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LEV GOLINKIN, golinkin@gmail.com
Ahead of last week’s visit to Ukraine by the U.S. Secretary of State, Golinkin wrote the piece “Secretary Blinken Faces a Big Test in Ukraine, Where Nazis and Their Sympathizers Are Glorified.”

After Blinken’s visit, Golinkin noted that Blinken “said nothing about the recent pro-Nazi SS march, or anything substantial about the Holocaust. When I asked the State Department for comment, they immediately pivoted to Russia. When I asked about Ukraine having an SS march — one that even Germany condemned — they immediately started attacking by invoking Russian disinformation. …”

Golkin noted in his recent article: “From the moment he was nominated for secretary of state, the media has made much over the Holocaust’s impact on Antony Blinken. Blinken’s stepfather was a famous survivor; his upbringing made the Holocaust an indelible part of Blinken’s identity. Indeed, last month Blinken lambasted America’s callousness during the genocide, going so far as denouncing a World War II-era State Department official for refusing to aid Jews fleeing Europe. …

“The reality is that glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine.

“Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to ’14 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries — the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) — heroes and freedom fighters and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.”

Earlier this year, Golinkin wrote the piece piece “How many monuments honor fascists, Nazis and murderers of Jews? You’ll be shocked,” in the Forward, launching the The Nazi Monument Project. He is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, a memoir of Soviet Ukraine, which he left as a child refugee.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken is traveling to Ukraine with Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, kat@thenation.com, or via Ricky D’Ambrose, rdambrose@thenation.com, @KatrinaNation
Editorial Director and Publisher of The Nation magazine, Katrina vanden Heuvel recently wrote for the Washington Post: “The successful campaign to block Matthew Rojansky’s appointment is ominous for Biden’s Russia policy”: “When a new administration comes to Washington, the flowery rhetoric and springtime promises are often less revealing than who is put where to run the place. That’s why many of Washington’s most scurrilous campaigns are backstage fights over potential appointments. And that’s why the successful campaign to block the appointment of Matthew Rojansky as Russia director on the National Security Council is not only a sad reflection of the poisonous state of the debate on Russian policy today, but also an ominous sign for Biden’s foreign policy going forward. …

“Rojansky’s tempered realism is at odds with the strident consensus of the foreign policy establishment. The foreign policy ‘blob’ sees Russia as weak and paints Putin as the devil. They call Russia’s SolarWinds hack an ‘act of war,’ when intelligence experts describe it as ‘reconnaissance and espionage of the sort the U.S. itself excels at.’ They seem intent on extending the U.S. commitment to Ukraine, writing a check that the American people have no intention of backing. New sanctions on Russia are shortsighted and are likely to drive Moscow still further toward Beijing. The result is a self-reinforcing spiral of tensions and hostile postures strengthening hawks on both sides. For the Biden administration, Rojansky’s sensible perspectives would provide a necessary balance to voices such as Victoria Nuland, the hawkish new undersecretary of state for political affairs.

“Upon taking office, Biden promised a ‘foreign policy for the middle class,’ tacitly acknowledging that the debacles of the past decades have badly served all but the few. Keeping that promise requires profound rethinking. By reversing some of Donald Trump’s most egregious follies — returning to the Paris climate accord and the WHO, ending the Muslim ban, beginning negotiations to return to the Iran nuclear deal, extending the START nuclear accord with Russia — Biden has taken the first steps. Recalibrating our relations to Russia — and reducing the tensions around Ukraine and the Russian border — surely must be part of that effort. Getting that right will be much harder if sensible experts such as Rojansky have no place in the administration.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel is vice-president of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord, a group interested in an informed dialogue about improving U.S.-Russia relations. The group recently participated in a talk organized by the Committee for the Republic (see background on the group) on the critical issues confronting U.S.-Russian relations, see video.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will be in Japan and South Korea, and then meet with Chinese officials in Alaska in the coming days.

JAMES BRADLEY, james@jamesbradley.com, Skype: JamesOnSound
Bradley is author of several bestsellers focused on U.S. policy in the Pacific and Asia, including Flags of Our Fathers and The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia.

He is currently in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand producing his “Untold Pacific” podcast about “the American experience in Asia.” Recent episodes include “China Rising,” “The #1 Focus of the U.S. National Security State is War with China” and “U.S. Military: ‘War with China Inevitable.'”

He said today: “Emperor Mao made dismembered China one. Emperor Deng made a poor China rich. Now Emperor Xi is determined to make a powerful China whole.

“The big issue between Beijing and Washington is Taiwan. Both sides have strong arguments, but start their observations at different points, sometimes different centuries.

“The business of China is business. The business of America is war. Will the U.S. make a business-like deal with China over Taiwan in Alaska? Or will the U.S. insist upon the Taiwan question being settled as a matter of war?”

President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, is scheduled to have his confirmation hearing today at 2:00 p.m. ET.

DAVID SWANSON, davidcnswanson@gmail.com, @davidcnswanson
Swanson is executive director of World Beyond War and campaign coordinator of RootsAction.org, which just sent out an email to their membership urging Senators to ask Binken serious questions: “Blinken should be asked about his role in helping start wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Which of those wars does he now regret? What would he do to prevent similar catastrophes going forward?

“The trend of the past dozen years is away from ground wars in favor of air wars. This often means more killing, more injuring, and more making people homeless, but with an even higher percentage of all that suffering concentrated on the non-U.S. side. We need to know whether Blinken favors continuing this trend and how he claims to defend it morally and legally.

“Much of the U.S. public has been wanting an end to endless wars, and President-elect Biden has promised it. Blinken has suggested that endless wars shouldn’t really be ended. We need to know which of these wars, if any, he supports actually ending every U.S. role in: Yemen? Afghanistan? Syria? Iraq? Somalia?

   “Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a company that helps war profiteers get contracts, and serves as a revolving door for unscrupulous individuals who get rich from private money for what they do and whom they get to know in their public jobs. WestExec has paid Blinken nearly $1.2 million for advising corporations, including seven that have recently lobbied the State Department, including Facebook, Boeing, and Blackstone.” See the full backgrounder.

See past accuracy.org news releases regarding Blinken.

Several media outlets are reporting that Joe Biden will announce Tuesday that Tony Blinken is his nominee for Secretary of State.

ZAREFAH BAROUD, zarefahbaroud@gmail.com, @ZarefahBaroud
Baroud is with American Muslims for Palestine. She recently wrote the piece “The Leahy Laws: Why Biden’s Promise to Israel is Illegal,” which states: “Biden and [Kamala] Harris are pledging to break U.S. law for Israel. … Essentially, the [Leahy laws state] that foreign military assistance must be suspended or discontinued if there exists credible information that the recipient foreign security force unit has committed a gross human rights violation. … According to Tony Blinken, Joe Biden’s senior advisor, ‘He [Biden] would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes. Period. Full stop. He said it; he’s committed to it.'”

RICHARD SILVERSTEIN, richards1052@gmail.com, @richards1052
Silverstein at Tikun Olam just wrote the piece: “Biden Names Blinken Secretary of State, Israel Lobby Pleased,” which notes: “During the campaign, Blinken’s most notable comments were made in a conference call to pro-Israel leaders hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel. DMI is a hawkish group which is the Democratic Party version of AIPAC. Though the latter claims it is bipartisan, it’s common knowledge that the vast majority of its membership, donors and leaders are Republican. Thus, DMI was manufactured to ensure that Democrats would not stray too far from the pro-Israel party line. The group has regularly acted as an enforcer within the party when candidates espouse positions considered anti-Israel.

“Among those who’ve been taken to the woodshed are Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The group sunk over $1 million in ads in the Iowa primary attacking Bernie Sanders … the ads didn’t mention Sanders’ views on Israel.”

Bloomberg reports Tony Blinken will be Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State.

SAM HUSSEINI, samhusseini@gmail.com, @samhusseini
Senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Husseini said today: “During the runup to the invasion of Iraq, Biden — with Blinken’s critical help — oversaw hearings many criticized for effectively propagandizing on behalf of the planned invasion. In 2007, I questioned Biden about his record and he responded that he ‘did ask the necessary questions’ and cut off further questioning. Blinken then effectively ran interference and claimed that ‘every hard question was answered.’ Blinken also claimed without evidence: ‘He [presumably Biden] said there was no yellowcake. … He said there was no aluminum tubes.'” Earlier this year, Husseini wrote the piece “Joe Biden won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years” for Salon. He is currently writing a piece about Blinken.

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes@usfca.edu
Zunes is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and wrote a piece on Biden’s Iraq record for The Progressive. He said today: “Tony Blinken served as Democratic Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman Biden during the critical months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Under their leadership, the Committee limited hearings to only a day and a half and stacked the witness list with war supporters, refusing to call leading Mideast scholars and former UN inspectors who would have testified that Iraq had already disarmed and that an invasion would have disastrous consequences. This refusal to listen to experts or allow for the airing of diverse opinions, and the willingness to push for an illegal, unnecessary, and predictably disastrous war is not the kind of leadership we need at the Department of State.” Zunes was featured in the mini-doc “Worth the Price? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War.”

MARIAMNE EVERETT, [in France], mariamne.everett@mycit.ie, @EverettMariamne
Everett recently wrote the piece “Biden: A War Cabinet?” She is an intern at the Institute for Public Accuracy and radio presenter with World Radio Paris where she hosts the podcast “Hidden Paris.” Her piece includes quotes from Blinken, noting he has “had immense influence over Biden in his role as Deputy National Security Advisor, helping formulate Biden’s approach and support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blinken seems to be of the view that it is up to the U.S., and only the U.S., to take charge of world affairs.”

On Monday, President Biden said about his recent statement that Russian President Vladimir Putin should not be in power: “I wasn’t then, nor am I now, articulating a policy change. I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it.”

Some analysts have noted that Biden has dropped his condemnations of Saudi Arabia as it has accelerated its bombing of Yemen in recent months.

NORMAN SOLOMON, solomonprogressive@gmail.com, @normansolomon

“By doubling down on his call for regime change, President Biden has undercut the words of top U.S. officials that appeared to ‘walk back’ his initial irresponsible statement in Warsaw,” Solomon said today. “Rather than trying to soothe the dangerous waters, Biden has made them even more dangerous. This should be condemned — rather than silently aided and abetted — by members of Congress.”

Solomon recently wrote the piece “Biden’s Dangerous Call for Regime Change in Russia,” which states: “Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn’t mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to ‘walk back’ his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw’s Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia.

“They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’

“With a reckless genie out of the bottle, no amount of damage control from the president’s top underlings could stuff it back in. ‘We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,’ Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday. Such words might plausibly have less than full weight; Blinken was chief of staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in mid-2002, then-Senator Biden wielded the gavel at crucial hearings that completely stacked the witness deck in support of the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with the explicit goal of regime change. …

“Mainstream journalists have avoided putting a fine point on the likelihood that World War III just got closer thanks to Biden’s words, whether or not they were ‘a slip’ or ‘a veiled threat.’ In fact, it might never be possible to know which it was. But that ambiguity underscores that his slip and/or threat was mind-blowingly irresponsible, endangering the survival of humanity on this planet.

“Outrage is the appropriate response. And a special onus is on Democrats in Congress, who should be willing to put humanity above party and condemn Biden’s extreme irresponsibility. But prospects for such condemnation look bleak. …

“Overall, in recent weeks, President Biden has jettisoned all but the flimsiest pretenses of seeking a diplomatic solution to end the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Instead, his administration keeps ratcheting up the self-righteous rhetoric while moving the world closer to ultimate catastrophe.”

Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions.

On Wednesday afternoon, Secretary of State Blinken released a statement: “War Crimes by Russia’s Forces in Ukraine.”

On Tuesday, Republicans accused Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson of calling George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld “war criminals.” Many media outlets noted inaccuracies in the statements by Republicans, but virtually none examined if the charge was actually true.

LAURIE CALHOUN, laurielcalhoun@gmail.com
Calhoun is author of several books, including We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age.

She said today: “There is a strong presumption against criticizing retired (or expired) government officials, which seems to be based on a mythical picture of what they are supposed to do, as opposed to what they actually do. To claim that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are/were ‘war criminals’ is to condemn them, but it is also the conclusion of a simple inference: if the 2003 war on Iraq was a violation of international law, then its perpetrators were war criminals, and all of those killed in the conflict were victims, whether directly or indirectly, of premeditated, intentional homicide, better known as murder.

“The United States government has been permitted since World War II to invade sovereign nations with effective impunity for the simple reason that they were positioned to crush anyone who disagreed. Unfortunately, U.S. citizens have become inured to mass homicide when inflicted on other states — well, at least some of them. In the current crisis in Ukraine, the government of Russia has blundered ahead with its invasion under the assumption that MAD (mutually assured destruction) logic will prevail, preventing a direct conflict between two nuclear-armed states, just as in the proxy wars throughout the Cold War.

“The question which must be asked is: how much destruction and how many lives will be sacrificed on behalf of power elites unwilling to undertake meaningful negotiations because they themselves stand to lose nothing, while military industry stands to profit handsomely from the conflict? The ghastly war in Yemen and resultant humanitarian crisis continues to be supported by the United States for the very same cynical reasons and yet is nearly never mentioned in the press. Both Ukraine and Yemen demonstrate that, notwithstanding the strident rhetoric of policy makers, the lives of human beings are not a significant factor in crafting U.S. foreign policy.”

See 2006 IPA release: “Bush Administration and Legal Accountability.” See 2009 analysis by the late Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, on prosecution of Bush administration officials. Also see “Farewell to Donald Rumsfeld, Dreary War Criminal” in The Intercept from 2021.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba have agreed to meet on Thursday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said, in what would be the first potential talks between the two since Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24. See report from Al-Jazeera. Before the invasion began, on February 22, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken cancelled a planned meeting with Lavrov after Putin had recognized the breakaway republics.

ANATOL LIEVEN, via Jessica Rosenblum, rosenblum@quincyinst.org, (202) 279-0005
Available for a limited number of interviews, Lieven is senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and just wrote the piece “It’s time to ask: what would a Ukraine-Russia peace deal look like?” published by The Guardian.

He writes: “If the Russians are ever to withdraw, a diplomatic agreement on the terms of withdrawal will be necessary.

“The West should back a peace agreement and Russian withdrawal by offering Russia the lifting of all new sanctions imposed on it. The offer to Ukraine should be a massive reconstruction package that will also help Ukraine to move towards the West economically and politically rather than militarily — just as Finland and Austria were able to do during the Cold War despite their neutral status.

“The demands by the Russian side are that Ukraine should sign a treaty of neutrality; engage in ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘denazification;’ and recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which was seized back by Russia after the Ukrainian Revolution. These demands are a mixed bag of the acceptable, the unacceptable, and the undefined. …

“President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly hinted that a treaty of neutrality may be on offer; and he is right to do so. For two things have been made absolutely clear by this war: that Russia will fight to prevent Ukraine becoming a military ally of the West, and the West will not fight to defend Ukraine. In view of this, to keep open the possibility of an offer of NATO membership that NATO has no intention of ever honouring, and asking Ukrainians to die for this fiction, is worse than hypocritical.

“As to ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘denazification,’ the meaning and terms of these will have to be negotiated. Demilitarisation is obviously unacceptable if it means that Ukraine must unilaterally dissolve its armed forces; but the latest statement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has suggested that Russia would accept a ban on missiles based in Ukraine. This could be modelled on a similar guarantee to the U.S. that ended the Cuba Missile Crisis. …

“Ukraine has already lost Crimea, and cannot recover it, as Serbia cannot recover Kosovo, without a bloody and unending war that in this case Ukraine would almost certainly lose. Our principle in all such disputes must be that the fate of the territories concerned must be decided by local democratic referenda under international supervision. This should also apply to the Donbas separatist republics.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
(202) 347-0020

March 8, 2022

Institute for Public Accuracy
980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
@accuracy * ipaccuracy

DAVE LINDORFF, dlindorff@gmail.com
Lindorff is an investigative journalist who just wrote the piece “Peace-washing: Is a network of major donors neutralizing activism in the peace movement?” for Salon.

He writes: “Consider the liberal response to the Biden transition team floating Michèle Flournoy’s name as a potential secretary of defense. Instead of outrage at the idea of someone who had spent the previous four years helping arms contractors win business with the Trump Pentagon and who is an advocate for tough, even aggressive stances towards Russia, China and Iran, we saw an open letter of support signed by 29 key people active in the peace and arms-control arena. Signatories included Joe Cirincione, former president for 12 years of the Ploughshares Fund, along with Tom Collina, Michelle Dover and Emma Belcher of that same well-endowed grant-offering organization. They were joined by the likes of Tom Countryman and Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, Rachel Bronson of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Ilan Goldenberg of the Center for New American Security, Joan Rohlfing of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and others. …

“Interestingly though, while serious opposition coalesced among anti-militarism, anti-revolving-door people and groups in the Flournoy case, her WestExec Advisors co-founder Antony Blinken, nominated as secretary of state, sailed through his nomination and hearing process. This despite Blinken’s record as an enthusiastic interventionist while serving in the Obama administration as deputy national security advisor and later as deputy secretary of state, and despite his profiting off his connections as a WestExec adviser to arms makers after leaving office.”

MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh@riseup.net
Hoh is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Until his resignation five years ago, he was a board member of Council for a Livable World, one of the larger national security/arms control organizations in the Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG). Hoh tells Lindorff that while he has no inside information about the funding policies of the funding consortium or its members, “The assumption that the big peace and national security funding groups are taming the peace movement is a correct one.”

He explains: “When you have a bunch of organizations in a group like that, and some of them are really mainstream vanilla like Open Society, you’re going to see the whole organization and its member groups moderate their positions and their funding policies to the lowest denominator. These big groups, especially the ones that also act as holding pens for people in the foreign policy area who have to leave government employment when a Republican administration comes in, and use them as references when looking for government jobs under a new Democratic administration like this one, don’t want to be funding groups that mount protests in House or Senate committee hearings or try to arrest [former Nixon Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger for war crimes.”

Hoh says he recalls comments being made while he was at CLW about organizations receiving grants needing to “ease up” on their rhetoric or protest actions, but doesn’t recall that kind of conversation moving beyond CLW to the collective PSFG membership. But he also says, “I think the issue of putting pressure on activist groups has deepened over the last 10 years.” He adds, “The best evidence that there is pressure on activists to tone down is the way you’re finding so few leaders of groups that get funding from PSFG member organizations willing to speak for this article on the record.”

Research for Lindorff’s article was funded by a grant from the ExposeFacts program of the Institute for Public Accuracy.