OMNI
RUSSIA NEWSLETTER #5
March 10, 2017.
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
(#1 March 21, 2014; #2 April 10, 2014;
#3 May 16, 2014; #4, July 22, 2014)
What’s at Stake: While Sovietphobic and Russophobic US leaders
and their still Cold War mainstream media decry Russian aggressiveness, the US
and NATO ring Russia with allies and weapons.
Nuclear war is the possible result.
The peace movement must focus and push for alternatives to
confrontation.
Contents: Russia Newsletter #5
Who’s
the Threat? Surrounding Russia. Think Peace.
Dick, Finland
and US Sign Military Accord
Blum, Who’s the
Threat?
Carden, US Interventionist
Orthodoxy and Ukraine
Herman, US
Double Standards, the Orthodoxy, and Ukraine
Katrina vanden
Heuvel, Break Through Orthodoxy to Peace Zone
Noam Chomsky,
Try to Understand the Other Point of View
Trump
and Russia
Stephen Cohen, “Against Kremlin-Baiting
Chris Hedges,
Hacking by Russia?
WHO’S THE THREAT? SURROUNDING
RUSSIA
FINLAND
AND US SIGN MILITARY ACCORD
By
Dick Bennett
Back in
August when I learned that Sweden, the other
Nordic country to have remained outside NATO, had signed a military cooperation agreement with
the US in
June, my respiration remained steady.
But when I read that Finland was nearing
a security deal with US, I jerked forward for my map of Europe to
gaze again at that long border with Russia.
A US military pact with a country whose contiguous border with Russia
stretches hundreds of miles! And Putin
had warned Finland against doing it. Imagine
US reactions to military pacts between Russia and Mexico and Canada.
Now on October 8, 2016, we learn that
the US and Finland had signed the military accord. With that border in my mind’s eye, my first
thought was, how would the mainstream mainly imperial US media fit that into
the official narrative of Russian aggression against the West? The brief AP story from Helsinki just gives the
facts; that is, from the US and Finnish point of view: “the U.S. presence in and around the Baltic
Sea undergirds stability in the region. . . .” The Finnish Defense Minister Jussi Niinisto
added this flourish: suspicion of
Russian fighter jets violating Finnish air space.
“U.S.,
Finland Sign Accord on Defense.” NADG (October 8, 2016).
William Blum, The Anti-Empire Report #148
By William Blum. February
4, 2017.
Who’s the Threat?
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six
impossible things before breakfast.” – Alice in Wonderland
Since Yalta, we have a
long list of times we’ve tried to engage positively with Russia. We have a
relatively short list of successes in that regard. – General James
Mattis, the new Secretary of Defense
If anyone
knows where to find this long list please send me a copy.
This delusion is repeated
periodically by American military officials. A year ago, following the release
of Russia’s new national security document, naming as threats both the United
States and the expansion of the NATO alliance, a Pentagon spokesman declared:
“They have no reason to consider us a threat. We are not looking for conflict
with Russia.”
Meanwhile,
in early January, the United States embarked upon its biggest military buildup
in Europe since the end of the Cold War – 3,500 American soldiers landed,
unloading three shiploads, with 2,500 tanks, trucks and other combat vehicles.
The troops were to be deployed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary
and across the Baltics. Lt. Gen. Frederick Hodges, commander of US forces in
Europe, said, “Three years after the last American tanks left the continent, we
need to get them back.”
The
measures, General Hodges declared, were a “response to Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea. This does not mean that there
necessarily has to be a war, none of this is inevitable, but Moscow is
preparing for the possibility.” (See previous paragraph.)
This
January 2017 buildup, we are told, is in response to a Russian action in Crimea
of January 2014. The alert reader will have noticed that critics of Russia in
recent years, virtually without exception, condemn Moscow’s Crimean action and
typically nothing else. Could that be because they have nothing else to condemn
about Russia’s foreign policy? At the same time they invariably fail to point
out what preceded the Russian action – the overthrow, with Washington’s
indispensable help, of the democratically-elected, Moscow-friendly Ukrainian
government, replacing it with an anti-Russian, neo-fascist (literally) regime,
complete with Nazi salutes and swastika-like symbols.
Ukraine and Georgia, both of which border Russia, are all that’s
left to complete the US/NATO encirclement. And when the US overthrew the government of
Ukraine, why shouldn’t Russia have been alarmed as the circle was about to
close yet tighter? Even so, the Russian military appeared in Ukraine only in
Crimea, where the Russians already had a military base with the approval of the
Ukrainian government. No one could have blocked Moscow from taking over all of
Ukraine if they wanted to.
Yet, the United States is
right. Russia is a threat. A threat to American world dominance. And Americans
can’t shake their upbringing. Here’s veteran National Public Radio newscaster
Cokie Roberts bemoaning Trump’s stated desire to develop friendly
relations with Russia: “This country has had a consistent policy for 70 years
towards the Soviet Union and Russia, and Trump is trying to undo that.”
Heavens! Nuclear war would be better than that!
US
Foreign Policy Interventionist Straightjacket, Ukraine and the Maiden Agreement
James
Carden, “A Foreign Policy Held Hostage.”
The Nation (Nov. 14, 2016). Carden’s main thesis is that the US is confined by its “foreign
policy orthodoxy” that eventuates in “seemingly endless interventions abroad.” That bipartisan orthodoxy operates “inside” by
one administration after the other and “outside” by its mainstream media allies
(he doesn’t discuss the reinforcing military industrial complex or the numerous
pro-empire think tanks.) This orthodoxy,
branding “Putin’s Russia an outlaw state,” supported the “Maidan” agreement (2013-)
for association between the Ukraine and the European Union. The agreement “effectively wrenched Ukraine
from Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, and it was pursued regardless of
the consequences, which have included the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s
democratically elected president and a civil war that has killed nearly 10,000
people” (18).
WHO NEEDS
TO BE CONTAINED?
Edward S.
Herman, “Foreign Engagement v. Aggression.”
Z Magazine (June 2016). Herman is a foremost critic of the inside/outside orthodoxy Carden
sets forth. In article after article in
this magazine, he exposes their dogmas and collaboration. In this article he familiarly explains US “us
and them” double standards--the US engaged, opponents (often “enemies”)
aggressive, to lead into the story of the Ukrainian civil war. So blinding, so memory-expunging is the
double-standard of our international misbehavior, that regarding the Ukraine Secretary
Kerry “stated in 2015 that “’You just don’t in the 21st century
behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a
completely trumped-up pretext.’” That
was the orthodoxy inside speaking. “And “no
U.S. mainstream publication chortled at Kerry’s Orwellian performance” (28). So where will Herman begin this story? Not with newspaper Russo-Putin-phobia Rather
we are reminded “that NATO has been steadily expanding and encircling Russia
since 1996.”
BEYOND
CONTAINMENT
Editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, reports
the inside/outside orthodoxy and offers concrete remedies. “Brexit’s Benefits,” The Nation (July 18/25, 2016).
The “reckless” “US decision to expand NATO to Russia’s borders” has caused
much harm and may lead to multiple dangers.
But the US and NATO “have compelling reasons to cooperate with Russia.” Thus a reassessment of Western foreign
policy orthodoxy is urgently needed to consider, among other initiatives, the
West and Russia joining in “building a zone of peace on Russia’s borders” that
would “acknowledge Russia’s security concerns.”
Noam
Chomsky: First Understand Your “Enemy’s” Point of View
Chomsky discusses Russia throughout Who Rules the World? and in his final
chapter (23, “Masters of Mankind”) he summarizes Russia’s point of view with
the kind of empathy often achieved by former Senator J. William Fulbright as
Chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee during the 1960s. The Western response to the collapse of the
Soviet Union and end of the Cold War in 1991 “was triumphalist. . . .NATO
enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev….” NATO
invited Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, which “Putin viewed as ‘a direct threat
to Russia’s core interests.’” (Chomsky
is quoting favorably an article by John Mearsheimer.) “’Who can blame him?’ After all, as everyone knows, ‘The United States
does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in
the Western hemisphere, much less on its border’. . . .We need not ask how the
United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the
Warsaw Pact. . . .one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and motives favorably
to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the importance of understanding
that logic instead of issuing imprecations against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at
stake, reaching as far--literally--as questions of survival” (pp. 246-249).
MORE THREATS FROM RUSSIA?
TRUMP AND RUSSIA
Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump
Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump
By Stephen F. Cohen.
The Nation, FEBRUARY 22, 2017.
[The title I read is “Against
Kremlin-Baiting” (March 13, 2017).
The
Russia-connected allegations have created an atmosphere of hysteria amounting
to McCarthyism.
The
bipartisan, nearly full-political-spectrum tsunami of factually unverified
allegations that President Trump has been seditiously “compromised” by the
Kremlin, with scarcely any nonpartisan pushback from influential political or
media sources, is deeply alarming. Begun by the Clinton campaign in mid-2016,
and exemplified now by New York Times columnists
(who write of a “Trump-Putin regime” in Washington), strident MSNBC hosts, and
unbalanced CNN commentators, the practice is growing into a latter-day
McCarthyite hysteria. Such politically malignant practices should be deplored
wherever they appear, whether on the part of conservatives, liberals, or
progressives.
The allegations are driven by political
forces with various agendas: the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party,
which wants to maintain its grip on the party by insisting that she didn’t lose
the election but that it was stolen by Russian President Vladimir Putin for
Trump; by enemies of Trump’s proposed détente with Russia, who want to
discredit both him and Putin; and by Republicans and Democrats stunned that
Trump essentially ran and won without either party, thereby threatening the
established two-party system. Whatever the motivation, the ensuing slurs against
Trump, which are already producing calls for his impeachment, pose grave
threats to US and international security and to American democracy itself.
So far, no facts have been presented to
back up the allegations. (Without facts, all of us are doomed to malpractice or
worse.) An impartial investigation might search for such facts, if any exist,
which should then be evaluated objectively—but neither may be possible in the
current political atmosphere, only a witch hunt.
For now, six allegations pass as evidence
that Trump has been compromised, or worse, by the Kremlin:
1. The president has “lavished praise”
on Putin. All Trump has said in this regard is that Putin is “a strong leader”
and “very smart” and that it would be good “to cooperate with Russia.” These
are empirically true statements. They pale in comparison with the warm words of
previous US presidents for Russia’s leaders, including those of Franklin
Roosevelt about Joseph Stalin, those of Richard Nixon about Leonid Brezhnev,
and particularly those of Bill Clinton about Boris Yeltsin, whom Clinton
compared favorably to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin
Roosevelt. Only against the backdrop of the unrelenting US political-media
establishment’s demonization of Putin could Trump’s “praise” be considered
lavish. Instead, unlike virtually every other mainstream American political
figure and media outlet, Trump simply refuses to vilify Putin—declining to
characterize him as a “killer” of personal enemies, for which there is also no
evidence.
2. Trump and his associates have had, it
is charged, business dealings in Russia and with Russian “oligarchs.” Perhaps,
but so have many major American corporations, including Boeing, Pfizer, Ford,
General Electric, Morgan Stanley, McDonald’s, and Starbucks. Their Russian
partners are often “oligarchs.” Moreover, unlike many international hotel
corporations, Trump tried but failed to build his signature enterprise in
Russia. The “Russian assets” about which his son spoke seem to have been from
selling condos and co-ops in the United States to cash-bearing Russians in
search of a luxury brand—hardly delegitimizing. It is said that Trump’s tax
returns, if revealed, would expose nefarious Russian influence. Perhaps, but
considering the financial documents of ownership he has made public, that seems
unlikely. Regardless, this remains an allegation, not a fact.
3. Trump’s “associate” and, briefly, campaign manager, Paul
Manafort, is alleged to have been “pro-Russian” when he advised Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych, later deposed unconstitutionally during the Maidan
“revolution” in February 2014. This makes no sense. A professional political
expert, Manafort was presumably well paid, like other American electoral
experts hired abroad. But he seems to have urged Yanukovych to tilt toward the
ill-fated European Union partnership agreement and away from Russia—as Yanukovych did—in order to win
the votes of Ukrainians outside his constituency in southeastern regions.
(Yanukovych, whom Putin loathed for this and other reasons, had fallen out of
favor with the Kremlin until late 2013.)
4. A “dossier” purporting to show how the Kremlin could
blackmail Trump was leaked to CNN and published by BuzzFeed. Compiled by a former British intelligence
official in the opposition-research business, its 30-odd pages are a
compilation of the innocent, the unverified, and the kind of trash for sale in
Moscow and elsewhere. More recently, CNN exclaimed that its own intelligence
leakers had “confirmed” some elements of the dossier, but thus far none that
actually compromise Trump.
5. The crux of the allegations against
Trump was, and remains, that Putin ordered the hacking of the Democratic
National Committee and the dissemination of stolen e-mails through WikiLeaks in
order to undermine the Clinton campaign and put Trump in the White House. A
summary of these “facts” was presented in a declassified report released by the
“intelligence community” and widely discussed in January. Though it quickly
became axiomatic proof for Trump’s political and media enemies, almost nothing
in the report is persuasive. About half are “assessments” based on surmised
motivations, not factual evidence of an actual Kremlin operation on Trump’s
behalf. The other half is standard whining about the Kremlin-funded television
network RT, which is at worst an above-average “propaganda” outlet. Moreover, a
number of American cyber-experts insist that Russian state hackers would have
left no fingerprints, as US intelligence officials claim they had. Indeed, the
group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity believes that the DNC
documents were not hacked but rather leaked by an insider. If so, this had
nothing to do with Russia. (The CIA and the FBI were “highly confident” about
the report’s findings, but the National Security Agency, which alone has the
capacity to fully monitor e-mails, was only “moderately confident.”) Still
more, at his final presidential press conference, Barack Obama referred to the
DNC scandal as a leak and said he didn’t know WikiLeaks’ exact role in the
scandal—this despite the allegations by his own intelligence agencies. Nor is
it clear that Putin so favored the erratic Trump that he would have taken such
a risk. Judging from debates in Kremlin-connected Russian newspapers, there was
serious doubt as to which US candidate might be best—or least bad—for Russia.
6. Finally, there is the firing of Gen. Michael Flynn as
Trump’s national-security adviser for having communicated with the Russian
ambassador about the sanctions imposed by Obama just before he left the White
House and Trump was inaugurated. So far as is actually known, Flynn did nothing
unprecedented or incriminating. Communications, including meetings, between
representatives of US presidents-elect and foreign capitals, particularly
Moscow, have been “common practice” over the years, according to Jack Matlock,
ambassador to Russia for Presidents Reagan and Bush; Matlock had previously
arranged meetings in Moscow for President-elect Carter’s transition team.
Moreover, Obama’s own Russia adviser, Michael McFaul, told The Washington Post recently that he visited
Moscow in 2008, even before that year’s election, for talks with Russian
officials. The Post implied that this was
“appropriate contact.” So, it seems, was Flynn’s, though perhaps inept. Indeed,
if Flynn’s purpose was to persuade the Kremlin not to overreact to Obama’s
last-minute sanctions, which were accompanied by a highly provocative threat to
launch a cyber-attack on Moscow, his urging was wise and in America’s national
interest.
In fact, it is not Putin who is threatening
American democracy, but rather these Kremlin-baiting allegations against
President Trump. It is not Putin who is endangering US and international
security, but rather the high-level political and intelligence enemies of
détente. Similarly, it is not Putin who is degrading the US media with “fake
news.” Nor is it Putin who is subverting the American political process, but
rather the US intelligence leakers who are at war against their own president.
President Eisenhower eventually stopped
Joseph McCarthy. Who will stop the new McCarthyism before it spreads further
into the “soul of democracy,” so revered by liberals and progressives? Facts
might do so. But in lieu of facts, there are only professional ethics, decency,
and patriotism.
1-9-17
|
9:56 AM (10 minutes ago)
 |
|
||
|
||||
What is the objective of focusing on Russia? It looks like
Chris Hedges may have seen through it all.
Joyce
The Real Purpose of the U.S.
Government’s Report on Alleged Hacking by Russia
Posted on Jan 8, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Some thoughts on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016
US Presidential Election,” the newly released declassified
report from the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence.
1. The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers
no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential
election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no
Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails.
I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation.
This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is
the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and
Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media,
to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for
impeachment.
The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking
pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based
universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to
make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and
sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed
against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little
public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in
the corporate media.
2. The second task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist
smear campaign against independent media, including Truthdig, as witting or
unwitting agents of the Russian government. The demise of the English
programming of Al-Jazeera and TeleSur, along with the collapse of the nation’s
public broadcasting, designed to give a voice to those not beholden to
corporate or party interests, leaves RT America and Amy Goodman’s Democracy
Now! as the only two electronic outlets with a national reach that are willing
to give a platform to critics of corporate power and imperialism such as Julian
Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Ralph Nader, Medea Benjamin, Cornel
West, Kshama Sawant, myself and others.
Seven pages of the report were dedicated to RT America, on which
I have a show called “On Contact.” The report vastly inflated the cable
network’s reach and influence. It also included a few glaring errors, including
the statement that “RT introduced two new shows—‘Breaking the Set’ on 4
September and ‘Truthseeker’ on 2 November—both overwhelmingly focused
on criticism of the US and Western governments as well as the promotion of
radical discontent.” “Breaking the Set,” with Abby Martin, was taken off the air
two years ago. It could hardly be tarred with costing Hillary Clinton the
election.
The barely contained rage of Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper at the recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on foreign
cyber threats was visible when he spat out that RT was “promoting a particular
point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human
rights, et cetera.” His anger was a glimpse into how the establishment seethes
with hatred for dissidents. Clapper has lied in the past. He perjured himself
in March 2013 when, three months before the revelations of wholesale state
surveillance leaked by Snowden, he assured Congress that the National Security
Agency was not collecting “any type of data” on the American public. After the
corporate state shuts down RT, it will go after Democracy Now! and the handful
of progressive sites, including this one, that give these dissidents space. The
goal is censorship.
3. The third task of the report is to justify the expansion of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a violation of the
promise Ronald Reagan made to the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev after the
fall of the Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO in Eastern Europe opened up an arms
market for the war industry. It made those businesses billions of dollars. New
NATO members must buy Western arms that can be integrated into the NATO
arsenal. These sales, which are bleeding the strained budgets of countries such
as Poland, are predicated on potential hostilities with Russia. If Russia is
not a threat, the arms sales plummet. War is a racket.
4. The final task of the report is to give the Democratic Party
plausible cover for the catastrophic election defeat it suffered. Clinton
initially blamed FBI Director James Comey for
her loss before switching to the more easily demonized Putin. The charge of
Russian interference essentially boils down to the absurd premise that perhaps
hundreds of thousands of Clinton supporters suddenly decided to switch their
votes to Trump when they read the leaked emails of Podesta. Either that or they
tuned in to RT America and decided to vote for the Green Party.
The Democratic Party leadership cannot face, and certainly
cannot publicly admit, that its callous betrayal of the working and middle
class triggered a nationwide revolt that resulted in the election of Trump. It
has been pounded since President Barack Obama took office, losing 68 seats in
the House, 12 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships. It lost more than 1,000
elected positions between 2008 and 2012 nationwide. Since 2010, Republicans
have replaced 900 Democratic state legislators. If this was a real party, the
entire leadership would be sacked. But it is not a real party. It is the shell
of a party propped up by corporate money and hyperventilating media.
The Democratic Party must maintain the fiction of liberalism
just as the Republican Party must maintain the fiction of conservatism. These
two parties, however, belong to one party—the corporate party. They will work
in concert, as seen by the alliance between Republican leaders such as McCain
and Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, to get rid of Trump, silence
all dissent, enrich the war industry and promote the farce they call democracy.
Welcome to our annus horribilis.
Contents Russia/Ukraine Newsletter
#4 HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS
Polner,
Manipulated Crisis
Moss,
Another Cold War?
Watkins,
Comparing Annexations
Johnstone,
Understanding Putin
Blum,
US Media War Against Putin and Russia
US or Russian Exceptionalism?
NATO’S
Eastward Expansion
THE
CRISIS 2013-
Pilger,
the Larger Coup in Washington ,
D.C.
Gagnon,
US and NATO Intervention
Parry,
Kerry’s State Department’s Fiasco
Dahlburg,
Poroshnko\Ukraine Signs Up with EU
Moeri,
Be Critical of Imperialisms
Zunes,
Non-violence
Four
Articles Via HAW
Fuerst,
Germany
US
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
No comments:
Post a Comment