Archive for category: Imperialism

In an interview published by Sputnik, Juan Ramón Quintana, Bolivia’s former minister of the Presidency, told journalist Karen Méndez Loffredo that ”we [in Latin America] are witnessing new forms of United States directed coups,” which include methods like the hiring of mercenaries from private security companies for the purpose of carrying out assassinations of political leaders.

Quintana stated that ”the right wing in Latin America has paved the way for US interventionism” and emphasized that, regardless of who is in the White House, the objective of the United States in Latin America remains the same: ”to maintain territorial, political, and ideological tutelage” over the region.

KML: Bolivia has presented evidence about the military support that the then governments of Argentina and Ecuador provided to the coup plotters in Bolivia and its use in the subsequent repression against the Bolivian people. Were these separate unilateral actions by each government or were they coordinated?

JRQ: My understanding is that the coup d’état in Bolivia had been plotted by an extra-regional entity with the participation of countries in the region, and also with the support and interference from the allies of the European Union and some of the diplomatic representatives of the European Union, and, of course, with the participation of other countries such as the United Kingdom.

This has been, atypically or unprecedentedly, a coup d’état that was attended by a right-wing international political community, obviously allied with Washington, and its fundamental matrix was the OAS, with the aid of the most prominent members of the OAS political right like Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile and, of course, Paraguay. Each one of these countries had its quota not only in support the coup, but also for the continuation of the coup regime. But all of this, I insist, was directed and commanded by extra-regional entities and—of course, how could it be otherwise—by military organizations and institutions in charge of the geographical control of Latin America and the Caribbean. I am referring specifically to the Southern Command.

There is a lot of evidence of the participation of countries of the region having pro-US ideological affiliation in the coup, such as the former government of Argentina with its shipment of anti-riot equipment and materials, lethal weapons and highly trained police teams, not for the control of mobs or civil disturbances, but teams trained for much more complex and specialized situations, like conflict management. These two instances of evidence, that of Ecuador and that of the government of Mauricio Macri of Argentina, certify a regional intervention against a legally constituted government, that of Evo Morales.

KML: Former President Evo Morales has recently denounced that a Plan Condor 2 is now underway, again under the direction of the United States. How do you see this new scenario in Latin America and what role may the US be playing?

JRQ: Evo’s statement is correct and it is based in historical facts. In Latin America and the Caribbean there has not been a historical disengagement from the use of coups d’état. Coups have been practically the main political and ideological tool used by the United States since the second half of the twentieth century, and they have positioned the United States at the center of all the covert operations stemming from regime change policies since the time of the war on communism. In other words, the Cold War was one of the bloodiest stages during which the United States destroyed progressive, left-wing, nationalist governments, starting with Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Víctor Paz Estenssoro [Bolivia] in 1964, João Goulart in Brazil [1964] and other progressive governments, which were overthrown by military coups led, commanded, organized and financed by the US and its arms the CIA, Southern Command, USAID and other US agencies.

These coups, used during the US war on communism, have now been rebuilt and reconfigured in their application against progressive governments. Therefore, there is a historical and political continuity of this hermeneutics of overthrowing governments that defend their national sovereignty, that recover the sovereignty of their natural resources, that recover national territory; and, since the early years of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing new putschist forms; we are witnessing a neo-coup cycle with diverse coup strategies, but whose objective remains the same: to maintain territorial, political, and ideological tutelage from Washington over Latin America.

The United States has not discarded the Monroe Doctrine, it has not discarded its philosophy of imperial domination, of believing itself superior, of considering that it is a nation that guides the destiny of the world; nor has it discarded its policy of considering Latin America as its backyard. Though Kerry, during the Obama administration, said that Latin America was no longer considered the backyard of the United States, this backyard policy towards Latin America was ratified by Mike Pompeo, who was Donald Trump’s secretary of state.

Today that policy, those three axes that guide US foreign and security policy on Latin America, have not changed at all. What is changing, simply put, is the form and the appearance of that policy, something that is characteristic of the Democratic Party.

Do not forget that it was during the Obama administration that most of the coups in the twenty-first century were executed. Might I remind you of the coup against the President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya in 2009, the coup against President Rafael Correa in 2010, the coup against President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012, and the coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016, all under President Obama.

The traces left behind are too obvious, a continuous line of coups d’état from the 1950s to the present day. You simply have to count the coups and to try and unravel the modalities of those coups.

KML: But some people had assured that with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, new times would come. What do you think of this?

JRQ: I think that this is actually a ratification of Democratic Party policy. The policy of the US Democratic Party is the same: it shows a different appearance, public diplomacy, colloquial language, a frank, benevolent gesture, but, in reality, it is the same imperial policy, which is the policy of Trump, Bush, Reagan or Nixon. That has not changed, because we are not talking about democratic governments in the United States, we are talking about an imperial government, an imperial presidency behind which is the military industrial complex. There are financial entities, large energy companies, large arms production companies—fundamentally linked to the extraction of natural resources.

Therefore, Biden has not changed Donald Trump’s policy at all. Today the same unilateral sanction policies are still being applied against Venezuela; today a change of government is being promoted in Cuba, openly financed though USAID resources; today it [the US] is trying to apply a regime change policy in Nicaragua; and it is continues to harass Luis Arce’s government that won with 55% of the vote. This is not going to change, and, most certainly, the nefarious hand of the US is trying to influence events in Peru, as it is surely doing in the case of the Constituent Assembly in Chile. What is happening is that, if we lose ourselves in the seemingly benevolent messages of apparent friendship [from the Democratic Party], we will lose our historical perspective. History is telling us categorically that the US, whether it is with Obama, Bush, Trump or Biden is still going to continue to apply a hostile policy against Latin America, beyond the naivety of political analysis.

From my perspective, Washington is waging a permanent war against Latin America because today Latin America is fundamentally in a geopolitical dispute since the emergence of powers such as Russia and China and, therefore, there is a gravitating dispute in the field of geopolitics and, within this context, what the United States is doing today is what it has customarily done to keep us subjected as its backyard.

KML: What is your analysis of the situation in the region after the assassination of the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, in which more than 20 Colombian nationals were involved, several of them retired soldiers of the Colombian Army, and two Americans?

JRQ: I am very concerned about the assassination of President Moïse in Haiti. I am, likewise, concerned about the method that has been used for the assassination of a president of a Caribbean nation. I am concerned not only with the assassination, but with the cruelty with which he has been assassinated, the manner and, fundamentally, the actors of this vile crime. I am particularly concerned with these nefarious criminal characters, like these former Colombian soldiers.

I have the impression that a sinister shadow is beginning to emerge over Latin America and the Caribbean, linked to the privatization of conflicts, the privatization of war, and this is what has happened in Haiti; this is what has been occurring in Latin America, particularly in Colombia. And it is in Colombia where this experiment is being carried out, with the recruitment of mercenaries, and of members of military and police who become mercenaries at the service of private security companies based in the United States. There is an extremely dangerous trend towards the employment of these private companies for strategic political purposes, as was the case in Haiti.

Then, from a historical perspective, it is important to remember that this is not something new. Let me remind you of the recruitment of Central American mercenaries and also Cuban ones, for the invasion of Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs] in 1961. This same method of training mercenaries was utilized in civil conflicts in Central America, as in the case of the Contras to overthrow the government of the Sandinista National Liberation Front [FSLN] in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Those mercenaries were financed by the US government, and then that great international scandal of the Iran-Contra arms sale was uncovered, which was under the command of a US colonel, Oliver North. Therefore, there is an extremely dangerous precedent in the Central American wars themselves.

We must also remember what has happened in Bolivia, the revelations that The Intercept has made regarding former de facto minister, Luis Fernando López, and his intention to hire mercenaries in Miami to carry out a second coup after the victory of Luis Arce and MAS with 55% of the votes. I believe that these new methods of intervention against legally constituted governments should vehemently draw our attention, and also the dark role played by the military or police forces that have been trained by Americans, whether in Colombia, Peru or Honduras. New forms of intervention are being created that are not just coups, but new forms of intervention to overthrow governments or to carry out terrible crimes, such as assassinations.

KML: A few days before the assassination of the president of Haiti, the heads of the CIA and the Southern Command visited Colombia. The CIA director was also in Brazil and, according to Bolsonaro, they talked about Bolivia, Venezuela, and Argentina. What do you think these people were looking for in Colombia and Brazil? What should we expect?

JRQ: I have the impression that, after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, we are experiencing a phase of limitless militarization of the United States foreign policy. In the name of the war on terror, in the name of the war against drug trafficking, in the name of the alleged fight against corruption and the promotion of democracy, absolutely undemocratic practices are being carried out which violate sovereignty of states, which violate the Vienna Convention and interfere in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

By the way, these practices not only depend on the strategic interest of the United States, but also on the political will of right-wing governments that unseemly accept this explicit interference in their countries. Such governments, I insist, are of right-wing ideological affiliation, as in the case of Bolsonaro, who has no qualms about US intelligence services replacing Brazilian intelligence services. Bolsonaro has no qualms about the Amazon being internationalized; he has no qualms that the CIA and the FBI operate with the Attorney General or that these foreign institutions influence judicial decisions.

In other words, Bolsonaro has practically destroyed the bare minimum sovereignty of the Brazilian people. The same happened with Macri, who facilitated a shameful interference by the Southern Command in Argentina, or the case of Ecuador, which has been such a pathetic case with the restitution of the island of Galapagos as a Southern Command military base used for regional aerial surveillance which was the result of submission to the International Monetary Fund, submission to the domination of the Southern Command. Or the case of Peru, where a profound crisis has been felt, practically, for the last ten years and which has become a no man’s land and, therefore, a site of very vigorous presence of US agencies—the presence of the Southern Command via police training centers and other facilities granted by the Peruvian governments to the Southern Command and the United States.

In conclusion, the right-wing governments in Latin America have paved the way for US intervention simply for the sake of preserving their political power and thus have sacrificed the sovereignty of their nations. What right-wing political forces have done in Latin America in the last decade has been to promote US interference in different State spheres: in the justice system, in the police, in the armed forces and even in entities as important as parliaments.

Consequently, today, right-wing political forces have become a real threat to State sovereignty and present a great danger of capitulation of States in regard to the control of natural resources and, of course, a great threat for popular movements that legally and legitimately protest for their rights.

And, obviously, it is also necessary to remain alert of the behavior of right-wing governments in Latin America that have pushed back socially minded policies. There has been a reconversion of policies, fundamentally social policies that expand human and social rights. Now there is a decline in the rights that had been achieved during progressive governments, as in the case of Correa in Ecuador, Néstor and Cristina in Argentina or Lula in Brazil. This is a dangerous setback that is severely damaging the fabric of our societies and, therefore, there is a climate of upheaval.

Of course, this, in turn, has had its contrary political effects, which is that, every day, societies are becoming more aware of their rights and, therefore, a much more intense, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist awareness and commitment has emerged. As we become more and more acquainted with the profile of right-wing political forces, our progressive forces also multiply their efforts to resist occupation of the State by right-wing forces.

Featured image: Juan Ramón Quintana, former minister of the Presidency of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, in an interview with Sputnik.

(Portal Alba) by Karen Méndez Loffredo

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/GMS/SC

Joseph Robinette Biden squints into the sun, having forgotten his signature aviator sunglasses

Shortly after Joe Biden took office, the president delivered a speech at the U.S. Department of State, declaring, “I want the world to hear today: America is back…. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy…. By leading with diplomacy, we must also mean engaging our adversaries and our competitors diplomatically, where it’s in our interest, and advance the security of the American people.”

Instead of de-escalation with China, we are witnessing an enormous U.S. military buildup through massive military exercises in the Pacific.

UF-15E Strike Eagles arrive in support of #PacificIron 2021 at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. #PresenceMatters pic.twitter.com/dhZ5mNkqXw

— U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (@INDOPACOM) July 16, 2021

A huge, 17,000 personnel, U.S. military land exercise named Talisman Sabre is now going on in Australia, causing much concern to many people there. Talisman Sabre 2021 involves practice for amphibious assaults, movement of heavy vehicles, use of live ammunition, and the use of U.S. nuclear-powered and nuclear-weapon-capable vessels.

Annette Brownlie, chairperson of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network said:

Talisman Sabre is a threat to the [Great Barrier] reef and to the environment…. The objective of Talisman Sabre is to integrate the Australian military further into the U.S. military, which is ranked among the world’s worst polluters and is the world’s greatest organizational consumer of oil…. Let us not forget that during Talisman Sabre in 2013, the U.S. jettisoned four unarmed bombs on the Great Barrier Reef when they had difficulty dropping them on their intended target, Townshend Island.

Additionally, in mid-July, 25 F-22 stealth jet fighters (a remarkable number), 10 F-15 E Strike Eagles and two C-130J cargo planes have flown into Guam, a U.S. territory, and Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas, one of two U.S. commonwealths, as a part of “Pacific Iron 2021.” This maneuver is described by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser newspaper as a key part of the “kick down the door” force for a possible conflict with China. Retired Lt. General Dan Leaf, a former deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, said he was not aware of a previous exercise using this many F-22s.

The Pacific Air Force command in Honolulu said that Iron Pacific 2021 will have more than 35 aircraft and 800 personnel. They will have operations at three airports on Guam and one airport on Tinian, 100 miles north of Guam. U.S. aircraft that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago flew from Tinian. Runways on Tinian, had fallen in disrepair until recently when major U.S. Air Force construction began to create an alternate air base to Guam.

Currently, Guam is also the site of the U.S. Army’s land war maneuvers called Forager 2021. About 4,000 U.S. personnel from the U.S. Army’s First Corps will be involved in various aspects of an airborne operation with the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force and 1st Special Forces Group, and an Apache attack helicopter live fire exercise. The war maneuvers also include eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles called Strykers; lightweight, highly mobile, easily transportable surface-to-air missile fire unit with eight Stinger missiles in two missile pods named Avengers; and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems. Forager 2021 tests the Army’s capability to rapidly deploy personnel and equipment in order to counter enemy forces.

Activists in Guam are mobilizing against the military buildup. Lisa Natividad, professor of social work at the University of Guam and primary convener of the Guahan Coalition for Peace and Justice, told Truthout that the change has been stark: “Our concrete houses have been shaken from the military maneuvers by aircraft we have never seen before.”

Natividad described Guam’s vulnerability as a staging ground for U.S. military exercises.

“Guam is being overwhelmed by the number of U.S. military war maneuvers that are taking place on our land, ocean and airspace,” Natividad said. “Military maneuvers are so frequent that they’re ongoing and continuous. These exercises take place on Guam and throughout the Mariana Islands and in civilian spaces like the airport and hospitals. The destruction of our land for the construction and expansion of military bases is heartbreaking, and underscores how we as a U.S. territory truly have no political rights or voice to make decisions in our own homeland.”

According to The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the U.S. Army has been moving Patriot batteries around the Pacific in a message to China, with upcoming plans to test the system in Hawaii. “Next month we are moving another (Patriot battery) from Okinawa to Hawaii for another exercise,” said Army Col. Matt Dalton. “We are trying to demonstrate our ability to quickly move our units around the Indo-Pacific to be able to counter any threat that is out there (with) our ability to move to different locations quickly, set up and establish defense of a particular asset.”

So much for the highly touted diplomacy in the Biden administration.

Military Ships Vie for Space in a Crowded South China Sea

These U.S. military forces come in addition to the two dozen ships in the U.S., French, Dutch, Japanese, South Korean and Australian armada that are patrolling the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits in “Freedom of Navigation” maneuvers. The U.S. aircraft carrier USS America and its numerous security vessels steaming in close proximity make for a crowded South China Sea. In July 2021, the naval exercise Pacific Vanguard includes U.S. Australian, Japanese and South Korean ships.

With the “Western” armada in the waters off China, the Chinese navy has added its vessels to the mix. The Trump administration increased tensions with China by sending the highest-ranking U.S. officials in over 40 years to Taiwan, and the Chinese government responded with the largest naval exercises in its history and sent numerous flights of up to 28 aircraft to the edge of Taiwan’s air defense zone.

Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of Pacific Air Forces with headquarters at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, described a new operational strategy called “agile combat environment” (ACE), of disbursing air assets to many small locations and spokes “so that we would be moving between the hubs and spokes multiple times per day, multiple times per week. Creating a targeting problem for an adversary that would have to target many locations instead of one or two large bases, dilutes the firepower the adversary can put on any one location.”

A Pacific Air Force spokesperson said the goal is to create targeting challenges for enemy hypersonic, ballistic and long-range cruise missile threats, thereby increasing survivability for U.S. forces by having outposts on small islands where refueling of aircraft can take place instead of relying on large bases, which are easily identified targets.

More Congressional Funding for the Pacific Region

In addition to the military war maneuvers, the House Appropriations Committee of the U.S. Congress recently advanced the 2022 defense budget that includes $2.2 billion for the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard as a part of the 20-year, $21 billion U.S. Navy project to upgrade four government-operated shipyards.

The defense appropriation bill includes $62.4 million for a missile defense system for Guam against ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles. A letter from a bipartisan congressional group had requested $350 million for the Guam defense system. Admiral Phil Davidson, the former chief of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, requested $4.68 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative for fiscal year 2022.

In one of the most controversial budget allocations, despite the Pentagon zeroing out funding requests from the Hawaii congressional delegation for a Homeland Defense Radar (indicating that the U.S. military does not want the radar), the appropriations committee, acting on a radar request from the Hawaii delegation, allocated $75 million. The radar is intended to track North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles, but the Department of Defense shelved the Homeland Radar and a separate radar as they could not track hypersonic missiles, reviving a focus on space-based sensors to identify these threats.

Due to residents’ formidable opposition to the radar on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the Defense Missile Agency is now looking at the Barking Sands Missile Test Facility, located on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, for the site of the massive 85-foot-tall structure sitting atop a 25-foot foundation. Yet opposition on Kauai, too, is growing as the scale of the project becomes clearer. Questions are mounting about whether Kauai’s infrastructure, roads and bridges can handle the heavy equipment and massive amount of concrete needed to construct the radar. Local officials are concerned about housing the hundreds of new employees on an island that already has chronic housing shortages and a homeless population that has an encampment just outside the fence of Barking Sands.

Added to those issues is the disturbing Notice to Airmen, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration about “electromagnetic radiation continuously existing at the Pacific Missile Range Facility (on the island of Kauai) from June 1, 2021, to June 1, 2022.” The notice, which was recently discovered by local citizens, states that, “Aircraft within the above airspace will be exposed to direct radiation which may produce harmful effects to personnel and equipment.”

There has been no response to inquiries from local citizens or local news outlets from the U.S. Navy Public Affairs office, which handles inquiries for the Pacific Missile Range Facility about the source of the electromagnetic radiation and why the public was not notified of this dangerous situation.

Where Is U.S. Diplomacy in the Pacific?

In March 2021, the first face-to-face meeting between the Biden administration and Chinese officials got off to a heated start in Anchorage, Alaska. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement that the Biden administration would bring up “deep concerns” about some of China’s actions around the world was met with immediate pushback from Chinese counterparts, sparking an unusually public exchange of diplomatic barbs.

Four months later, not much has changed on the diplomatic front. On July 11, Blinken called on China to stop its “provocative behavior” in the South China Sea. Blinken followed on July 13, in his first meeting with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) foreign ministers and on the fifth anniversary of a ruling by an arbitration tribunal rejecting China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, with a statement that the United States stands with Southeast Asian countries and rejects China’s unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea. China does not accept the arbitration ruling, and claims much of the waters within a so-called Nine Dash Line, which is also contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

As more U.S. funding is allocated toward military buildup in the Pacific, those of us who oppose war, militarism and imperialism must be vocal in our concerns to the Biden administration, as well as our congressional delegations who vote for military instead of peaceful resolutions of economic and political disputes in the region.

Beijing may lack the ambition needed to develop a global military presence that rivals the US

From its headquarters just blocks from the White House, a small, high-powered team of former ambassadors, lawyers, and Obama appointees has spent the past few years solving problems for the world’s biggest companies.

Less than six months into the Biden administration, more than 15 consultants from the firm WestExec Advisors have fanned out across the White House, its foreign policy apparatus, and its law enforcement institutions. Five, some of whom already have jobs with the administration, have been nominated for high-ranking posts, and four others served on the Biden-Harris transition team. Even by Washington standards, it’s a remarkable march through the revolving door, especially for a firm that only launched in 2017. The pipeline has produced a dominance of WestExec alums throughout the administration, installed in senior roles as influential as director of national intelligence and secretary of state. WestExec clients, meanwhile, have controversial interests in tech and defense that intersect with the policies their former consultants are now in a position to set and execute.

The arrival of each new WestExec adviser at the administration has been met with varying degrees of press coverage — headlines for the secretary of state, blurbs in trade publications for the head of cybersecurity — but the creeping monopolization of foreign policymaking by a single boutique consulting firm has gone largely unnoticed. The insularity of this network of policymakers poses concerns about the potential for groupthink, conflicts of interest, and what can only be called, however oxymoronically, legalized corruption.

“The private sector can in essence co-opt the public sector.”

WestExec does not affirmatively share its clients, and public financial disclosure forms only offer broad outlines. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at the University of Washington in St. Louis, says that government ethics laws written decades ago aren’t equipped to handle a situation in which a single firm launches 15 senior officials. “Yes, they’re employed by the government, I’ll grant you that. But are they actually working for the American people or not? Where does their loyalty lie?” said Clark. “The private sector can in essence co-opt the public sector.”

“These White House officials are experienced government leaders whose prior private sector experience is part of a broad and diverse skill set they bring to government service,” said a White House spokesperson in a statement. WestExec did not reply to a detailed list of questions for this story.

The firm describes one of its chief selling points as its “unparalleled geopolitical risk analysis,” now confirmed by the saturation of its employees in positions of power. WestExec has also succeeded in getting tech startups into defense contracts and helped defense corporations modernize with tech; it worked to help multinational companies break into China. One of its collaborators is the defense-centered investment group Pine Island Capital Partners, which launched a SPAC, or “blank check” company,” last year. Tony Blinken advised Pine Island and was a part owner. (Michèle Flournoy, another WestExec co-founder, had her nomination to be secretary of defense nixed. President Joe Biden instead nominated Lloyd Austin, himself a former Pine Island partner but not a WestExec consultant.)

What makes WestExec “boutique” is the promise that its executives would have face time with its seasoned policymakers. “We felt other firms brought people in for big names and never got to see the big names,” said one WestExec co-founder in 2020. “Tony is on client calls.”

The WestExec to Biden administration pipeline, part one.

Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Blinken, now secretary of state, advised household names like telecommunications giant AT&T, defense contractor Boeing, shipping magnate FedEx, and the media company Discovery as a WestExec founding partner. He worked for Big Tech pillars Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Uber. He helped niche companies like speakers bureau GLG, art seller Sotheby’s, and biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Blinken also lists clients that are global investment firms and asset managers, like Blackstone, Lazard, Royal Bank of Canada, and the multinational conglomerate SoftBank — which does extensive business with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He even advised the consulting group McKinsey & Company. Though Blinken left WestExec in July 2020 — after The American Prospect inquired about the relationship — each of these businesses has an international profile that may impact his calculations as he implements Biden’s foreign policy.

Blinken also brought several of his key staff members at the State Department with him from WestExec. His senior adviser Julianne Smith, who listed Boeing and SoftBank as clients, earned $34,000 as a WestExec consultant while holding down a full-time role at the think tank German Marshall Fund. Smith has been nominated to be permanent representative to NATO. (Blinken also brought WestExec executive assistant Sarah McCool to the State Department as his director of scheduling.) Barbara Leaf, a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, worked for the firm and advised the National Basketball Association. She went on to serve as Biden’s senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. Leaf awaits a vote to be the State Department’s assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs. Meanwhile, consultant Daniel B. Shapiro, Obama’s ambassador to Israel and a “very busy” early member of the firm, according to his colleague, is being floated as a Middle East envoy. The Prospect revealed last summer that one of WestExec’s clients was Windward, an Israeli artificial intelligence company that specializes in ship tracking.

The firm also provided a comfortable place for Biden’s most powerful intelligence chiefs to wait out the Trump administration. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines had her name scrubbed from WestExec’s website early on, but she worked with the firm from October 2017 to July 2020, when she joined Biden’s transition team as foreign policy lead. According to a questionnaire completed before her confirmation hearing, she delivered “strategic advice” on “cyber norms; national security threats; and testing, evaluation, validation and verification of machine learning systems by the Department of Defense” to clients like Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Open Philanthropy. Deputy Director of the CIA David S. Cohen was an early member of WestExec’s “core team” alongside Haines and Blinken. But it’s impossible to know who his clients were, because an exemption for the spy agencies’ officials means that his disclosure is not publicly available.

“That exempts them from public accountability,” said Clark, the ethics expert at Washington University, “and that’s a problem because we can’t necessarily rely on internal controls and external, public disclosure.” A CIA spokesperson declined to share the companies Cohen worked for at WestExec.

Then there’s Chris Inglis, who the Senate recently approved as national cyber director. He earned $15,000 from the firm and worked for internet security outfit CrowdStrike and email encryption company Virtru.

Since its founding in 2017, WestExec’s focus has been to enhance the capabilities of defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. It partners with the Silicon Valley venture firm Ridgeline, which describes itself as “mission-driven” — meaning that unlike some tech investors, which avoid working with the military, Ridgeline seeks out military products. Both Cohen and Inglis appeared on Ridgeline’s website, and through that partnership, Blinken invested in the venture group’s many portfolio companies. The obscure startups have kooky names (Agolo, Doodle, Wallaroo, etc.) but are innovating advanced technologies like drones, artificial intelligence, and robots. The alumni of WestExec are deeply engaged in emerging tech, which could lead to conflicts of interest as they take on policymaking roles that affect the contracts the government greenlights.

One of the administration’s most visible faces also worked at the firm. Jen Psaki, now the White House press secretary, was a senior adviser to WestExec, where she did crisis communications for the Israeli facial recognition software company AnyVision and advised the nonprofit Spirit of America.

The WestExec to Biden administration pipeline, part two. Not pictured: senior adviser to the domestic policy adviser Erin Pelton; director of scheduling for the secretary of state Sarah McCool; nominee for assistant secretary of defense Celeste Wallander; Biden-Harris transition team advisers Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Cristina Killingsworth, Jay Shambaugh, and Puneet Talwar; deputy director for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission John Costello; and vice chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Robert O. Work.

Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

As companies faced the Covid-19 pandemic’s massive challenges, Lisa Monaco joined Blinken on client calls. As a WestExec adviser, she worked for Boeing and SoftBank. Now Monaco is the U.S. deputy attorney general. Before Matt Olsen earned millions of dollars as a senior official at Uber, he worked early on as a principal for the firm. Biden has nominated Olsen to be assistant attorney general in the National Security Division.

Ely Ratner is developing China policy for the Defense Department as assistant secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs. At WestExec, according to his Office of Government Ethics forms, “Billable hours were for background white papers without identified clients and most income was passive retainer.” Though he only earned $11,450 at WestExec, he did so while making more than $400,000 at the think tank Center for a New American Security.

Gabrielle Chefitz, a senior associate of WestExec, joined the Pentagon as special assistant to the under secretary of defense for policy. In June, Biden nominated WestExec senior adviser Celeste Wallander to be assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

WestExec’s consultants are so connected and pedigreed that they often hold down multiple jobs, appointments, and titles. That’s how someone like Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former WestExec senior adviser, can join the Treasury Department as a senior official without much notice. At the end of May, Biden nominated Rosenberg to be Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorism financing. In her LinkedIn profile, she says she has managed federal initiatives to “promote financial transparency.” Her role at WestExec fell off the bio that the White House released publicizing the nomination.

The U.S. Agency for International Development administrator’s office is also full of the firm’s consultants. Colin Thomas-Jensen “advised WestExec and its clients on due diligence and navigating political risk in Sub-Saharan Africa,” and those clients included Boeing, SoftBank, and Delta Capital Management, a venture capital firm that specializes in financing litigation. In April, Thomas-Jensen joined USAID as national security director. That month, WestExec’s Latin America expert Michael Camilleri began serving as senior adviser to Administrator Samantha Power and as executive director of the agency’s Northern Triangle Task Force. As a WestExec consultant, he advised Blackstone, SoftBank, the Intel founder’s multibillion-dollar nonprofit Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the mineral extraction company Rio Tinto.

And it’s not just international policy that will be shaped by the firm. Erin Pelton, who works in the White House as a senior adviser on domestic policy, provided advisory services to WestExec. And the nominee to be the Department of Commerce’s assistant secretary for industry and analysis, Grant Harris, has a connection to the firm. His personal consulting firm Connect Frontier, which advises companies and organizations working in developing markets, hired WestExec.

Even Bidenworld’s backbenchers are entangled in the firm. The Biden-Harris transition team was advised by WestExec consultants Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Puneet Talwar, Jay Shambaugh, and Cristina Killingsworth. Further, the firm’s members oversee influential nonpartisan federal commissions: Robert O. Work at the National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence and John Costello at the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

“West Exec’s advisors have worked together at the highest levels of government, navigating and anticipating the impact of international crises on decision making — we can provide the same insights and strategies to business leaders around the world,” Blinken said in an early pamphlet advertising the firm.

A half-year after Blinken’s return to government, the pamphlet is still featured on WestExec co-founder and managing partner Nitin Chadda’s LinkedIn profile. It’s a reminder to potential clients about the firm’s enduring proximity to power.

The post Meet the Consulting Firm That’s Staffing the Biden Administration appeared first on The Intercept.

Progress in developing digital renminbi aids quest to undermine global order based on US currency

In 2021, too, the war in Kurdistan has a great impact on the struggle for an ecological society there. So we need to take a closer look at how these two issues relate to each other and what an ecological stance can look like in times of war. To that end, Make Rojava Green Again conducted an interview with Kamuran Akın from Humboldt University in Berlin.

Would you briefly introduce yourself and explain how you came to deal with the topic of “ecology and war”?

My name is Kamuran Akın, I am a Kurdish political refugee and activist scholar in Berlin. I am doing my PhD at Humboldt University and writing my thesis on the colonial rule of the Turkish state in North Kurdistan. If we only look at the recent history of the Kurds, there has been a war in North Kurdistan for 40 years. But if you look at the history of the Kurds, you can say that this state of war or struggle for existence of the Kurds has actually been going on for 100 years. And I am investigating the destructive effects of this colonial endeavor on the geography and ecology of North Kurdistan through the HPP (Hydroelectric Power Plants), Kalekols (military high security checkpoints), and forest fires. So, in a sense, I am examining how Turkish colonialism affects the geography and ecology of North Kurdistan.

Wars can cause severe environmental damage. Throughout history, it has not been uncommon for drinking water to be contaminated, agricultural land to be burned, or soil to be rendered infertile by salinization. Dams and levees have also often been targeted. How do you evaluate the environmental damage caused by the current war operations in Kurdistan?

It is a reality that has been known for centuries that geography is used as an instrument of war, including ecology. If we look at the example of Kurdistan, we see that in the past, for example, in the Kurdish-Alevi province of Dersim, dams were built for the purpose of repression and counterinsurgency, and military outposts were built on the most important hilltops. A similar policy is being implemented today in almost all Kurdish cities under the guise of the security discourse. And in my thesis, I insist that these geopolitical infrastructure projects (such as Hydroelectric Power Plants HPP, Kalekols and also forest fires) are carried out with colonial intention. Today, these geopolitical infrastructure projects not only serve as a security strategy in the war against the guerrilla, but they also mean the irreversible destruction of the geography of Kurdistan as they are still being expanded. We can already foresee the enormous scale of ecological destruction that began immediately after the completion of the Ilısu Dam, which was built in what was the historic Heskîf (Hasankeyf) and the Tigris Valley. According to official documents of some state institutions, many HPPs built in Kurdistan, especially the Ilısu Dam, are considered `security dams`. Under their concept of “security” we can understand that the local residents and the people of the region, who had returned full of hope to their villages that had been burned down in the 1990s, are irrevocably forced to migrate. In the reports published by ecological activists of the Mesopotamian Ecological Movement (MEH-Mezopotamya Ekoloji Hareketi), there is statistical data about the ecological disaster caused by these dam constructions. For example, cutting off the water supply to Rojava in the summer months, discharging dirty sewage into the agricultural areas of Rojava, and siltation of areas are only the most well-known of the ecological war tools used by the Turkish state in recent years. I don’t want to repeat anything, but share some notes from the interviews I did for my PhD thesis. Today, cancer cases are increasing in Dersim due to gold mining activities involving the use of cyanide. The retention of water by weirs and changing the direction of the natural course of rivers, the ambiguity of seasonal transitions due to the effects of the global ecological crisis have caused the degradation of the ecosystem existing in the region and a noticeable decline in biodiversity. Dams, kalekols and security roads built along a line in Şirnex (Şırnak) and Colemêrg (Hakkari) are turning the nature of Kurdistan into a concrete desert. Burning down all the surrounding forest areas to protect the respective Kalekols, tells us the following: The aim of the Turkish state is to use these three interlinked geopolitical measures as a means of ecological warfare to eliminate the possibility of a future life for the Kurds in an autonomous Kurdistan.

How are resources used as weapons today? For example, why is it geostrategically important for NATO to have control over water resources?

In a war situation, weapons can be anything used against an enemy or to gain a strategic, material, or mental advantage by one group, state, or organization over another. Interestingly, the term “weapon” is not formally defined in international law or treaties regulating the use of force. Since the end of the Cold War, researchers have increasingly explored the links between natural resources, security, and conflict. They distinguish several arguments in the literature for possible interactions between violence and natural resources. According to this, the first possibility is that natural resources contribute to the escalation of events and to violent conflicts. Although the biophysical environment is rarely the sole cause of conflict, natural resources may indirectly contribute to the escalation of violence or be part of a broader political strategy. When coupled with political instability, scarce natural resources can fuel conflict over access to shared transboundary resources between competing states, e.g. the Turkish state uses dams to impede the flow of water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to neighboring countries such as Iraq and Syria, using water as a threat. It is worth noting that the main factor behind the desire to establish hegemony over neighboring states with water policy, despite existing international conventions, is the presence of the PKK in the region. A second possibility is that the biophysical environment becomes a direct or indirect target in violent conflicts, either as a weapon, victim, or beneficiary of the conflict. For example, it may be “weaponized” and used by one of the parties to the conflict as a direct means of exerting violence against the opposing party. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a well-known example of a conflict in which water scarcity plays a role and is used by various parties as a means of exerting pressure. If we again take an example from North Kurdistan, as I am investigating in my doctoral thesis, the construction of hydroelectric power plants with the help of water blockage or the burning of forest areas can be shown to be means of war. Even though the occupation of Rojava (West Kurdistan) by the Turkish state is tolerated or ignored by NATO members and European Union member states today, everyone knows the extent of the ecocide taking place there. For example, we learn from reports of the international organizations what kind of war crimes and natural massacres are taking place in Efrîn today. Let me end the answer to your question with a personal remark. There are two well-known reasons for the way NATO members, especially the U.S., seize natural resources in war zones. The first is the war for hegemony they are waging as a continuation of the Cold War against Russia and Iran. Second, there is the support of terrorist organizations such as IS and al-Qaeda, especially in the Middle East and African countries, only to then act as problem solvers to end the destruction wrought by these terrorist organizations and gain control of natural resources. In short, Capitalist Modernity continues to exploit the people of the region so that they continue to be dependant, and it is turning the geography of the Middle East, especially Kurdistan, into a dumping ground by war.

How is the ecological paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement being implemented? And what is war doing to this understanding of ecology? What does self-defense mean in terms of ecology?

The revolution is based on an ecological ethic, and there is a reason for that. The nation-state and Capitalist Modernity have deprived society of its own resources and made it dependent on the state and often on the benevolence of the state. We see, for example, in North Kurdistan, a systematic plunder and genocide of the environment. The attempts of the states to prevent any environmental sustainability in Kurdistan are part of the broader war against the Kurds and their revolution. Indeed, the relationship between capitalist nation-states and the environment is more severe than ever before. We have a global ecological crisis, and states are still thinking about their short-term profit, which is causing the destruction of our environment, but also migration flows, war over natural resources, famines, etc. War means destruction. The ecological paradigm is based on the idea of sustainability despite the problems caused by nation states and war policies. For example, the ecological paradigm wants to find solutions from within society, and develop approaches for society to organize itself to solve problems such as water scarcity, desertification, and dependence on oil production, etc. Resilience and strength comes from within society and its own resources. This is something that the revolution in Rojava has shown. Abdullah Öcalan has stressed many times that one must not wait for mercy from one’s oppressors. One must not demand something from the state when the state is acting as an oppressor. He has emphasized that all solutions to society’s problems lie within society. Rojava is a good example of the fact that self-defense does not only mean taking up arms against the enemy, such as the so-called Islamic State, but that self-defense means being equipped with an ideology that allows one to build one’s own system, find one’s own solutions to the problems, maximize autonomy, and make the political system self-sufficient, resistant to attacks, and a role model for the world and other oppressed people.

Women’s liberation plays a central role in the paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. How is the solution of the ecological question related to women’s liberation?

I am responding to your question as someone who is still going through self-reflections on his own masculinity, so the following can only be read from this perspective and with these limitations. The liberation of women is central to the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s understanding of the liberation of society. Nothing can be regarded separately. Liberation is an organic process and must involve all aspects of life and society. Öcalan refers to women as the first colony and has coined the term “housewife marriage” in which men have systematically deprived women of their freedoms. Again, if we understand nature as a colony, then we see how the liberation of women from patriarchy is similar to the ecological question. In this sense, for example, Jineolojî is an essential component. Even if you have enough organizational and ideological power, it turns out that you are insufficient in defining the sociological foundation if you cannot reflect it in the society. Jineolojî grounds the paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement in a scientific field. She regards science neither as a power nor on a positivist ground, but as a definition of life based on a regime of truth. She does this with serious concerns and honest ambitions. Above all, Jineolojî, born from the struggle against all the destruction caused by the male principle embodied in the male state – the representative of patriarchy – proposes a new model of life under the leadership of women. In this sense, women’s self-decolonization will be a dynamic force in decolonizing all colonial practices, especially ecological destruction, in the geography of Kurdistan. Women’s empowerment and autonomy is also linked to the strengthening of women’s abilities to be self-reliant, financially, socially and environmentally. Currently, we have a great example before us: the armed and political movement of Kurdish women. We have the Rojava Revolution as a great source of inspiration, and there are new life practices that are being promoted by women. In this context, there is the establishment of women’s co-operatives such as Eko-Jin and KED (Woman-Labor-Nature) in North Kurdistan. Or as an example from Rojava: Jinwar, a village built by women for women, including reforestation, planting, irrigation systems and collective principles.

How can the paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement be a solution to this global problem?

Let me try to answer such a seemingly simple but difficult question by standing somewhere between hope and desire, but also with my sympathy for a liberation movement that has high aspirations and its founder as an ideological leader. Against all the creative-destructive policies that capitalist modernity has pursued in its 300-year colonial history, a 45-year-old freedom movement that emerged in a geography like Kurdistan, which is extremely fragmented and oppressed, is challenging this modernity and building Democratic Modernity against it. And it is trying to do so in all areas. This is not a simple task. It is a movement that is fighting and building at the same time. I think that is the difference from classical revolutions. The movement does not say that we will first make a revolution and later build a new life. The paradigm of a self-renewing movement that aims at revolution and sees this goal as a path on which to move forward is attracting attention all over the world today. While a paradigm and an alternative model of life that seek to destroy the entire accumulation of Capitalist Modernity to date is being implemented and further developed in Rojava today, this is fundamentally disapproved of by the capitalist states. While the paradigm of Democratic Modernity is growing stronger and is spreading all over the world, attempts are being made to criminalize it, war is being imported into the geography of Kurdistan, political and ethnic genocides and occupations in Kurdistan are being supported directly or indirectly, and hypocrisy is taking place. To complete my words, maybe we don’t have much time left in such an era of global catastrophe, now we should abandon the critical revolutionary approach and see our shortcomings and accelerate the constructive revolutionary approach by taking care not to repeat old mistakes while building the alternative. In the effort to increase the proportion of freedom in society, we must constantly realize our own alternative and ensure the victory of freedom by having a strong aspiration. The despotic and destructive policies of the fascist and bourgeois governments, which have increased all over the world in recent years, require a hard struggle of all other social movements, especially of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. The only alternative against this colonial order is the adoption and promotion of the methods and means of a continuous struggle for the construction of a new life, as well as the struggle against the destruction by capitalism.

This article was first published in the May/June 2021 edition of the Kurdistan Report.

One critic of the weapons industry called it “another example of how our system for awarding money to contractors is often pay-to-play.”

By Steve Lalla – Jun 20, 2021

On June 18, 1954, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected progressive president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz. It marked the first known coup in Latin America successfully executed by the US Central Intelligence Agency, which was founded in 1947.

The US-backed dictator Ubico had been unseated by the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944 and the president of Guatemala immediately prior to Árbenz, Juan José Arévalo, was no stranger to coup attempts either, having survived 25 of them during his four-year term.¹ Arévalo was the country’s first democratically elected president. Fearing for his life, he decided not to run again in 1951, and passed the progressive mantle to his successor, Jacobo Árbenz.

Among Árbenz’s crimes against imperialism:

• Rose to power through electoral process, in which he defeated the next closest candidate by over 50%. Politicians with great popular support are always dangerous to imperialism.

• Implemented policy of social reforms such as permitting workers to form unions, including workers of the US-owned United Fruit Co.; certified numerous political parties; allowed public political debate.

• Was friends with communists including José Manuel Fortuny of the Guatemalan Party of Labor, Árbenz’s agricultural secretary.

• Perhaps Árbenz’s most unforgivable crime against imperialism was passing an agrarian reform law under which uncultivated land was expropriated and redistributed to poor farmers and rural populations, a policy which benefited 500,000 Guatemalans, mostly Indigenous Mayans, whose ancestors had been dispossessed by colonialism and Spanish and US imperialism. In 1954 the population of Guatemala was only three million.

Some of these uncultivated lands (over 450,000 acres) belonged to the United Fruit Co., employer of the Dulles brothers of CIA fame. In total, 1.4 million acres of land were expropriated and redistributed beginning in 1951. It should be noted that the landholders were compensated — United Fruit Co. was offered twice what it had paid for the land. The lawyer who had negotiated the acquisition of massive tracts of land in Guatemala by United Fruit Co. was John Foster Dulles. From 1953–1959, he also happened to be US Secretary of State and his brother, Allen Dulles, was CIA director from 1953–1961 and had also worked as a lawyer for United Fruit Co.

After the law went through in June, 1951, Washington DC-based World Bank turned on Guatemala and began to lock them out of the international economic system.

Jacobo Árbenz “was a committed defender of the Indigenous who constituted 70% of the Guatemalan population and who had been completely excluded from society,” wrote Telesur in 2020. “In 1954, he expropriated the land of the US company United Fruit and instituted a modest tax on banana exports to finance social programs. This redistribution of any of the profits of the lucrative banana trade was the tipping point for the CIA, which had built an anti-communist base in Guatemala, to have an excuse to have Árbenz’s government overthrown. It marked the first direct intervention by the CIA in Latin America.”²

US presidents authorized both Operation PB Fortune, by Truman in 1952, and Operation PB Success, by Eisenhower in 1953.

After the US cut off Guatemala’s access to the World Bank in 1951, and blocked the country’s purchases of arms from the US or its allies, Guatemala made commercial and overtures to the Communist bloc. This of course resulted in US media painting Guatemala as a “communist beachhead in the Americas.”

A wave of anti-communist propaganda softened the ground for a military invasion of the country carried out by US-financed and trained paramilitaries and mercenaries. About 500 CIA-trained soldiers, led by the Guatemalan proxy Colonel Castillo Armas, and backed by US-supplied fighter jets, invaded from El Salvador and Honduras. Compliant media in the region, including the CIA’s Voice of Liberation radio station (akin to today’s Voice of America, broadcast around the world in 46 languages) then presented the military victory of Castillo Armas as a fait accompli. In order to avoid bloodshed Árbenz resigned and went into exile — similar to Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2019 — thus completing the military coup.

These events marked a Latin American revolutionary who happened to be in Guatemala at the time.

“The last Latin American revolutionary democracy — that of Jacobo Árbenz — failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the United States,” said Che Guevara of his experience. “Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company.”³

Árbenz’s overthrow confirmed Guevara’s distrust of US imperialism and helped convince him that the monster to the north would try to destroy any government of the region that tried to rectify inequality, alleviate poverty, redistribute land equitably, or implement socialist reforms. Thus, Guevara’s belief that a civic-military union was the only way to defend revolutionary gains made by a sovereign nation.

After the overthrow of Árbenz, the progressive reforms were annulled. Guatemala was plunged into a civil war that lasted for more than 35 years. The puppet dictatorship of the US war pigs went on a killing spree to expunge all progressive or collective initiative from the tiny Central American country. About 200,000 Indigenous peoples, leftists and revolutionaries were killed or disappeared, and over 1.5 million Guatemalans were displaced from their land and homes. Over 600 Indigenous villages were wiped off the map by the army.

Indigenous people and those opposing the dictatorship were massacred by a succession of US-backed military regimes armed, funded, supported, and trained by the US war pigs and its military ally, the apartheid state of isn’t-real. The United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification concluded in 1999 that their actions constituted genocide.

Notes

1. Streeter, Stephen M. (2000). Managing the counterrevolution : the United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies.

2. Telesur, September 14, 2020. [link]

3. Kellner, Douglas (1989). Ernesto “Che” Guevara (World Leaders Past & Present). Chelsea House Publishers, from Wikipedia [link]

Featured image: Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala’s second democratically elected president

(Medium)

The U.S. is far and away the single most egregious offender in the world on this front, which is largely why it is perceived around the world as a greater threat to democracy than any other government.

June 18, 2021 | Newswire

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