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Both President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have endorsed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last-minute accusation of “genocide” against the Muslim Uyghur population in China’s Xinjiang province. But an investigation of published work by the researcher Pompeo relied on to level his genocide allegation reveals a pattern of data abuse and fraudulent assertions that substantially undermines the incendiary charge.
The cat is out of the bag. The U.S. is in relative decline and there is resource crunch. There is absence of a positive vision for humanity, as the country struggles with its own demons. The dramatic events in the American society and politics in the recent past badly exposed the country as a sham democracy with an abominable record of racism and appalling inequality where top 0.1 percent of the population hold roughly the same share of the country’s wealth as the bottom 90 percent.
So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the U.S. invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force. And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.
In 2019, Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a prominent Donald Trump supporter, aided a plot to move U.S.-made attack helicopters, weapons, and other military equipment from Jordan to a renegade commander fighting for control of war-torn Libya. A team of mercenaries planned to use the aircraft to help the commander, Khalifa Hifter, a U.S. citizen and former CIA asset, defeat Libya’s U.N.-recognized and U.S.-backed government. While the U.N. has alleged that Prince helped facilitate the mercenary effort, sources with knowledge of the chain of events, as well as documents obtained by The Intercept, reveal new details about the scheme as well as Prince’s yearslong campaign to support Hifter in his bid to take power in Libya.
Fifty-five years ago on this day, the fate of Africa was irrevocably altered when the CIA sponsored a 1966 coup d’état against Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, former Prime Minister of Ghana and Pan-Africanist visionary who was voted as “Africa’s Man of the Millennium.”
More than 100 academics, activists and artists are calling on the Trudeau government to cease its support for Jovenel Moïse
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Ms. Alena Douhan, visited the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela from 1 to 12 February 2021. She thanks the Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for enabling and supporting her visit to the country. The purpose of the visit was to assess the impact of unilateral sanctions on the enjoyment of human rights by people living in Venezuela and any other affected people.
A s per usual, news on Haiti in the United States remains limited, except for during periods of “crisis.” As if on cue, U.S. media began reporting on Haiti’s “constitutional crisis” this week. [...] Most reporting failed to note the international role, and particularly that of the United States, in creating this “crisis.”
Due in part to Ottawa’s repeated interventions, Haiti is once again on the road to dictatorship
Any future government that’s concerned about environmental and human rights issues will have to reign in mining companies operating abroad.
Utsa Patnaik | The farmers’ movement for the repeal of the three farm laws which affect them closely but have been rammed through without consulting them, has now entered its second month. It is of historic significance. It is not just about minimum support prices but also about the survival of the entire system of public procurement and distribution of foodgrains. Without ensuring the economic viability of foodgrains production in North India — the grain basket of the country — no continuity can be ensured for the public procurement and distribution system, which, despite its drawbacks, continues to provide a modicum of food security to vast numbers of our population.
Seventeen Iraqis were killed and 14 seriously wounded in an unprovoked attack by the four who indiscriminately fired machine guns, sniper rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades into a crowd of unarmed civilians. Among the dead were two boys, 9 and 11 years of age, and a woman burned alive in her car. The four killers suffered no injuries and their claims of self-defense were rejected by Iraqi and U.S. investigations. It was one of many atrocities committed by U.S. and allied forces.
U.S. trials and retrials found the four guilty of heinous crimes including first-degree murder and manslaughter.
But why were they never tried in Iraq, the site of their monstrous actions?
The most recent denunciation from Syria confirms the support of Western powers to the alleged humanitarian organization of the White Helmets which is also a fraud of crude media manipulation.
The US Congress’ $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill was packaged with $1.4 trillion in omnibus spending that includes tens of billions for war, weapons, and regime change abroad, from anti-Russia and anti-China initiatives to $3.3 billion for Israel’s military.
Democracy Now! interview with Andrew Quilty on his story for The Intercept.
A U.S.-Backed Militia That Kills Children May Be America’s Exit Strategy From Its Longest War
By Patrick Cockburn | It was the worst crime of Donald Trump’s years in the White House. In October 2019 he ordered US troops to stand aside, greenlighting Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria that led to the murder, rape and expulsion of its Kurdish inhabitants.
Eighteen months earlier, Trump did nothing as the Turkish army occupied the Kurdish enclave of Afrin and replaced the population there with Syrian Arab jihadis.
Those farmers who survive the profiteering strategies of dispossession and imperialism are to become incorporated into a system of contract farming dictated by global agri-food giants tied to an exploitative food regime based on market dependency and corporate control. A regime that places profit ahead of biodiverse food security, healthy diets and the environment.
Vote No. 23 specifically targets China as a threat to Canadian “values” and demands the government table a plan to “combat China’s growing foreign operations.” In the midst of the pandemic, this motion (and the agenda behind it) have not penetrated most people’s bubbles. We ignore it at our peril. Vote No. 23 represents the thin edge of a wedge that would cleave the world in two and potentially lead to unmitigated disaster.
The legacy of the Iraq war, and the prospect of a bloody sequel sparked by Donald Trump’s assassination of a senior Iranian official in Baghdad this week, has the potential to transform the Democratic primary, offering voters radically different visions of how the next commander-in-chief proposes to deal with the ongoing chaos caused by the 2003 invasion.