The Syria Game is Just Another Repeat

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

12-24-24

Following on from Owen Jones' extensive report about the western media bias, particularly the BBC,and the US when it comes to the Israeli genocide in Palestine; we need to recognize that this is not new and not confined to that one issue.

 

As Israel, the US, and Britain bomb Yemen, (did you vote for that?) it’s important for working people to reflect on Syria for a bit and the video above is an important contribution to an understanding of the underlying causes of the Syrian crisis and US imperialism’s role in it. 

 

As the narrator points out in the video, the western mass media is praising the overthrow of Bashar Assad by the Islamist fundamentalist group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Al Qaeda offshoot which translates to the “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”. The group is led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, known more familiarly as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani who until last week had a $10 million bounty on his head. HTS was also designated a terrorist organization by the US. 

 

With Assad’s overthrow, numerous forces are seeking to strengthen their positions, some local like the Kurdish YPG that the US has been supporting but as the narrator above points out, the Kurds have been betrayed by the US on more than one occasion and, in this case, what complicates matters is the Turks, who controlled the region prior to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WW1, consider the YPG a terrorist group. There are some 25 million Kurds in Turkey as well as others in Iraq and Syria and perhaps Iran. Turkey will not be favorable to any strengthening of the Kurdish presence in an Assad free Syria.

 

Last week, the US state department’s senior diplomat for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, met with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and its leader and removed the $10 million bounty. This has all the trappings of yet another US/ NATO catastrophe written all over it. 

 

The Islamist group’s meeting with US imperialism’s representatives in the region is like a kiss of death for the Syrian people. Neither group at the table has the interests of the workers in Syria or the region in mind. Nor are they acting in support of US or British workers.

The US proxy in the region, the Zionist Apartheid state, has been bombing Syrian infrastructure, installations, its navy and air force, in order ensure that whatever government follows Assad will not have the capability to defend itself against Israeli aggression. 

From what I understand, Jolani wants to create Sharia law in Syria but at the same time is claiming to be supportive of minorities and other religions. Why would he not? The US wouldn’t give him any of our money otherwise. But he’d better be careful. The US has no problem with supporting jihadists, religious fanatics and despots of all stripes but, only if Wall Street interests are protected. Hussein, Ben Ali, Mubarak who Hillary Clinton considered “like family”, and many other so-called friends of the US have not fared well over time.

 

Syria, a Nation state created in secret by the French and British through the Sykes/Picot agreement after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, has faced many efforts by the US to foster and promote destabilizing sectarian divisions over the past 25 years.

 

In 2006, five years before the Arab Spring that forced numerous ruthless US backed dictators from power in 2011, “….destabilizing the Syrian regime was a central motivation of US policy.” Robert Naiman wrote in the Wikileaks Files. Thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks, we have access to cables sent by William Roebuck, chargé d’ affairs at the US embassy in Damascus, to the US State Department and White House.

 

In a December 2006 cable Roebuck stressed that there were a number of weakness in the regime that could be exploited including the Kurdish threat and Islamic extremists. Bathist regimes were traditionally hostile to Islamic fundamentalists but the US clearly has a much more flexible approach as the makeover of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani shows.

“The cable suggests….”,  Naimann writes, “…that the US goal in December 2006 was to undermine the Syrian government by any available means and that what mattered was whether US action would help destabilize the government, not what other impacts the action might have.” My added emphasis. Let’s not forget that the first Americans in Vietnam were CIA, and their job was to disrupt that society.

 

Publicly, the US was then, and still is apparently, opposed to Islamic extremists unless they serve Wall Street’s interests as Osama bin Laden did for a while.  In Syria, as in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, US imperialism saw the possibility of Islamic extremism as a potential threat to the Syrian government and an opportunity that should be taken.

 

Syria is a very diverse nation composed of Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Kurds, Jews, Christians and US representatives would be failing in their duties if they didn’t foster sectarian divisions when it suited US interests. 

 

With the growing influence of Iran and the ongoing tensions between the Iranian Mullahs and the Saudi’s, Roebuck saw an opportunity and suggested that the US should try to destabilize the Syrian government by joining forces with Egypt and the Saudi’s  to “fan sectarian tensions between the Sunni and Shia.”, writes Naiman. 

 

Roebuck’s cable to the White House makes that pretty clear: “Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here…….are giving increasing attention to the matter and, we should coordinate more closely with their governments on wats to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue” added emphasis.

 

The US ambassador to Syria was recommending cooperation with two of the most corrupt regimes in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in an effort to undermine the Assad regime in the hope of creating a more reliable pro-western ally. 

 

Eight years later as Syria was engulfed in civil war that had sectarian Shia/Sunni elements in it, the US, and most likely other western nations, criticized this conflict as an unfortunate development, a product of Arab/Muslim backwardness. These former colonial subjects simply don’t know how to govern themselves. The Irish, the black South Africans, the numerous colonized states of Latin America, all of them unable to govern, were desperately in need of a colonial overseer to save them from themselves. 

 

Their political instability and relative backwardness, economically, the inability to develop “healthy” capitalist democracies along the lines of Britain or Germany,  was not a product of colonial occupation, restricting this development, but inherent in the racial or religious makeup of the population.

 

As I read some of the cables detailed in The Wikileaks Files, I am reminded of the debt we owe to Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and others who have pulled the mask from the ugly face of capitalist politics. There are others mentioned in Julian Assange’s excellent book, When Google Met Wikileaks

 

The developments in Syria will not benefit the Syrian working class and we will see more bloodshed as the forces determining the outcome are the enemies of the Syrian workers and workers throughout the world.

 

But this is not unique to Syria. Sudan, Kashmir, Eastern Europe, Argentina, Mexico, India and throughout the world we are witnessing the by-products of a global social system that has reached the limits of its ability to take human society forward. China too will be engulfed in struggle as the Chinese working class pushes back against the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing. There is no human or environmentally friendly capitalism and China will confirm that as time goes on.

 

Most of the nation states in the former colonial world are relatively young, created from without. Nigeria for example only became a state in 1960 as British colonialism put a box around hundreds of different tribal communities and told them they are all Nigerian now; national consciousness takes time. Syria and all the problems we are witnessing in former European colonies are a direct result of colonialism and will never escape endless war, poverty and famine within the framework of global capitalism.

 

National borders are not a divine creation but workers cannot ignore them. The vast majority of the world’s people possess no working capital. Yes there are huge differences in living standards and conditions are so bad in some regions that slavery is a norm. But we have much in common as an exploited class and there is an inherent tendency for oppressed peoples to unite and seek allies beyond their immediate borders. The attack in immigrants is an attempt by our enemies to undermine this tendency. But we can, and must build an international movement to combat and eliminate the system that is waging war against humanity and nature.

 

The only answer is a global federation of democratic socialist states that can work cooperatively to produce the necessities of human life in a way that is in harmony with nature not in conflict with it. As things are going, there will be huge swathes of the planet that will be uninhabitable due to climate change, a product of industrial society and capitalism.

 

We have a future to fight for, a future for our children and grandchildren. We owe it to them.

Reprinted from the UK socialist website, Left Horizons

Lobby outside the High Court. Free Julian Assange!

21 February 2024 Posted by Editor

Report from Dave Putson

Supporters of Julian Assange have been at the High Court two days running now, where he is fighting against extradition to the USA. When I arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice on the first morning, I was expecting to see a few dozen people, but by 8.30am, there were already easily 300 people carrying placards and banners, and that was in the rain (picture top).

Assange has been illegally incarcerated for years. He was first of all holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy for seven years up to 2019, and in prison after that. He is facing extradition to the USA on trumped up charges under their Espionage Act.

Most of the media that appeared to be there did not seem to be from the mainstream, but mostly independents. The one exception, Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian, who previously supported and accepted information to enable award-winning articles to be written, courtesy of Assange’s Wikileaks, only then to turn on him when he was threatened by the UK security services (and probably the USA ’s as well).

Incarcerated in Belmarsh for five years.

Among the supporters and campaigners for Assange, there were some with materials to purchase goods to enable funding the support Julian Assange campaign were there, as they are every Saturday at General Gordon Square in Woolwich SE18, unless there is an actual event outside Belmarsh Prison, where Assange has been held, for five years, such as for his birthdays.

There was a very limited window of opportunity for speeches at the Court lobby, so many people who spoke but were limited to just a few minutes. We heard from Julian’s father and brother, and the briefest of words from his wife Stella. A couple of members of the European Parliamentary spoke, as well as MPs Zarah Sultana, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon and Jeremy Corbyn, who still gets waves of cheers when he gets up.

Among the speakers, there was also a journalist from Jacobin who had flown in from Washington DC specifically for this event. Craig Murray, a formed UK Ambassador, also had a minute or two, But by far and away the largest noise and cheering was when Andrew Feinstein was announced to speak. It appeared it was in equal measure for his personal approval, as well as the fact that he is standing against Keir Starmer in his seat in the coming the general election. It did not appear that the Labour Party’s alleged leader was very popular with this crowd!

Julian Assange has been held in HMP Belmarsh for five years, whilst having sustained no charges against him. The hypocrisy is of the  mainstream media and most establishment politicians is staggering. Western ‘journalists’ (using the term loosely) and politicians have been decrying the incarceration, and then the subsequent death of Alexei Navalny in Russia.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, for most politicians and the media, Assange is already guilty and condemned, even before his trial. Those politians like Tony Blair and George W Bush, who ‘justified’ the war on Iraq with lies and cover-ups, are allowed to go free. But Assange, who exposed war crimes during that war, is castigated andd condemned.

Among the crimes shown by Assange – which would never had seen the light of day, but for Wikileaks – was film of the wanton strafing and killing of men and youths in a street in Iraq, as they were simply hanging out and chatting. The war criminal goes unpunished, while his exposer is crucified for his actions.

Australian parliament voted for Assange to be released

Assange, if these journalists but knew it, follows in the tradition of other outspoken critics of the UK state, like John Lilburne (“Freeborn” John), who was also arrested many times for having the temerity to speak truth to power, and was eventually dumped in prison. Julian Assange’ real ‘crime’ is to expose the truth, to the great embarrassment of the US and UK states and it is for that reason and that reason alone he has  been imprisoned for years without a charge.

The UK government will have made sure that the Court as it is now in session is a “safe pair of hands”, to get the decision they want. I believe it will be a massive surprise if any decision is made that gives Julian Assange justice. The Court will doubtless disregard the vote of the Australian parliament – by a two thirds majority – to return to Julian to Australia his native country.

Unfortunately, many reports are suggesting that the judges involved in the extradition process, in both the UK and USA, are well ‘tied in’ to both countries’ establishments. So I am sceptical that they will be minded to, or even able to sustain any resistance to the perpetual behind the scenes lobbying that has gone on and is still going on, to have Assange demonised for revealing truths he was not supposed to reveal.

However, even if there is only a 1% chance of Julian’s release, the fight continues. After all, even the postmasters and postmistresses were found guilty in a court of law after Post Office Horizon IT debacle, and it is only now, after 20 years, that they have a chance of justice.

For Julian Assange’s wife and family and for Julian himself, this is a matter of life or death. His wife, Stella, has said that this might be his “final hearing” because he is so weak physically and mentally after so many years that she thinks he is unlikely to survive being extradited. The fight has to go on.

Why US and Global Capitalism Wants Julian Assange Dead

order here

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

US capitalism is “merciless” when it comes to defending its profits.German Industrialist.

 

The Collateral Murder Video that showed a US attack helicopter mowing down civilians, (See full video here)  including a Reuters reporter, in Iraq (and laughing about it) is not the only reason the US ruling class wants Julian Assange dead or why he has been incarcerated for so long. Wikileaks, Assange, Chelsea Manning, Bradley Manning at the time, the whistleblower who leaked the video, have been persecuted and tortured by the US government in its brutal efforts to silence free speech and independent journalism.  Edward Snowden is another US citizen wanted by the US regime for informing us and the world of the regime’s crimes and exposing so called diplomacy for what it is.

 

I bought the book, The Wikileaks Files when Verso first published it in 2015. Every activist and socially conscious person should have a copy as a reference source.

 

Here are a few comments from the book about Russia and Ukraine and more:

“…in the decade following the century’s turn, the US has pursued a policy of aggressive NATO expansion, challenging Russia’s regional hegemony within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area and seeking to subvert nuclear treaties to maintain its strategic advantage. As the cables show, these efforts have not gone unnoticed by Russia and are recurring points of conflict….”

 

Another area of warfare is trade and agriculture. Ukraine, as we now know (some of us didn’t need a war to inform us) is the largest country in Europe and main exporter of grains, particularly wheat. I remember my father, who spoke some Russian, used to call it Europe’s bread basket. We now know it is very much the former colonial world’s bread basket.

 

Wikileaks released 1000 documents from the Cablegate cache related to the US government’s, “pushing (US) industrial manufactures on its allies” but beyond that, The files point out that US support of the biotech industry is aggressive in Europe and plays an even  “…bigger role……in assuring a place for genetically modified agricultural products (GMO’s) in a region that largely wanted nothing to do with them.” The US state representing Monsanto in this example.

 

Wikileaks and the leaked cables showed that the “…American campaign promoting biotech products was a worldwide effort. In all, some 1,000 documents from the Cablegate cache address this effort…..”

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But US biotech was not all that was being pushed on the global community. Along with the  release of cables between the US state department and its representatives abroad revealing their phony diplomacy, the publishing of When Google Met Wikileaks in 2014 by OR Books was the last straw for the US ruling elite. The book is an account of a meeting Assange had (at Google’s request) when he was under house arrest in Norfolk in 2011. In late 2010, Foreign Affairs,  a journal of the Council on Foreign Relations,   published a policy piece co-written by Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and Jared Cohen, who Assange initially describes as the “director of Google ideas” Assange later referred to Cohen as “Googles director of Regime Change”.  The article, Assange writes, praises the, “reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy.”  and was the basis for a book published in 2013 titled, The New Digital Age.

 

In When Google Met Wikileaks Assange writes that, “The New Digital Age is a startingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the twenty first century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google and Mr. Cohen, a former advisor to Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.”  P53 *

 

He says of Google’s Eric Schmidt that he, “…fits exactly where he is: at the point where the centrist liberal and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By all appearances Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgement of the “benevolent superpower”.. They will tell you that open-mindness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil”. They believe they are doing good. And that is the problem.” P35 (my added emphasis)

 

The advance of information technology epitomized by Google…., says Assange, “…. heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism.” (P57 When Google Met Wikileaks). Through this meeting Assange draws the conclusion that Schmidt, the technocrat, and Jared Cohen, the foreign policy wonk, along with two others that accompanied them to the meeting comprised, a “…..delegation that was one part google three parts US foreign policy establishment.”

 

It’s important to remember that prior to the publishing of these books, the rape accusations against Assange and his house arrest on November 28^th 2010, Wikileaks released US diplomatic cables (Tunileaks) between the US Embassy in Tunisia and the US State Department revealing what every Tunisian knew and felt; the corruption of the US supported regime. Less than an hour after WikiLeaks had published the diplomatic cables on its own site, they were published by the dissident Tunisian website Nawaat with whom Wikileaks had formed association. "The monopoly of state media in most authoritarian Arab regimes had been progressively undermined for several years as citizens sought alternative information from dissident bloggers and television.”, Yasmine Ryan wrote in Al Jazeera at the time, but “WikiLeaks……. offered the final blow, and, in fact, found partners in the Arab world in the alternative media.”

 

Wikileaks was gaining a following among dissidents, and news outlets (primarily bloggers) in corrupt despotic regimes the US either installed or supported.

 

In December, what we know as the Arab Spring took off as a Tunisian street vendor set fire to himself protesting the rotten corrupt regime of Ben Ali, the US supported head of state that ran Tunisia, as many Arab regimes do, like a family business. The revolts spread, assisted by social media and numerous heads of Arab gangster regimes were dislodged including Hosni Mubarak who Hilary Clinton described as a “family friend”and  who Joe Biden stressed was “not a dictator” and said he should not resign. Obama and Clinton only abandoned the torturer Mubarak when it was clear the Egyptian people were removing him.

 

Julian Assange, is presently incarcerated in Belmarsh prison in the UK. The US is aiming to get the UK government to extradite him where he will no doubt be tried and likely executed for “….obtaining classified information with reason to believe that the information was to be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation.” Read more at the United States Department of Justice website. As of this writing, the information Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning released to the American people and the world has not caused harm to the working class of the United States or anywhere else.

 

Julian Assange is a friend of the working class. He has not revealed things to us that we don’t already know in the abstract, what he, Chelsea Manning and people like Edward Snowden have done, is make them social fact. This undermines the pretense that diplomacy is about honor, cooperation, democracy and principles.

 

Assange is imprisoned having had no trial, having been convicted of no crime.  Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson who claimed Assange asked him to hack in to government computers has since admitted he fabricated that story and instead was, “…recruited by US authorities in order to build a case against Assange, and misled them into believing he was a close associate of the Wikileaks founder. In reality, however, he had only “volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010 but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than $50,000 from the organisation” Key Witness Admits He Lied, US Media Ignores Exculpatory Revelations The Wire 7-7-21,

 

Assange is not a socialist to my knowledge. He does not appear to have any history of trade unionism or such activity and in When Google Met Wikileaks he doesn’t see the working class as a force for change. Why would he? But he is not an enemy of the working class or the workers who, with little other opportunity, end up in uniform being sent by those in power in to military ventures that are waged in the rapacious quest profits. As I write, Ukrainian and Russian workers are dying in a proxy war between two imperialist powers, one much more powerful than the other.

 

Working class people owe Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and others like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning a debt of gratitude. They are heroic figures and we must support them in some way. If you are in a union get your local to pass a resolution condemning the continued incarceration of Julian Assange. Speak out for Edward Snowden and others as well. It’s in our interests to do so.

 

In the book Assange points out that, “for us as an organization, we are in a. position where we have the full force of a superpower and its investigative organs, and the rest of NATO, operating against us, bribing people, monitoring communications, et cetera”.

 

I know that there are millions of US workers, if they were reading this (and I wish they were so share it) would agree. The most distrusting of the US rogue regime is the US working class. Look at how they treat us. But like any citizens of any nation, without a powerful force speaking for us, one we can join, participate in and build, one that has real power, the general approach is, “better the devil we know than the one we don’t”. I get that but unfortunately that road leads to hell too.

 

Free Julian Assange

 

*Google Ideas is now Jigsaw. Cohen was the CEO as of last year.

Why The US Wants to Kill Julian Assange

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Why The US Wants to Kill Julian Assange

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

6-08-22

 

When a writer, or someone that writes something which is how I prefer to refer to myself, takes that first step to put pen to paper, the most important decision is to decide who you want to read it.

 

The audience I would like to read this commentary is working class people. I would like millions of working class people to read what I have to say here, but I know that will not be the case. Not only do I not own a publishing outfit, I also think that millions of us do our best to ignore the madness and potential catastrophic consequences of this madness. But, most of us have children and grandchildren, and we owe it to them not to ignore reality.  It’s not as if we don’t care, we do. We care about the possibility of nuclear war, and climate change. The problem is that millions of workers, and huge sections of the middle class, just do not see a way out. There is a powerful mood in this country that there is nothing we can do.

 

If we consider Julian Assange, his incarceration and the war against Wikileaks, as well as Chelsea Manning) formerly Bradley Manning).  Here are two people that working-class people should embrace and defend. In fact, we owe a debt of gratitude to them. Manning is the whistelbower that leaked the Collateral Damage Video that showed a US attack helicopter mowing down civilians, including a Reuters reporter, in Iraq (and laughing about it). Assange has been incarcerated for years and both have been persecuted and tortured by the US government in its brutal efforts to silence free speech and independent journalism.  Edward Snowden is another US citizen wanted by the US regime for informing us and the world of the crimes of the US ruling class.

 

It is informing the world and the US population about the horrific crimes of US imperialism that Assange and Manning are guilty of. When the US state department or any US administration whether Democratic or Republican, talk of a threat to national security, they are not talking about “our” security, the US workers and middle class. Our security is constantly being undermined and actually destroyed by both these Wall Street Parties.

 

What National Security means to the folks in Washington and the Pentagon, to the US capitalist class and its representatives in these parties, is the right to profits no matter what the consequences. It means protecting the rights of capital over labor, profits over the environment, and the US over the rest of the world.

 

What Assange and Manning did, was expose their phony diplomacy. If they had exposed Russian war crimes, or Chinese war crimes, or torture in Venezuela, they would have been knighted in the UK and had their own talk shows in the US, even movies in Hollywood. Tom Hanks would play Assange and maybe Leonardo Di Caprio Manning.

 

Back in 2015 I bought the book, The Wikileaks Files. It is a book every worker should have as a reference source.

Here are a few comments from the book about Russia and Ukraine and more:

“…in the decade following the century’s turn, the US has pursued a policy of aggressive NATO expansion, challenging Russia’s regional hegemony within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area and seeking to subvert nuclear treaties to maintain its strategic advantage. As the cables show, these efforts have not gone unnoticed by Russia and are recurring points of conflict….”

 

We know the consequences of this action. But Another area of warfare is trade and agriculture. Ukraine, as we now know (some of us didn’t need a war to inform us) is the largest country in Europe and main exporter of grains, particularly wheat. I remember my father, who spoke some Russian, used to call it Europe’s bread basket. We now know it is very much the former colonial world’s bread basket.

 

When military power may prove too unpopular and might damage its reputation as the world beacon for democracy and freedom, the US regime wages an economic war. US capitalism uses its economic power and the sheer size of its productive forces in industry and agriculture (food production), to deprive other weaker countries of desperately needed commodities including food. The US blockade of Cuba has increased the misery and depravation the Cubans have had to bear during the pandemic by increasing the scarcity of much needed medical supplies. The US sanctions on Venezuela have reportedly led to 50,000 deaths As I wrote previously, the sanctions against Iraq that cost half a million lives, never gave Saddam Hussein hunger pains.

 

Wikileaks released 1000 documents from the Cablegate cache with some published in the 2015 book. Some were related to the US government’s “pushing (US) industrial manufactures on its allies” but beyond that, it points out that US support of the biotech industry is aggressive in Europe and plays an even  “…bigger role……in assuring a place for genetically modified agricultural products (GMO’s) in a region that largely wanted nothing to do with them.”

 

Wikileaks and the leaked cables showed that the “…American campaign promoting biotech products was a worldwide effort. In all, some 1,000 documents from the Cablegate cache address this effort…..”

 

The US state representing Monsanto is evident in this example.

 

I recall a German industrialist during the investigation and eventual fining of VW for cheating with mileage software in its cars, saying that US capitalism is
“merciless” when it comes to defending its profits. Indeed, four million dead in Vietnam can attest to that.

 

The authors of the first three chapters of the book, the footnotes inform us, “wish to remain anonymous”. Looking at Assange in prison in the UK should we expect otherwise? In the first chapter, and I am not going to go much beyond here, the authors remind us of the Wilsonian Doctrine, basically Manifest Destiny and the view that there is no limit to the response when the issue of building a world composed of liberal democratic states (bourgeois democracy) is the order of the day. As the authors state, “this doctrine is generally understood as the justification of military and other interventions by the US if they help produce a liberal world order….” They mean a liberal “capitalist” world order.

 

This strategy takes precedence over the concept of state sovereignty or the right of a nation to self-determination, to determine its own future,that Biden and co. are using today with regard to Ukraine. The Ukrainian working class is being used in the most horrible way as a front for US imperialism in a proxy war with its weaker Russian competitor; better they die than US Americans. The anonymous authors in The Wikileaks Files said as much back in 2015. They write: “The US sees itself as the natural vanguard of such a global order, as well as the chief bearer of any right to suppress, state sovereignty in the pursuit of liberal (capitalist RM) goals”.

 

Britain was invaluable to the US in the second great imperialist war (1939-45) as hundreds of thousands of workers from its colonies were drawn in to this war between European powers.  Nigerian, Irish, and thousands of Indian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindu’s fought for the allies in both world wars (were there any Indians in the movie Dunkirk?). But according to Wikileaks, in order to maintain the Wilsonian Doctrine, the US opposed a “racial equality” motion and “’self determination’”  was denied  “to colonized nations” 20 years before at Versailles.

 

The Wikileaks files points out that “The chief concern of US officials during this period was that ‘premature independence’ might lead to a new freedom for people, as yet unfit to govern themselves.” Even more astounding, Wikileaks points out that a leading US expert on African politics “William J Foltz wrote in 1966, it would take more than a few generations to teach the majority of black Africans, ‘the skills necessary to participate meaningfully and effectively in politics.’” This theoretical grounding explains the reason for the assassination of Lumumba, the installation of Mobutu in the Congo, the overthrow of Albenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and the support of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the support of the South Vietnamese government that couldn’t get elected by its own people and so much more. Effectively and meaningfully means safeguarding profits, not providing water, health care, infrastructure, food etc. A dictator or strong man regime was more favorable than people attempting to choose their own path.

 

I will not continue in this vein. But, given the tight control and censorship of the US mass media I watch reports from former colonial countries like India for example. The media is so controlled here (admittedly it is not the same as a dictatorial state like Putin’s Russia, (the US bourgeois has mastered the art of self-deception) but there are many former colonial countries that have a different view to the Ukraine crisis and are not happy about being dragged in to a European basically a US/NATO conflict.

In this video, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar confronts the criticism by the US and the UK that India is supporting Putin and the Russian war machine basically. Jaishankar responds perfectly and I am certain his views are held by millions of people in former colonial countries, plundered and/or bombed by the west.

 

I also consider the US bourgeois political strategist, John Mearsheimer to be pretty much right on the button in this analysis of the present situation. Here is what he says about the US, Australian and UK defense pact but more importantly is his straight forward explanation of US history and the US role in our global society in under two minutes.

 

But we never hear these views, these opinions in an serious way. They are not made available to the masses. I am not asking people to forsake the NBA finals but ….it’s in our interest to educate ourselves.

 

This aggression, this almost religious like, acceptance the US ruling class has of its role in the world and human history, is the most dangerous threat to humans as a species on this planet. They call it Manifest Destiny, the view that the expansion of the United States throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable and indeed its expansion throughout the world. And that's what Marx means when he wrote about 170 years ago that the capitalist class that arose from the crumbling feudal society,”….compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” My added emphasis.

 

I recognize that the Indian External Affairs Minister and John Mearsheimer are representatives of the capitalist class and apologists for capitalism. They do not see the working class as a force for change in society. Mearsheimer in the videos I have watched never mentioned them and Jaishankar is a politician in the Hindu nationalist regime of Modi I assume. There have been massive strikes in India and it’s not likely Jaishankar has supported them. But this does not negate their comments.

 

As I pointed out in a previous commentary, Julian Assange in his other book, When Google Met Wikileaks, had some very astute observations about US capitalism and global capitalism in general, but failed to understand or even see the working class as a major player in the events ahead or even a force at all. Who can blame them in a way.

 

The reality is that we are in a period of late stage capitalism. There is little room for reform and if there is any possibility at all it will be very temporary. The recent upsurge in the class war between workers at Amazon and Starbucks and other 21^st century employers is a positive development and we hope it grows, but everything points in the other direction and if Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is to be taken seriously and I think he should, the proxy war in Ukraine aimed at weakening Russia will continue for some time. The main goal is, as Blinken admitted in a rare moment of honesty, to get Russia out of the way and go for the competitor of note, China.

 

These are scary times and workers should not underestimate the rapacious quest for profits and the willingness of the US ruling class to sacrifice our standard of living and even our lives being the last ones standing in the marketplace of the world.

 

Only a united working class and a global federation of democratic social states can change this situation and drag us back from the abyss.

 

And John Mearsheimer had better watch out otherwise he may end up in the cell next to Assange.

Google, Tech Billionaires, Wikileaks and and Julian Assange

Richard Mellor

GED/HEO

The conflict in Eastern Europe is part of a wider struggle internationally between major powers. In my view it is not Russia that US imperialism sees as its major adversary but China. CIA Director William Burns says as much.

One of the problems is that at some levels, particularly 5g, China is way ahead of the US and the US tech billionaires (Oligarchs?) want help from the US taxpayer to "level the playing field".

Reading some reports about this led me to return to a a book by Julian Assange titled "When Google Met Wikileaks." The book was a result of a meeting Google boss Eric Schmidt had with Julian Assange when he was under house arrest in the UK back in 2014. Schmidt and one of his sidekicks, Jared Cohen, wrote a book titled "The New Digitial Age". Assange wrote a review of the book that was published by the New York Times and it is a chapter in, When Google Met Wikileaks. He referred to Cohen as Googles Director of Regime Change. I recommend reading it.

I do mention the invasion of Panama by the US under the pretext of hunting down a terrible drug dealer named Manuel Noriega. Noriega was an associate of George H. W. Bush and another war criminal, Oliver North.  For what actually happened in that invasion where according to US mass media, nobody died, watch The Panama Deception. A bit long but worth it. The great Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran is in it.

The CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange

October 5, 2021

The CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange in London is a Story that is Being Mistakenly Ignored

by Patrick Cockburn

 

Photograph Source: Jeanne Menjoulet – CC BY 2.0

 

Reprinted from Counterpunch

Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a foreign power.

It was revealed this week that a year before the Khashoggi killing in 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials – eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal – quoted in a 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo News into the CIA campaign against Assange.

The plan was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want”, recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide “options” about how this could be done. Trump has denied that he did so.

The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said publicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of “a hostile intelligence service”. Apologists for the CIA say that freedom of the press was not under threat because Assange and the WikiLeaks activists were not real journalists. Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselves who is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as “information brokers”, who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power.

Among those against whom the CIA reportedly wanted to take action were Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the Intercept magazine and a former Guardian columnist, and Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. The arguments for doing so were similar to those employed by the Chinese government for suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, which has been much criticised in the West. Imprisoning journalists as spies has always been the norm in authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, while denouncing the free press as unpatriotic is a more recent hallmark of nationalist populist governments that have taken power all over the world.

It is possible to give only a brief precis of the extraordinary story exposed by Yahoo News, but the journalists who wrote it – Zach Dorfman, Sean D Naylor and Michael Isikoff – ought to scoop every journalistic prize. Their disclosures should be of particular interest in Britain because it was in the streets of central London that the CIA was planning an extra-judicial assault on an embassy, the abduction of a foreign national, and his secret rendition to the US, with the alternative option of killing him. These were not the crackpot ideas of low-level intelligence officials, but were reportedly operations that Pompeo and the agency fully intended to carry out.

This riveting and important story based on multiple sources might be expected to attract extensive coverage and widespread editorial comment in the British media, not to mention in parliament. Many newspapers have dutifully carried summaries of the investigation, but there has been no furor. Striking gaps in the coverage include the BBC, which only reported it, so far as I can see, as part of its Somali service. Channel 4, normally so swift to defend freedom of expression, apparently did not mention the story at all.

In the event, the embassy attack never took place, despite the advanced planning. “There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition,” said a former senior US counter-intelligence official, who added that the British had refused to allow the operation to take place.

But the British government did carry out its own less melodramatic, but more effective measure against Assange, removing him from the embassy on 11 April 2019 after a new Ecuador government had revoked his asylum. He remains in Belmarsh top security prison two-and-a-half years later while the US appeals a judicial decision not to extradite him to the US on the grounds that he would be a suicide risk.

If he were to be extradited, he would face 175 years in prison. It is important, however, to understand, that only five of these would be under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, while the other 170 potential years are under the Espionage Act of 1917, passed during the height of the patriotic war fever as the US entered the First World War.

Only a single minor charge against Assange relates to the WikiLeaks disclosure in 2010 of a trove of US diplomatic cables and army reports relating to the Iraq and Afghan wars. The other 17 charges are to do with labeling normal journalistic investigation as the equivalent of spying.

Pompeo’s determination to conflate journalistic inquiry with espionage has particular relevance in Britain, because the home secretary, Priti Patel, wants to do much the same thing. She proposes updating the Official Secrets Act so that journalists, whistle-blowers and leakers could face sentences of up to 14 years in prison. A consultative paper issued in May titled Legislation to Counter State Threats (Hostile State Activity) redefines espionage as “the covert process of obtaining sensitive confidential information that is not normally publicly available”.

The true reason the scoop about the CIA’s plot to kidnap or kill Assange has been largely ignored or downplayed is rather that he is unfairly shunned as a pariah by all political persuasions: left, right and centre.

To give but two examples, the US government has gone on claiming that the disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010 put the lives of US agents in danger. Yet the US Army admitted in a court hearing in 2013 that a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers had failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks. As regards the rape allegations in Sweden, many feel that these alone should deny Assange any claim to be a martyr in the cause of press freedom. Yet the Swedish prosecutor only carried out a “preliminary investigation” and no charges were brought.

Assange is a classic victim of “cancel culture”, so demonised that he can no longer get a hearing, even when a government plots to kidnap or murder him.

In reality, Khashoggi and Assange were pursued relentlessly by the state because they fulfilled the primary duty of journalists: finding out important information that the government would like to keep secret and disclosing it to the public.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso).

Wikileaks Has Dumped All of Its Files On The Internet

 

Wikileaks has dumped all of its files on the Internet. You can find them at this link:

http://bit.ly/3hBchZn

Or this one

https://file.wikileaks.org/file/?fbclid=IwAR2U_Evqah_Qy2wxNY12FMqFC5dAFUcZL5Kl4FIfQuMFMp8ssbM46oHXWMI 

The Trial of Julian Assange and Independent Journalism

Free Julian Assange. No Extradition

John McDonnell on the Trial of Julian Assange 

 

Assange, Manning and Snowden, Standing with the Conscience of Truthtellers

Snowden, Assange and Manning Statues in Berlin

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Assange, Manning and Snowden, Standing with the Conscience of Truthtellers

First and foremost, all of these truth tellers exposed or published documents exposing government misdeeds and crimes. All of the disclosures were of information that was valuable to the public debate of United States war tactics, intelligence gathering and privacy concerns, with no documentable damage to national security interests. For example, Chelsea Manning exposed American involvement in torture centers in Iraq, an unauthorized war in Yemen, and the so-called "collateral murder" of thousands of Iraqi citizens. Manning brought the "Collateral Murder" video and other documents to Wikileaks after going to people above her in the chain of command who refused to act. In fact, none of these truth tellers had another way to get this information out, which should afford them protections from prosecution.

And, the incredible value that should be ascribed to the Snowden leaks is clearly present in the Manning disclosures, which exposed the brutal and illegal nature of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning's disclosures opened up an entirely new public debate on the nature of modern war and diplomacy. 

Manning, Assange, and Snowden all did their civic duty by disclosing information on government overreaching. They all exhibited great moral courage in doing so. And they all deserve far more than unfair imprisonment and exile for the service they have done for the American people and for people all around the world. 

After being forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange is now in a high security prison in London where he faces extradition to the United States and imprisonment for the rest of his life.  The charges Assange faces are a major threat to press freedom. The charge against Assange for ‘conspiring’ with a source is the most dangerous we can think of with respect to the First Amendment.  

Two years after being released from prison where she had served seven years for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chelsea Manning was jailed once again for refusing to answer questions before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.  “I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury,” Manning declared in a written statement. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.” 

Noted whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg praised Manning. “Chelsea Manning is in jail again, this time for resisting a grand jury system whose secrecy and lack of witness rights makes it prone to frequent abuse,” Ellsberg said. “She is also resisting its current abuse, as it is used to attack freedom of the press by pursuing criminal charges for publication of the very war crimes and corruption she courageously revealed to WikiLeaks nine years ago.”

When Edward Snowden shared US intelligence documents with journalists in June 2013, he revealed the shocking extent of global mass surveillance. He showed how governments were secretly scooping up huge chunks of our personal communications, including private emails, phone locations, web histories and so much more. All without our consent.

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