Tag: perpetual war

Kyiv Residents Who Posted Footage of Russian Air Attack on Social Media Threatened With Jail

Six Kyiv residents who posted shocking night-time footage of missiles flying through the air which quickly went viral could face up to eight years in prison if charged with breaking wartime censorship rules.

While in an age of social media saturation, it may seem natural to record and post something extraordinary happening outside your bedroom window, that is presently illegal in Ukraine, as six locals — including a locally famous Instagram model — are finding out.

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said the Kyiv City Prosecutor’s Office have launched “comprehensive measures” to “establish all the circumstances of the crime and bring the guilty to justice” after footage showing the night-time sky of Kyiv during Tuesday’s “exceptional ” air raid was published online. Russian ‘hypersonic’ missiles and suicide drones were among the 18 incoming shot down in the raid, according to the Ukrainian government.

Keep reading

Russian porn star added to Ukrainian ‘kill list’

A notorious Ukrainian government-linked website that tracks purported enemies of the state has added Russian-born porn star Eva Elfie to its “hit list.” According to the Mirotvorets database, the adult film actress is guilty of “legitimizing the occupation of Crimea.”

Mirotvorets publishes profiles of public figures and private citizens whom it considers to be enemies of Ukraine, marking those have died by any causes as “eliminated.” It is also known to dox its targets whenever it obtains their personal data. Some of the people blacklisted by Mirotvorets have been murdered.

The website took issue with Elfie, whose real name is Yulia Romanova, traveling to Crimea for a photo shoot 2018, just as her adult entertainment career was taking off. The Siberian-born actress’s popularity was given a boost in 2021, when she received the ‘Best New Foreign Starlet’ accolade at the adult movie industry’s prestigious AVN Awards.

According to an anonymous Mirotvorets editor, Elfie was blacklisted after she became “the number one porn actress in the world.”

A screenshot posted by Elfie in November of her Pornhub profile showed that she was ranked first on the adult website, with over 870 million views and 1.9 million subscribers. In April, she received a Pornhub award for ‘Most Popular Female Performer Chosen by Women’.

Keep reading

Over 4.5 million people killed in post 9/11 wars

A new study from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates that over 4.5 million people have died from wars launched by the west in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The study estimates that between 906,000 to 937,000 people have been killed as a direct result of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia.

“These countries have experienced the most violent wars in which the US government has been involved in the name of counterterrorism since 2001,” the report highlights.

Moreover, 3.6 million people are estimated to have died indirectly from the effects of western wars, including economic collapse, food insecurity, destruction of public health facilities, environmental contamination, and recurring violence.

However, the researchers go on to stress that “the true impacts [of war] are so vast and complex that they are unquantifiable and thus [the report] does not generate a precise mortality figure, but instead provides a reasonable and conservative estimate.”

The study also points to other factors that exacerbate the crisis in war-torn nations, including “natural disasters, climate chaos, and forced displacement.”

It also highlights that women and children are the most vulnerable to the effects of war, with researchers calculating that over 7.6 million children under five suffer from acute malnutrition in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia.

“The post-9/11 wars have occurred in countries whose populations are largely Black and brown and are often waged by countries with histories of white supremacism and Islamophobia,” the report adds.

Keep reading

‘NYT’ slights Palestinian civilian deaths and Netanyahu’s political motivation for attacks

We are accustomed to The New York Times parroting the official Israeli view of Palestinian resistance, and once again this week the Times came through, all but leaving out the Palestinian civilians killed by Israel and dismissing an important factor in Israel’s missile strikes on apartment buildings in Gaza — the pressure on Netanyahu from the fascistic members of his own coalition.

Even liberal Zionists in the United States were alarmed by the political motivation for murdering innocent civilians. But the Times made excuses for Netanyahu.

Yesterday the Times put the death of an Israeli in the third paragraph of its story– the first Israeli casualty during a week of violence. But in a frank demonstration that Palestinian lives don’t matter to the newspaper of record, the Times left civilian deaths in Gaza till a few paragraphs from the end of the story. (“At least 29 Palestinians have been killed since the hostilities began on Tuesday, six of them children…”)

The Times justified the Israeli attacks, calling them “airstrikes against what the military described as 150 targets linked to the militant group [Islamic Jihad] in Gaza.”

One Times headline only mentioned the three Islamic Jihad leaders killed, not the 10 civilians. Palestinians are being dehumanized, Dahlia Hatuqa pointed out.

Here’s a good example of how you dehumanize Palestinians. Israel purposefully struck a residential area in one of the most densely populated places on earth. It is impoverished and besieged. 12 people are killed, including women and children. And the headline is about “militants”

The PBS News Hour was almost as deferential. Geoff Bennett left the large number of Palestinian dead to the last line of his report, and didn’t say that almost all have been civilians. Nope, it’s legitimate targets: “Israeli airstrikes hit Islamic Jihad targets. Palestinian officials said at least 21 people in Gaza have been killed.”

This politeness about state terrorism reflects the enormous pressure inside Israel not to talk about the civilian deaths. When an Israeli channel highlighted the killings of ten women and children, it was ravaged by critics, including government ministers.

Keep reading

St. Petersburg Uhuru members speak for first time since indictment

It’s a matter of free speech, says Omali Yeshitela, the longtime leader of the St. Petersburg-based Uhuru Movement and founder of the African People’s Socialist Party.

Yeshitela was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa last month and accused of working with Russian nationals to sow discord in the United States, spread pro-Russian propaganda and influence elections, along with two other members of the Uhuru Movement, Penny Joanne Hess and Jesse Nevel.

On Wednesday, the three Uhuru members spoke to the press for the first time since their indictment.

“I believe in free speech,” Yeshitela said at the news conference. “If I didn’t believe in free speech, I would never have said anything because they kill Black people for talking in this country.”

Yeshitela founded the African People’s Socialist Party in 1972. The Uhuru Movement is the party’s activist branch, started in the 1990s. The group supports reparations for Black people and has protested racism, colonialism and capitalism for decades. Hess and Nevel are the chairpersons of groups for white allies under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, respectively.

Keep reading

U.S. meddling contributed to the Russia-Ukraine war, it’s time we stop meddling around the world

The United States should end involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, call for a cease-fire and begin negotiations immediately.

No matter what the War Party claims about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supposed desire to reinstate the Soviet Union or Russian empire, the fact is that this war was provoked by the United States, and — no surprise — particularly the neoconservatives.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama overthrew the government of Ukraine twice in 10 years, with their astro-turfed fake Orange and Maidan so-called “revolutions” of 2004 and 2014 because the people of Ukraine kept voting for the wrong guy.

W. announced at Bucharest in 2008 America’s determination to bring both Ukraine and former-Soviet Georgia, both of which border Russia, into the NATO alliance, just as he had overseen the addition of the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in 2004. This led to war in Georgia just a few months later when their American-installed regime attempted to reconquer two provinces lost during the breakup of the Soviet Union.

W. also began installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Romania and Poland, which are launched from the dual-use Mark-41 launchers, which can also fit Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be fitted with hydrogen bombs, thus violating at least the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s great Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty of 1987, which President Donald Trump tore up in 2019.

The Obama administration — led by Robert Kagan’s wife, former Dick Cheney advisor Victoria Nuland — supported the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, with neo-Nazi and far-right groups taking an active role in the overthrow. Soon, the new regime threatened to kick the Russians out of their only year-around, warm-water port at Sevastopol, Crimea, leading to Ukraine’s loss of the entire peninsula and the outbreak of war in the far-eastern Donbas region, which was majority ethnic Russian and had supported the recently ousted president.

After France and Germany struck the Minsk peace deals of 2014 and 2015 between Ukraine and Russia, Obama and Trump sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Kiev, incentivizing their continued violation of the peace deals.

After eight years of so-called “low-level” proxy war in the east, Putin demanded the full implementation of the Minsk agreements and a new treaty with the United States promising not to integrate Ukraine into NATO or station missiles there.

Instead of negotiating in good faith, the Biden administration said they were looking forward to replicating U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They would bog Russia down and bleed them to bankruptcy just as the Soviets had helped do to the United States in Vietnam and our own government has been helping Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda do to us for the last 20 years in the Middle East.

Keep reading

This Is What Dystopia Looks Like

So U2 singer Bono is doing illustrations for the imperialist propaganda rag The Atlantic now, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in a dystopian civilization during the death throes of a globe-spanning empire.

A Washington Post article, “Bono likes to sketch Atlantic covers, so the magazine hired him,” reports that “Bono is into Atlantic cover fanfic — so much so that he was invited to illustrate the magazine’s June cover featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.” 

Bono’s latest contribution to the mountain of cringe-inducing Zelensky moments we’ve been seeing for the past year provides a cover image for an article by lifelong war propagandists Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg.

The article endorses a Ukrainian offensive to recapture Crimea, which experts largely agree would be the move most likely to trigger a nuclear war in this conflict.

Here’s a paragraph from Applebaum and Goldberg’s article, just to give you a taste of the infantile “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” framing that Western liberals are being fed by mass media war propagandists these days:

“Sometimes, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or between dictatorship and freedom. In truth, the differences between the two opponents are not merely ideological, but also sociological. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia pits a heterarchy against a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society — one that is both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized — is fighting a very large, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20?something engineers build eyes in the sky, using tools that would be familiar to 20?something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, commanders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be slaughtered — just as Stalin once sent shtrafbats, penal battalions, against the Nazis — under the leadership of a dictator obsessed with ancient bones. ‘The choice,’ Zelensky told us, ‘is between freedom and fear.’”

Keep reading

The Iraq War Is (And Will Always Be) Undefendable

This spring marks the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. After an initial frenzy of war fever in the early years of the war, support for the war has since largely evaporated. Nearly two thirds of veterans now say the war was “not worth fighting.” Two thirds of American adults say the same thing. Even among Republican veterans, only a minority say the war was worth it.

These numbers are not surprising. The U.S. obviously failed to achieve its stated objectives in Iraq, and the reasons given to justify the initial invasion were either exaggerations or outright lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was never any threat to Americans. Years after the initial invasion, the U.S. regime still couldn’t keep the lights in in Iraq, suicide bombings became an epidemic, and the war paved the way for the spread of the so-called Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

In fact, the war has been such an obvious failure that its supporters are now routinely on the defensive. We’ve come a long way from the days when war supporters were denouncing all dissenters as traitors or Saddam-lovers, or as being “with the terrorists.” Today, many of the war’s supporters studiously avoid mentioning the war at all. But many others have been forced to express “regrets” or even offer half-hearted apologies.

This is all certainly insufficient. A “sufficient” response would be a Church-committee-like Congressional investigation of the war and its supporters. This would be followed by legal authorization of lawsuits against the personal property and estates of government officials who prosecuted the war. This would be followed by a tidal wave of lawsuits by maimed soldiers and the families of Americans killed in the war. Foreigners would be able to sue in federal court, as well. George W. Bush and Paul Bremer should be facing financial ruin as should the heirs of Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell.

The odds of all that happening are about zero, unfortunately. The more attainable goal at hand, however, is to fight to ensure that the Iraq War and its supporters are never rehabilitated by historians, and the war does not go down in history as some sort of “noble but misguided” conflict. Nor should it be forgotten.

Keep reading

Not Your Grandfather’s Military-Industrial Complex

Honestly, it should take your breath away. We are on a planet prepping for further war in a staggering fashion. A watchdog group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), just released its yearly report on global military spending. Given the war in Ukraine, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, in 2022, such spending in Western and Central Europe surpassed levels set as the Cold War ended in the last century. Still, it wasn’t just Europe or Russia where military budgets leaped. They were rising rapidly in Asia as well (with significant jumps in Japan and India, as well as for the world’s second-largest military spender, China). And that doesn’t even include spiking military budgets in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on this embattled planet. In fact, last year, 12 of the 15 largest military spenders topped their 2021 outlays.

None of that is good news. Still, it goes without saying that one country overshadowed all the rest – and you know just which one I mean. At $877 billion last year (not including the funds “invested” in its intelligence agencies and what’s still known as “the Department of Homeland Security”), the U.S. military budget once again left the others in the dust. Keep in mind that, according to SIPRI, Pentagon spending, heading for a trillion dollars in the near future, represented a staggering 39% of all (yes, all!) global military spending last year. That’s more than the next 11 largest military budgets combined. (And that is up from nine not so long ago.) Keep in mind as well that, despite such funding, we’re talking about a military, as I pointed out recently, which hasn’t won a war of significance since 1945.

With that in mind, let Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Ben Freeman explain how we’ve reached such a perilous point from the time in 1961 when a former five-star general, then president, warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of endlessly overfunding the – a term he invented – military-industrial complex. Now, let Hartung and Freeman explore how, more than six decades later, that very complex reigns supreme. 

Keep reading

“Consider it a fake, even if it’s not” – FBI accused of assisting Ukraine with Facebook censorship

The FBI has been pressuring Facebook and other platforms to censor misinformation on behalf of Ukraine, even when the information is not necessarily untrue, according to a report by independent journalist Lee Fang.

Fang learned about the FBI’s alleged role in the censorship after interviewing the head of the Department of Cyber Information Security of Ukraine, Illia Vitiuk.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the US, we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said Vitiuk.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that.”

They also flag information that might be true.

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

From the report:

“During the panel, Vitiuk thanked the Ukrainian government’s many public and private sector allies in the United States, including Mandiant, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Clearview, Google, Amazon, and Starlink, among others. Cyber security support from American partners has helped thwart Russian cyber attacks on civilian and military infrastructure and have been a “psychological game changer,” Vitiuk said. He emphasized that the FBI has been his agency’s ‘top partner.’”

While such tactics are a common, but controversial, warfare practice, the FBI is supposed to have the First Amendment to think about.

The allegations that the FBI continue to be involved in online censorship is concerning, especially given that the FBI’s censorship efforts have already been exposed by Matt Taibbi and other journalists who released the Twitter Files.

Keep reading