Contrary to What Biden Said, US Warfare in Afghanistan Is Set To Continue by Norman Solomon

When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm. Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did. Guljumma, 7, and her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2009. (Photo by Reese Erlich) There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when – according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday – all US forces will be withdrawn from that country. What Biden didn’t say was as significant as what he did say. He declared that "US troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan" before Sept. 11. And "we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily." But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing Afghanistan. What’s more, he pledged that "we will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces," a declaration that actually indicates a tacit intention to "stay involved in Afghanistan militarily." And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are filled with flat-out statements that the US war in Afghanistan will end come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise. The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during much of Wednesday proclaimed: "Withdrawal of US Troops in Afghanistan Will End Longest American War." But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a story headed "Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11," the Times reported: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.” Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking US official to resign from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday: "Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged US troops leave Afghanistan, the US military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines." We scarcely hear about it, but the US air war on Afghanistan has been a major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the US government hasn’t even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of that bombing has occurred. "We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to," diligent researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. "From January 2004 until February 2020, the US military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing US Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either." The US war in Afghanistan won’t end just because President Biden and US news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have experienced, troops on the ground aren’t the only measure of horrific warfare. No matter what the White House and the headlines say, US taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and "special operations" that remain shrouded in secrecy. Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

The Secret Wars of Africa’s Sahel: What Is Behind Mali’s Ongoing Strife by Ramzy Baroud

In a recent report, the United Nations Mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, concluded that, on January 3, French warplanes had struck a crowd attending a wedding in the remote village of Bounti, killing 22 of the guests. According to the findings, based on a thorough investigation and interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses, 19 of the guests were unarmed civilians whose killing constitutes a war crime. Unlike the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and other countries, the French war in Mali receives little media coverage outside the limited scope of French-speaking media, which has successfully branded this war as one against Islamic militants. What is interesting about the Mali story is the fact that, despite its centrality to the geopolitics of the Sahel region in Africa, it is framed within disconnected narratives that rarely overlap. However, the story has less to do with Islamic militancy and much to do with foreign interventions. Anti-French sentiment in Mali goes back over a century when, in 1892, France colonized that once-thriving African kingdom, exploiting its resources and reordering its territories as a way to weaken its population and to break down its social structures. The formal end of French colonialism of Mali in 1960 was merely the end of a chapter, but definitely not the story itself. France remained present in Mali, in the Sahel and throughout Africa, defending its interests, exploiting the ample resources and working jointly with corrupt elites to maintain its dominance. Fast forward to March 2012 when Captain Amadou Sanogo overthrew the nominally democratic government of Amadou Toumani Touré. He used the flimsy excuse of protesting Bamako’s failure to rein in the militancy of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) in the north. Sanogo’s pretense was quite clever, though, as it fit neatly into a grand narrative designed by various Western governments, lead among them France and the United States, who saw Islamic militancy as the greatest danger facing many parts of Africa, especially in the Sahel. Interestingly but not surprisingly, Sanogo’s coup, which angered African governments, but was somehow accommodated by Western powers, made matters much worse. In the following months, northern militants managed to seize much of the impoverished northern regions, continuing their march towards Bamako itself. The army coup was never truly reversed but, at the behest of France and other influential governments, was simply streamlined into a transitional government, still largely influenced by Sanogo’s supporters. On December 20, 2012, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2085, which authorized the deployment of the African-led International Support Mission to Mali. Armed with what was understood to be a UN mandate, France launched its war in Mali, under the title of "Operation Serval." It is worth mentioning here that the Mali scenario had just transpired in Libya when, on March 17, 2011, the UNSC passed Resolution 1973, which was conveniently and immediately translated into a declaration of war. Both scenarios proved costly for the two African countries. Instead of "saving" these countries, the interventions allowed violence to spiral even further, leading to yet more foreign interventions and proxy wars. On July 15, 2014, France declared that "Operation Serval" was successfully accomplished, providing its own list of casualties on both sides, again, with very little international monitoring. Yet, almost immediately, on August 1, 2014, it declared another military mission, this time an open-ended war, "Operation Barkhane." Barkhane was spearheaded by France and included Paris’ own "coalition of the willing", dubbed "G5 Sahel." All former French colonies, the new coalition consisted of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. The declared goal of France’s indefinite intervention in the Sahel is to provide material support and training to the "G5 Sahel" forces in their "war on terror." However, according to Deutsche Welle, the "optimism" that accompanied "Operation Serval" completely vanished with "Operation Barkhane." "The security situation has worsened, not only (in the) the north but (in) central Mali as well", the German news agency recently reported, conveying a sense of chaos, with farmers fleeing their land and with "self-defense militias" carrying out their own operations to satisfy "their own agendas", and so on. In truth, the chaos in the streets merely reflected the chaos in government. Even with a heavy French military presence, instability continued to plague Mali. The latest coup in the country took place in August 2020. Worse still, the various Tuareg forces, which have long challenged the foreign exploitation of the country, are now unifying under a single banner. The future of Mali is hardly promising. So what was the point of the intervention, anyway? Certainly not to "restore democracy" or "stabilize" the country. Karen Jayes elaborates. "France’s interests in the region are primarily economic," she wrote in a recent article. "Their military actions protect their access to oil and uranium in the region." To appreciate this claim more fully, one only needs a single example of how Mali’s wealth of natural resources is central to France’s economy. "An incredible 75 percent of France’s electric power is generated by nuclear plants that are mostly fueled by uranium extracted on Mali’s border region of Kidal," in the northern parts of the country. Therefore, it is unsurprising that France was ready to go to war as soon as militants proclaimed the Kidal region to be part of their independent nation-state of Azawad in April 2012. As for the bombing of the Bounti wedding, the French military denied any wrongdoing, claiming that all of the victims were "jihadists." The story is meant to end here, but it will not – as long as Mali is exploited by outsiders, as long as poverty and inequality will continue to exist, leading to insurrections, rebellions and military coups.

Lying is as American as Cherry Pie BY PAUL STREET

A few weeks ago, someone going as “R. Tillman” spent a chunk of change to place a small add in The New York Times saying that “LYING IS UN-AMERICAN.” I had to laugh. Mr. or Ms. Tillman was likely thinking of Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen and perhaps of some other among many thousands of fibs told by the record-setting dissembler Trump. I don’t like lies or (I am guessing) Trump any more than R. Tillman but who is he or she trying to kid? Lying is as American as cherry pie. Which reminds me, the story that young George Washington broke down and told his father he cut down a cherry tree “because I cannot tell a lie” is a lie. It was made up by the early Washington biographer Mason Lock Weems for the fifth edition of his popular volume The Life of Washington (1806). Here’s another lie: “George Washington was a great man.” Not true. He was a vicious killer of Native Americans known to the Iroquois as Conoctocaurious, meaning “Town Taker,” “Burner of Towns,” and “Town Destroyer.” In 1779, during the American War for Independence, Washington ordered and organized the Sullivan Campaign, which carried out the genocidal destruction of 40 Iroquois villages in New York. Along the way, the glorious Father of Our Country owned more than 300 Black slaves. He expected the Black chattel humans on his 1790s Mount Vernon estate to work from before sunrise to after sunset six days a week. At the end of the U.S. “revolutionary” war, he demanded that the British return all escaped slaves in their possession to their “rightful owners.” Washington’s “American Revolution” was based on a great lie embedded in the opening of the second paragraph of the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,…” The nation’s revered Founders did not believe these supposedly self-evident things when it came to Black, Indigenous, and female people, all of whom fell outside their racial nationalist and male-supremacist definition of legitimate citizenship. As militant propertarians, they didn’t view poor whites as worthy of equal rights either. And the Founders were more than happy to impose social and political regimes that oppressed the nonwhite, female, and poor without the slightest concern for their subjects’ consent. Seventy-eight years after the Declaration of Independence, which signaled a break off from Britain that led to the significant expansion of North American slavery and “Indian removal” (ethnic cleansing), the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked “What, to the American Slave, is Your 4th of July?”: “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” The Fourth of July, in other words, was a Big Lie. More lies followed. Contrary to its aristo-republican claim to have introduced “popular government,” the U.S. Constitution was a profoundly un- and even anti-democratic document crafted to preserve and codify the oligarch rule of the wealthy Few. It was expertly and explicitly designed to keep at bay the Founders’ ultimate nightmare: popular sovereignty. Andrew Jackson’s claim to have ordered Indian Removal (what would today be called genocidal ethnic cleansing) from concern for Indigenous First Nations people’s happiness and health was gravely disingenuous. The longtime Indian killer and slaver Jackson was clearing obstacles for the expansion of cotton slavery across the southern and western frontier and for the settlement of surplus white populations piling up in the eastern seaboard. The description of the white Americans who spread across the United States in the late 18th and 19th Century as “settlers” was a really big lie. From the perspective of the continent’s original inhabitants, animal and human, and from the perspective of livable ecology, the Euro-American hordes were invading un-settlers and indeed great destroyers. There was nothing settling about being worked and whipped to death as a slave on one of the forced labor camps that Jackson’s fellow slave-owners set up on land robbed from the Cherokee and Choctaw in Georgia and from other Native peoples across the burgeoning southern cotton belt. “Settlers,” right. Further north, the so-called Black Hawk War of 1832 was a viciously one-sided and genocidal affair. After some of their warriors dared to challenge the occupation and appropriation of their sacred lands by white “settlers,” the Sauk and Fox Indians lost 600 people, including hundreds of woman and children. in the August 1, 1832 “Battle of Bad Axe,” on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, near the present-day community of Victory in southwest Wisconsin. “While the Sauk refugees were preparing rafts and canoes,” historian Kerry Trask writes, “the armed [U.S.] steamboat Warrior arrived, whereupon Black Hawk tried to negotiate with its troops under a flag of truce. The Americans opened fire, killing twenty-three warriors.” “As we neared them,” one US officer who “served” in the U.S. assault recalled, “they raised a white flag and endeavored to decoy us, but we were a little too old for them.” Hundreds of Sauk and Fox men, women and children were shot, clubbed, and bayoneted to death at the confluence of the Bad Axe and Mississippi Rivers on August 2nd. US soldiers scalped the dead. They cut long strips of flesh from dead and wounded Indians for use as razor strops. The slaughter was supported by cannon and rifle fire from the Warrior, which picked off tribal members swimming for their lives. The United States suffered 5 dead in the “Battle of Bad Axe.” In a popular account of the “battle” published two years later, U.S. Major John Allen Wakefield offered some interesting reflections. “It was a horrid sight,” Wakefield wrote, “to witness little children, wounded and suffering the most excruciating pain, although they were of the savage enemy, and the common enemy of the country…It was enough to make the heart of the most hardened being on earth to ache” But, Wakefield wrote, “I must confess, that it filled my heart with gratitude and joy, to think that I had been instrumental, with many others, in delivering my country of those merciless savages, and restoring those [invading white] people again to their peaceful homes and firesides.” By Wakefield’s account, the US troops at Bad Axe “shrank not from their duty. They all joined in the work of death for death it was. We were by this time fast getting rid of those demons in human shape… the Ruler of the Universe, He who takes vengeance on the guilty, did not design those guilty wretches to escape His vengeance…” It was an unsettling read. The top “demon in human shape” – “chief” Black Hawk – escaped death and lived six years beyond the “war” (slaughter) that bore his name. He was sent to a US reservation in Iowa after US President Andrew Jackson (himself a famous and prolific Indian-killer) had Black Hawk paraded across Eastern cities as a celebrity freak and war booty – an exotic savage held up to gawking white crowds as proof of the United States military’s alleged prowess in defeating barbarian brutes. The “Black Hawk War” was a lopsided campaign of ethnic cleansing that pushed all northern Illinois’ surviving original inhabitants west of the Mississippi. The commonplace white American “settler” notion of pre-conquest North America as an uninhabited “wilderness” was of course a bald-faced lie. One can look no further than Encyclopedia.com to learn the following: “In 1492 the native population of North America north of the Rio Grande was seven million to ten million. These people grouped themselves into approximately six hundred tribes and spoke diverse dialects. European colonists initially encountered Native Americans in three distinct regions. Eastern Woodland tribes included the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, Abenakis, Shawnees, Delawares, Micmacs, Mahicans, and Pequots. Some of these tribes were sedentary hunter-gathers while others grew maize (corn), beans, and squash. In the Southeast white settlers came into contact with Powhatans, Catawbas, Cherokees, Creeks, Natchez, Choctaws, and Chickasaws; these people were primarily agriculturalists. Pueblos, Zunis, Navajos, and Hopis represented some of the adobe-dwelling bands in the arid Southwest. Regardless of their differences, these groups shared some common characteristics. For Native Americans the family, clan, and village represented the most important social groups. In addition, religions revolved around the belief that all of nature was alive, pulsating with spiritual power.” The “great American” and jingoist liar Teddy Roosevelt had an interesting take on these pre-existing civilizations, homes to an Indigenous population inside the United States that would fall below one million by the time “the Bull Moose” ascended to the White House. He called pre-conquest North America a “waste space.” No 20th century fascist had anything on Roosevelt’s two-volume Winning of the West when it came to the heralding of white supremacist violence. “During the past three centuries,” Roosevelt opined, “the spread of English-speaking people over the world’s waste spaces” (meaning spaces not occupied by “progressive” capitalist-developmental/eco-cidal Caucasians) was a great and welcome “feat of power,” for which the “English-speaking race” could justly feel proud. “The settler and pioneer,” the future war president wrote, “have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages…The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman.” Which reminds me: the notion that the war-mongering racist and imperialist Teddy Roosevelt was a great man is a lie. The commonplace white-American depiction of the Native Americans as “savages” and the white so-called “settlers” as agents of “civilization” is itself a great lie. The truth was, if anything, the opposite. The new imperialist nation’s original indigenous inhabitants lived without the savage class inequalities and the related ferocious propertarian, Cartesian, capitalist, and imperial destruction of nature and the exterminist and eliminationist warfare that pockmarked European and Euro-American society. The people already here were the civilized ones, not the barbarian un-“settlers,” who thanked their imagined vengeful God for supposedly helping them murder and enslave Red, brown, and Black people and fence off the lands and pollute the soil and water of the supposed “wasteland” and “wilderness” that was pre-conquest North American. The relentless, indeed savage Indian-killing of 18th and 19th Century planted the racist, evangelical, and bloodthirsty seeds for later massive eliminationist U.S. wars waged against Filipinos, Central Americans, Japanese, Southeast Asians, Iraqis, and other nonwhite people caught on the wrong sides of the guns of the self-declared homeland and headquarters of freedom and democracy. Likewise, the savage slavery practiced on the land stolen from the “Indian savages” planted seeds and set the stage for the ongoing oppression of Black America today, replete with shocking levels of racial apartheid and disparity and ubiquitous and savage racist police brutality, incarceration, and criminal branding. Antebellum southern U.S. slavery propagandists claimed that the slave South had developed a paternalist and non-capitalist society concerned for the welfare of its supposedly cherished Black workforce. This was a lie and, yes, “a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” Edward Baptiste’s prize-winning study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and Rise of American Capitalism shows that 19th Century U.S. cotton slavery was a highly profitable capitalist project based on the ruthless exploitation and indeed torture of Black workers in forced labor camps (“plantations”) producing surplus value that fueled the United States’ emergence as a player in the world of capitalist nations before the Civil War. Nineteenth century northern U.S. leaders’ claim to have constructed a glorious “free labor” land of opportunity where hard work was rewarded with upward and outward mobility so as to prevent the formation of fixed social classes and a wage-earning proletariat was a lie. Already, even before the Civil War, northern cities and early industrial towns were home to a swelling impoverished and exploited population of permanently proletarianized, slum-dwelling whites. After the Civil War, as the United States became a leading industrial power, the northern and western states hosted the bloodiest labor history in the world, involving the regular and recurrent bloody repression of working class activists (i.e., the murdered Molly McGuires, the Haymarket Martyrs, Joe Hill, etc.) by company militias, local and state police, and federal troops (including Sioux Indian killers who were called into Chicago to murder strikers during the Great Upheaval of 1877). The southern white Redeemers’ overthrow of post-Civil War Reconstruction governments and construction of a racial terrorist Jim Crow regime in the South was based on three great lies: the myth of white supremacy and Black inferiority, the false claim that the South had seceded from the Union out of concern for states’ rights (the real cause was fear that Abraham Lincoln’s opposition to slavery in the Western territories spelled doom for their vicious chattel system), and the claim that the Reconstruction governments briefly enabled and protected by the Union Army had been woefully incompetent and oppressive due to a combination of Black inferiority and northern corruption. Then there are all the lies involved in making the case for America’s endless imperial wars. The Mexican War of American western conquest began in 1846 when President James K. Polk cited an attack on American troops south of the Nueces River in Texas — troops he had placed precisely to provoke Mexico. The notion that the conflict was started by Mexico was a lie meant to provide a pretext for U.S. seizure of the North American Southwest and California. It worked, creating a vast westward U.S. expansion that American imperialists sold in the name of a great lie called “Manifest Destiny” – the preposterous notion that the United States was destined by God to spread its supposedly benevolent dominion, “democracy,” and capitalism across the entire North American continent. “Manifest Destiny” was another one of those “self-evident truths” enforced by the barrel of a racist gun. War lies? The Spanish-American War began in 1898 when President William McKinley claimed that the warship USS Maine had been blown up by Spanish operatives. This was a convenient fabrication: the explosion resulted from an accidental fire in the munitions compartment inside the ship. The resulting war led to a significant expansion of U.S. power and bloodshed into the Pacific and Caribbean, sold under the great lies that Washington sought to liberate the people of the Philippines and Cuba. The U.S. would liberate many tens of thousands of Filipinos from earthly existence, its troops referring to the Asian peasant they exterminated en masse as “niggers,” “gooks,” and other racist names. The notion that the Franklin Roosevelt White House was surprised by the supposedly “unprovoked” Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a great lie. Also false was the notion that the Japanese had no reasons other than sheer malevolent imperialism for attacking U.S. forces there. The savagely racist and criminal atomic bombings of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 were justified with epic lies, all part of the lie of “the Good War.” As John Pilger wrote 12 years ago: “In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie. ‘No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin’ said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. ‘I write this as a warning to the world,’ reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called ‘an atomic plague.’ For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared – and vindicated…The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason, its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate ‘good war.’ whose ‘ethical bath,’ as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb…The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. ‘Even without the atomic bombing attacks,’ concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, ‘air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.’” (emphasis added). The “Vietnam War” – more honestly understood as the U.S. war on Southeast Asia – moved into high gear when President Lyndon B. Johnson exploited an alleged attack on a U.S. ship in “international waters” to justify a massive escalation of America’s assault on the region, which killed 3 to 5 million people — “parents, grandparent, children” (John Marciano) – between 1962 and 1975. The famous Gulf of Tonkin war resolution in Congress was based on one of the most fateful lies in American and world history. As a presidential candidate in 1968, future war criminal and epic serial liar Richard Nixon lied about wanting peace in Vietnam. His agent, Henry Kissinger, actively undermined a peace accord with Hanoi before the 1968 election. Nixon later lied about respecting the neutrality of Cambodia. He lied through secrecy and omission about the criminal and fateful U.S. bombing of Cambodia—a far bigger crime than the burglarizing of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex, about which he of course famously lied. Regarding Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg recalled 20 years ago that his 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers exposed U.S. military and intelligence documents “proving that the government had long lied to the country. Indeed, the papers revealed a policy of concealment and quite deliberate deception from the Truman administration onward. … A generation of presidents,” Ellsberg noted, “chose to conceal from Congress and the public what the real policy was. …” The Cold War, in whose name the “Vietnam War” was fought was a great lie, predicated on the myth of an international, Moscow-based conspiracy to spread socialism (supposedly a bad thing – a great lie) and the related myth that the United States was advancing “democracy” (this while backing and even imposing Third World Fascist governments around the world), supposedly at one with the supposedly benevolent (and in fact authoritarian and destructive) system called “capitalism.” The Cold War hatched all kinds of lies. President Dwight Eisenhower flatly lied to the American people and the world when he denied the existence of American U-2 spy plane flights over Russia. President John F. Kennedy lied about the supposed missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union. And Kennedy lied when he claimed that the United States sought democracy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and around the world. The serial fabricator and arch-Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan made a special address to the nation in which he lied by saying, “We did not—repeat—we did not trade weapons or anything else [to Iran] for hostages, nor will we.” He did trade weapons in a criminal effort not merely to secure the release of hostages but to fund the mass-murders murderous Contras, right-wing terrorists fighting to bring own the leftist revolutionary government in Nicaragua. The foreign policy lying continued after the end of the great Lie Fest that was the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush falsely claimed on at least five occasions in the run-up to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that Iraqi forces, after invading Kuwait, had pulled babies from incubators and left them to die. Operation Desert Storm was based on the lie that Washington was concerned for the fate of the Kuwaitis and the people of Iraq. The real war aims were to preserve U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil reserves and to demonstrate newly undeterred American military power – that “what we say goes” (in former CIA director Bush’s words) – in the wake of the decline of the Soviet Union. Bush41 savagely slaughtered surrendered and retreating conscripts with racist impunity during the infamous Highway of Death and left oppressed Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to be massacred by Saddam once it was determined that these US objectives had been achieved. American war planes risked mid-air collisions in their frenzy to exterminate already defeated Iraqi troops. George H.W. Bush crassly lied to Russian leaders when he and his emissaries promised that the West would not expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe during 1990 negotiations over the reunification of Germany. President Bill Clinton (who shamelessly lied about his White House sexual shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky) falsely claimed to be upholding international law and to be opposing genocide when he bombed Serbia for more than two months in early 1999. The mass-murderous petro-imperialist U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq under George W. Bush was based on cold-blooded blockbuster lies that would have made Orwell blush and Goebbels envious: the false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including a nuclear capacity, and that there were clear connections between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the 9/11 jetliner attacks. After the WMD fabrication was exposed, the serial liar Bush43 falsely claimed to have invaded Iraq to spread liberty and democracy – an abject lie. The notion that the United States had done nothing to provoke 9/11 was of course a great lie based on the total Orwellian erasure of Washington’s bloody history of petro-imperial intervention in the Middle East. Bill Clinton (subject of a useful 1999 book titled “No One Left to Lie To”) and Barack Obama were both silver-tongued corporate-neoliberal Wall Street and Pentagon Democrats who deceitfully asserted that they were progressive friends of working people and the poor. President Obama lied repeatedly, as when he falsely claimed that he would have his Department of Justice investigate and prosecute abusive lenders for cheating and defrauding ordinary homeowners. In a grotesque lie early in his presidency, Barack Obama’s White House claimed that the carnage caused by its bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk (where dozens of children were blown to pieces by U.S. ordnance) had really been inflicted by “Taliban grenades.” Obama lied when he said he ordered the 2011 bombing of Libya out of benevolent concern for the Libyan people. He was pursuing petro-imperial regime change there, a disastrous policy that sparked humanitarian and racist disaster within Libya and across north Africa. Obama turned reality upside down when he portrayed a 2014 U.S.-backed coup spearheaded by fascist forces in Ukraine as a peaceful and democratic revolution. Obama lied in essence when he ran as the supposed progressive candidate of the 99 percent against the 1 Percenter Mitt Romney in 2012. A deeply conservative neoliberal corporatist who would go on to champion the arch-authoritarian global-corporatist Trans Pacific Partnership after a first term in which he protected and bailed the financial parasites who collapsed economy while offering no bailout for the working and lower classes and passing a health insurance reform that only the big insurance and drug companies could love, Obama had enlisted the Department of Homeland Security in the infiltration and dismantlement of the populist Occupy Wall Street movement – the inventor of the terms “the 1 Percent” and “the 99 percent.” One of my favorite Obama lies came the day the record-setting liar Donald Trump defeated the serial liar Hillary Clinton in November of 2016. Obama went out to the White House Rose Garden to, in the trademark language of his public relations department, “address the nation on the election results and the next steps we can take to come together as a country and ensure a peaceful transition of power.” His oration that day was a tour de force of accommodation, appeasement, and denial. Despite Trump’s history of vicious attacks on him, Obama spoke in muted terms of conservatism, unity, and normalization: “Now, everybody is sad when their side loses an election. But the day after, we have to remember that we’re actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage…We are Americans first. We’re patriots first. We all want what’s best for this country….[Trump wants]…what the country needs—a sense of unity; a sense of inclusion; a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law; and a respect for each other… That’s the nature of democracy…We all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens—because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy. That’s how this country has moved forward for 240 years. It’s how we’ve pushed boundaries and promoted freedom around the world. That’s how we’ve expanded the rights of our founding to reach all of our citizens…I’m confident that this incredible journey that we’re on as Americans will go on. …We’re all on the same team.” Obama didn’t believe a word of this. In October of 2016, Obama said this to Hillary’s lame vide presidential candidate Tim Kaine: “Tim, remember,” Obama said by phone, “this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.” It was an accurate observation, born out in subsequent years, but never voiced in public by Obama. I could go on. A real catalogue of great U.S,-American lies could run for many volumes. Paul Street’s new book is The Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement.

The Missing Lessons From Israel’s Latest Elections BY RAMZY BAROUD

A ‘major setback’ was the recurring term in many news headlines reporting on the outcome of Israel’s general elections of March 23. While this depiction specifically referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to secure a decisive victory in the country’s fourth elections in two years, this is only part of the narrative. Certainly, it was a setback for Netanyahu, who has repeatedly resorted to Israeli voters as a final lifeline in the hope of escaping his ever-growing list of problems – splits within his Likud Party, the constant plotting of his former right coalition partners, his own corruption trials and his lack of political vision that does not cater to his and his family’s interests. Yet, as was the case in three previous elections, the outcome of the fourth was the same. This time, Netanyahu’s right-wing camp, thus potential government coalition partners, consists of even more ardent right-wing parties, including, aside from the ‘Likud’, which won 30 Knesset seats, ‘Shas’, with 9 seats, ‘United Torah Judaism’ with 7, and ‘Religious Zionism’ with 6. At 52 seats only, Netanyahu’s base is more vulnerable and more extreme than ever before. ‘Yamina’, on the other hand, which emerged with 7 seats, is a logical partner in Netanyahu’s possible coalition. Headed by an ardent right-wing politician, Naftali Bennett, who assumed the role of minister in various Netanyahu-led right-wing coalitions, sits, ideologically speaking, on the right of Netanyahu. A keen politician, Bennett has, for years, tried to escape Netanyahu’s dominance and to eventually claim the leadership of the right. While joining another right-wing coalition, again headed by Netanyahu, is hardly a best-case scenario, Bennett might reluctantly return to the Netanyahu camp for now, because he has no option. Bennett could, however, take another radical path, like that taken by former Likudist, Gideon Sa’ar of ‘New Hope’ and Avigdor Lieberman of ‘Yisrael Beiteinu’, ousting Netanyahu, even if the alternative means forming a shaky, short-lived coalition. Indeed, the anti-Netanyahu camp does not seem to have much in common, neither in terms of politics, ideology nor ethnicity – a crucial component in Israeli politics – than their collective desire to dispose of Netanyahu. If an anti-Netanyahu coalition is, somehow cobbled together – uniting ‘Yesh Atid’ (17 seats), ‘Kahol Lavan’ (8), ‘Yisrael Beiteinu’ (7), ‘Labor’ (7), ‘New Hope’ (6), the Arab ‘Joint List’ (6), ‘Meretz’ (6) – the coalition would still fail to reach the required threshold of 61. To avoid returning to the polls for the fifth time within approximately two years, the anti-Netanyahu coalition would be forced to cross many political red lines. For example, former Netanyahu’s anti-Arab allies, namely Lieberman and Sa’ar, would have to accept joining a coalition that includes the Arab ‘Joint List’. The latter would have to do the same thing, cooperating with political parties with avowedly racist, chauvinistic and anti-peace agendas. Despite this, the anti-Netanyahu coalition would still fail to secure the needed numbers. At 57 seats, they still need a push either from Bennet’s ‘Yamina’ or Mansour Abbas’ ‘United Arab List (Ra’am)’. Bennett, known for his ideological rigidity, understands that a coalition with the Arabs and the left could jeopardize his position within his ideological base: the right and the far-right. If he is to join an anti-Netanyahu coalition, it would be for the sole purpose of passing legislation at the Knesset that prevents politicians on trial from participating in elections. This has been Lieberman’s main strategy for quite some time. Once this mission is achieved, these odd coalition partners would pounce on each other to claim Netanyahu’s position at the helm of the right. For Mansour Abbas’ ‘Ra’am’, however, the story is quite different. Not only did Abbas betray desperately needed Arab unity in the face of an existential threat posed by Israel’s growing anti-Arab politics, he went on to suggest his willingness to join a Netanyahu-led coalition. However, even for opportunistic Abbas, joining a right-wing coalition with groups that champion such slogans as “Death to the Arabs” can be extremely dangerous. From the perspective of Arabs in Israel, Abbas’ politics already borders on treason. Joining the chauvinistic, violent Kahanists – who ran as part of the ‘Religious Zionism’ list – to form a government that aims at saving Netanyahu’s political career, would place this inexperienced and foolhardy politician in direct confrontation with his own Palestinian Arab community. Alternatively, Abbas may wish to vote in favor of the anti-Netanyahu coalition as a direct partner, or from the outside. Similar to Bennett, both options would make Abbas a potential kingmaker, an ideal scenario from his point of view and less than ideal from the point of view of a coalition that, if formed, would be unstable. Consequently, it is hardly sufficient to categorize the outcome of the latest Israeli elections as a ‘setback’ for Netanyahu alone. While that is true, it is also a setback for everyone else. Netanyahu failed to achieve a clear majority, but his enemies, too, failed to make a case to Israeli voters of why Netanyahu should be shunned from politics altogether. The latter remains the uncontested leader of the Israeli right and his Likud party still leads with a 13 seats difference from his closest rival. Though the center temporarily unified in previous elections in the form of Kahol Lavan (‘Blue and White’), it quickly disintegrated, and this is equally true for the once unified Arab parties. Disuniting just before the fourth elections, these parties squandered Arab votes and, with it, any hope that racist, militaristic and religiously zealot Israeli politics could possibly be fixed from within. This means that, whether Netanyahu goes or stays, the next Israeli government is likely to remain firmly within the right. Moreover, with or without Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Israel is unlikely to produce a politically unifying figure, one who is capable of redefining the country beyond Netanyahu-style cult of personality. As for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine, dismantling apartheid and, with it, the illegal Jewish settlements, these remain a distant hope, as these subjects were hardly part of the conversation that preceded the last elections.

Kosovo MPs elect lawyer Vjosa Osmani as president

The 38-year-old charismatic leader received backing from the parliament in a vote boycotted by a Serb party. Ex-President Hashim Thaci vacated the post in November after being charged with war crimes. The 38-year-old reformist and lawyer Vjosa Osmani was approved as president by the country's parliament in Pristina on Sunday with the backing of Prime Minister Albin Kurti and his Vetevendosje (Self-Determination) party. Osmani received 71 votes from the 82 lawmakers present in the 120-seat parliament. While the president's duties are largely ceremonial, Osmani will now be the commander of the country's armed forces and also serve as one of the country's top diplomatic representatives.Two opposition parties and the ethnic Serb minority party refused to take part in the vote. Who is Vjosa Osmani? Osmani started her carrier as a teenage activist. She studied law in Pristina and then completed her master's and bachelor's degrees at the US University of Pittsburgh. The politician was one of the senior officials of the Democratic League of Kosovo (DLK) party. However, Osmani was ousted from the organization following inter-party strife. She remained an immensely popular figure, securing over 300,000 votes as a Vetevendosje candidate at the February election. Osmani is also seen as a role model for women in the mostly patriarchal Balkan country. Unlike Prime Minister Kurti, Osmani said it was a priority for her to resume the stalled normalization talks with Serbia. Officially, Belgrade still views Kosovo as a Serbian province and rejects its 2008 declaration of independence. On Sunday, Osmani once again called for dialogue, but also called on Belgrade to apologize for the 1990s conflict and persecute war criminals. "Peace would be achieved only when we see remorse and an apology from Serbia and when we see justice for those who have suffered from their crimes," she said. She is Kosovo's second female leader following Atifete Jahjaga, who served as president between 2011 and 2016. Why is Osmani succeeding Hashim Thaci? The position became vacant in November after Hashim Thaci resigned over war crimes charges. Osmani, who previously served as the speaker for Kosovo's 120-seat parliament, took over the presidential role provisionally ahead of the Sunday vote.Thaci, like most Kosovar politicians, built his reputation on his wartime record, fighting as a guerrilla commander against Serbian armed forces. The war culminated with the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, which forced Belgrade to pull back its police and military from Kosovo. With the backing of the US and other Western countries, Kosovo declared independence, but Russia, China, and several other EU countries do not recognize it as an independent state. The country remains mired in economic problems and political divisions, with tensions occasionally flaring up with Belgrade. Both Osmani and Prime Minister Albin Kurti present themselves as part of the next generation of Kosovo politicians, professing more liberal values and pledging to tackle widespread corruption. Kurti's Vetevendosje party secured a resounding victory in the general election in February, but fell two seats short of an absolute majority in the parliament. The Sunday vote is another step towards cementing the party's dominance, as the country's prime minister, the new parliamentary speaker, and the president are all from Vetevendosje. dj/mm (AP, dpa, Beta)

Ancient coins found in Rhode Island may solve mystery of murderous 1600s pirate

By The Associated Press WARWICK, R.I. — A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in rural Rhode Island and other random corners of New England may help solve one of the planet’s oldest cold cases. The villain in this tale: a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most-wanted criminal after plundering a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims home to India from Mecca, then eluded capture by posing as a slave trader. “It’s a new history of a nearly perfect crime,” said Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal detectorist who found the first intact 17th-century Arabian coin in a meadow in Middletown. That ancient pocket change — among the oldest ever found in North America — could explain how pirate Capt. Henry Every vanished into the wind. On Sept. 7, 1695, the pirate ship Fancy, commanded by Every, ambushed and captured the Ganj-i-Sawai, a royal vessel owned by Indian emperor Aurangzeb, then one of the world’s most powerful men. Aboard were not only the worshipers returning from their pilgrimage, but tens of millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver. What followed was one of the most lucrative and heinous robberies of all time. Historical accounts say his band tortured and killed the men aboard the Indian ship and raped the women before escaping to the Bahamas, a haven for pirates. But word quickly spread of their crimes, and English King William III — under enormous pressure from a scandalized India and the East India Company trading giant — put a large bounty on their heads. “If you Google ‘first worldwide manhunt,’ it comes up as Every,” Bailey said. “Everybody was looking for these guys.” Until now, historians only knew that Every eventually sailed to Ireland in 1696, where the trail went cold. But Bailey says the coins he and others have found are evidence the notorious pirate first made his way to the American colonies, where he and his crew used the plunder for day-to-day expenses while on the run. Image: Amateur historian Jim Bailey uses a metal detector to scan for Colonial-era artifacts in a field on March 11, 2021, in Warwick, R.I. Amateur historian Jim Bailey uses a metal detector to scan for Colonial-era artifacts in a field on March 11, 2021, in Warwick, R.I.Steven Senne / AP The first complete coin surfaced in 2014 at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, a spot that had piqued Bailey’s curiosity two years earlier after he found old colonial coins, an 18th-century shoe buckle and some musket balls. Waving a metal detector over the soil, he got a signal, dug down and hit literal paydirt: a darkened, dime-sized silver coin he initially assumed was either Spanish or money minted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Peering closer, the Arabic text on the coin got his pulse racing. “I thought, ‘Oh my God,’” he said. Research confirmed the exotic coin was minted in 1693 in Yemen. That immediately raised questions, Bailey said, since there’s no evidence that American colonists struggling to eke out a living in the New World traveled to anywhere in the Middle East to trade until decades later. Since then, other detectorists have unearthed 15 additional Arabian coins from the same era — 10 in Massachusetts, three in Rhode Island and two in Connecticut. Another was found in North Carolina, where records show some of Every’s men first came ashore. “It seems like some of his crew were able to settle in New England and integrate,” said Sarah Sportman, state archaeologist for Connecticut, where one of the coins was found in 2018 at the ongoing excavation of a 17th-century farm site. Recommended U.S. NEWS Inmates break windows, set fires in uprising at St. Louis jail DATA GRAPHICS Millions traveled in the last few weeks. See the trend of air travel since March. “It was almost like a money laundering scheme,” she said. Although it sounds unthinkable now, Every was able to hide in plain sight by posing as a slave trader — an emerging profession in 1690s New England. On his way to the Bahamas, he even stopped at the French island of Reunion to get some Black captives so he’d look the part, Bailey said. Obscure records show a ship called the Sea Flower, used by the pirates after they ditched the Fancy, sailed along the Eastern seaboard. It arrived with nearly four dozen slaves in 1696 in Newport, Rhode Island, which became a major hub of the North American slave trade in the 18th century. “There’s extensive primary source documentation to show the American colonies were bases of operation for pirates,” said Bailey, 53, who holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Rhode Island and worked as an archaeological assistant on explorations of the Wydah Gally pirate ship wreck off Cape Cod in the late 1980s. Bailey, whose day job is analyzing security at the state’s prison complex, has published his findings in a research journal of the American Numismatic Society, an organization devoted to the study of coins and medals. Archaeologists and historians familiar with but not involved in Bailey’s work say they’re intrigued, and believe it’s shedding new light on one of the world’s most enduring criminal mysteries. “Jim’s research is impeccable,” said Kevin McBride, a professor of archaeology at the University of Connecticut. “It’s cool stuff. It’s really a pretty interesting story.” Mark Hanna, an associate professor of history at the University of California-San Diego and an expert in piracy in early America, said that when he first saw photos of Bailey’s coin, “I lost my mind.” “Finding those coins, for me, was a huge thing,” said Hanna, author of the 2015 book, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire.” “The story of Capt. Every is one of global significance. This material object — this little thing — can help me explain that.” Every’s exploits have inspired a 2020 book by Steven Johnson, “Enemy of All Mankind;” PlayStation’s popular “Uncharted” series of video games; and a Sony Pictures movie version of “Uncharted” starring Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas that’s slated for release early in 2022. Bailey, who keeps his most valuable finds not at his home but in a safe deposit box, says he’ll keep digging. “For me, it’s always been about the thrill of the hunt, not about the money,” he said. “The only thing better than finding these objects is the long-lost stories behind them.”

Media Release from Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK

For immediate release: 1st April 2021 UN Security Council Barriers are no Excuse for International Inaction on Myanmar Today BROUK hosted five esteemed panelist as part of an online event to discuss international action on the coup in Myanmar. Thin Lei Win moderated the event as more than 400 attendees joined to hear Dr. Sasa, Thomas Andrews, Naomi Kikoler, and Matthew Smith, and BROUK president Tun Khin discuss the current situation in Burma and action needed from the international community to overturn the Military coup and establish a true democracy in Myanmar. The discussion also featured an emphasis from several panelists about the importance of cutting economic ties that sustain the military. “The international community must stop giving the money for weapons to the military,” said Dr. Sasa, UN Special Envoy of CRPH. “The international community must stop supplying them with weapons. The companies that are doing business in Myanmar, they need to stop doing business with the military.” Matthew Smith, CEO of Fortify Rights agreed and emphasized the importance of cutting off oil and gas revenues that benefit the military, “The multinational oil companies that are still operating in Myanmar, including French Total, American Chevron and Malaysian Petronas, they are handing revenue over to this illegitimate regime. Those payments should stop immediately.” Thomas Andrews added that the oil and gas sector should be the focus of future sanctions, “You can also impose sanctions, these companies would have to follow the law. So we should move forward on a sanctions regime that includes the oil and gas sector.” All panelist emphasized that the international community must stop waiting for the UN security council to take leadership on justice and accountability in Myanmar. “There is a need for justice, a need for targeted sanctions, a need for a global arms embargo, for ASEAN to step up,” said Naomi Kikoler, Director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. “We have to be creative and think outside of the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council.” Panelists expressed an urgent need for individual countries to take the initiative to build coalitions for strong collective action on Myanmar. “If you are not going to have action through the UN Security council or the General Assembly, then sympathetic countries need to come together in an emergency summit for the people of Myanmar,” said Thomas Andrews, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights on Myanmar. “They should coordinate action, both on sanctions and weapon embargoes, but also on financial support for humanitarian assistance that does not go through the military junta.” Panelists also presented complentary visions for a future democratic Myanmar and expressed solidarity with protesters and the nationwide civil disobedience movement. “The solidarity that many of the protesters and the CDM have shown with Rohingya has encouraged me to believe that a future democratic Burma is possible, said Tun Khin. “I am thankful from the bottom of my heart, that they acknowledge that the genocide has happened to us.” Dr Sasa promised that CRPH would deliver a federal democracy that would represent all people in Myanmar, “We promise to deliver a democratic federal union of Myanmar. We promise to set up the government of Myanmar for the people, not the military. We will protect the rights of all, freedom of all, justice of all.” Lastly, Tun Khin added that he hoped CRPH would truly include Rohingya as equals, “I hope that CRPH will also be brave enough to speak up officially and respect the ethnic and citizenship rights of Rohingya as they develop a more representative political body. If they are willing to work together, we the Rohingya diaspora, are ready to help them take advantage of every avenue at the international level to ensure that our fight for justice is truly inclusive and democratic for all of Burma's people.” For more information, please contact Tun Khin +44 (0)7888714866. With Kind Regards Jarmal Ahamed General Secretary Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) London http://www.brouk.org.uk https://www.facebook.com/burmeserohingya.orguk