UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30A, June 4, 2023

USA-NATO-UKRAINE-RUSSIA

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/06/omni-ukraine-war-anthology-30a-june-4.html

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OMNI ANTHOLOGIES ON SOVIET UNION/RUSSIA

 Each of these items will lead you to the other anthologies as of  May 2023. 
RUSSIA (Newsletter) ANTHOLOGY  #10, January 28, 2022https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/01/omni-russia-newsletter-10-january-28.html
SOVIET/RUSSOPHOBIA ANTHOLOGY #2, March 3, 2023
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/03/omni-sovietrussophobia-anthology-2.html
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #28, February 18, 2023
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/02/omni-us-nato-ukraine-russia-war.html
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #29
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/05/omni-us-nato-ukraine-russia-war.html
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30, June 4, 2023

Number of articles in first 18 Ukraine War Anthologies, 2014-2022:
306.  From #19-28 = 189.  Total in 28 Anthologies: 495.  The quantity is an important point.  Clearly, contrary to the presentation of the war by the US and NATO, there are two ways of understanding the war.  The Ukraine War includes a propaganda war.  Inside the US, the war is supported by mainstream journalism, especially television, which reports mainly official opinions and data.  A citizen, surrounded with mainly one view of good and evil, might be excused for thinking she or he knows the truth.  But in the case of wars, the truth is entangled with so many powerful controlling interests—the billions of dollars to the military-corporate complex (jobs!), patriotism–that an ordinary citizen must very actively seek opposing views to be informed.  It’s like our justice system: a prosecutor and a defense are considered necessary to ascertain the facts and the motives involved in a murder.   The truth of a war (mass murder) is often like investigating a thousand murders with only the prosecution or the defense present.  I have had to search for the opposition: 495 articles.  It’s miniscule compared to the one-sided pro-war onslaught, but at least nobody can say the war was an open and shut case.  I had to go to foreign sources and read books and plumb friends to discover if reality derived exclusively from the Pentagon and White House and Congress (the MICC).  For example, here are my sources in #29 (in addition to friends):  

Antiwar.com
Common Dreams
Consortium News
Counterpunch
Council on Foreign Relations  
Dissident Voice
Eurasia Review 
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
The First Casualty (book)
Foreign Affairs
Global Network against Nuclear Weapons and Power in Space
The Guardian (UK journal)
Independent Australia
Orinoco Tribune
Responsible Statecraft
United for Peace and Justice
University of Chicago

CONTENTS  UKRAINE WAR #30A
[Note 30A, my first division of an anthology into parts.  The large number of essays was exhausting, and forced me to divide into smaller, more manageable anthologies.]

3 essays trace aspects of the war from beginning to present.
Fergie Chambers,   “A Donbas diary: Looking back at the early stages of the conflict in Ukraine.”

Colin Todhunter.   “Sowing seeds of plunder.”

M. K. Bhadrakumar.  “U.S. hopes to snatch victory from jaws of defeat in Ukraine.”

CALLS FOR PEACE

International Summit for Peace in Ukraine – Vienna, Austria, June 10 -11. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.  “When Will US Join Global Call to End Ukraine War?    
John Mearsheimer.  “The West is playing Russian roulette.”
JEFFREY D. SACHS.  “The United States, not Russia, provoked this war.  We must stop the war and negotiate peace.”  
David Schwartzman.   “How China can prevent climate catastrophe?”
Orinoco Tribune.   Xi Jinping: all parties must “create the conditions” for a political solution.
Global Network.  Stop funding US proxy war against Russia.
STEVE BROWN.   “Why is Assange in Jail and Not Seymour Hersh?” 

TEXTS

Three pieces function as a wide-ranging introduction looking back and ahead–on the early stages of the war in Donbas, Ukraine; who’s the aggressor and what and how Ukraine is losing; and where is victory now?

Seven make the case for stopping the war, including some of our country’s finest writers, organizers, and activists: Jeffrey Sachs is world-renowned for his skills on all levels; Medea Benjamin also writes books and organizes for peace and justice, and is physically fearless against power; and John Mearsheimer, like them, is world renowned for exposing mendacious officials and telling the truth (like the other two he has previously appeared in these anthologies).   And four more.

The final reading, on the pipeline sabotage, functions as a coda.

Fergie Chambers,   “A Donbas diary: Looking back at the early stages of the conflict in Ukraine.” – OpEd”   Editor.  Mronline.org (4-7-23).

Originally published: Eurasia Review  on March 17, 2023  (more by Eurasia Review)  |  (Posted Apr 06, 2023)

Empire, Fascism, Movements, StrategyEurope, Russia, UkraineNewswireNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia-Ukraine War    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

. . .When my friend Pyotr arrives, we sit for beers and share our recent stories; it is late March 2022, just one month since Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began. I have been maneuvering a bureaucratic maze as I try to gain entry into the Russian Federation and the separatist republics of the Donbas; I am awaiting a call back from consulates in Romania and Moldova. Pyotr has just arrived from Kiev by train. A number of his comrades in communist, socialist, and union organizations around Ukraine have been detained.

Recently, the Kononovich brothers, notable Ukrainian communists, had been arrested and disappeared (following their imprisonment, they are now under house arrest). Over a few days of conversation, I learn more from Pyotr than I could ever put into writing; he says to me at one point: “if there is one thing to understand, it is that sovereignty in Ukraine and Eastern Europe has been stolen by the West not through any military invasion or political party, but through the infiltration of Ukrainian civil society by Western interests, NGOs, and right-wing nationalists. Everyone in Ukraine knows that Washington directs this process, whether they support it or not.”

After a week in Bucharest, I head for the consulate in neighboring Moldova, where I have just spent nearly a month reporting on the refugee influx from Ukraine. I have been advised that it is my only option for obtaining a visa to Russia. The divide between pro-Western and pro-Russian civilians is palpable where the Moldovan government is led by Maia Sandu, a graduate of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and former staffer for the World Bank.

Just as in Ukraine, there is a push in Moldova by pro-West factions to limit public use of the Russian language, despite Russian being the native tongue of hundreds of thousands of Moldovans. . . .   At last, the visa materializes. I leave Moldova and travel to Russia. . . .    MORE  https://mronline.org/2023/04/06/a-donbas-diary/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-donbas-diary&mc_cid=726928b808&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e

Colin Todhunter.   “Sowing seeds of plunder.”

Editor.  Mronline.org (5-17-23).   A Lose-Lose Situation for Ukraine

Originally published: Dissident Voice: a Radical Newsletter in the Struggle for Peace and Justice  on May 10, 2023 (more by Dissident Voice).  (Posted May 16, 2023).  Imperialism, Movements, Political Economy, WarEurope, UkraineNewswire

[Causes of the War Part I: Who Owns the Land]

It’s a lose-lose situation for Ukrainians. While they are dying to defend their land, financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.  So says Frédéric Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank.

Depending on which sources to believe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers (possibly more) have died during the conflict with Russia. That figure, of course, does not include civilian casualties.

[Causes of the War Part II:   Bipartisan political and mainstream media Russophobic narrative of Russia the aggressor in Ukraine is false.] 
The mainstream narrative in the West is that Russia grabbed Crimea and then invaded Ukraine. Russia is portrayed as the outright aggressor which wants to restore its control over large swathes of Europe.

[The real causes of Russia’s intervention.]
However, this narrative is false and has been debunked by various commentators who explain in some depth how Ukraine has been used and manipulated as part of a geopolitical campaign formulated by neoconservatives in Washington to destabilise Russia.

The expansion of NATO towards the east, the U.S.-backed coup in 2014—followed by eight years of the shelling of the ethnic Russian eastern parts of the country by the regime in Kyiv resulting in around 14,000 deaths—led up to the military intervention by Russia, which regards the expansionism and militarism as an existential threat.

It is not the purpose of this article to explore these issues. Much has already been written on this elsewhere. [Every number of these 30 anthologies has included at least one article or book that asserts this alternative narrative.  The narrative matters, for ]. . . .   billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the NATO countries and hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have died.  They died in the belief that they were protecting their nation—their land. A land that is among the most fertile in the world.

[Causes of the War Part I continued: Who Owns the Land]
MORE click on essay’s title
Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture. You can read his new e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order for free here.
Dissident Voice, located in Santa Rosa, CA,  is an internet newsletter dedicated to challenging the distortions and lies of the corporate press and the privileged classes it serves. The goal of Dissident Voice is to provide hard hitting, thought provoking and even entertaining news and commentaries on politics and culture that can serve as ammunition in struggles for peace and social justice.  DV Senior Editor Angie Tibbs.   gro.eciovtnedissid.wen@eigna  The DV website (www.dissidentvoice.org).

 “U.S. hopes to snatch victory from jaws of defeat in Ukraine.”
M. K. Bhadrakumar.  mronline.org (6-26-23). 

The G7 Leaders’ 2700-word statement on Ukraine, issued in Hiroshima after their summit meeting glossed over the burning question today–the so-called counter-offensive against the Russian forces.

By M. K. Bhadrakumar (Posted May 25, 2023)

Originally published on May 21, 2023.
Imperialism, WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireGroup of Seven largest rich countries (G7), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia-Ukraine War

The G7 Leaders’ 2700-word statement on Ukraine, issued in Hiroshima after their summit meeting glossed over the burning question today–the so-called counter-offensive against the Russian forces.

It is a deafening silence, since rumours are swirling about the disappearance of the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces. Significantly, President Vladimir Zelensky himself is making himself scarce from Kiev touring world capitals–Helsinki, Hague, Rome, Vatican, Berlin, Paris, London and Jeddah and Hiroshima. It does seem that something is rotten in the state of  Denmark.

As the G7 summit ended, the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on Saturday that the Russian operation to capture the strategic communication hub of Bakhmut in Donbass region of eastern Ukraine lasting 224 days, has been brought to a successful completion, overcoming the resistance by more than 80,000 Ukrainian troops.

It is a painful moment for Zelensky, who had boasted before U.S. lawmakers in Capitol Hill last December that “just like the Battle of Saratoga (in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War), the fight for Bakhmut will change the trajectory of our war for independence and for freedom.”

Meanwhile, to distract attention, there is talk now about a subtle shift in the U.S. policy regarding supply of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine in an indeterminate future. . . .,MORE click on title

International Summit for Peace in Ukraine – Vienna, Austria, June 10 -11, 2023

United for Peace and Justice (May 2023).
The International Peace Bureau, CODEPINK, Assembly of the World Social Forum, Transform Europe, Europe for Peace, International Fellowship of Reconciliation Italy, Peace in Ukraine, Campaign for Peace Disarmament and Common Security, and Prague Spring 2 will convene an International Summit for Peace in Ukraine June 10 – 11 in Vienna, Austria, with an opportunity to participate virtually. The conference will discuss the controversial questions related to the Russian-Ukrainian war and listen to civil society representatives from Russia, Ukraine, and NATO countries. The conference will focus not only on critique and analysis, but also on creative solutions and ways to end the war and prepare negotiations. This is not only the task of states and diplomats but more and more also of global civil society. Find out more and register.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.  “When Will US Join Global Call to End Ukraine War?     31/05/2023 Stop the War Coalition and CND march through London for peace in Ukraine. Photo credit: Stop the War Coalition

When Japan invited the leaders of Brazil, India and Indonesia to attend the G7 summit in Hiroshima, there were glimmers of hope that it might be a forum for these rising economic powers from the Global South to discuss their advocacy for peace in Ukraine with the wealthy Western G7 countries that are militarily allied with Ukraine and have so far remained deaf to pleas for peace.

But it was not to be. Instead, the Global South leaders were forced to sit and listen as their hosts announced their latest plans to tighten sanctions against Russia and further escalate the war by sending U.S.-built F-16 warplanes to Ukraine.

The G7 summit stands in stark contrast to efforts of leaders from around the world who are trying to end the conflict. In the past, the leaders of Turkey, Israel and Italy have stepped up to try to mediate. Their efforts were bearing fruit back in April 2022, but were blocked by the West, particularly the U.S. and U.K., which did not want Ukraine to make an independent peace agreement with Russia.

Now that the war has dragged on for over a year with no end in sight, other leaders have stepped forward to try to push both sides to the negotiating table. In an intriguing new development, Denmark, a NATO country, has stepped forward to offer to host peace talks. On May 22, just days after the G-7 meeting, Danish Foreign Minister Lokke Rasmussen said that his country would be ready to host a peace summit in July if Russia and Ukraine agreed to talk.

“We need to put some effort into creating a global commitment to organize such a meeting,” said Rasmussen, mentioning that this would require getting support from China, Brazil, India and other nations that have expressed interest in mediating peace talks. Having an EU and NATO member promoting negotiations may well reflect a shift in how Europeans view the path forward in Ukraine.   More https://countercurrents.org/2023/05/when-will-us-join-global-call-to-end-ukraine-war/

The U.S. rejection or dismissal of peace initiatives illustrates the disconnect between two diametrically opposed approaches to resolving international disputes: diplomacy vs. war. It also illustrates the disconnect between rising public sentiment against the war and the determination of U.S. policymakers to prolong it, including most Democrats and Republicans.

A growing grassroots movement in the U.S. is working to change that:

§  In May, foreign policy experts and grassroots activists put out paid advertisements in The New York Times and The Hill to urge the U.S. government to be a force for peace. The Hill ad was endorsed by 100 organizations around the country, and community leaders organized in dozens of congressional districts to deliver the ad to their representatives.

§  Faith-based leaders, over 1,000 of whom signed a letter to President Biden in December calling for a Christmas Truce, are showing their support for the Vatican’s peace initiative.

§  The U.S. Conference of Mayors, an organization that represents about 1,400 cities throughout the country, unanimously adopted a resolution calling on the President and Congress to “maximize diplomatic efforts to end the war as soon as possible by working with Ukraine and Russia to reach an immediate ceasefire and negotiate with mutual concessions in conformity with the United Nations Charter, knowing that the risks of wider war grow the longer the war continues.”

§  Key U.S. environmental leaders have recognized how disastrous this war is for the environment, including the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear war or an explosion in a nuclear power plant, and have sent a letter to President Biden and Congress urging a negotiated settlement.

§  On June 10-11, U.S. activists will join peacemakers from all over the world in Vienna, Austria, for an International Summit for Peace in Ukraine.

§  Some of the contenders running for president, on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, including Robert F. Kennedy and Donald Trump.

The initial decision of the United States and NATO member countries to try to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion had broad public support. However, blocking promising peace negotiations and deliberately choosing to prolong the war as a chance to “press” and “weaken” Russia changed the nature of the war and the U.S. role in it, making Western leaders active parties to a war in which they will not even put their own forces on the line.

Must our leaders wait until a murderous war of attrition has killed an entire generation of Ukrainians, and left Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position than it was in April 2022, before they respond to the international call for a return to the negotiating table?

Or must our leaders take us to the brink of World War III, with all our lives on the line in an all-out nuclear war, before they will permit a ceasefire and a negotiated peace?

Rather than sleepwalking into World War III or silently watching this senseless loss of lives, we are building a global grassroots movement to support initiatives by leaders from around the world that will help to quickly end this war and usher in a stable and lasting peace. Join us.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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https://countercurrents.org/2023/05/when-will-us-join-global-call-to-end-ukraine-war/

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Mearsheimer: NATO success brings us closer to Nuclear War

Dear friends,

Take a listen to this short (or longer) video clip from the distinguised foreign policy expert Professor Mearsheimer. He explains how we (US-NATO) are backing Russia into a corner where they become more & more likely to use nuclear weapons. He highlights the perverse paradox that the more NATO succeeds in its objective of “defeating Russia”, the more likely nuclear war becomes.

“I find it quite remarkable at this point in time, how few people seem to understand”  the danger that this war may turn into a thermonuclear war and we will all be dead

There’ll be no more London, there’ll be no more Europe…”

Mearsheimer

Short Video clip:

https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1634126014589616130?t=rlpQgBeASwrJPmdYOv6eqQ&s=19

Longer interview video, I sent previously:

 JEFFREY D. SACHS.  “The United States, not Russia, provoked this war.  We must stop the war and negotiate peace. “   Common Dreams.  May 23, 2023
George Orwell wrote in 1984 that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”  

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy … but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.” MORE   https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/wgtgma5kj69pbpndjr4wf6aayhrszm

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.  Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely. 
JEFFREY D. SACHS
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and The Age of Sustainable Development (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Ceasefire, Stop the Killing and Destruction.  And Stop Wars to Stop Warming.

“How China can prevent climate catastrophe? Moving humanity toward global ecological civilization.”

David Schwartzman.  Mronline.org (4-12-23). 

As the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report tells us, there is still a chance to keep warming at no more than the 1.5°C target, but tipping points to climate catastrophes much worse than we are witnessing now will kick in if this target is breached. It is now crystal clear that ongoing wars, in particular the Ukraine war, create huge obstacles to the global cooperation necessary for any chance of meeting the 1.5°C warming target. Following the lead of China’s peace plan, we should support the call for an immediate ceasefire in the Ukraine war, and for all parties involved to negotiate.

DIPLOMACY NOT WAR
“China’s president on Ukraine conflict: all sides involved should assume responsibility.”  Editor. Mronline.org (4-11-23). 

The president of China, Xi Jinping, commented to his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that all parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine “must assume their responsibilities” and “create the conditions” for a political solution and avoid escalation.

Originally published: Orinoco Tribune  on April 8, 2023 by Últimas Noticias (more by Orinoco Tribune)  |  (Posted Apr 10, 2023)

WarAsia, China, Europe, France, Russia, UkraineNewswireRussia-Ukraine War

The president of China, Xi Jinping, commented to his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that all parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine “must assume their responsibilities” and “create the conditions” for a political solution and avoid escalation.  President Xi made this remark after Macron told the Chinese leader that he “knows” that he has the Chinese president’s support “to make Russia come to its senses and bring all parties to the negotiating table.”   The dialogue took place on Thursday April 6, during the French president’s visit to China.  During the meeting, Xi told Macron that China supports peace, and will continue to promote dialogue and a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis.   MORE click on title

Stop funding US proxy war against Russia: Protest Apr 15 Topsham

STEVE BROWN.   “Why is Assange in Jail and Not Seymour Hersh?”  Counterpunch (February 27, 2023).  

On February 7, Seymour Hersh – arguably the most credible investigative journalist of our era – published a bombshell exposé revealing that the United States was guilty of blowing up the Nord Stream II undersea pipeline that was supposed to deliver natural gas from Russia to the Federal Republic of Germany.

Hersh’s revelations were based entirely on classified information leaked to him by a member of the government with first-hand knowledge of the planning and implementation of the attack on the pipeline – a member of the government who clearly broke the law by violating his fiduciary duty not to reveal classified information to an unauthorized source.

Like Chelsea Manning, who had revealed classified information to Julian Assange, for which she was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison, Hersh’s source, if identified, would surely also be convicted and sentenced to similar long-term imprisonment.

But Hersh’s source has not been identified. However – Hersh himself has. According to the same logic under which Assange was indicted for publishing classified information, and now faces up to 175 years in prison, Hersh, too, should be indicted and face comparable long-term imprisonment.

So why is Sy Hersh still free?

Hersh broke the same laws that the U.S. government accuses Julian Assange of breaking. But unlike Assange, a foreigner whom the U.S. has unsuccessfully been trying to extradite from England for years, Hersh is an American citizen living right here in the United States – easy to find, cuff, indict, convict and throw in prison for the rest of his life.

So why is Sy Hersh still free?

Surely the classified information that Hersh has revealed is even more dangerous to the safety of the U.S. than what Assange revealed. Hersh showed that the U.S. had committed an unprovoked act of war against Russia. This gives Russia an absolute legal right to retaliate under Chapter VII, Article 51, of the United Nations Charter, which cites self-defense as an exception to the prohibition against the use of force.

Since Russia happens to be a nuclear power, its potential retaliation could trigger World War III and wipe out not just the U.S. but the entire human race. Therefore, in any comparison of who has placed the U.S. in greater danger – Julian Assange is a piker compared to Sy Hersh.

So why is Sy Hersh still free?

The answer is this. Although President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland would love to throw Sy Hersh into a maximum security prison for the rest of his life, as punishment for revealing their complicity in blowing up the Nord Stream II pipelines – they don’t dare to. If they did, it would be tantamount to admitting that … what Hersh published is true.

Which would be embarrassing, to say the least, because Biden and Company have spent every day since February 7 denying that Hersh’s revelations are true. In other words, they claim he made it all up – which means, according to them, that he did not publish classified information. Therefore he cannot be guilty of any crime.

That’s the frustrating double bind in which Biden now finds himself. It must drive him crazy. Because the day he sends federal agents to put the cuffs on Sy Hersh, that is the day he and Blinken and Nuland will have to admit that they lied, that Hersh’s exposé is true, and that they did indeed order the destruction of the Nord stream pipelines.

So of course that day will never come, and Sy Hersh will remain a free man. Which is why, at least this one time, I am glad that our leaders are liars.

[Forwarded to me by Sonny San Juan, Jr.]   https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/27/why-is-assange-in-jail-and-not-seymour-hersh/

END UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30A