The Media Celebrated Julian Assange and is Now Too Afraid to Defend Him

 By: Patrick Cockburn

June 27, 2022

It has become easier over the last month for governments to kill or imprison journalists whom they want to silence. But the most sinister aspect of this assault on freedom of speech is that it is facing such limited resistance from the very media that is under attack.

US intelligence agencies concluded in a report declassified by President Joe Biden that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Biden began by treating him as a pariah, but is now reversing this policy in the run-up to his visit to Saudi Arabia next month which is aimed at persuading MBS to pump more crude to replace Russian exports and bring down the oil price.

In other words, the murderers of Khashoggi have got what they wanted and shown with grisly brutality that no Saudi dissident journalist is safe, a precedent that will be taken to heart in Turkey, where MBS has been visiting this week. All is now forgiven by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly allied to Saudi Arabia, while the trial in absentia of the 26 alleged murderers of Khashoggi had already been transferred from Ankara to Riyadh.

 

US Held Secret Meeting With Israel, Arab Military Chiefs on Iran

Jason Ditz

6/26/2022

At the Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, the US held secret meetings in March with top military figures from Israel and the various Arab states in the Middle East. The focus, as ever, was on Iran.

Explain It to Me, Please

Explain It to Me, Please: If you want a war with Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela tell me why and how it would benefit Americans

 Phillip Giraldi

June 22, 2022

 

استقرار یک رهبریِ مردمی در ایران

چهل و اندی سال پیش، ایرانیان به پا خواستند تا خود را از یک دیکتاتوری وابسته و اجنبی پرست رها کنند. تاریخ ایران گواه بسیاری از این جنبش‌ها است، که همیشه در منطقه پرچم‌دار بوده است. آنچه که همواره ایرانیان را متحد کرده است تا جنبش‌های عظیمی بر ضد حاکمان ادمکش داشته باشند یک عزم ملی بوده است. رژیم فعلی نیز با همه دندان تیز نشان دادن‌ها و سفاکی، کاملا شکننده است.

امردم ایران هیچگاه طرفدار رژیم آخوندی نبودند، و شقاوت شوک آور این رژیم تنها نیروئی است که توانسته است آنرا بیش از چهار دهه در ایران پایدار نگاه دارد. جالب اینجاست که رژیم در برقراری وابستگی مجدد به غرب، آنچنان که در زمان شاه مرسوم بود، تلاش می‌کند، که البته چون در طول بقایش شعار آن مرگ بر آمریکا بوده است، جرات عنوان آنرا با صراحت ندارد. ولی سخنان عمال رژیم، در جبهه‌های راست و چپ، کاملا و به وضوح نمایان‌گر آن هستند.

Next 100 Days of Ukraine War

M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

JUNE 13, 2022

The New York-based Council on Foreign Relations held a videoconference on May 31 titled Russia’s War in Ukraine: How does it end? The president of the think tank Richard Haas chaired the panel of distinguished participants — Stephen Hadley, Prof. Charles Kupchan, Alina Polyakova and Lt. Gen. (Retd) Stephen Twitty. It was a great discussion dominated by the liberal internationalist stream that has so far guided President Biden’s national security team, which wants to help Ukraine fight a long war against Russia. 

Why It’s Hard To Take America’s Word on the Summit of the Americas

Ted Snider

June 16, 2022

President Biden has made the battle between autocracy and democracy a theme of his presidency. He invoked that theme again last week to explain to Latin America and the world why Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua were cut from the list of nations invited to the US hosted Summit of the Americas. The State Department explained that "It’s the president’s decision, but I think the president has been very clear about the presence of countries that by their actions do not respect democracy – they will not receive invitations."

But by Biden’s actions, it is difficult to take the US at its word that the Summit snubs were about democracy.

Why Russian intellectuals are hardening support for war in Ukraine

Anatol Lieven

June 6, 2022

Dr. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center until the Russian government closed it in April, was for many years one of the most important pragmatic Russian voices in support of cooperation with the West and the “westernization” of Russia. He was one of the few Russian figures still to retain some of Gorbachev’s hopes for a “common European home.” (I should say that I have known Dr Trenin since I was a British journalist in Moscow in the 1990s, and I was his colleague at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between 2000 and 2004).

 

Biden Refuses to Mention the Worsening Dangers of Nuclear War. Media and Congress Enable His Silence.

Norman Solomon

June 10, 2022

I’ve just finished going through the more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiqués about the war in Ukraine that the White House has released and posted on its website since Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in early March. They all share with that speech one stunning characteristic – the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers. Yet we’re now living in a time when those dangers are the worst they’ve been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

America’s Gun Fetish

 June 7, 2022 By Chris Hedges

There will be no gun control, not only because of the gun lobby and a corrupt political class, but because for many white Americans the idea of the gun is the only power they have left.

Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7.

By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting.

 

New York Times Opinion Piece: What Biden Is Telling Putin

Ted Snyder

June 6 ,2022

When the President of the United States writes an opinion piece in The New York Times, he is talking to Americans, but, as he is aware as he is writing it, he is also talking to Putin. Officials in Russia will be analyzing the short text, decoding the messages.

What message is Biden sending? And why now?

 

رضا شاه

نقدی بر نوشته صادق زیباکلام

در مورد رضا شاه کتابهای بسیاری منتشر شده است. کتابهائی که در زمان دومین و آخرین پادشاه پهلوی به چاپ میرسید، به وضوح از ترقیات زمان رضا شاه، و تبدیل ایران در زمان او از یک کشور عقب افتاده به ورود به دنیای علم و پیشرفت سخن میگفت. سرا سلسله پهلوی البته در زمانی‌ میزیست که دنیا به سرعت در حال تحول بود. به همان درجه ای که در رژیم سابق نوشته های بسیاری در خدمت رضا شاه به نشر میرسید، به همان درجه در رژیم فعلی‌ در ذم او سخن میرود. ولی صادق زیبا کلام که شاید به دلیل اعتقادش به اسلام میتواند در دانشگاه درس دهد و کتابی متباین با تبلیغات رژیم بنویسد، با اطمینان می‌توان گفت که با گزارش پیگیر و مطالعه کتب مختلف شرح حالی در مورد زندگی اولین پادشاه پهلوی نوشته است، که قابل مطالعه است. در اینکه رضا شاه در زمان بسیار حساسی وارد ایران شد و تحولی که در ایران صورت داد، و پسرش آنرا ادامه داد تا ایران به یک کشور متمدن و مترقی تبدیل شوید شکی‌ نیست. پرسش این است که اگر مظفر‌الدین شاه عمر بیشتری داشت، و یا محمد علی شاه با مشروطیت مخالفت نمیکرد، و یا احمد شاه به پادشاهی علاقه داشت، کشور ما به تبعیت از سایر کشورهای دنیا سیر تحول خود را نمی‌پیمود؟

The unpalatable truth in Ukraine

 ANDREW LATHAM

June 2, 2022

At one point in the novel “Sign of the Four,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inimitable detective Sherlock Holmes explains and demonstrates to Dr. Watson his method of observation and deduction. Confronted with an apparently inexplicable circumstance, Dr. Watson is utterly perplexed. He simply cannot understand how the event in question came to pass, given the facts as he understands them and the laws of nature. Slightly irritated at his plodding companion’s bafflement, Holmes once again shares with him the methodological key to solving all such mysteries: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Biden tweaks Ukraine narrative

 June 1, 2022

Bhadra Kumar

The US President Joe Biden’s op-Ed in the New York Times on Tuesday on the Ukraine war starts with a bluff. He says President Vladimir Putin had thought Russia’s special operation would only last days. How Biden arrived at such an estimation is unclear. Like the US narrative on the war, it is largely presumptive.

The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame

Christopher Caldwell

5/31/2022

In the Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro this month, Henri Guaino, a top adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president of France, warned that Europe’s countries, under the shortsighted leadership of the United States, were “sleepwalking” into war with Russia. Mr. Guaino was borrowing a metaphor that the historian Christopher Clark used to describe the origins of World War I.