Tag: perpetual war

Germany Rejects Cluster Bombs For Ukraine As Clip Surfaces Of Biden Admin Previously Calling Them A ‘War Crime’

In light of the Biden White House approving cluster bombs for Ukraine, under the justification that ‘but Russia used them first’, below is a quick trip down memory lane…

First, here is then White House press secretary Jen Psaki unequivocally condemning the use of cluster munitions as a potential “war crime” in 2022. The implication behind the exchange is that only the “bad guys” use them…

Next, below is a lengthy letter from top-ranking Congressional Democrats in a 2013 written to then President Barack Obama highlighting the evils of cluster bombs, explaining they are “indiscriminate, unreliable and pose an unacceptable danger to US forces and civilians alike.”

The letter emphasized they “cause unintended harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure, in many cases long after the cessation of hostilities,” and also recalled that “During Operation Desert Storm, US-dropped cluster submutnions caused more US troops casualties than any single Iraqi weapon system.”

Back when Democrats were outraged over cluster bombs and the potential for war crimes and indiscriminate killing…

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White House sends cluster bombs to Ukraine, but previously called Russian use a possible ‘war crime’

The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would send controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine to bolster the country’s defenses, but previously condemned Russian use of such weapons as a possible war crime.

Cluster bombs include dozens of explosive submunitions, which they distribute across a wide area. They are known to have a significant “dud” rate and human rights groups have condemned their use due to their propensity to cause civilian casualties.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Friday confirmed the decision to provide Kyiv with the munitions, but asserted that “Ukraine has committed to post-conflict demining efforts to mitigate any potential harm to civilians.” Sullivan cited Russia’s use of the weapons as a justification.

Notably, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki previously condemned Russian use of such munitions in the war as a possible war crime. In a February 2022 press briefing, Psaki field a question as to the legality of Moscow’s use of the weapons.

“There are reports of illegal cluster bombs and vacuum bombs being used by the Russians,” the reporter stated. “If that’s true, what is the next step of this administration?  And is there a red line for how much violence will be tolerated against civilians in this manner that’s illegal and potentially a war crime?”

“It is — it would be.  I don’t have any confirmation of that.  We have seen the reports.  If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime,” Psaki replied at the time. “Obviously, there are a range of international fora that would assess that.  So, certainly, we would look to that to be a part of that conversation.”

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The CIA’s Blind Spot about the Ukraine War

One of the biggest secrets of the Ukraine war is how much the CIA doesn’t know. The Agency is as uncertain about Volodymyr Zelensky‘s thinking and intentions as it is about Vladimir Putin‘s. And as the Russian leader faces his biggest challenge in the aftermath of a failed mutiny, the Agency is straining to understand what the two sides will do—because President Joe Biden has determined that the United States (and Kyiv) will not undertake any actions that might threaten Russia itself or the survival of the Russian state, lest Putin escalate the conflict and engulf all of Europe in a new World War. In exchange, it expects that the Kremlin won’t escalate the war beyond Ukraine or resort to the use of nuclear weapons.

America’s stance is under threat because the near-mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, raises the question as to whether Moscow has run out of options.

“Putin’s back is really against the wall” a senior defense intelligence official tells Newsweek, warning that while the CIA fully grasps how much Russia is stuck in Ukraine, it is very much in the dark with regard to what Putin might do about it. With talk of Russian nuclear weapons possibly being deployed to Belarus, and in light of Prigozhin’s public exposure of the terrible costs of fighting, something that Moscow has suppressed, the official says that it is a particularly delicate moment. “What is happening off the battlefield is now most important,” says the official, who was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly. “Both sides pledge to limit their actions, but it falls to the United States to enforce those pledges. This all hinges on the quality of our intelligence.”

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NATO ‘OK’ With Cluster Bombs After Biden Approves For Ukraine: Stoltenberg

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg doesn’t see a problem with internationally banned cluster munitions… only when the US or its allies deploy them, apparently.

Without doubt if cluster bombs were being deployed by Russia or official US enemies, NATO would condemn it (and has in the past). But with the Biden administration now reportedly moving forward with sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, Stoltenberg has said that “Nato does not have a position on them” as some allies have signed up to prohibit their use and some haven’t.

He was specifically asked by a reporter about the wisdom of allowing them to be sent to the Ukrainians. He had further added in response, “This will be for governments to decide, not for Nato to decide.”

“We are facing a brutal war, and we have to remember this brutality is reflected, that every day we see casualties, and that cluster munitions are used by both sides,” he sought to justify and explain.  “And Russia used cluster munitions to invade another country. Ukraine is using cluster munitions to defend itself.”

The Associated Press first reported Thursday that the White House has decided to arm Ukraine with cluster bombs after many weeks of intense internal discussion and debate over the controversial munitions. The cluster bombs are expected to be announced as part of the next $800 million arms package. 

On the very same day it was widely reported the US administration is ready to pull the trigger on sending the bombs, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a scathing report. It concluded: 

  • Ukrainian forces have used cluster munitions that caused deaths and serious injuries to civilians. Russian forces have extensively used cluster munitions, causing many civilian deaths and serious injuries. 
  • Cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine are harming civilians now and will leave bomblets behind that will continue to do so for many years.
  • Both sides should immediately stop using cluster munitions and not seek to obtain more of these indiscriminate weapons. The US should not transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine.

Other groups and activists have warned it marks an escalation which is to provide greater dangers to civilians now and in the future. 

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Former U.S. officials have held secret Ukraine talks with prominent Russians

A group of former senior U.S. national security officials have held secret talks with prominent Russians believed to be close to the Kremlin — and, in at least one case, with the country’s top diplomat — with the aim of laying the groundwork for potential negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, half a dozen people briefed on the discussions told NBC News. 

In a high-level example of the back-channel diplomacy taking place behind the scenes, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with members of the group for several hours in April in New York, four former officials and two current officials told NBC News. 

On the agenda of the April meeting were some of the thorniest issues in the war in Ukraine, like the fate of Russian-held territory that Ukraine may never be able to liberate, and the search for an elusive diplomatic off-ramp that could be tolerable to both sides. 

Sitting down with Lavrov were Richard Haass, a former diplomat and the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, current and former officials said. The group was joined by Europe expert Charles Kupchan and Russia expert Thomas Graham, both former White House and State Department officials who are Council on Foreign Relations fellows. 

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Burns Calls Ukraine War Major ‘Opportunity’ for CIA Recruiting Spies

CIA Director William Burns said in a speech on Saturday that the war in Ukraine provides his spy agency a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to recruit Russians.

“Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service,” Burns told the Ditchley Foundation in the UK, according to The Hill.

Burns mentioned how the CIA has been openly trying to recruit people inside Russia using social media. “We’re not letting it go to waste. We recently used social media — our first video post to Telegram, in fact — to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business,” he said.

The CIA published a video on Telegram and YouTube in May asking Russians to contact the spy agency with links using Tor, a web browser that encrypts user activity. The idea is to use Tor to access a CIA site on the dark web that the agency uses to gather information from people around the world. The CIA has been posting similar instructions on social media throughout the war.

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Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine

Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders (Extra!, 7/13). The weapons industry is a major contributor to these idea factories; a recent report from the Quincy Institute (6/1/23) demonstrates just how much influence war profiteers have on the national discourse.

The Quincy Institute—whose own start-up funding came mainly from George Soros and Charles Koch—looked at 11 months of Ukraine War coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, from March 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023, and counted each time one of 33 leading think tanks was mentioned. Of the 15 think tanks most often mentioned in the coverage, only one—Human Rights Watch—does not take funding from Pentagon contractors. Quincy’s analysis found that the media were seven times more likely to cite think tanks with war industry ties than they were to cite think tanks without war industry ties.

With 157 mentions each, the top two think tanks were the Atlantic Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Both of these think tanks receive millions from the war industry. The Atlantic Council has long been the brain trust of NATO, the military organization whose expansion towards Russia’s borders was a critical factor in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Both think tanks receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, companies which have already been awarded billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts as a result of the war in Ukraine.

CSIS was revealed in a New York Times expose (8/7/16) to produce content that reflected the weapons industry priorities of its funders.  It also “initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations” of military funders.

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9/11: Whodunnit? and Why It Matters to the Peace Movement

“I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace . . .”— PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, JUNE 10, 1963

Sixty years later it behooves us more than ever to penetrate the tenacious ignorance of which Kennedy spoke. To honor my friend and colleague, TRANSCEND member Prof. Graeme MacQueen, who passed away in April, this editorial addresses topics he was passionate about, namely peace, justice and truth, in particular 9/11 truth.

If we’re not willing to open our minds to the abundant evidence refuting the narrative, fed to us mere minutes after the heinous crimes of 9/11 unfolded before our eyes, that a band of foreign militants from the Middle East was solely responsible for those crimes, then we risk continuing to fall prey to propaganda leading to unending wars and suffering.

Johan Galtung introduced me to Graeme at a 2011 TRANSCEND symposium in North Carolina. 9/11 was not on the formal agenda, but came up in side conversations as the 10-year anniversary approached. Galtung has always promoted open dialog on challenging topics, bucking the penchant of academic institutions and major media platforms to ignore dissenting views on 9/11 and dismiss them as crazy conspiracy theories. He thus proposed adding a session on 9/11 to the symposium and opening it to the general public. Three of us presented our views, followed by Q and A.

Galtung accepted the official narrative that 9/11 was perpetrated by foreign Muslim extremists, viewing it as blow-back from the many injustices the US had inflicted on the Middle East. He called it a public execution of 3 buildings (World Trade Center 1 and 2, and the Pentagon) that symbolized the US military-financial complex. 

Graeme and I enumerated unexplained anomalies pointing to complicity of key agents within the US Government and cast doubt on the culpability of Al-Qaeda operatives. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of 9/11, confessed involvement only after being subjected to prolonged torture via waterboarding, while videos of Osama bin Laden claiming credit for the attacks look suspiciously fake.

We all agreed, however, along with most peace activists, that the US response to the events of 9/11 was reprehensible: declaring the unending war on terror, fomenting widespread Islamophobia, curtailing civil liberties, decades-long military incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq that ruined both countries and cost countless lives. The US leadership justified its violent response by the fear, outrage and desire for revenge that swept across much of the nation, horrified at the shock and awe it had witnessed that fateful day. How could that have been prevented?

Imagine what our world might look like if the propaganda machine set in motion the morning of 9/11 had failed. What if most journalists, commentators, engineers, pilots, firefighters, police, and politicians on mainstream media had pressed for answers to valid questions, like:

How could damage and fires on the upper floors have caused both twin towers to explode and disappear into their footprints? How could World Trade Center 7, a third skyscraper not hit by a plane, have imploded symmetrically at free fall speed? How could an alleged hijacker who flunked flight school on small planes have executed a harrowing maneuver to ram a passenger jet into the Pentagon going 500 mph at ground level? How did the US, with its hundreds of billions in defense spending, fail to defend the nerve center of its military headquarters in the nation’s capital? 

Once it was announced hijacked planes were crashing into buildings, why did Secret Service agents allow President Bush to remain in a Florida classroom with children, leaving them vulnerable to attack? Who made money on a significant increase in stock market betting right before 9/11 that prices of American and United Airline stocks would drop? 

What if honest eye-witness journalists, who in the morning had reported explosions both before and during the destruction of the towers, had continued to develop that thread and ask deeper questions throughout the day and following days, rather than being diverted by select experts and pundits who silenced the “explosion” theme, supplanting it with unproven assertions that Osama bin Laden did it.

Had these questions — many raised also by 9/11 victims’ family members — been relentlessly pursued, the flimsy tale of Muslim extremists from remote parts of the world with no ties to any government being the lone perpetrators of this apocalyptic theatrical display would have soon disintegrated.

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Tony Blair and The Iraq War: Digging Deeper into the Death of David Kelly

In little more than two weeks, we mark the 20th anniversary of the Welsh scientist and authority on biowarfare, Dr David Kelly. [1]

Listeners to this station will remember a discussion about the man in March 2023, the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Our past guest, Dr David Halpin outlined some of the reasons he, Dr Stephen Frost, and a list of determined skeptics doubted the official story of his passage due to suicide and were mobilizing in support of not just public hearings, but a public inquest to get to the bottom of his death, which they suspected was a murder which benefited the government of the UK, and Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular. [2]

The oft repeated assertion among many such skeptics, including Liberal-Democrat MP Norman Baker, was the claim that weapons of mass destruction was a key to a motive behind his elimination. Iraq supposedly still had WMDs. They could be launched at the insistence of Big Bad Saddam to cause tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people in some innocent country – maybe even America! But David Kelly, acclaimed and high profile weapons instructor that he was, publicly challenged this claim. Hence, ripping away the fundamental reason for going to war with Iraq.

However, there may be another motive that could potentially lead to an even darker agenda. Dr. Kelly was the head of biological defence at the Government’s secretive military research establishment  in Wiltshire, England. He was the brain behind much of the West’s germ warfare programmes. . [3]

If Dr. Kelly was knowledgeable of anything untoward, and was willing to blab to the public, might that also be a reason for doing him in? After all, soon after the suspicious releases of anthrax letters post 9/11, followed an astonishing level of deaths of top scientists in the field of microbiology. Was Kelly a target? Or unfinished business? [4]

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Biden Close To Approving Cluster Bombs, Banned In 120 Countries, For Ukraine

President Biden is said to be close to approving controversial cluster munitions for Ukraine. CNN on Friday cites administration sources to say he is “strongly considering” approval of the transfer. 

“Officials told CNN that a final decision is expected soon from the White House, and that if approved, the weapons could be included in a new military aid package to Ukraine as soon as next month,” the report says.

“These would undoubtedly have a significant battlefield impact,” a US official said to the outlet. CNN further acknowledges that “Cluster munitions, which the US has stockpiled in large numbers since phasing them out in 2016, could help fill that gap, officials said.”

The White House would likely receive significant support from bipartisan lawmakers in Congress, given that’s precisely where the initiative to supply Kiev with cluster munitions originated. 

In March a Republican letter to the president chastised the White House’s “reluctance to provide Ukraine the right type and amount of long-range fires and maneuver capability to create.”

That particular letter had been signed by influential, high-level GOP Congress members, including: Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike Rogers the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

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