Israel doubles down on genocide and media manipulation

 

• The UK Employment Appeal Tribunal has upheld a landmark ruling that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism and constitutes a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010. The judgment rejects the University of Bristol’s attempt to overturn the central findings in favour of its former professor, David Miller. The ruling reinforces a distinction which pro-Palestine campaigners, Jewish anti-Zionists and civil liberties advocates have defended for years: opposition to Zionism as a political ideology is not inherently the same as hostility towards Jewish people. 

• RT: A deal between Iran and Oman on reopening commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is close to being finalized, according to the Foreign Ministry in Tehran. Around one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil has historically passed through the strategic waterway. The proposed agreement would establish a new corridor through the strait, with Iran expected to gain greater control over vessels entering the Persian Gulf while Oman would oversee outbound traffic, according to media reports. [If this deal works out, look for Trump to take credit for it.]

• Simplicius: It is always interesting to read Robert Kagan’s words, because they represent a glimpse into the heart of the neocon ideological crucible and how it has evolved and pivoted in the years following the disastrous global refutation of PNAC’s core ideological thesis. Responsible Statecraft has published a new in-depth interview with Kagan [Victoria Nuland's husband] wherein he gives us some provocative statements. Kagan’s role appears to be to cement the US as forever politically entwined with the region for the purpose of securing Israel’s indefinite hegemony over it. In reality, the obvious and fully justified plan of action would be to extricate the US from the Middle East entirely, and leave Israel to its own devices, as the US has nothing to gain and everything to lose in being Israel’s whipping boy and “protector” in a region hostile to the artificially implanted political entity. 

• A New York Times investigation has concluded that the US used a 2,000-pound bomb to strike a family home on Iran’s Qeshm Island during overnight attacks last week, killing a husband, wife and their two-year-old son. Drawing on satellite imagery, videos, photographs and munition fragments, the newspaper determined that the weapon used was a US-made Mark-84 bomb fitted with a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit.
• Sovereignista: Google has signed a six-month, $45 million contract with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office to run propaganda campaigns denying famine in Gaza and promoting Tel Aviv’s war narrative. The deal, revealed in government disclosures, places Google and its YouTube platform as “key entities” in Netanyahu’s messaging drive, managed through Israel’s state advertising bureau Lapam. Ads paid for under the contract insist “there is food in Gaza” despite the UN declaring famine and warning of mass starvation, with at least 367 Palestinians - 131 of them children - already dead from hunger and malnutrition. Alongside YouTube, Israel is spending millions more on platforms like X and Outbrain/Teads, funding videos that accuse the UN of “sabotage,” discredit the Hind Rajab Foundation, and push debunked claims against Hamas. The campaigns were launched in June not only to counter reports of famine but also to justify Israel’s bombing of Iran during Operation Rising Lion, which killed more than 400 civilians. 

• There is a move just starting in Africa, spurred from the success of Burkina Faso kicking the French out and taking back their gold manufacturing. Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has passed legislation that the raw rare earth and critical mineral material mined stock cannot be exported, but it must be processed inside the countries and completed products must be exported.
• Washington Post: Trump and Hegseth clashed over munition shortages affecting Iran war strategy. The president demanded answers from the defense secretary on why he had apparently been misled on extreme munitions shortages that now threaten to limit military options with Iran, two people told newspaper. [Could it be that Trump is using Hegseth as the fall guy to blame?]

• The Pentagon’s policy chief is drafting a new US nuclear strategy that would place greater emphasis on the potential use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a regional conflict with China or Russia. The classified strategy informs nuclear options for the commander in chief during crises.  At the same time European factories, NATO software, and defense companies are now built into Kiev’s war effort.

• Washington Post: A federal judge allowed the Trump administration to terminate temporary protected status for 350,000 Haitians, meaning they are likely to lose their jobs and be at risk of deportation.
• Tara Reade: The US is handing its war machine to Israel. A new Pentagon-IDF tie-up deepens military integration while ordinary US citizens get more war, more debt, and less to hope at home. 

• Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who built a surging progressive movement in Michigan, overcame a more than 8-to-1 spending disadvantage (largely due to $30 million of AIPAC funding his opponent) and opposition from the Democratic establishment to win Tuesday’s nationally watched Senate primary, the AP reported. A Rhodes scholar and podcaster with sharp critiques of modern politics, El-Sayed sold a populist message to swing-state voters and beat establishment candidate Rep. Haley Stevens (D). El-Sayed’s win both accelerates an ideological fight within his party and launches a hypercompetitive general election contest with national implications. He opposes funding Israel and supports Medicare for All among other progressive positions. If elected in November, El-Sayed will be the country’s first Muslim senator.
• MSN: Families of the sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are sounding the alarm that their loved ones are so exhausted they fear it could lead to deadly mistakes, as the carrier enters its ninth month at sea and its fifth consecutive month of combat operations against Iran. The crew of the Lincoln has had only two days off the aircraft carrier since it left its home port in San Diego in November. Currently most family members said they are able to message with their service member on a daily basis, but that wasn’t always the case. Many described their kids or spouses telling them about non-operational toilets, moldy showers, laundry facilities that were broken for weeks, and extended periods with no hot water for showering. The families have described food shortages and standing in line for the ship’s store for an hour or more, and that the store often lacks basic supplies like toothpaste, soap and deodorant. Families said there have been times during the deployment when the Lincoln was rationing meal portions.

• Trump's administration has detained dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty US troops as it rolls back immigration protections for military families to pursue its mass deportation agenda, an AP investigation found. More than 50 parents and spouses of active-duty service members have been detained since Trump took office for a second term, and at least six have been deported. At least eight immediate family members of US service members remain in federal immigration custody.
• In a post on X, Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, commented on the newly announced defense deal between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan, warning that Saudi must realize that a paper agreement with Turkey and Pakistan will not bring it security, just as years of one-sided reliance on the US failed to do so. Rezaei further urged Riyadh to reform its policies rather than begging for security from external powers. 

• Five Republican-led states are now jockeying to host nuclear technology hubs - and possibly spent nuclear fuel - in a show of heightened political interest in breaking through chronic barriers to new US reactors. Oklahoma, Louisiana, Idaho, Tennessee and Utah are in the running to host Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses - Energy Department-backed facilities that would support the full nuclear fuel cycle, from enriching uranium and fabricating fuel to reprocessing and disposing of waste.

• Colombia President Petro: "Foreigners used foreign money to commit the electoral fraud imposing a president who did not win the election... and so we are a colony, starting Friday at 3:00 in the afternoon. A colony." 

Hiroshima Day vigil at BIW

Fourteen of us peaceniks arrived from around Maine on August 6 at Bath Iron Works to remember Hiroshima Day when the US dopped an atomic bomb on that city followed by another one on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. 

What we saw when we arrived at the shipyard, where they build 'destroyers' for the Navy, looked like someone had dropped a bomb there. We learned that BIW (owned by General Dynamics Corp.) was destroying a big parking lot, a large building and then on the other side of the street three suitable homes were knocked down all for high-rise parking garages for the growing work force.

Maine's US Senator Angus King (a so-called Independent but always a warmonger) had made sure to extract large sums of taxpayer dollars for the company to build these new structures. With now about 7,000 workers at the shipyard more parking is needed.

The expansion is in preparations for endless war$ not only with Iran but also with Russia and China as the US-NATO vainly attempt to destroy the growing movement toward a multi-polar world and BRICS. Currently around seven new Aegis destroyers are under construction at BIW. 

The recent attack on Iran that killed 170 at the Minab girls school was a 'double-tap-strike'. Cruise missiles were fired from US destroyers near the Strait of Hormuz. After the first hit the school administration called the parents and when parents came a second strike hit the school again. It's likely that one or more of the destroyers firing the missiles were built at BIW.

We held signs for an hour and while there one man repeatedly rode his hoverboard up and down Washington Street carrying a Palestinian and Veterans For Peace flag the entire 3/4 mile length of the BIW shipyard. This happened during the noon lunch break at the shipyard which meant many workers saw him ride by.

As a construction company was loading debris into a series of huge dump trucks we were sucking in toxic dust from the site.

We closed with our usual circle and will return again as part of Keep Space for Peace Week on Friday, October 2 at 11:30 am for another vigil.

Bruce

~ Photos and video by MB Sullivan  

Pistol Pete: This is war

U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth was seen exercising alongside American military personnel aboard the USS Boxer while docked in Singapore ahead of the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit held last June. 

Who was the Stern Gang?

IN THE U.S. KEEP CALLING & EMAIL YOUR DC SENATORS NOW!!!      (202) 224-3121 

DON'T MERGE OUR MILITARY WITH ISRAEL!!! 

Senate Version: NDAA Sect. 622 & Sect. 1217. 

Also ~ In another bill, 'The Intelligence Authorization Act': Section 619 makes a 'merger' Permanent and Unreviewable and would legally prevent the President from limiting intelligence sharing with Israel even over documented human rights abuses.

Remember Hiroshima-Nagasaki: No wars in the Heavens

Keep Space for Peace Week October 3-10 ­ The Global Network's annual Keep Space for Peace Week comes at a time when the Trump administration is moving to spend trillions of 'unavailable dollars' on his new pet project - Golden Dome.  As we remember the last big US military development of nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we now face the latest twist in the big-tech agenda for war in and from space. In the poster above Pistol Pete Hegseth declares that the US must dominate space and has no 'interest in orbital equity or orbital parity'. These words signal a dangerous declaration of coming space wars against nations like China, Russia, India and more. Of course this will cost the US an arm and a leg at the very time our nation is $39.8 trillion and counting in debt.  The American Physical Society has estimated that the cost of Golden Dome would be trillions. Trump has said he wants to add Canada to the coverage area and even hinted adding Europe. Each addition adds massive costs to the proposed project which only makes the aerospace industry happy. I heard Trump recently state that the Congress must vote to turn over Medicare and Medicaid coverage to the states because the feds can't afford these vital programs due to our current wars. States don't have the funds either! This brutal austerity agenda includes privatizing the Veterans Administration, Post Office, Social Security and selling off national parks and forests. We urge you to help the Global Network during Space Week to illuminate these serious dangers and contradictions of the Golden Dome and the broader militarization and nuclearization of space. One good resource is our YouTube library of  videos on nearly every aspect of the space issue. It would help to share some of these between now and October 3-10. Just click here We thank you for your support for our work to keep space for peace. Please keep in touch. Bruce K. Gagnon GN Coordinator  ­

­ ­

'Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.' ~ Henry David Thoreau 'It's sad that so many people are blinded by the green frog skin....'                 ~ Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

Book Review: Martyrs to the Unspeakable

 

By Bruce K. Gagnon 

I’ve recently read the latest James Douglass exceptional historical treasure entitled Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK. Having previously read his remarkable book JFK and the Unspeakable I had a good clue what to expect from this new undertaking.

I was not disappointed as I read this excellent recounting of our government’s deceit, arrogance, murderous past, wars, and denial of democracy.

I am certain that any person wishing to understand our current political situation will greatly benefit from reading this monumental recounting.

JFK  

James Douglass writes: “We can discern an underlying purpose from the public record: covering up systemic state killings, fragmenting the movement for change, and strengthening wartime policies... Congress and the presidents after Kennedy have sustained the Cold War, foreign interventions, the War on Terror, and a new Cold War. The death of a country and the world has become apparent destiny.”

Early on in JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960 he was made an offer by the Zionist lobby in the US. According to a JFK political columnist friend he expressed indignation, “As an American citizen he was outraged to have a Zionist group come to him and say: ‘We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you let us have control of your Middle East policy.’”

One key issue JFK had with Israel was its development of nuclear weapons at the Dimona nuclear facility. David Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] met with JFK and the president made it clear that he unreservedly opposed the development of nukes by Israel. Ben-Gurion lied to JFK claiming that the main purpose of Dimona reactor was for desalinization purposes.

Douglass remembers: “From the Dimona reactor to the Palestinian refugees, Kennedy and Ben-Gurion were at odds…Ben-Gurion’s retirement, and his successor Levi Eshkol’s continuing coverup of Dimona, would eventually secure Israel’s bomb-making in the depths of the Negev desert.”

JFK’s determination to resist Israeli control of his government created a sharp divide. In 1961 the president stated, “We sometimes find ourselves in difficulty due to our close relationship with Israel. If these ties hurt anyone, they hurt the US more than Israel.”

JFK’s determination to force Israel to register as a foreign agent under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) angered the Zionists. Douglass reports, “After JFK was assassinated the Department of Justice subsequently lost all of the political cover necessary to force the Israel lobby to register under FARA.”

Douglass suggests that in addition to JFK’s efforts to reign in Zionist control of the US government, the president also stepped into the danger zone when he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (and some of his key agents). “In the Cold War thinking of such men and their Mafia-style agency, Kennedy’s dialogue with [Soviet leader] Khrushchev for nuclear disarmament, with Castro for a normalized US-Cuban relationship, with [President] Sukarno for a peaceful Indonesia – and down the list of the president’s priorities for a better world – meant defeat for their national security state. Reconciliation with the enemy was treason. Anticommunist warriors played the nuclear (extinction) game to win.”

Essentially JFK was killed by what we today call the ‘Deep State’.

Kennedy further got himself into hot water with the ‘ruling elites’ when he planned the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 as was disclosed in the RAND Corporation’s study the Pentagon Papers.

General Curtis LeMay summed up the Pentagon’s view of JFK’s rejection of a full invasion of Cuba and the deal with the Soviets that their missiles would be pulled out of Cuba if the US would remove its nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Feeling snubbed by JFK, LeMay snorted at the time, “What does a politician know about war? Who needs the president if there is a war? Nobody!”

Malcolm X   

Douglass shares that “Malcolm’s most powerful enemies, who tracked every move he made, saw where he was going. They were threatened by his vision. They tried to kill it by killing him. Malcolm’s life was taken by a conspiracy involving the Nation of Islam, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and US intelligence agencies.”

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “was in charge of purging the country of ‘alien radicals.’ That meant, first and foremost, Black radicals”

After Malcolm’s 1964 visit to Mecca he felt that Allah had given him the power to confront evil: “And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America – then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.”

In September 1960, Malcolm became an ally of Premier Fidel Castro and his Cuban delegation to the United Nations in a confrontation with the US government. The US State Department restricted the Cubans to Manhattan Island and the hotel they were to stay at suddenly demanded a $20,000 security fee. Castro responded that their delegation would camp out. Malcolm arranged for the Cuban delegation to stay at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem.

As a supportive crowd gathered outside the hotel Malcom met Castro at midnight and told Fidel a parable: “No one knows the master better than his servants. We have been servants ever since we were brought here. We know all his little tricks. Understand? We know what he is going to do before he does.”

Douglass recalls that “Malcom made Harlem the North American stage for what would be the first meeting anywhere between Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Fidel Castro. It took place at the entrance of the Hotel Theresa at high noon on Tuesday, September 20, 1960, a month and a half before the election of JFK as US president.”

Four days before the Cuban leader’s plane landed in New York for the UN events, as a CIA document discloses, “a CIA-organized plot to assassinate him was formally set in motion at a meeting at a New York hotel with a key Mafia figure [Johnny Rosselli] whom the Agency wanted to handle the assignment.”

Castro was one of the few world leaders who escaped a CIA assassination plot.

In July 1964 Malcom flew to Cairo to observe the Second Organization of African Unity (OAU).

An analyst of the Cairo conference observed, “Malcolm’s main goal for the Summit was to convince the African leaders to pass a resolution addressing the plight of African Americans, condemn the US for racism, and to propose steps to bring the US accountable for bringing about needed changes.”

Malcolm, Douglass writes, had developed a new strategy. In an April, 1964 speech in Cleveland Malcolm urged: “We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level - to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam…All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the US…But the United Nations has what’s known as the charter of human rights, it has a committee that deals in human rights.”

Martin Luther King became impressed with Malcom’s international strategy and also began to echo this new African-American human rights organizing avenue.

On February 9, 1965 Malcolm flew from London to Paris for a speaking event. At Orly Airport he was barred from entering France and was sent back to London.

Douglass reports that, “A highly placed North African diplomat said word had been passed quietly to his country by French intelligence ‘that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil,’ scapegoating France.”

On February 14, 1965 at 2:45 am the Queens, New York home of Malcolm’s family was fire bombed. The sleeping family barely escaped alive. But it was a sign of things to come.

Malcolm X was shot multiple times and died from his wounds in Manhattan, New York City, on February 21, 1965, at the age of 39 while preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in the neighborhood of Washington Heights.

A. M. Babu, a Tanzania cabinet minister later described his American comrade’s dilemma at the critical hour: “Malcolm had the vision to see the threat that a united Third World would pose to imperialism.”

Martin Luther King Jr.   

Jim Douglass sadly recalls that “Martin King did not live to make public his support of Robert Kennedy for president. Following [President Lyndon] Johnson’s March 31, 1968 announcement of his withdrawal from the race, King was shot dead four days later.”

On December 23, 1963, a month after JFK’s assassination, a nine-hour conference was held at FBI headquarters to plan an intensive campaign against Dr. King.

Standing in his Riverside pulpit in New York, April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke truth to the war-making power of his nation. He knew the war in Vietnam now as never before – from seeing and feeling in his soul the impact of his government’s napalm and white phosphorus bombs, searing the flesh of the Vietnamese people.

James Douglass reports “MLK’s assassination cannot be understood apart from his resistance to the Vietnam War, nuclear war, and his organizing of the Poor People’s Campaign to abolish poverty.”

In a series of lectures MLK delivered over Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at the end of 1967, Dr. King envisioned first a national, then a global, nonviolent revolution against corporate wealth and military power.

Douglass writes, “King’s other goal was the abolition of war. He told his staff that, what was important, ‘after we get [to Washington with the Poor People’s Campaign], and stay a few days’ was to ‘call the peace movement in, and let them go on the other side of the Potomac and try to close down the Pentagon, if that can be done.’”

Just before MLK’s murder by the Deep State in Memphis on April 4, 1968 local authorities withdrew all police and fire department protection usually given to the visiting legend. On the morning after King’s assassination, the Memphis Police Department ordered the crime scene destroyed. (We recently saw the same thing happen just after the killing of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University – the crime scene was immediately destroyed.)

Douglass concludes that MLK “recognized there could be no peace unless the warfare economy would be deconstructed and freed from the total military-industrial hold on it, for the sake of serving instead the people working in the factories and the fields: ‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military [offense] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.’”

RFK

It’s quite sad and telling that the person set up and framed for the murder of Robert F. Kennedy was a Palestinian man. Like in all the other assassinations in this comprehensive work by James Douglass it was the modus operandi (method of operation) by the Deep State to always have patsies in place in order to re-direct public opinion away from the true killers.

Douglass reminds the reader about the post-WW2 program called ‘Operation Paperclip’ that brought 1,500 former high-level Nazis into the US seeding the entire military industrial complex with these operatives. One such example was the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program that Sirhan was very likely subjected to prior to RFK’s murder when the accused was missing for an extended period of time. His family could not find him during this period. After the killing of RFK was done, Sirhan was confused and unable to articulate much of what happened that tragic night.

Douglass again shares the truth: CNN investigative reporter Brad Johnson, in recapping the thirteen eyewitnesses with the best view of the [June 5, 1968 RFK] shooting, concluded, “The tip of Sirhan Sirhan’s gun was never close enough to RFK’s body to have created the point-blank Kennedy wounds reported in the RFK autopsy.”

Douglass recalls: “On behalf of his brother, Robert Kennedy discovered how the Bay of Pigs [1961] planners over-rode the president’s orders, lied and plotted against him…The Bay of Pigs showed JFK, with the help of RFK, the folly of allowing his top spies and generals to channel him into their Cold War plots. The Bay of Pigs was the first stage of the president’s enlightenment through the courage of confronting his national security hierarchy.”

It was then that JFK decided to attempt to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” In the end it cost him his life.

On June 23, 1965, just months after being elected to the US Senate representing the state of New York, RFK picked up his brother JFK’s fallen baton in his first major Senate address.

RFK said: “I rise today to urge action on the most vital issue now facing this nation and the world. This issue is not in the headlines. It is not Vietnam, or the Dominican Republic, or Berlin. It is the question of nuclear proliferation - of the mounting threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons. Five nations now have the capacity to explode nuclear bombs…perhaps a score of other nations are now in a position to develop nuclear weapons within three years. Two of these nations – Israel and India - already possess weapons-grade fissionable material, and could fabricate an atomic device within a few months.”

The New York Times, in its front-page article on Senator Kennedy’s speech, made no mention of the hazards represented by a nuclear-armed Israel. However, RFK’s leaning into the Unspeakable made news on the other side of the world. As Seymour Hersh would point out a quarter-century later in The Samson Option, “The senator’s remarks caused a sensation in Israel,” even though they “were little noted elsewhere.”

In February, 1967 RFK went to Paris and met with President Charles De Gaulle who urged him to publicly oppose Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Once back in Washington RFK met with Johnson who was very angry about his meeting with De Gaulle and threatened the senator by saying: “I’m going to destroy you in six months. We’re going to win in Vietnam by the summer. By July or August, the war will be over. You and every one of your dove friends will be dead politically in six months. You guys will be destroyed.”

Douglass concludes: “Nixon and the military-industrial complex would be the main beneficiaries of the gunning down of Robert Kennedy. The Vietnam War that Kennedy pledged to end would continue for seven more terrible years during the administrations of Presidents Nixon and Ford.”

My final thoughts

It is my belief that at least since the JFK assassination the secret government (the CIA, Wall Street and the MIC) have been fully in control of America. The US is now a rogue state. No one is allowed to become president, from any political party, that is not under their control.

I am reminded when Obama ran for the presidency, he wrote his obligatory book prior to the election. In the book there was a missing year. The only thing Obama told about that period was he went to work for ‘Business International Corporation’. Some time after Obama’s election victory, renowned journalist and filmmaker John Pilger said, ‘I know Business International Corporation. It is a well-known CIA front group.’ Obama was essentially put through a screening program and he obviously passed the test.

This remarkable book by James Douglass educates, stimulates and raises serious moral and ethical questions about our current time. How do people of good will, who truly seek peace, operate when we live under a government that is run by the corporate state? How can we support candidates for Congress or the White House who we know are under the thumb of the ruling oligarchies?

For me these are the real questions that must be debated and answered if we are to re-establish any real hope of democracy in America. As long as we avoid having this discussion we will remain like a small boat adrift at sea. Coupled with that is the urgent need for a dramatic increase in movement resistance building using the lessons from our past great leaders.

But first the public must know the history – how the Deep State operates – where they are taking us – and how we should effectively react? This book by James Douglass will go a long way in freeing our minds from corporate brainwashing about how our nation actually works. It is a must read for those who truly wish to be serious about ending fascism - defined as the wedding of corporate power and government.

~ Bruce K. Gagnon coordinates the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He is a Vietnam-era veteran and lives in Brunswick, Maine. 

Francesca Albanese: We are in the hands of predatory elites

Anand Naidoo spoke to UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese about the crisis in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. 

Albanese has produced a series of reports examining the humanitarian crisis, allegations of international law violations, and questions of accountability. #Heat #Israel #Gaza #Palestine  

Aussie Protestors Want Pine Gap Closed

Pine Gap, a key U.S.-run listening post in Australia’s Northern Territory

Pine Gap is a garrison outpost dominated by the U.S. imperium that defiles sacred native land and aids Israel in its cleansing conflict against Palestinians

By Binoy Kampmark

It remains a prickly reminder that Australia is an embarrassed vassal of power, annexed to the security interests of another state basking in imperial and fast diminishing splendour.

Pine Gap, known more technically as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), is a largely U.S.-operated effort in Alice Springs, Central Australia. As the late scholar of strategic studies Desmond Ball pithily remarked in 1988, it is “an espionage operation. Euphemisms should not be allowed to obscure this essential point.”

It grew out of a desire on the part of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) in 1965 to establish a remote Australian-sited ground control station intended for signals intelligence satellites. Land belonging to the Central Arrernte people was accordingly excised the following year for the site.

The decision, in typically rough fashion, was made without consultation and discussion with local residents or elders, a secret place that became what Trevor Paglen would describe as a “blank space on the map … erased from the public record.”

The facility staffs some 800 personnel from the U.S. National Security Agency (N.S.A.), C.I.A., the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (N.R.O.) and such Australian agencies as the Australian Signals Directorate and Australian Federal Police.

Over the years, the base has become increasingly corporatised with a heavy American accent: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, IBM and Hewlett Packard. A mere 10 percent of the constituted personnel are said to be Australian government employees.

The base periodically attracts its keen and principled protesters, aghast at the base’s role in furnishing targeting data for U.S. and allied drone and missile strikes across the Middle East and Africa. This year, the Close Pine Gap-Sacred Land Back convergence three days (July 18-20) of activities, with hundreds of participants gathered in Alice Springs to demand the closure of the facility through a series of workshops, panels and woven “threads of anti-militarism and decolonial movements.”

On July 20, a rally of 300 individuals gathered close to the front of the spy base, the largest since 1987, sporting signs and flags and chanting the stock phrases: “shut it down,” “close Pine Gap,” and “always was, always will be Aboriginal land.”

New South Wales Greens Senator David Shoebridge was present, expressing his concern about a “foreign military base setup for the interests of a foreign military” in the service of “right wing politics” and disrespectful of international law.

The base was also a potential target for any adversaries the U.S. might be willing to antagonise, thereby bringing “danger into the heart of our country.”

Arrernte Apmereke-artweye traditional custodians Felicity, Wyonna and Jacquita Hayes offer sound if disturbing logic, as reported by the Australian Associated Press: Pine Gap sits on a sacred site that not only profanes tradition but acts as vehicle for the waging of foreign wars and the conduct of genocide.

“We don’t want to be feeling guilty all the time when bad things are happening overseas to little ones. We’re not the ones controlling that facility, but we feel guilty that it’s coming to our land.” The custodians wished for the facility to be closed “so the generation coming can be safe. We want to be compensated so we can get houses at Whitegate community.”

It is also with some astonishment that the residents of Whitegate, to this day, are deprived of rudimentary services, including decent housing and running water. The water has to be brought in by truck. There is no sewerage.

Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute, one of Pine Gap’s most astute and flawlessly detailed critics, proved ever reliable in remarking that, “Unless the Australian direct and indirect military relationship to Israeli activities in the Gaza Strip are closely reviewed … it is not possible for the Australian government to assure parliament and the Australian public that Australia is not complicit in acts of genocide.”

The good professor has been able to shed much light on the facility’s broader purposes and is dismissive of critics who fault claims that the site is being used to feed such military efforts as those of Israel. (He can point to at least three satellites having the Gaza Strip within their reach.)

In October 1973, for instance, satellite intelligence from Pine Gap was passed on to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, a contribution that aided Israel’s breakthrough of the Egyptian lines.

This is of little concern to the clubland militarists in Canberra and such think tanks as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

Former intelligence officer Patrick White, writing for ASPI’s The Strategist, laments the diminished secrecy and security of the site, worrying that trends in signals technology have no longer made the base “irreplaceable.” The advent of extensive encryption means that satellite download feeds can be protected “almost anywhere. The remoteness that once hid the site from view no longer hides much at all.”

He is sentimental about the ties with Washington. “We have shared in intelligence and expertise far beyond anything our own resources could produce. We have no satellites of this kind.” Precisely why Canberra is blood-crusted in its complicity, less an authoritative host than a butler eager to please.

Destruction caused by Israeli bombing of Jabalia camp, Gaza Strip, October 2024. (UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons)

Pine Gap acts, then, as a symbol of highly distilled, triple strength colonisation: a garrison outpost dominated by the U.S. imperium and its personnel (a poke in the eye of Australian sovereignty), located on native land it defiles (a poke in the eye of the First Nations peoples), and also responsible for aiding the predations of Washington’s allies – more recently the Israeli Defense Forces in its cleansing conflict against the Palestinians.

“I understand the genocide in Gaza against my people is made possible by intelligence flowing from the heart of this colony in Alice Springs directly to the Israeli occupation forces,” stated Palestinian activist Remah Naji of Justice for Palestine Magan-djin with potency.

Shoebridge agreed: “We’re letting them use our land, this key real estate, I think [to] commit some of the worst atrocities we’ve seen.”

As the AUKUS Public Inquiry continues its various hearings on that ghastly, doomed security pact between Australia, the UK and the US, the Close Pine Gap campaign should be commended as a linked, worthy extension.

The former’s proceedings have been mostly savaging the wisdom of a pact that has shown Australia to be embarrassingly disadvantaged, its politicians largely deluded, and its strategic establishment impressionable and bankrupt. (That establishment seeks to bankrupt the Australian treasury to the princely sum of AU$368 billion over promised nuclear-powered submarines that may never arrive.)

The Close Pine Gap protests, while receiving less in the way of coverage, is no less pertinent and urgent in its aims.

~ Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

CENTCOM seeks 'ideas to pressure and punish Iran'

• Foreign Policy: The administration has repeatedly fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy. In the face of this strategic failure, Trump has mostly acted as if the problem were one of scale or duration. In reality, US negotiating leverage has diminished as the war has progressed and will likely continue to erode as the US exhausts its munitions and domestic political consequences mount. New Houthi attacks on Saudi oil exports add precarity to a war that has already induced global economic shocks, damaged US credibility, and put America’s regional allies in the middle of a conflict they advocated against.

• The Financial Times confirms that the US has withdrawn some of its presence across West Asia after Iranian attacks. The US is now fighting at a pace that’s set by Iran. Washington withdrew its forces from Kuwait, Erbil (Iraq), and Bahrain, and redeployed them to Germany, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Crete, Ovda, Ramon, and Ben Gurion.  

• Washington Post notes the plummeting public opinion of the war: The Iran war is increasingly unpopular among the US public, and members of Congress - from both political parties - have grown frustrated with the administration as top officials struggle to articulate a plan for ending the conflict on terms deemed favorable to the US. There is a deepening worry among many Republicans, particularly, that the war’s impact on the price of gas, food and other goods will cost the party in November’s midterm elections.

• Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson: Negotiations between Iran and the Sultanate of Oman to regulate safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz are ongoing. Our negotiations with Oman focus on establishing safe routes for ships to and from the Strait of Hormuz. The talks with the Sultanate of Oman at both the technical and political levels are positive.
• Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian denied rumors that he would resign, saying he would remain in office and continue his work.
• The were recently rumors that Trump wants to cut electricity to Tehran in its entirety, punishing the Iranian people he so valiantly professed to be defending from the “regime” he now can’t even locate. But it is this very misunderstanding of the Iranian people that is fatefully leading Trump into his Waterloo moment. 

• Hebrew Channel 24: Gulf Disagreement and Disappointment with Trump Behind Cancellation of Nighttime Attack on Iran. Recent developments have revealed growing disagreements between the Gulf states and the US administration regarding how to handle the escalation with Iran, at a time when the region's countries are increasingly disappointed with Trump's positions.
• The US Central Command (CENTCOM) has asked military analysts to develop “unconventional” ideas for punishing Iran, CNN reported. “We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” a US Central Command intelligence officer wrote in a message to a group of military analysts. According to CNN, the request highlights the limited and potentially politically unpalatable options available to the Washington administration in dealing with Iran. Meanwhile, a source told Fox News that CENTCOM was prepared to consider any new proposals. The US military believes the strategy toward Iran requires reassessment.

• Israeli occupiers on Sunday cut electricity to a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank by attacking power infrastructure, while the Israeli army arrested five Palestinians during raids across several areas. Official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that a group of occupiers attacked Madama in the northern West Bank, near the city of Nablus, cutting and damaging electricity poles, causing power outages in the northern part of the town. 

• Sovereignista: While Israel cannot strike Iran, it is killing people in Gaza and West Bank, in the most cruel manner.  A witness states:  'Today, I saw a Palestinian child picking up the brain of another Palestinian child. Yes, the actual brain. He used a small rag to pick it up. I also saw an infant ejected from his mother’s womb, due to the sheer power of the explosives Israel used in Gaza last night. But the most inhumane thing was witnessing someone open up a baby’s soft pink onesie – only to discover pieces of bones and diaper inside. Israel evaporated her little body with chemical weapons that are internationally banned.'

• Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine: Policeman attacks a one legged Ukrainian veteran. 

• Drop Site News is reporting Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly working with Israel to help influence how artificial intelligence chatbots talk about Gaza. Israel awarded Parscale’s firm a $46.5 million contract for the project, which involves creating websites and blog posts about Israel. The target audience for the sites is AI chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT. When Drop Site asked one chatbot whether it would be beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel, the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: “Yes.” The top source cited was a website created by Parscale’s firm for the Israeli government.

• Israel demands freedom to strike areas of the Gaza Strip set to be handed over to a temporary International Stabilization Force under the emerging agreement with Trump’s Board of Peace, a source familiar with the matter told Haaretz.

• China will launch its first weekly container service between China and Europe via the Northern Sea Route. The voyages will begin in August, with a sea transit time of approximately 20 days. The destination is Felixstowe (UK), with potential stops at other European ports. The distance between Shanghai and Rotterdam via the Arctic is approximately 12,800 km, while the distance via the Suez Canal is over 20,000 km. However, on most world maps, the "Arctic Express No. 1" appears longer due to the Mercator projection. 

• Stars & Stripes: Iran war brain injuries could outlast US troops’ return to duty. More than 600 service members have been wounded in action during the five-month war with Iran, with a majority suffering traumatic brain injuries, according to statements from the Pentagon and US Central Command.
• Matthew Whitaker, the US representative to NATO, said that a potential deal between the US and Ukraine regarding a license to manufacture Patriot missiles will not be finalized by this winter.