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News Release Archive - Foreign Policy

The Palestine Laboratory: X/Twitter Reportedly Working with Israeli Surveillance Firm

August 18, 2023
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ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN, antloew@gmail.com, @antloewenstein
Loewenstein, an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Australia, is author of the recently released book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.

He said today: “If current reports are true, and Elon Musk’s X is partnering with Israeli digital ID company AU10TIX to verify users, it’s a concerning development in the normalisation of Israeli surveillance tech in the West. My new book, The Palestine Laboratory, is a global investigation into Israel’s weapons and repression technology in the last 75 years. Palestinians in Palestine are guinea-pigs with Israeli spyware, drones, biometric tools and facial recognition companies testing their equipment on an occupied population.

“What happens in Palestine is being exported around the world to over 130 nations in the last decades. Israel is now the world’s 10th biggest arms dealer, selling some of the most sophisticated forms of surveillance to democracies and dictatorships. From India to Saudi Arabia and Rwanda to Greece, Israel’s occupation tools are ubiquitous in the modern state’s apparatus.

“For over 50 years, the occupation of Palestine, namely the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights, have provided Israel with the ultimate testing ground to develop and perfect the art of control. Many countries want to emulate Israel’s methods and learn how to get away with it. Israel has complete global impunity.

“The worldwide spread of surveillance tech, often built by veterans of the Israeli intelligence service who have spent years monitoring Palestinians under occupation, is a threat to democracy across the globe. In an age of rising ethno-nationalism, from India to Hungary to Israel, it’s vital to ask critical questions about the source and pedigree of any Israeli digital company.”

See Loewenstein’s recent interviews on MSNBC and “Democracy Now.”

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“Blatant Lie”: Secret Pakistan Cable Documents U.S. Pressure to Remove Imran Khan

August 10, 2023
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Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept are reporting in “Secret Pakistan Cable Documents U.S. Pressure to Remove Imran Khan” that: “The U.S. State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document obtained by The Intercept.

“The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster. Khan’s defenders dismiss the charges as baseless. The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

“One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

“The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a ‘cypher,’ reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.”

Available for interviews:

ABDUL JABBAR, ajabbar102@gmail.com
Jabbar is emeritus professor of interdisciplinary studies, City College of San Francisco, California. He said the truth of the situation “is buried under layers of disinformation. Take, for example, the following words of Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, as reported in The Intercept coverage. It is a blatant lie.”

From The Intercept: “Miller said, ‘We had expressed concern about the visit of then-PM Khan to Moscow on the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and have communicated that opposition both publicly and privately.’ He added that ‘allegations that the United States interfered in internal decisions about the leadership of Pakistan are false. They have always been false, and they continue to be.'”

BIZAA ZEYNAB ALI, zeynab.ali@gmail.com, @zeynabali74

Bizaa Zeynab Ali is a New York based academic at the New School for Social Research and New York University.  She is also a representative of the Human Rights Legal Aid Foundation and the Pakistan Legal Fund.

JUNAID AHMAD, junaidsahmad@gmail.com

Ahmad teaches law, religion, and world politics in Pakistan and is the director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality.

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Battles Over Ukraine * Nuland * Rewriting History

August 7, 2023
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JAMES CARDEN, jamescarden09@gmail.com
Carden is a former adviser to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. He just wrote the piece “The Coming Battle: ‘Who Lost Ukraine?’ — An effort to rewrite history is happening in real time.”

Recently Victoria Nuland rose to acting deputy secretary of state; Carden was featured on the news release “Biden Nominating Victoria ‘F*ck the EU’ Nuland” in early 2021, where he sounded the alarm about the course of U.S. policy if she held office.

In his most recent piece, Carden writes: “As it becomes more and more difficult to deny what is happening on the battlefield in Ukraine, a grinding war with hundreds of thousands of casualties, establishment media continue to present a picture of the war designed to rally the public, should its enthusiasm for this latest American overseas adventure begin to flag in the face of long and hard realities.”

He gives a series of specific examples in major media and continues: “In the nearly ten years since the Maidan Revolution, a handful of us have been sounding the alarm over the possibility of war breaking out between Russia and the West. For nearly ten years, a small minority of writers and thinkers have relentlessly advocated for a peaceful solution to the Ukraine crisis, and in the process have, at various times, been smeared, mocked, marginalized, denied employment opportunities, branded ‘terrorist’ sympathizers, and placed on a Ukrainian kill-lists for the crime of telling the truth about what has been happening in eastern Ukraine since 2014. …

“And as the war in Ukraine grinds on to its disastrous denouement, we can reasonably expect those who are responsible for helping set off this conflagration — along with those who cheered this ludicrous and unnecessary war from the beginning — to pay about as severe a price as that paid by the architects and cheerleaders of the Iraq fiasco: none at all.

“Advocates of a restrained and sensible foreign policy ought to prepare for an even nastier period of recrimination and finger-pointing that will make the Russiagate years (2016-2021) look like a time of national serenity. Indeed, it is all too easy to imagine that 2024 and the years following will be dominated by a ‘Who lost Ukraine?’ crusade not unlike the poisonous ‘Who lost China?’ debate that midwifed the McCarthy period of the 1950s. The coming campaign will no doubt consist of a litany of accusations of unpatriotic disloyalty leveled against American opponents of the war by a parade of Eastern Europeans and their vocal and powerful lobby in Washington.”

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Oppenheimer and the Profiteers of Armageddon

August 3, 2023
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WILLIAM HARTUNG, hartung@quincyinst.org

Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “More Money, Less Security: Pentagon Spending and Strategy in the Biden Administration.”

He just wrote the piece “The Profiteers of Armageddon: Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex,” for TomDispach, which notes positive and negative elements of the recently released film “Oppenheimer”: “The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war. General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that when he was told by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on populated areas in Japan, ‘I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.’

“The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. …

“Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons — the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.

“Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms. …

“We need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.”

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“Biden Says There’s No Blockade. Tell That to Yemenis Who Need Medical Care.”

August 2, 2023
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ARWA MOKDAD, mokdadarwa@gmail.com, @arwa_mokdad

Just back from Yemen, Mokdad is in New York City. She is with the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation.

The group is cited in the recent article in The Nation: “Biden Says There’s No Blockade. Tell That to Yemenis Who Need Medical Care.”

The article states: “There are just three flights leaving Sana’a every week. But Yemen has an estimated 71,000 cancer patients who need out-of-country care. …In May, 39 members of Congress signed a letter calling on the Biden administration ‘to pressure the Saudis to lift the blockade unconditionally — not use it as a bargaining chip in negotiations.’

“With a presidential campaign ramping up, Biden has an incentive to emphasize relief and openness in Yemen; the U.S. role in the humanitarian crisis — including rolling out the red carpet for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last year, and ongoing weapons sales — goes against the president’s claims to embrace human rights as a foreign policy principle.”

Mokdad said today: “While the blockade has been eased, the amount of essential goods allowed in, such as oil and medicine, are still far below the needs within Yemen. The blockade must be fully and unconditionally lifted as it is a war crime that contributes to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.

“During my recent trip to Yemen, I met families who have been in Amman for months waiting to get one of the few tickets to Sanaa. And these are the lucky ones who are able to even afford the tickets. The limited supply has made it impossible for the vast majority of Yemenis to travel. Three flights a week to a country of thirty million is not acceptable.”

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Israeli Killing of Palestinian Journalist a “Calculated Act of Savagery”

May 11, 2022
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MOUIN RABBANI, [currently in Oman] mail@mouinrabbani.net, @mouinrabbani
Rabbani is co-editor of Jadaliyya.

He said today: “The only appropriate response to the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, which is not only a crime but a calculated act of savagery, is justice. Justice is only achievable through proper accountability. The Israeli occupier has repeatedly demonstrated that its priority is impunity, and it cannot be entrusted with either investigation, accountability, or justice for either Shireen or those whom it has deprived of their fundamental rights for more than half a century. But there will be no justice, only an impunity which set the stage for this murder and will set the stage for the next one.”

Rabbani has published and commented widely on Palestinian affairs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He was previously senior analyst and special advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, and head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria.

Background: “Al Jazeera’s iconic ‘Voice of Palestine’ killed during Israeli raid” from the Electronic Intifada.

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Facing Starvation and Sanctions, How Does Afghanistan Move Forward?

January 4, 2022
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 via Wikimedia Commons

Jim Lobe’s “Out of sight, out of mind: Afghanistan vanishes from U.S. news” in Responsible Statecraft states: “New data shows stunning plunge in coverage, just as the humanitarian crisis — much of it caused by Washington sanctions — peaks.” See accuracy.org news release: “As Afghans Face Starvation, U.S. and UN Sanctions Tighten the Screws.”

ZAHER WAHAB, zwahab@lclark.edu
Professor emeritus at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education, Wahab was senior adviser to the education ministry from 2002 to 2006.

He states that the U.S. government’s goal in Afghanistan was “not progress or nation-building” but rather “ideological, geopolitical, hegemonic, imperial.”

“The 20-year occupation was run with massive corruption and cronyism” leading to a hollowed state which “allowed the president and his gang to betray the nation.” Former president Ashraf Ghani recently denied widespread reports that he fled the country with over $100 million.

Wahab outlines a plan to rescue Afghanistan by forming a “really inclusive and meritocratic government,” “open the banks, reactivate the healthcare system,” expel foreign fighters and a host of other steps.

He stated that the U.S. government must take steps including:

* “Engage and recognize the Afghan government
* “Unfreeze ALL Afghan assets.
* “End ALL sanctions.
* “Cease all political, economic, diplomatic, psychological, drone, and proxy warfare against Afghanistan.
* “Provide immediate massive humanitarian assistance.
* “Return all the assets stolen in different forms by Afghans, Afghan-Americans, Americans NGOs, others.”

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Hawkish Outcries for Russia Sanctions “Exceedingly Dangerous”

January 3, 2022
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KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, kat@thenation.com, @KatrinaNation
Publisher and editorial director of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel is president of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord.

She said today: “While there is no question that Russia has contributed to tensions, the West should have understood that an attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO would spark deep, historical divisions within Ukraine and escalate Russian concerns. What is essentially a civil war has become a proxy war, a site of dangerous geopolitical focus.

“The hawkish outcry for more sanctions, more weapons, NATO membership for Ukraine, and an even more confrontational stance toward Russia is exceedingly dangerous and is not in our security or national interests.

“It is imperative that we embrace sober reasoning and diplomacy to end the conflict — more than 14,000 lives have already been taken. Make no mistake: There is no military solution to this conflict. Only reasoned dialogue and political settlement can put Ukraine on the path to long term stability and some semblance of peace.”

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Why is the U.S. Government Making Nuclear War More Likely?

December 21, 2021
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The New York Times recently reported: “Hundreds of Scientists Ask Biden to Cut the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal.”

Norman Solomon recently wrote in Salon: “Some policy technocrats for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and some advocates for arms control are locked in a heated dispute over the future of ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles. It’s an argument between the ‘national security’ establishment — hell-bent on ‘modernizing’ ICBMs — and various nuclear-policy critics, who prefer to keep the current ICBMs in place. Both sides are refusing to acknowledge the profound need to get rid of them entirely.

“Elimination of ICBMs would substantially reduce the chances of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. ICBMs are uniquely vulnerable to effective attack, and thus have no deterrent value. Instead of being a ‘deterrent,’ ICBMs are actually land-based sitting ducks, and for that reason are set up for ‘launch on warning.’ …

“An enormous ICBM lobbying apparatus remains in high gear, with huge corporate profits at stake. Northrop Grumman has landed a $13.3 billion contract to proceed with developing a new ICBM system, misleadingly named the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.” (Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.)

DAVE LINDORFF, dlindorff@gmail.com,

Lindorff wrote the piece “The U.S. is Set to Make Nuclear War More Likely,” which states: “The U.S. is about to move towards a far more likely first use of nuclear weapons, with word that the Air Force has ‘completed flight testing’ of the cost-and-performance-plagued F35A Lightning fighter, all units of which are being ‘upgraded’ to carry thermonuclear weapons.
“What this means, as explained in a new article in Popular Mechanics, is that the world’s most costly weapons program (at $1.7 trillion), a fifth-generation fighter, supposedly ‘invisible’ to radar (that actually cannot fight and is not invisible to advanced radars), now has a new mission to justify its existence and continued production: dropping dial-able ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons that can be as small as 0.3 kilotons or up to 50 kilotons in explosive power. …

“Bernie Sanders, the independent self-described ‘socialist’ senator from Vermont, now needs to finally end his own dogged and cynical support for the basing of 18 F-35A planes at the Burlington International Airport, where pilots of the Vermont Air National Guard are now training for exactly the kinds of bombing scenario described above. …

“Sanders has insisted that while he ‘opposes’ the ‘wasteful’ F35 program, it is a ‘done deal’ and so he wants Vermont’s Air National Guard unit to get a piece of the ‘benefits’ of having it and the ‘jobs’ it supposedly brings with it in his state. He has continued to dissemble, claiming that the Vermont F35As will not carry nuclear weapons or be used in nuclear war. In fact, his office was caught altering a document from the Pentagon to hide the fact that the Vermont Guard’s planes would in fact definitely be upgraded with the ‘block four’ alterations so they can carry nukes just like all F-35As in the Air Force fleet.”

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Pentagon “Cover-up” in Kabul Drone Killing of Family Continues

December 13, 2021
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“No U.S. Troops Will Be Punished for Deadly Kabul Strike, Pentagon Chief Decides,” the New York Times reports this afternoon. “The military initially defended the August strike, which killed 10 civilians including seven children, in the days afterward, but ultimately called it a tragic mistake.”

The group BanKillerDrones.org responded: “Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, in declining to punish any military personnel for the August 29 drone slaughter of 10 members of the Ahmadi family in Kabul, Afghanistan, is continuing the Biden administration’s cover-up of who and what technology was indeed responsible for the attack, including, possibly, protecting the White House if the President was involved.”

“If the Pentagon wants to come clean about this horrific event,” said Nick Mottern, a co-coordinator of BanKillerDrones.org, “it will release documents and video tapes that show who was responsible for key decisions and what technological failings were responsible. If President Biden was involved in the decision, we must know that.”

The Air Force’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, insisted that the strike has to be considered in the context of the moment, with American officials at a heightened state of alert after a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport three days earlier killed about 170 civilians and 13 U.S. troops. “The broader context the Pentagon should acknowledge was clarified by Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower who disclosed that innocent Afghan civilians were killed in 90 percent of the U.S. drone attacks during a five month period,” said Kathy Kelly, also with BanKillerDrones. “U.S. attacks slaughtering civilians have been routine,” Kelly added. “The unusual aspect of the August 29th attack was that international media exposed the murder of civilians and the pernicious initial claim that this was a ‘righteous attack.’”

Daniel Hale, sentenced to 45 months in prison, is serving time at U.S. Penitentiary Marion. In his own words, the only thing that Daniel Hale did wrong is that he “stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretend things weren’t happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives.”

“Austin’s announcement indicates that the slaughter in Kabul on August 29 was business as usual,” said Brian Terrell, also with the group. “The slaughter of the Ahmadi family is what happens when all the proper protocols are followed, and this was not a matter of botches by individuals who were properly doing their jobs that day, as Secretary Austin indicates, but of gross failures within the system, human and technological, that have been routinely accepted. If this happens when the system is working as it should, then it is not a problem that can be fixed short of shutting down the weaponized drone program altogether.”“It is also shocking that the U.S. government has still not enabled the Ahmadi family to come to the U.S. and guaranteed them reparations,” Mottern said. BanKillerDrones has called on the U.S. government to compensate the family $3 million for each family member killed, based on the $3 million that the U.S. gave to the family of Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian citizen killed in a mistaken U.S. drone attack in Pakistan in 2015.

BanKillerDrones.org is working to achieve an international treaty banning weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance.

Contact: Kathy Kelly, kathy.vcnv@gmail.com

Nick Mottern, nickmottern@gmail.com
Brian Terrell, brian1956Terrell@gmail.com

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