to be the one indispensable power that is willing to spend blood and treasure on that.  
Barack Obama in Interview with The Economist.

On the eve of Obama’s meeting with African politicians, he gave an interview with obsequious editors and reporters from The Economist.  He used it to attack Russia and Putin once again.  The objective was clear:  To dismiss Russia as weak and irrelevant and so to drive other countries away from it, including China and the EU.

But Obama’s effort was quite strange.  Like the entire U.S. anti-Ukraine, anti-Russian effort, it seemed to have little relationship to the truth.   To the very anti-Putin interviewers he feigned dismissiveness of Russia.  (If he was not lying and believes this stuff, we are really in deep trouble, because his ignorance could well reap the whirlwind for the human race.)  Among other things he claimed that: “Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. … The population is shrinking.” A few graphs will make clear that this is way off the mark.   The implication is that Russia is failing economically.  So let us look at Russia’s GDP, especially under Putin.  We can see it at a glance here:

Continue reading “Obama Continues Psyop Against Russia, Threatens China, in Interview with The Economist“

The military operations undertaken by the Ukrainian and Israeli governments in East Ukraine and Gaza, although frequently being represented as "anti-terror operations", in fact involve the mass killing of civilians on the ground, with US support, under the pretext of the state defending itself. As wars are being waged in both countries, the Ukrainian and Israeli militaries are heavily bombarding civilians as Human Rights Watch has confirmed. The civilian toll in Ukraine has been at least 1,129 so far and 1,650 people were killed in Gaza. The UN condemned the massive shelling of schools and seniors’ homes by the Ukrainian military as it condemned the bombing of a UN school by Israel, saying these violated international law. The similarities between the two conflicts and the ideology that produced them may be worth pointing out, as has been done before in different ways by a critic of these policies and also by the ambassador of Ukraine to Israel, though perhaps not by the way the latter had in mind.

The slaughter of civilians, be they ethnic Russian or Palestinian, cannot be divorced from the fact that both the Ukrainian and the Israeli Governments have no intention of granting autonomous rights to these respective populations under their control and may ultimately even see their lives as disposable. The unelected Ukrainian Government did not accept the referendum held in the Donbass in which over 90% of residents voted for self-rule, while in Israel, Netanyahu recently said that he would never support a sovereign Palestinian state. Indeed, both the Ukrainian and Israeli government share highly racist views of these targeted populations.

Continue reading “Israel and Ukraine: Ridding the Nation of the ‘Undesirables’”

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.”  ~ George W. Bush

Those in the U.S. who are enthralled by relentless reports of the most demonic acts attributed to President Vladimir Putin and the rebel Eastern Ukrainian federalists a in the NYT (New York Times), NPR, ETC. would do well to look at the track record of the “reporters” dishing out this stuff. What they will find is a trail of deception that is piled with corpses of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

Principle among the purveyors of these bloodletting falsehoods is Michael R. Gordon, chief military correspondent for the NYT, serving over the decades as a trusty pipeline from the Pentagon to you. Although his name should be in profound disrepute, many opposed to war are unaware of his ignoble career or may have forgotten it. Most notoriously he is the co-author with Judith Miller of the front page NYT article planted by Dick Cheney’s minions, which claimed that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), relying on the idea that aluminum tubing being purchased by Iraq was to be used for purifying uranium.

Continue reading “Beware the New York Times’s Michael R. Gordon”