U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Rafael DeGuzman-Paniagua, 305th Aerial Port Squadron special handling representative, secures a pallet of equipment bound for Ukraine from Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey on March 24 / credit: Air Force Senior Airman Joseph Morales / U.S. Department of Defense
Editor’s Note: This report was originally published by Antiwar.com.
CBS News retracted a documentary it briefly released on August 7 after pressure from the Ukrainian government. The original documentary (watch it here) CBS put out examined the flow of military aid to Ukraine and quoted someone familiar with the process who said in April that only 30 percent of the arms were making it to the frontline.
We removed a tweet promoting our recent doc, "Arming Ukraine," which quoted the founder of the nonprofit Blue-Yellow, Jonas Ohman's assessment in late April that only around 30% of aid was reaching the front lines in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/EgA96BrD9O
“All of this stuff goes across the border, and then something happens, kind of like 30 percent of it reaches its final destination,” said Jonas Ohman, the founder of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based organization that CBS said has been meeting with and supplying frontline units with aid in Ukraine since the start of the war in the Donbas in 2014. “30-40 percent, that’s my estimation,” Ohman said.
After the documentary sparked outrage from the Ukrainian government, it was removed from the internet by CBS. In an editor’s note, CBS said it changed the article that was published with the documentary and that the documentary itself was being “updated.”
The editor’s note also insisted that Ohman has said the delivery of weapons in Ukraine has “significantly improved” since he filmed with CBS back in April, although he didn’t offer a new estimate on the percentage of arms being delivered.
The editor’s note also said that the Ukrainian government noted U.S. defense attaché Brig. Gen. Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kyiv in August for “arms control and monitoring.” Defense attachés are military officers stationed at U.S. embassies that represent the Pentagon’s interests in the country. Previously, it was unclear if there was any sort of military presence at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv after it reopened in May.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the retraction by CBS was not enough and called for an investigation into the documentary. “Welcome first step, but it is not enough … There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why,” he wrote on Twitter.
In the documentary, Ohman described the corruption and bureaucracy that he has to work around to deliver aid to Ukraine. “There are like power lords, oligarchs, political players,” he said. “The system itself, it’s like, ‘We are the armed forces of Ukraine. If security forces want it, well, the Americans gave it to us.’ It’s kind of like power games all day long, and so eventually people need the stuff, and they go to us.”
Other reporting has shown that there is virtually no oversight for the billions of dollars in weapons that the United States and its allies are pouring into Ukraine. CNN reported in April that the United States has “almost zero” ability to track the weapons it is sending once they enter Ukraine. One source briefed on U.S. intelligence described it as dropping the arms into a “big black hole.”
Members of the Bronx Green Party joined the Bronx Anti-War Coalition on March 20 to protest against U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and Adriano Espaillat hosting a “student services fair” that prominently featured U.S. military service branches at the Renaissance High School for Musical Theater and the Arts in the Bronx, NY / credit: Bronx Green Party / Twitter
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Workers World.
Dozens of Bronx public school parents, teachers, students and community activists gathered on March 20, the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, to oppose a military recruitment fair, hosted by U.S. House Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Adriano Espaillat, at Renaissance High School in the Bronx. The grassroots Bronx Anti-War Coalition organized the demonstration.
The protesters aimed to educate students and parents about the violence and dangers that Black, Brown and Indigenous youth face entering the military. “A third of women in the military experience sexual harassment and assault,” said Richie Merino, a Bronx public school teacher and community organizer. “The rates are even higher for women of color. We demand justice for the families of Vanessa Guillén and Ana Fernanda Basaldua Ruiz,” two 20-year-old Latinas who were sexually assaulted and killed after speaking up at Fort Hood U.S. Army base in Texas.
Outside the AOC-endorsed military recruitment fair, Mohammed Latifu of the Bronx spoke to a group of community members. The group had gathered in memory of Latifu’s 21-year-old brother, Abdul Latifu, who was murdered on Jan. 10 at Fort Rucker, a U.S. Army base in Alabama. Abdul had been in the Army for only five months when he was bludgeoned to death with a shovel by another soldier.
Through tears, Mohammed shared how he and his family have been kept in the dark by military investigators and still await answers. He said their parents can’t sleep at night due to the senseless murder of their son Abdul.
“We really want to hear what happened,” Latifu said. “What took place? What transpired? Until today, no answers. No phone calls. We still don’t have any updates. Anybody who was thinking about enlisting their kid in the military, I think you better think again. Don’t do it. I wouldn’t dare ask my kid’s friends or anybody to join the military.”
Outside the @aoc sponsored U.S. military recruitment event at low-income public high school in the Bronx, we invited Mohammed Latifu to speak, who is seeking justice for his 21yo brother, Abdul Latifu, who was murdered in Jan at Fort Rucker, a US Army base in AL #JusticeForLatifupic.twitter.com/29xA7VZaTY
— U.S./NATO = State Sponsors of Terrorism (@bxcommie) March 21, 2023
‘They’re Killing Their Own’
“They say they ‘protect’ the country,” Latifu continued. “They’re killing their own. They’re molesting these women that go over there. These kids, young men and women that go over there, they’re sexually harassed, and then they kill them and try to cover it up.
“They’ll tell you, ‘sorry for what happened, our condolences.’ No, keep your condolences! We want answers. What we really want is justice — justice for everybody who has had to endure this and their families,” Latifu concluded.
Outside the event, representatives from IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization)/Pastors for Peace informed students about alternative ways to “travel and see the world” without the military. They spoke about how to apply to the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Cuba and receive a free medical degree. Chants of “Cuba Sí, Bloqueo No!” broke out in the crowd.
Claude Copeland Jr., a Bronx teacher and member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, shared his experiences as a victim of the poverty draft. He spoke about how recruiters pitched the military as the only way to advance economically and secure safe, independent housing. They never told him about alternatives or other options. If you have no resources, “you have to sign your life away,” he said.
Community members criticized Ocasio-Cortez for abandoning her antiwar campaign promises to oppose predatory recruitment tactics by U.S. military recruiters, who target young, low-income Black and Latinx children.
“Only three years ago,” Merino said, “AOC introduced an amendment to prohibit military recruiters from targeting kids as young as 12 through online gaming. She understands the U.S. military preys on vulnerable, impressionable kids. For AOC to now use her celebrity status to headline a high school military recruitment event, in the Bronx, signals that she has turned her back on the Black, Brown and migrant working-class community that elected her into office.”
“We don’t want our children to train to kill other poor, Black and Brown people like themselves. The best thing we can do now is to grow the movement to completely remove police and military recruiters from our schools,” Merino concluded.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog (right) with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jerusalem, on January 30 / credit: Olivier Fitoussi / JINI via Xinhua
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.
Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, on Monday, January 30, filed an objection to the U.S. move to build its new embassy in Jerusalem on land stolen by Israel from its original Palestinian owners. It called for the immediate cancellation of the plan.
The objection was filed by Adalah to the Jerusalem District Planning Committee, U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas R. Nides, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on behalf of 12 descendants of the original owners, four of them U.S. citizens.
Blinken was in Israel on Monday to meet Israeli President Issac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other state officials.
In a press release on Monday, Adalah called the move to build a U.S. diplomatic compound in Jerusalem a violation of international law related to the respect of private property.
Israel confiscated the land from its original Palestinian owners under the Absentees’ Property Law, passed in 1950. Israeli state archive records, published by Adalah in July 2022, make Palestinian ownership clear. The documents reveal that the land was temporarily leased to British mandate authorities by its Palestinian owners well before the creation of Israel in 1948.
Adalah also called Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law “one of the most arbitrary, sweeping, discriminatory, and draconian laws enacted in the state of Israel.” It further said that the “law was drafted with racist motives and its sole purpose was to expropriate the assets of Palestinians.”
Israel had forced more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages at the time of its creation in 1948, during the Nakba, and confiscated much of their land using the 1950 law. It is also doing the same in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in its attempt to Judaize them.
Adalah underlined that if the United States proceeds with the plan, “it will be a full-throated endorsement of Israel’s illegal confiscation of private Palestinian property and the state department will become an active participant in violating the private property rights of its own citizens.”
The U.S. embassy is currently located in Tel Aviv, which was recognized by the U.S. as the capital of Israel until 2018. Under the Donald Trump presidency, the U.S. government changed this long-standing policy and officially designated Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Plans to move the embassy to Jerusalem were put in place then, and final proposals for the same were submitted in February 2021 under Joe Biden’s administration. Israel has already leased the land to the U.S. State Department.
The United States remains the only major country to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. The UN considers the city disputed territory as Palestinians also claim the city as their own.
I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London on August 11 with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. On August 12, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege.
The barrister, Clair Dobbin, is in the pay of the regime in Washington, first Trump’s then Biden’s. She is United States’ hired gun, or “silk,” as she would prefer. Her target is Julian Assange, who has committed no crime and has performed an historic public service by exposing the criminal actions and secrets on which governments, especially those claiming to be democracies, base their authority.
For those who may have forgotten, WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments, such as Venezuela’s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the CIA’s Vault 7 campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your TV set, into a spy in your midst.
WikiLeaks released almost a million documents from Russia which allowed Russian citizens to stand up for their rights. It revealed the Australian government had colluded with the United States against its own citizen, Assange. It named those Australian politicians who have “informed” for the United States It made the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the rise of jihadism in American-armed states in the Gulf.
There is more: WikiLeaks disclosed the U.S. campaign to suppress wages in sweatshop countries like Haiti, India’s campaign of torture in Kashmir, the British government’s secret agreement to shield “U.S. interests” in its official Iraq inquiry and the British Foreign Office’s plan to create a fake “marine protection zone” in the Indian Ocean to cheat the Chagos islanders out of their right of return.
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange on August 18, 2014 / credit: David G Silvers/Consulate of Ecuador
In other words, WikiLeaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the preordained, repetitive spin that fills newspapers and television screens. This is real journalism; and for the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in one form of incarceration or another, including Belmarsh prison, a horrific place.
Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent, and accountable.
On August 11, the United States sought the approval of Britain’s High Court to extend the terms of its appeal against a decision by a district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January to bar Assange’s extradition. Baraitser accepted the deeply disturbing evidence of a number of experts that Assange would be at great risk if he were incarcerated in the United States’ infamous prison system.
Professor Michael Kopelman, a world authority on neuropsychiatry, had said Assange would find a way to take his own life—the direct result of what Professor Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, described as the craven “mobbing” of Assange by governments—and their media echoes.
Those of us who were in the Old Bailey last September to hear Kopelman’s evidence were shocked and moved. I sat with Julian’s father, John Shipton, whose head was in his hands. The court was also told about the discovery of a razor blade in Julian’s Belmarsh cell and that he had made desperate calls to the Samaritans and written notes and much else that filled us with more than sadness.
Watching the lead barrister acting for Washington, James Lewis—a man from a military background who deploys a cringingly theatrical “aha!” formula with defense witnesses—reduce these facts to “malingering” and smearing witnesses, especially Kopelman, we were heartened by Kopelman’s revealing response that Lewis’s abuse was “a bit rich” as Lewis himself had sought to hire Kopelman’s expertise in another case.
Lewis’s sidekick is Clair Dobbin, and August 11 was her day. Completing the smearing of Professor Kopelman was down to her. An American with some authority sat behind her in court.
Dobbin said Kopelman had “misled” Judge Baraitser in September because he had not disclosed that Julian Assange and Stella Moris were partners, and their two young children, Gabriel and Max, were conceived during the period Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
The implication was that this somehow lessened Kopelman’s medical diagnosis: that Julian, locked up in solitary in Belmarsh prison and facing extradition to the United States on bogus “espionage” charges, had suffered severe psychotic depression and had planned, if he had not already attempted, to take his own life.
For her part, Judge Baraitser saw no contradiction. The full nature of the relationship between Stella and Julian had been explained to her in March 2020, and Professor Kopelman had made full reference to it in his report in August 2020. So the judge and the court knew all about it before the main extradition hearing last September. In her judgment in January, Baraitser said this:
“[Professor Kopelman] assessed Mr. Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr. Assange’s background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician and he was well aware of the possibility of exaggeration and malingering. I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.”
She added that she had “not been misled” by the exclusion in Kopelman’s first report of the Stella-Julian relationship and that she understood that Kopelman was protecting the privacy of Stella and her two young children.
In fact, as I know well, the family’s safety was under constant threat to the point when an embassy security guard confessed he had been told to steal one of the baby’s nappies so that a CIA-contracted company could analyze its DNA. There has been a stream of unpublicized threats against Stella and her children.
For the United States and its legal hirelings in London, damaging the credibility of a renowned expert by suggesting he withheld this information was a way, they no doubt reckoned, to rescue their crumbling case against Assange. In June, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin reported that a key prosecution witness against Assange has admitted fabricating his evidence. The one “hacking” charge the Americans hoped to bring against Assange if they could get their hands on him depended on this source and witness, Sigurdur Thordarson, an FBI informant.
Thordarson had worked as a volunteer for WikiLeaks in Iceland between 2010 and 2011. In 2011, as several criminal charges were brought against him, he contacted the FBI and offered to become an informant in return for immunity from all prosecution. It emerged that he was a convicted fraudster who embezzled $55,000 from WikiLeaks, and served two years in prison. In 2015, he was sentenced to three years for sex offenses against teenage boys. The Washington Post described Thordarson’s credibility as the “core” of the case against Assange.
On August 11, Lord Chief Justice Holroyde made no mention of this witness. His concern was that it was “arguable” that Judge Baraitser had attached too much weight to the evidence of Professor Kopelman, a man revered in his field. He said it was “very unusual” for an appeal court to have to reconsider evidence from an expert accepted by a lower court, but he agreed with Ms. Dobbin it was “misleading” even though he accepted Kopelman’s “understandable human response” to protect the privacy of Stella and the children.
If you can unravel the arcane logic of this, you have a better grasp than I who have sat through this case from the beginning. It is clear Kopelman misled nobody. Judge Baraitser—whose hostility to Assange personally was a presence in her court—said that she was not misled; it was not an issue; it did not matter. So why had Lord Chief Justice Holroyde spun the language with its weasel legalese and sent Julian back to his cell and its nightmares? There, he now waits for the High Court’s final decision in October—for Julian Assange, a life or death decision.
And why did Holroyde send Stella from the court trembling with anguish? Why is this case “unusual”? Why did he throw the gang of prosecutor-thugs at the Department of Justice in Washington -—who got their big chance under Trump, having been rejected by Obama—a life raft as their rotting, corrupt case against a principled journalist sunk as surely as Titanic?
This does not necessarily mean that in October the full bench of the High Court will order Julian to be extradited. In the upper reaches of the masonry that is the British judiciary there are, I understand, still those who believe in real law and real justice from which the term “British justice” takes its sanctified reputation in the land of the Magna Carta. It now rests on their ermined shoulders whether that history lives on or dies.
I sat with Stella in the court’s colonnade while she drafted words to say to the crowd of media and well-wishers outside in the sunshine. Clip-clopping along came Clair Dobbin, spruced, ponytail swinging, bearing her carton of files: a figure of certainty: she who said Julian Assange was “not so ill” that he would consider suicide. How does she know?
Has Ms. Dobbin worked her way through the medieval maze at Belmarsh to sit with Julian in his yellow arm band, as Professors Koppelman and Melzer have done, and Stella has done, and I have done? Never mind. The Americans have now “promised” not to put him in a hellhole, just as they “promised” not to torture Chelsea Manning, just as they promised.
And has she read the WikiLeaks’ leak of a Pentagon document dated March 15, 2009? This foretold the current war on journalism. U.S. intelligence, it said, intended to destroy WikiLeaks’ and Julian Assange’s “center of gravity” with threats and “criminal prosecution.” Read all 32 pages and you are left in no doubt that silencing and criminalizing independent journalism was the aim, smear the method.
I tried to catch Ms. Dobbin’s gaze, but she was on her way: Job done.
Outside, Stella struggled to contain her emotion. This is one brave woman, as indeed her man is an exemplar of courage. “What has not been discussed today,” said Stella, “is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and for Julian’s life. The constant threats and intimidation we endured for years, which has been terrorizing us and has been terrorizing Julian for 10 years. We have a right to live, we have a right to exist and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.”
