Left I on the News

As I see it, there are four facets or different aspects to the whole Russiagate issue:

1) Is it true? Who hacked into or leaked emails from the DNC and John Podesta? Did the Russian government place ads on Facebook or just some random politically active Russians (or even the CIA)? I'm not going to address that here, just putting this out as issue #1.

2) Did it have any effect on the elections? Did something come out in the Clinton emails that really send voters fleeing to Jill Stein or Donald Trump? Did $40K of FB ads really change anyone's mind? Personally I've seen zero evidence of any of this, but in any case it's issue #2.

3) The "US has done much worse and even done it openly" argument, and that just goes for influencing elections with its media or buying elections with its money, and doesn't even include overthrowing governments with bombing and/or invasions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Grenada) or organizing or lending its backing to military coups (Iran, Honduras).

But the fourth aspect is one I haven't seen discussed anywhere else — why shouldn't Russia (or anyone else) have a say in American elections? (Not a vote, but a say). I'm not addressing here the legalities involved (what is or is not legal right now), just the morality or philosophy of the issue.

My point is best illustrated by using Cuba, not Russia, as an example. How many Americans are affected by American policy towards Cuba? Some certainly, but a small percentage of the entire population. People wanting to visit, farmers wanting to sell products to Cuba, patients with diseases which could be treated by medicines developed in Cuba, people who like good rum, and so on. Again, definitely some people, but probably just a few percent.

On the other hand, how many Cubans are affected by U.S. policy towards Cuba? Pretty much every single one. Whether it's directly affected (people renting rooms in their homes through AirBnBs, for example), or indirectly affected by the fact that Cuba loses billions of dollars each year because of the blockade, money that could be used for all kinds of improved services and development, there are few if any Cubans who aren't affected by U.S. policy.

So, given those facts, why shouldn't Cubans have a say (by placing ads on FB, just for example) if there's one candidate whose policies promise to improve their lives and another whose policies promise to make them worse.

When the argument is applied to Russia, of course it's not quite so dramatic. Russia is a much bigger country, further away, with a stronger economy, and so on. But even so, there is little doubt that U.S. policy towards Russia affects a far higher percentage of Russians than it does Americans (actually it affects hardly any Americans at all, except those profiting from the increased war budget that having Russia as our "enemy" promotes). So again, why shouldn't Russians, or the Russian government, be able to voice its opinion about that policy, including how different candidates might change that policy? It seems perfectly reasonable to me.

And why, returning to point #3 above, would I still say it's wrong for the opposite, that is, why it's wrong for the U.S. to try to influence elections in other countries? Because it's the U.S. which is the 800-lb gorilla in the world. El Salvador's foreign policy towards the U.S. matters, more or less, not a whit. U.S. policy towards El Salvador (for example, its position on Temporary Protected Status), on the other hand, matters immensely. And that's precisely why I would argue that other countries should have a say in U.S. politics, while the U.S. should butt out of theirs.

The U.S. government has now demanded that Sputnik radio register as a “foreign agent”, an outrageous assault on free speech and nothing less than an attempt to enforce media conformity in this country.

I listen to two shows on Sputnik, Loud and Clear and By Any Means Necessary. Both are hosted by American socialists. Another show (that I don’t listen to) is hosted by a conservative Trump supporter. As far as I can tell all of Sputnik’s hosts and most of their guests are American, and none takes orders from the Kremlin or is restricted in any way as to what they say, and I know this for a fact because the two American socialists I mentioned above are both friends of mine.

Sputnik broadcast studio in Washington, D.C., with Brian Becker (L) and John Kiriakou (R) in the background, on the air with their show Loud and Clear

No, Sputnik is not a “foreign agent”. What it is is one of the few places in the broadcast media spectrum, along with shows like Democracy Now, where you can hear stories and guests you absolutely will not hear on any “mainstream” sources. Is there a single socialist with a show on “left-leaning” (really Democrat-leaning) MSNBC, or even a regular guest? A single socialist who is a columnist for the New York Times, Washington Post, or any corporate newspaper? Not to my knowledge.

Sputnik’s motto is “Telling the Untold”. That’s why the government wants to demonize them and, if they can, shut them down. Not because they’re a “foreign agent”.

Listen for yourself and make up your own mind. Start with this show which deals with this very subject:

I honestly don't think it's my preexisting bias to say that Margarita Simonyan, Editor-in-Chief of RT, absolutely destroys CBS' Leslie Stahl in this interview. Stahl does a great job parroting U.S. accusations but little else, starting with an unimportant but basic factual error ("RT" no longer stands for "Russia Today", just like "KFC" no longer stands for "Kentucky Fried Chicken") and going on from there.

Although only a tiny number of Americans can actually watch RT on their televisions, Stahl tries to scare us by letting us know that RT videos have had up to 2B views on YouTube. Sounds like a lot right? That's for all their videos combined. Gangnam Style has had 3B views all by itself. She accuses RT of broadcasting "a steady diet of violent protests and racial conflict." Does it occur to her they could only do that if there were a steady stream of such news? And, by the way, cops killing Black people isn't "racial conflict", it's cop terror.

Stahl slams RT for broadcasting white supremacists like Richard Spencer but he and people like him get orders of magnitude more exposure on FOX News, or even on CNN (e.g., here). And as for broadcasting people slamming Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, again as if those broadcasts had the tiniest fraction of the views of identical criticism of Clinton on FOX News.

In what I thought the most amusing moment, Stahl also criticizes RT for interviewing…wait for it…actors! Yes, you never see that on American news channels.

I'll close by asking a simple question. If RT had been "in the tank" for Hillary Clinton, and had broadcast a steady stream of glowing news stories about Clinton and negative ones about Trump, and Clinton had won, or even if Trump had still won, is there anyone who thinks that "Russiagate" would be a thing now? Not a chance, even though in that hypothetical case alleged Russian interference would have been just as great (or, in my postulated scenario, even greater and more clear cut).

Russian "interference" is an excuse invented by the Clinton camp to provide a convenient excuse for their loss and to ward off the ascension of the Sanders wing of the party, and picked up and amplified by the entire establishment because it helps elevate an "enemy" that can be used to justify a trillion dollar war budget (as I've said before, ISIS doesn't have a navy or an air force or even anti-aircraft guns, so justifying advanced weaponry based on ISIS or Al Qaeda as your main foe just doesn't cut the mustard). And those of you who are on that bandwagon are doing your part, however inadvertently, to join in that justification, and the simultaneous destruction of the social fabric of this country (because that trillion dollars has to come from somewhere, and it sure isn't coming from taxing the rich or the corporations). Which is a particular shame coming from those of you who are "Sandernistas".

It's been a while since I've been writing long-form blog entries. But I'm still doing what I've been doing since 2003. You'll find me on Twitter at @leftiblog. Follow me there!

It started with Jeb Bush, since his brother George was President when the decision was made to invade Iraq in 2003. Since then, it has become standard practice in the media to ask every one of the more than a dozen people running for President the same question: "If you knew then what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq?"

Readers who weren't politically active in 2003 might be forgiven if they thought that this question was serving some kind of progressive role, discrediting the invasion, occupation, and continuing U.S. military role in Iraq. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because the central function of this question is actually to perpetuate the myth that the invasion of Iraq was a "mistake," a well-meaning action based on "faulty intelligence" but all in the service of some noble goal.

In late 2002 and early 2003, there was a certain divergence of opinion in the ruling class. Some were pushing for an invasion of Iraq, based on claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that it had something to do with Al Qaeda's terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, and that its alleged alliance with Al Qaeda meant that, even if Iraq wouldn't dare use nuclear weapons directly against the U.S. or its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, it might give a nuclear bomb to Al Qaeda who would do so. All of these claims were utterly false, but in the media which reflect ruling class thinking, they were all (with the exception of the 9/11 connection) accepted uncritically.

The opposition to the invasion came not from those who disputed the supposed "facts", but from the more cautious who wanted U.N. inspections to continue, to be able to prove definitively that Iraq did (or did not) have WMD. Of course, following the famous dictum of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence" — that proof would never have been forthcoming. There would always be one more place to look, and even if the inspectors had looked everywhere, those pushing for war simply claimed that WMD were being moved around to hide them.

But even that opposition vanished on Feb. 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke at the United Nations, repeating and expanding upon allegations that had been made a few days earlier by President Bush during his State of the Union Address. Brandishing an ominous vial of white powder (as if it were anthrax), diagrams of imaginary mobile bioweapons labs, and ambiguous satellite photos, Powell told the world with absolute certainty that Iraq had WMD. "We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories," he said. "There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." "Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons." Every one of these statements, and more, were categorical. Not "we think he has," but "there can be no doubt."

Unlike Bush and his Vice-President Dick Cheney, Powell was looked on as a "moderate," a reasonable man. Faced with his speech at the U.N., ruling class opposition to the invasion collapsed, despite the fact that his speech didn't sway enough U.N. members into providing a Security Council endorsement of the invasion, which would have made it "legal." When reporters and politicians talk now about what "we" "knew" then, they're referring above all to Powell's speech at the U.N.

We know now that virtually every word of that speech was an out-and-out lie. But what about then? To begin with, even if it turned out that Iraq did have WMD, the speech was still a lie from beginning to end. Because, contrary to Powell's assertions, the U.S. did not "know" that Iraq had seven mobile biolabs (to take just one of the allegations). It had been told they did by a single person, later revealed to have the curious code name "Curveball," who had told the German intelligence agents who debriefed him that he had never made any bioweapons nor seen anyone else do so. The Germans categorized his claims as "vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm" and categorized Curveball himself as "not a stable, psychologically stable guy." This kind of "evidence" was the basis for Powell's statement, which was not "we've heard that," or "we have reason to believe that," but "we know." It's true that the American public didn't learn about Curveball until 2004, but Powell certainly had. The only Defense Department analyst who had ever met Curveball had told Powell the day before his speech that his "information" was unreliable.

The person in charge of the weapons inspections in Iraq, David Kay, had even admitted in a September 2002 interview on CNN that there was a "lack of hard evidence" for the charges they were making. Did that stop Powell from speaking with such certainty at the U.N.? Of course not, because this speech was intended to launch a war and nothing less. Admitting that the U.S. wasn't actually sure of what he was claiming would have given more ammunition to those who wanted inspections to continue, and that is not what the Bush administration wanted. They (and the majority of the U.S. ruling class) wanted war.

It wasn't just that the U.S. didn't really "know" that Iraq had WMD, as Powell claimed they did. In fact, the U.S. actually had quite reliable evidence that Iraq did not have WMD. In 1995, General Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and the Iraqi minister who had been in charge of Iraq's weapons programs, had defected to Jordan. Kamel told U.N. debriefers that after the Gulf War (which ended in early 1991), Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them. The U.S. government had managed to keep this story from the American public for years, but on Feb. 24, 2003, shortly after Powell's speech but still three weeks before the invasion actually happened, Newsweek broke the story, and two days later, the transcript of Kamel's testimony, which had been kept secret, was made public by a Cambridge University analyst.

So "what we knew then" was, in fact, that Iraq had neither WMD nor an active WMD program. The government (although not the public) was also well aware at the time that George Bush's State of the Union claim that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was an out-an-out lie. Indeed the reason the words "the British government" were in that sentence was to defect responsibility, because the CIA already knew that the documents on which this claim were based were amateurish forgeries; the director of the CIA, George Tenet admitted as much, but only several months after the invasion.

Is this all "20-20 hindsight"? No. My own blog, Left I on the News, didn't begin until August, 2003, but in other writings before the invasion I wrote many of the things described above. And even in cases where the facts hadn't yet come out (as in the case of Curveball, for example), listening to Powell's speech with an open mind made very clear at the time that this evidence was less than solid, or completely fabricated. For example, I wrote then:

"The reason why the U.S. has not shared this "evidence" is readily apparent. George Bush and Tony Blair have stood before the cameras before and trotted out photos purporting to show, among other things, Iraq rebuilding nuclear facilities. But inspectors on the ground quickly verified that this was complete nonsense — the facilities in question were rusted, cobwebbed, and hadn't been used in years. Likewise we have heard much about aluminum tubes, which Bush and Powell continue to point to as evidence despite the fact that the IAEA has concluded they were intended for conventional weapons, not centrifuges. The Iraqi government may have minimal credibility, but the sad fact is that the credibility of the U.S. and British governments is nil."

Nor was I the only one, of course. Among others who wrote columns exposing the hollow nature of Powell's speech (and the U.S. "evidence" in general) were Rahul Mahajan, Phyllis Bennis, Robert Fisk, Ali Abunimah, and Stephen Zunes.

Nor was the antiwar movement fooled by Bush and Powell's lies. The ANSWER Coalition, which had formed a year and a half earlier in response to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, threw itself into organizing demonstrations against the impending war, demonstrations which brought out hundreds of thousands across the United States and millions around the world. In its response to Powell's speech, it wrote "Powell has presented no threat, no plan, no capability. Is there justification for waging a first strike war of aggression, for bombarding the people of Iraq with massive firepower?" And unlike the Bush administration, which was busy downplaying the potential cost of the war both in dollars and manpower, as well as the duration of the war ("weeks, not months" was their prediction), the ANSWER Coalition correctly foresaw what was to come:

"Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis may be slaughtered. Tens of thousands of service members will be sent to risk their lives. The economic cost, estimated between $200 billion to $2 trillion will loot the U.S. treasury and mortgage future generations, depleting funds that could provide essential human needs such as education, healthcare, childcare and jobs."

The truth is this — any objective person who wasn't looking for a reason (or an excuse) for the U.S. to launch a war on Iraq could look at the "evidence" presented and understand that it didn't support the U.S. claims.

And there's another aspect to this as well, perhaps in some ways even more important. What if Iraq did have WMD, or WMD programs? Based on their statements, all of the major candidates would have supported the invasion, even "knowing what we know now" (which is, among other things, that thousands of Americans and a million Iraqis would die, all to destroy a functioning country and leave in its place what is approaching what the U.S. government calls a "failed state"). But whether Iraq had WMD or not, the invasion was still illegal under international law because it was not supported by a vote of the U.N. Security Council.

There was also no "imminent threat" to the United States (e.g., troops massed on the U.S. border) which would justify such an attack without a U.N. vote. Far from threatening to attack the U.S., Iraq had in fact been under constant U.S. attack since the end of the Gulf War, both militarily and economically. So the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a war crime, the "supreme crime" according to Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials. That's a simple statement of fact you won't hear from Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, or any of the other candidates, because they are quite prepared to commit such war crimes themselves in the future. Today, for example, almost without exception they support arming rebels in Syria attempting to overthrow the sovereign Syrian government, a clear violation of international law. Yet the only criticism we hear of Obama is that he didn't do it soon enough, or go far enough. To the U.S. ruling class, "international law" is something to be used to punish its enemies, but not something that applies to the U.S. itself.

So when you hear candidates claiming that "knowing then what we know now" they wouldn't have attacked Iraq, realize that they are either ignorant of the facts discussed above, or lying. Because the politicians at the time also "knew then what we know now" (at least about WMD in Iraq, although obviously not about the outcome of the war), and it didn't stop them from launching the war, which was never about Iraqi WMD, Al Qaeda, or any of the other explanations offered by the ruling class. Facts simply didn't play a role in the decision. Not those facts, anyway.

A good chronology of what the U.S. government was saying, what they actually knew, and when the public learned the truth can be found here

On April 10, a man was arrested by the FBI. He had been recorded discussing plans to travel with other armed people to burn down a religious institution and gun down anyone who tried to stop them. His plan was nothing short of "Holy War": "We will offer those lives as collateral to prove our commitment to our God" and "We shall be Warriors who will inflict horrible numbers of casualties" were two of the things he had written.

Two weeks after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to "interstate communication of threats," a charge that carries a sentence of between 0 and 5 years in prison, along with a fine. He was not charged with terrorism, or even with a hate crime. He wasn't even charged with "conspiracy" despite having talked to numerous individuals around the country to plan his attack. And despite his murderous threats and the fact the he is armed, he is currently out on bail, awaiting sentencing.

To this day, the name of this man - Robert Doggart - has not appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, nor been heard on CNN or any other national media, despite the fact that just last year he was a Congressional candidate who received six percent of the vote. Nor, in the literal handful of local news articles which have appeared about the case, has he been referred to as a terrorist.

Robert Doggart, you see, isn't a Muslim, but an Islamophobe, and the religious institution he planned to burn down was a mosque. The community he planned to attack and "utterly destroy" was called Islamberg, a New York community of the Muslims of America consisting primarily of African-American Muslims. It goes without saying that the coverage of this story, and the treatment Doggart would have received from the legal system, would have been completely different had he been a Muslim targeting a synogogue and a Jewish community.

The U.S. ruling class is heavily invested (psychologically and monetarily!) in spreading the false idea that the American people are under threat from Muslims, threats that require spending trillions of dollars and expending hundreds of thousands of lives (mostly Muslim lives) to counter. Acknowledging the very real threat to American lives - Muslim-American lives - from people right here in the United States, not mention the role that constant propaganda plays in influencing people like Robert Doggart, isn't in their interest, and once again the "free press" demonstrates its role in shoring up ruling class interests.

More details on the story can be found here.

Last week I watched Ken Burns' latest documentary about the great American author Mark Twain. It was a fascinating portrait of a fascinating man, although it gave short-shrift to his most radical views, which included being Vice-President of the Anti-Imperialist League which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. The film did mention Twain's stinging denunciation of King Leopold II, the man responsible for the death of 10 million Congolese in the late 1800's.

My interest in Twain awakened by the film, I picked up my copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, one of a literal handful of "classics" amidst my library of books on Marxism, socialism, and feminism. It was a book I had enjoyed enough when I read it years ago to save it from periodic purging, an enjoyment kept alive over the years by several viewings of the movie, which features the delightful Bing Crosby as the protagonist Hank Morgan.

Morgan is a man from the 19th century transported by a blow on the head back to 6th century England and King Arthur's Court. The book has Twain's trademark humor, but is also a serious indictment of organized religion, slavery, and especially of the "1%" of the day, the kings and nobles whose only credential for "leadership" was birth. But, with events in Gaza and Ferguson foremost in my mind, it was the following passage which really caught my attention. Hank has just met with a group of "freeman," the agricultural working class of the day, ostensibly free, but in reality contributing virtually all the fruits of their labor to their "lord", the owner of the land:

"Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood - a settlement of that hoary debt in proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would be remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."

The analogy of the French Revolution with either Gaza or Ferguson is far from perfect, of course. But in both of those, the media and Western politicians want us to focus on what they call a "Reign of Terror" (the missiles being shot at Israel in the case of Gaza, the alleged Molotov cocktails and looting in the case of Ferguson), while the real Reign of Terror is the rain of Israeli missiles and artillery on Gaza, and the rubber bullets, tear gas, and sound bombs raining down on the streets of Ferguson. And in both cases, the "horrors" of the "minor Terror" (the reaction of the oppressed) that the media and politicians dwell on are dwarfed by the "slow tortures" that have been visited on the oppressed people of Gaza and Ferguson (and so many other communities across the country) over a period of decades, if not centuries.

To close, a few more notes about Mark Twain which got left out of Burns' film. First, his comment on the French Revolution:

"When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin [a moderate]; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently — being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." [The Sanculottes - whose name says that they were not the moderate bourgeois revolutionaries who wore culottes (silk knee-breeches) - were the more radical, left-wing, working class arm of the revolution].

Next, this perhaps startling quote, definitely not heard in Burns' film:

"I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute."

And one final quote, this one from Connecticut Yankee:

"All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that."