weapons and war « nuclear-news

Ukrainian drones injure Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant workers, say Russian-backed officials

By Reuters, July 4, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-drones-injure-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-workers-say-russian-2024-07-03/—

MOSCOW, July 3 (Reuters) – A Ukrainian drone attack injured eight workers from the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and left a nearby town largely without power and water, Russian-backed officials said on Wednesday.

In a statement on Telegram, the plant’s management said that eight staff had been injured during an attack by three Ukrainian kamikaze drones on an electricity substation near the plant in south-eastern Ukraine.

It said all of the injured workers were receiving medical treatment.

Reuters was not able to independently confirm what had happened and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Eduard Senovoz, the Russian-installed mayor of the nearby city of Enerhodar where the plant’s workers live, said in a statement that the attack had left most of the city without power and water.

The attack was the third of its kind within two weeks, he said, adding that work was underway to repair the damage to the substation.

Alexei Likhachev, director general of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, said the attack was the first time that the power plant’s workers had been deliberately put in danger.

In comments to Russian state TV channels, Likhachev called on the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to assess what had happened.

“IAEA head Rafael Grossi has repeatedly said that the activities of nuclear cities, the lives of people, and especially the lives of nuclear power plant workers are ‘sacred’ elements of nuclear safety. Today they have been defiantly violated,” Likhachev said.

The IAEA last month called for a halt to attacks on Enerhodar after earlier attacks on electricity substations in the area.

July 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US announces more than $2 billion package for Ukraine

BY BRAD DRESS – 07/02/24, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4752120-biden-administration-lloyd-austin-2-million-ukraine-aid-package/

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced a $2.3 billion security assistance package for Ukraine ahead of a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Tuesday.

The package will include critical air defense interceptors and other weapons. A spokesperson for the Pentagon said more details on the package would be made available soon.

Austin met with Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov at the Pentagon on Tuesday and underscored the U.S. commitment to defending the country against a Russian invasion.

“Ukraine is in a tough fight,” Austin said in remarks ahead of the meeting, adding “make no mistake, Ukraine is not alone.”

The Pentagon chief also noted that the U.S. has signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement with Ukraine, providing Kyiv with defense cooperation guarantees over a decade. He added that he would discuss with Umerov additional ways to strengthen the partnership.

The U.S. has announced billions of dollars of assistance to Ukraine since the last congressional package of some $60 billion was approved in April. That legislation came after months of delays, giving Russia the advantage on the battlefield before more U.S. aid began arriving on the battlefield.

Ukrainian troops are fighting across the 600-mile front against Russian forces, including in the northeastern Kharkiv region, where Moscow opened a new front in May.

July 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel Has Forcibly Displaced 1.9 Million Palestinians in Gaza

Israel’s assault has displaced over 1 million people just since May, a UN human rights official said.

SCHEERPOST, By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT, July 2, 2024

srael’s ongoing assault in Gaza has now forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, a UN humanitarian official reported on Tuesday as Israel forced another round of evacuations for hundreds of thousands of people across southern and central Gaza.

Israel’s brutal assault and humanitarian blockade has turned Gaza into an “abyss of suffering” and a “maelstrom of human misery,” said Sigrid Kaag, UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza, in an address to the UN Security Council.

“Following the Israeli offenses against Rafah, since the sixth of May, over 1 million people have been displaced once again, desperately seeking shelter and safety,” said Kaag. “One point nine million people are now displaced across Gaza.”

This amounts to over 86 percent of the 2.2 million person population of Gaza displaced — though the proportion may be larger when the number of Palestinians who have been killed, are missing under the rubble or have died in ways that officials aren’t recording are subtracted from the population estimates. The number of displaced people is up from 1.7 million Palestinians who UN officials said had been forced out of their homes in earlier estimates……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Meanwhile, Israeli forces are also fiercely attacking Gaza City in the north. This has sparked an “exodus” from the eastern part of the city, the UN reported, after days of intense bombardments and tanks entering the region.

According to the UN, about 84,000 Palestinians have been displaced by this massacre, with most families having already fled areas multiple times, their supplies and energy dwindling amid Israel’s intensified famine campaign.

UNRWA’s communications head Louise Wateridge reported from a recent trip to Gaza that the region is “apocalyptic — most people have lost their homes, either completely or partially, and have to flee with very few belongings; essentially what they can carry in their hands.” https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/03/israel-has-forcibly-displaced-1-9-million-palestinians-in-gaza/

July 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

You Don’t Want to Live in America’s ‘Nuclear Sponge’

military planners often describe ICBMs as a “nuclear sponge” that would soak up hundreds of Russian warheads as they tried to destroy the missiles before they could launch.

People living in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado may not think of their homes as “nuclear sponges” but that is one of the primary justifications for ICBMs today………. . ICBMs are sitting ducks

By Joseph Cirincione, National Security Analyst, 3 July 24, https://www.newsweek.com/you-dont-want-live-americas-nuclear-sponge-opinion-1919646

ou have to be a real optimist to think that we can keep thousands of nuclear weapons in fallible human hands indefinitely and nothing terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen—and it could mean the end of human civilization.

The risks are growing. Today, nine nations hold over 12,000 nuclear weapons, each many times more powerful than those used on Japan. The United States and Russia have most of them—about 90 percent of the global total—but China may be trying to catch up.

The fear that China might increase its nuclear arsenal from some 500 to 1,000 weapons has fueled calls for America to abandon all arms control limits and vastly increase its stockpile of some 5,000 weapons. In fact, massive new programs to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines and missiles were well under way before China began its build up—and may well have triggered China’s move.

The cost of this new nuclear arms race is high. A new report shows that global spending on nuclear weapons jumped last year—and that the United States accounted for 80 percent of that increase.

The global costs and the U.S. share will grow. This year, U.S. spending climbed again to more than $70 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the government will spend over $750 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years. The total modernization cost will likely be over $2 trillion. Add in the $30 billion a year spent on programs to try to intercept ballistic missiles and the cost goes from unimaginable to unaffordable.

It gets worse. The Air Force just disclosed that the price of its new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) has jumped 37 percent. Originally, the Air Force claimed that replacing the existing force of 400 Minuteman III missiles would cost only $62 billion. That rose to $95 billion, then to more than $125 billion (plus tens of billions more for the nuclear warheads). In a new report, the watchdog group, Taxpayers for Common Sense, warns that the price tag could hit $315 billion.

For a family, a cost increase of 37 percent on a house or car they want to buy would certainly change their minds. Even for the Pentagon, this hike was “a critical breach” of cost projections, triggering a rare report to Congress.

This is likely why defense contractors are working furiously with their Congressional supporters to defend the program, supplying members with talking points and briefings, in addition to the generous contributions that flow into their campaign coffers. Members in the few states that have nuclear bases also do not want to lose the considerable economic benefits they provide.

Thus, Sen. Deb Fischer, a Republican from Nebraska, home to the Strategic Command, pleads in her recent piece for Newsweek, to continue the programs no matter what the cost. She argues that “Our ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are indispensable. …by virtue of their location in our heartland, [they] are also unlikely to be targeted by enemy attacks.”

That would be a surprise to military planners who often describe ICBMs as a “nuclear sponge” that would soak up hundreds of Russian warheads as they tried to destroy the missiles before they could launch. This would complicate an adversary’s planning so severely that it would discourage any attack, the theory goes.

People living in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado may not think of their homes as “nuclear sponges” but that is one of the primary justifications for ICBMs today. Formerly valued as being more accurate and faster to launch than missiles from submarines, that is no longer the case. As the Taxpayers report notes. “Both ballistic missile submarines and nuclear-armed aircraft carry more accurate and powerful nuclear weapons than they used to,” allowing them to destroy even the most hardened target. Meanwhile, “the survivability of U.S. ICBMs has steadily declined as U.S. adversaries have developed more powerful and accurate nuclear weapons.”

Submarines are undetectable and bombers can be scrambled. ICBMs are sitting ducks that must be launched on warning of an enemy attack, stressing their human controllers to decide within minutes whether to launch Armageddon. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry says we must eliminate these relics of the Cold War, calling them, “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world. They could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

There have been dozens of close calls in the nuclear age, most caused by the need to launch these hulking missiles so quickly. Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA), Don Beyer (D-VA) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) will hold a public hearing July 24 to examine the troubled missile program and “raise the alarm about our unsustainable, reckless nuclear posture.”

“We must confront the challenges before us, not by building ever more dangerous weapons,” says Garamendi, “but by placing the same priority on effective arms control and risk reduction measures that we currently place on modernization.”

This hearing may be our last, best chance to evaluate the risks of putting more nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert before it is too late.

Joe Cirincione is the author or editor of seven books and over a thousand articles on nuclear policy and national security.

July 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why cost should not be an obstacle to compensating nuclear survivors

By Alicia Sanders-Zakre, Susi Snyder | July 1, 2024, https://thebulletin.org/2024/07/why-cost-should-not-be-an-obstacle-to-compensating-nuclear-survivors/?utm_source=Newsletter+&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter07012024&utm_content=NuclearRisk_CompensatingNuclearSurvivors_07012024

Passing an extended and expanded Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) would be an enormous victory for those affected by US nuclear weapons testing and development who will receive compensation from the legislation. A proposed revised bill would include many communities formerly left out from the compensation program, including additional residents of Arizona, Nevada and Utah, for the first time, residents of Colorado, Idaho, Guam, Montana and New Mexico, uranium miners after 1971, veterans of nuclear waste clean-up in the Marshall Islands, and St. Louis area residents exposed to nuclear waste. The bill, originally estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $147 billion over 10 years, was cut down to cost $50 billion over 10 years, due to concerns by members of Congress about the expense. A RECA bill has gained overwhelming support in the Senate, but it has yet to be passed by the House, in part due to ongoing concerns about the price tag.

Our research shows that more resources exist and should be directed to this important effort, in the United States and internationally, where many nuclear survivors still wait for justice. In our report, we found that nuclear-armed countries spent $91.4 billion on nuclear weapons in 2023 alone. That’s nearly $3,000 every second. The United States spent more than half of that total – $51.5 billion or $1,633 per second. In the five years that we have done this research, from 2019 to 2023, governments have spent a total of $387 billion on nuclear arsenals. The United States alone spent more than $212 billion of that total.

The amount that the United States and other nuclear-armed governments have put towards addressing the harmful legacy of nuclear weapons for their citizens pales by comparison. Since RECA was passed in 1990, the United States has put $2.67 billion into one-time settlements to compensate those whom the United States considered eligible. To address the nuclear legacy of its testing in the Marshall Islands, the United States gave $150 million to establish a Nuclear Claims Tribunal in 1987, but has not provided further funds explicitly for this purpose since.

Internationally, compensation for survivors also comes up short. Russian nuclear test veterans receive one-time compensation for harm to health of 22,102 roubles ($245 as of February 1, 2024) as well as small monthly stipends for food. In 2023, Russia spent 710.5 billion roubles ($8.3 billion) on its nuclear arsenal. In France, CIVEN, le Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, provided 14.9 million euros ($15.9 million) to victims of its nuclear testing in Algeria and French Polynesia in 2022. Last year, France spent 5.6 billion euros ($6.1 billion) on its nuclear weapons. The United Kingdom provided a “full and final” settlement payment of £20 million to Australia in 1993 to remediate former nuclear tests sites there, in comparison to the £6.5 billion ($8.1 billion) it spent on its nuclear arsenal in 2023.

It is no coincidence that, around the world, formerly colonized and Indigenous populations were the first to be bombed and the last to receive recognition and compensation. Existing programs rarely address the multifold harms of nuclear testing beyond physical harm from radiation, such as the psychological and economic toll of displacement, deprivation of traditional ways of life or the fear of children also suffering the scars of nuclear weapons.

But international efforts to address nuclear harms, grounded in human rights principles, have increased in recent years. In July 2017, 122 governments adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty includes Articles 6 and 7, creating for the first time an international collective effort to address the impacts of nuclear weapons use and testing on people and the environment. States affected by nuclear weapons use and testing that have joined the treaty—such as Kazakhstan, Kiribati, Fiji, and New Zealand—take the lead in identifying needs for affected people and for environmental remediation in their countries and designing national plans of action and structures to address those needs. All governments that have joined this treaty pledge to help if they are able. States are currently discussing establishing an international trust fund to support this work.

Providing adequate assistance to those suffering from nuclear harm and beginning to remediate contaminated environments will cost money. It will also take time. But the cost is not an excuse to forgo necessary nuclear justice programs. Our research clearly shows that ever-growing budgets to build and rebuild nuclear arsenals are readily approved by every nuclear-armed government, while funds to help those suffering are a pittance in comparison.

The exorbitant funding poured into producing and maintaining weapons of mass destruction—as those who have borne the brunt of their impacts are dismissed—constitutes a gross dereliction of duty by the nuclear-armed countries. Governments must work together at the national and international level to address the multifaceted harms that nuclear weapons production and testing have inflicted on survivors and the environment. Extending and expanding RECA would be a good place to start. House leaders should stop stalling and start acting.

July 3, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

How far can American money push the Kiev regime’s suicidal war with Russia?

SOTT, Drago Bosnic, InfoBrics, Thu, 27 Jun 2024

The economic might of the United States was one of the major reasons why the Allies won WW2. While much of the world was in ruins thanks to the combined invasion of the Axis powers, America was virtually unscathed. Its strategically isolated position made it possible to switch to an unprecedented war economy without the fear of it ever being disrupted by anything. Unfortunately, one of the tools of victory over the world’s most repugnant ideology soon turned into a way of pushing the outgrowth of that ideology all across the globe.

The birth of the US MIC (Military Industrial Complex), particularly when combined with “Operation Paperclip”, unified the production capacity of America and technological innovations of Germany, creating a monster that many have been warning about ever since, including US General (and later president) Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He warned in his 1961 farewell address:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex [MIC].”

However, it all fell on deaf ears, as many warmongers and war criminals were already deeply ingrained in virtually every federal institution. American militarism became the norm and this hasn’t changed to this very day. Dozens of major conflicts were launched under endless false pretexts, with millions of dead and tens of millions displaced in the last 20 years alone. Perhaps the only segment of America’s production economy that hasn’t been outsourced entirely is precisely the MIC. A lot of its less crucial parts have been, but the core elements remain in the US. However, the country’s financial structure went through tectonic changes since Eisenhower’s era. Namely, after President Nixon ended the gold standard, the might of the MIC was unleashed and American militarism spread to other NATO members, cementing a conglomerate of nations with one interest alone – perpetual war.

…………………………………………………………………………. the Kiev regime has so far gotten upwards of three times more money than what Moscow has (nominally) spent on its entire military in 2021. This means that Russia is getting a lot more bang for its buck. However, things are about to get a lot worse for the Neo-Nazi junta, as the Kremlin has made some major changes in its Ministry of Defense. Worse yet, Russia is now increasing its military spending to a nominal figure of nearly $200 billion, although the real budget (in GDP PPP terms) is now equivalent to over half a trillion dollars. NATO fully realizes that the Kiev regime’s already slim chances of winning are now in the realm of impossible, which is why it decided to deploy up to half a million soldiers and get them ready for a direct confrontation with Moscow, while also trying to use sabotage and terrorism to shift its attention away from Ukraine.

However, none of this has reinvigorated America’s MIC in the same way wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have. On the contrary, it revealed its numerous deficiencies, particularly in artillery munitions production, an area in which Russia keeps strengthening its already dominant position and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. What’s more, America is now wasting decades-old stockpiles (as well as those of its allies, vassals and satellite states) just to keep the Neo-Nazi junta another day in the fight. It’s even giving top dollar for surplus Soviet-era weapons and equipment around the world, as these have proven to be far more robust and cost-effective in comparison to overhyped NATO gear. This is without even taking into account a number of Russia’s asymmetric advantages, ones that NATO can match only with terrorist attacks on beachgoers. https://www.sott.net/article/492721-How-far-can-American-money-push-the-Kiev-regimes-suicidal-war-with-Russia

July 2, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Julian Assange Is Finally Free, But Let’s Not Forget the War Crimes He Exposed

Contrary to US government claims, WikiLeaks’s revelations actually saved lives — and drove demand for US accountability.

By Editor on June 29, 2024 https://truthout.org/articles/julian-assange-is-finally-free-but-lets-not-forget-the-war-crimes-he-exposed/

After a 14-year struggle, including five years spent in Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is finally free. Under the terms of a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain documents, writings and notes connected with the national defense under the Espionage Act. Assange was facing 175 years in prison for 18 charges in the indictment filed by the Trump administration and pursued by the Biden administration.

The plea agreement requires that before entering his plea, Assange must have done everything he could to either return or destroy “any such unpublished information in his possession, custody, or control, or that of WikiLeaks or any affiliate of WikiLeaks.”

As stipulated in the plea deal, Ramona Manglona, U.S. Chief Judge of the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, sentenced Assange to 62 months with credit for the time he served in Belmarsh Prison. The U.S. sentencing guidelines say the range for this “offense” is 41-51 months, so Assange served 11 to 21 months longer than this type of case would typically garner.

Assange was prosecuted because WikiLeaks exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who had a “TOP SECRET” U.S. security clearance, furnished WikiLeaks with 700,000 documents and reports, many of which were classified “SECRET.”

These documents included the “Iraq War Logs,” 400,000 field reports documenting 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces transferred detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad.

They also contained the “Afghan War Diary,” comprising 90,000 reports that documented more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And they included the “Guantánamo Files” — 779 secret reports containing evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantánamo Bay for years. The reports explain how the nearly 800 men and boys there had been tortured and abused, which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Manning also provided WikiLeaks with the infamous 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, which depicts a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter crew targeting and killing 12 unarmed civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, as well as a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured in the attack. A U.S. Army tank drove over one of the bodies, severing it in two. In a conversation after the attack, one pilot said, “Look at those dead bastards,” and the other responded, “Nice.” The video reveals evidence of three violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.

WikiLeaks provided material for news outlets around the world to report on U.S.-led atrocities. Informing the public about the illegality of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” resulted in calls for accountability.

“10 years on, the War Logs remain the only source of information regarding many thousands of violent civilian deaths in Iraq between 2004 and 2009,” John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count (IBC), wrote in his submitted testimony for Assange’s extradition hearing in October 2020. IBC is an independent NGO that has done the only comprehensive monitoring of credibly reported casualties in Iraq since Bush’s 2003 invasion.

“WikiLeaks cables have contributed to court findings that US drone strikes are criminal offences and that criminal proceedings should be initiated against senior US officials involved in such strikes,” Clive Stafford Smith, co-founder of Reprieve and attorney for seven Guantánamo detainees, wrote in his submitted testimony.

“They took a hero [Assange] and turned him into a criminal,” Vahid Razavi, founder of Ethics in Tech, told Common Dreams. “Meanwhile, all of the war criminals in the files exposed by WikiLeaks via Chelsea Manning are free and never faced any punishment or even their day in court.”

The Iraq War Logs

The Iraq War Logs contained extensive evidence of U.S. war crimes. Several reports of detainee abuse were supported by medical evidence. Prisoners were blindfolded, shackled and hung by their ankles or wrists. They were subjected to punching, whipping, kicking, electrocution, electric drills, and cutting off fingers or burning with acid. Six reports document the apparent deaths of detainees.

Secret U.S. Army field reports revealed that U.S. authorities refused to investigate hundreds of reports of murder, torture, rape and abuse by Iraqi soldiers and police. The coalition had a formal policy of ignoring these allegations, marking them “no investigation is necessary.”

Although U.S. and U.K. officials maintained that no official records of civilian casualties existed, the logs document 66,081 noncombatant deaths out of 109,000 fatalities from 2004-2009.

The log describes video footage of Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar. It says, “The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army [IA] soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him.”

The Afghan War Diary

The Afghan War Diary also revealed evidence of U.S. war crimes from 2004-2009. The reports describe how a secret “black” unit composed of special operations forces hunted down accused Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial. Secret commando units — classified groups of Navy and Army special operatives — used a “capture/kill list,” which resulted in the killing of civilians, angering the Afghan people.

Moreover, the CIA expanded paramilitary operations in Afghanistan, carrying out ambushes, ordering airstrikes and conducting night raids. The CIA financed the Afghan spy agency, operating it like a subsidiary.

A 2007 meeting between Afghan district officials and U.S. civil affairs officers was documented in the reports. Afghan officials are quoted as saying, “The people of Afghanistan keep loosing [sic] their trust in the government because of the high amount of corrupted government officials. The general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worst [sic] than the Taliban.”

The logs recorded numerous civilian casualties from airstrikes, shootings on the road, in villages and at checkpoints; many were caught in the cross fire. The victims weren’t suicide bombers or insurgents. Several deaths were not reported to the public.

The Guantánamo Files

The Guantánamo Files say that only 220 of the 780 people held at the prison camp since 2002 were classified as “dangerous international terrorists.” Of the rest of the detainees, 380 were classified as low-level foot soldiers and 150 were considered innocent Afghan or Pakistani civilians or farmers.

Many detainees were held at Guantánamo for years based on paltry evidence or confessions extracted by torture and abuse. Among the detainees, for example, were an 89-year-old Afghan villager with senile dementia and a 14-year-old boy who was the innocent victim of a kidnapping.

The files document a system aimed more at extracting intelligence than detaining dangerous terrorists. One man was transferred to Guantánamo because he was a mullah with special knowledge of the Taliban. A taxi driver was sent to the prison camp because he had general knowledge of certain areas in Afghanistan. An Al Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years to be interrogated about the news network.

Nearly 100 detainees were classified with depressive or psychotic disorders. Several joined hunger strikes to protest their indefinite detention or attempted suicide, the files revealed.

**No One Was Harmed by WikiLeaks’s Revelations**

Although the U.S. government alleged that WikiLeaks’s publication of information had caused “great harm,” they “admitted there was not a single person anywhere that they could produce that was harmed by these publications,” Assange’s attorney Barry Pollack said at a June 26 press conference in Australia.

The plea agreement says, “Some of these raw classified documents were publicly disclosed without removing or redacting all of the personally identifiable information relating to certain individuals who shared sensitive information about their own governments and activities in their countries with the U.S. government in confidence.”

The U.S. government claims that Assange endangered U.S. informants who were named in the published documents. But John Goetz, an investigative reporter who worked for Germany’s Der Spiegel, testified at the 2020 extradition hearing that Assange went to great lengths to ensure that the names of informants in Iraq and Afghanistan were redacted. Goetz said that WikiLeaks underwent a “very rigorous redaction process” and Assange repeatedly reminded his media partners to use encryption. Indeed, Goetz said, Assange tried to stop Der Freitag from publishing material that could result in the release of unredacted information.

Moreover, WikiLeaks’s revelations actually saved lives. After WikiLeaks published evidence of Iraqi torture centers established by the U.S., the Iraqi government refused then-President Barack Obama’s request to grant immunity to U.S. soldiers who committed criminal and civil offenses there. As a result, Obama had to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

Obama took credit for ending U.S. military involvement in Iraq. But he had tried for months to extend it beyond the December 31, 2011, deadline his predecessor negotiated with the Iraqi government. Negotiations broke down when Iraq refused to grant criminal and civil immunity to U.S. troops.

What Assange’s Plea Bargain Means for Free Speech

Before she accepted Assange’s guilty plea, Judge Manglona asked him what he did to violate the law. “Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified,” Assange said. “I believed the First Amendment protected that activity, but I accept that it was a violation of the espionage statute.” Assange then added, “The First Amendment was in contradiction with the Espionage Act, but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all these circumstances.”

Even though Assange will go free, his plea deal raises concerns for First Amendment advocates in the U.S.

“The United States has now, for the first time in the more than 100-year history of the Espionage Act, obtained an Espionage Act conviction for basic journalistic acts,” David Greene, head of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The New York Times. “These charges should never have been brought.”

Charlie Savage, who has covered the Assange case extensively for years, warned that Assange’s plea sets a “new precedent” that “will send a threatening message to national security journalists, who may be chilled in how aggressively they do their jobs because they will see a greater risk of prosecution.” But, Savage noted, since Assange pled guilty and didn’t mount a constitutional challenge to the Espionage Act, that eliminated the risk that the U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately sanction a narrow interpretation of First Amendment press freedoms.

“WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions,” WikiLeaks said in a statement announcing the plea agreement. “As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know. As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.”

There is no doubt that but for the sustained activism of people around the world and the work of his superb legal team, Julian Assange would still be languishing behind bars for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes.

July 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Legal | Leave a comment

The $91 billion wasted on nuclear weapons last year could transform ecosystem restoration (commentary)

by Melissa Parke on 28 June 2024, https://news.mongabay.com/2024/06/the-91-billion-wasted-on-nuclear-weapons-last-year-could-transform-ecosystem-restoration-commentary/

Nuclear weapons have caused much damage to the environment and are the only devices ever created that have the capacity to destroy all complex life forms on Earth.
Yet every year, the nine nuclear armed-nations divert vast sums of taxpayers’ money into producing, maintaining and modernizing weapons of mass destruction, approximately $91.4 billion in 2023 alone.
“One year of nuclear weapons spending could pay for wind power for more than 12 million homes to help combat climate change, plant one million trees a minute, or clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for 187 years in a row,” argues the director of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, ICAN.
This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

The overwhelming sums of money being wasted on nuclear weapons every year should be spent on conserving our planet instead, argues a new report from my organization, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). We should take the money wasted on these bombs and missiles every single year and instead of setting ourselves up to cause more, possibly irrevocable and irreconcilable damage, clean up the legacy of harm already done and invest in restoring ecosystems and halting biodiversity loss.

Nuclear weapons have already caused so much damage to our environment and they are the only devices ever created that have the capacity to destroy all complex life forms on Earth. Nuclear war would mean climate disruption with devastating consequences. The world would fall under a nuclear winter, be subject to a deadly global famine and exacerbated effects of global warming.

But contrary to what some would like you to believe, their devastating impact is not just limited to a hypothetical post-apocalyptic hell, many of them are already being felt today.

Throughout their entire cycle, nuclear weapons have left a devastating environmental legacy around the world: from uranium mining through fuel production at nuclear processing plants to the impacts of the thousands of nuclear tests over the decades. Nuclear weapons facilities have contaminated land and water with radioactive waste that can last many thousands of years. Efforts to clean up the sites have been haphazard or half-hearted, cost billions of dollars over decades – and are still largely unfinished.

For a terrible and terrifying example of how poorly restoration efforts were carried out, we need to talk about the Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands. After exploding 43 nuclear bombs on the Enewetak Atoll between 1948 and 1958, and removing the people who lived there from their homes, the U.S. government did not initiate clean up until the 1970s. This consisted of – as the LA Times put it in a scathing exposé – “burying 33 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of irradiated soil and two Olympic swimming pools’ worth of contaminated debris from islands across the atoll” and dumping it into the crater they created with the detonation, capping it off with a concrete dome.

That dome is showing signs of structural weakness and could crack under the pressure from rising sea levels. The U.S. Government now contends that the crater was built to store the debris, not protect the rest of the nearby environment from its contents.

Of course, it is not only the U.S. that has failed to deal with the environmental effects of its nuclear weapons production, testing, and use. The same can be said for the British in Australia and Kiribati, the French in Algeria and the Pacific, and the USSR/Russia in Kazakhstan.

It is also important to remember that radiation cannot be contained geographically; it respects no country’s border. Fallout patterns are complex and the full consequences of the fallout of years of particular atmospheric nuclear testing is not known- neither on humans, nor on other animals. Recent scientific studies found that the high radiation levels in wild boars in Ukraine are likely not directly due to the Chernobyl disaster but rather the result of nuclear weapons testing before the disaster occurred, resulting in residual radiation in the surrounding areas for decades.

Yet their destructive capacity does not end there. Nuclear weapons also carry a hefty opportunity cost that prevents us from addressing some of the urgent crises facing our planet.

Every year, the nine nuclear armed-states divert vast sums of taxpayers’ money into producing, maintaining and modernizing weapons of mass destruction. ICAN puts out the only report tracking this global nuclear weapons spending on an annual basis, our latest edition found that they wasted $91.4 billion on their arsenals in 2023.

Think of what this money could have gone to instead. One year of nuclear weapons spending could pay for wind power for more than 12 million homes to help combat climate change, plant one million trees a minute, or clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for 187 years in a row.

It could also cover the entire annual funding gap ($79 billion) for global efforts to restore ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss. As biodiversity loss continues at unprecedented speeds under the onslaught of environmental degradation and climate change, new studies reveal that conservation efforts to improve or slow the decline of biodiversity are working in two-thirds of the cases. Imagine what could be achieved if these efforts were fully funded.

Anyone concerned about the climate crisis, about environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, should also support the cause of nuclear disarmament with equal passion, as these are interconnected issues.

Every species will be harmed in a nuclear war. Only one species can stop it.

Melissa Parke is Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. She formerly worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and served as Australia’s Minister for International Development.

July 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, weapons and war | Leave a comment

WAR OR PEACE: Towards a Ukrainian Peace or a Direct NATO-Russian War

Russian and Eurasian Politicsby GORDONHAHN. June 28, 2024

Introduction

The following is an overview of the recent events and present state of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. We observe movement towards the end of the conflict in its present configuration and in two new directions simultaneously—a race to the final resolution of the NATO-Russia question. One direction consists of movement towards peace negotiations. The other is toward escalation into a open, direct NATO-Russia war likely to expand beyond the borders of Ukraine and far western regions of Russia. The race to resolution is on and it remains anyone’s guess whether peace or greater war will win the day.

Russia Proposes Diplomacy…Again

On June 14 Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a roadmap for ending the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War during a speech at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs………………………………………………………………..

. In particular, he has now offered “simple” conditions for the “beginning of discussions.” They include: the full withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia oblasts as they existed as of 1991—that is, Russia would receive all the oblasts’ territories not just those now controlled by Russian troops. Immediately upon agreeing to this condition and a second requiring Kiev’s rejection of any NATO membership (Ukraine’s “neutral, non-bloc, non-nuclear status”), from the Russian side “immediately, literally the same minute there will follow an order to cease fire and begin negotiations” and Moscow “will guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal” of Ukrainian units. ……………………………….

To be sure, Putin’s offer was not made under the illusion that it would be taken up within the next few months and was certainly another effort to lay blame for the conflict at Washington’s, Brussels and, less so perhaps, Kiev’s doors. Nevertheless, Putin’s public offering before Russia’s Foreign Ministry personnel is a most authoritative and official statement of a specific proposal from Russia; one that included paths to both a ceasefire and permanent peace, if Washington and/or Kiev choose to take them as Ukraine continues to crumble at the front, in the political sphere, and economically throughout this year.

………………………………………………………Continued refusal to talk with Moscow and any further Russian gains give Putin flexibility in enticing or threatening Washington, Brussels, and/or Kiev to the negotiating table. Refuse talks and lose non-Novorossiyan lands; accept talks and Kiev gets them back.

Also, both subjectively (with Putin’s intent) and objectively (without Putyin’s intent) the proposal undermined Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s ‘disnamed’ ‘peace summit’ in Switzerland which was nothing other than an exercise in rallying support among supporters for the beleaguered Maidan regime. ………………………..

……………………………………………………my sense that the Ukrainian war will end one way or the other this year unless NATO intervenes directly with troops on the ground.

Moscow’s Military Plans: Reject Talks and War You Shall Have

Moscow’s military plans for the remainder of the year can be summed up as continuity in Ukraine and preparations for war beyond Ukraine against the West. Thus, in Ukraine Russia will continue its more offensive strategy of ‘attrit and advance’ upgraded from, an intensification of what Alexander Mercouris calls ‘aggressive attrition’ (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/02/02/russian-strategic-transformation-in-ukraine-from-aggressive-attrition-to-attrit-and-advance/). . Under attrit and advance, Russian forces still emphasize destruction of Ukraine’s armed forces over the taking and holding of new territory. The attrition of massive, combined air, artillery, missile, and drone war supersedes the advances on the ground by armor and infantry in this strategy. Thus, territorial advance is slow, but personnel losses are fewer.

………………………………………………………………….Despite the calls of some Russian hawks, Putin will never acquiesce to bomb Ukraine, no less Kiev ‘into a parking lot’ or ‘the stone age.’ For Russians, Ukrainians are a fraternal eastern Slavic people, with long-standing ties to Russia. Most Russian families have relatives or friends from or in Ukraine. Kiev is ‘the mother of all Russian cities’, and despite Russia’s possession of precise smart weapons, the risk of destroying Orthodox holy sites and other historical monuments in Kiev is too high. Russia’s overwhelming strength in weapons and manpower, despite Western inputs into Ukraine’s armed forces, could allow Russian attrit and advance to persist for many years—more than will be necessary to force negotiations or seize much of Ukraine.

Boiling the Russian Frog – Escalation by Any Other Name

There has been much talk about the US repeartedly stepping over Russian red lines. The most recent is Washington’s and Brussels’ (NATO’s) grant of permission to Kiev to target the territory of Russia proper (1991 territory) with Western-made weapons. The West itself has drawn many red lines that it said could spark direct war with Russia and, therefore, should not be crossed: offensive weapons, artillery, tanks, aircraft, various types of missiles, cluster munitions, etc., etc. Most recently, Washington crossed two red lines in rapid succession by approving Kiev use of U.S missiles, such as ATACMs to target Russian territory across the border in Kharkov and, presumably Sumy……………………………………………………………………

It then expanded approval of the use of such missiles against any Russian territories from which attacks in Ukraine are being supported (www.politico.com/news/2024/06/20/us-says-ukraine-can-hit-inside-russia-anywhere-00164261). Days later Ukraine fired 5 ATACMs (4 were intercepted) at Sevastopol which hit beach-goers far from any military target, wounding 46 and killing 3, including 2 children. The potential escalation of the overall war resulting from this Ukrainian target was compounded ……………………………………………………………………….

Western NATO leaders seem intent on expanding the war beyond Ukraine’s borders and that will require Western public support and thus a vaccum of public discussion of NATO actions and national interests. Even if the constant escalation is ‘simply’ a game of chicken, upping the ante to see if Putin blinks or if the war can be dragged out past the November U.S. elections, there are many in U.S. intelligence and other departments, who are itching for a war against Russia who may escalate or enable Kiev to do so, intentionally or not, such that one is provoked. Unintentionality comes in, as Kiev has been anxious to force NATO or at least NATO member-states into direct involvement in the war. Ukraine has achieved some success in this, but so far such Western involvement has been limited, intially, to secret injections of Western troops and mercenaries, and then to open advisory roles. The summer and fall of 2024 will be a dangerous window in which a spark can detonate the larger war that such mad men and women are playing with.

To the extent that the West remains intent on continuing the escalation of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Moscow will engage in asymmetrical escalation targeting Western forces outside of Europe and prepare for possible full-scale war with NATO or NATO members in and beyond Ukraine……………………………………………………………….

Towards a Eurasian Security Pact: Getting Ready for Direct War with NATO

With war with NATO now firmly in the cards, a distinct possibility, the Kremlin is intensely set on military and military-political preparations. The rejection of Putin’s next peace proposal was likely the last straw that will set in motion the next phase in Russia’s diplomatic offensive in tendem with China aimed at rallying the Rest against the West. …………….

For years, particularly after the Maidan coup, Putin has been conducting Russian diplomacy with the goal of creating a Great Eurasian and global alternative to the West’s ‘rules-based world order’, seeking to base a new, alternative international system of political, economic, financial, and monetary institutions on different rules written by all the great powers – the ‘Rest’ – rather than just the West…………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………. This Greater Eurasia security pact is thus also a mechanism for splitting NATO, particularly Europe from the U.S. This is to be achieved by networking and lobbying all the international organizations in Eurasia that Russia has been building for decades now: ………………………………….

……………………………………………… the train of the Rest’s rejection of the Western worldview has left the station, and, with the danger of escalation in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere afoot, it seems more likely that the new Eurasian-South bloc will be an alternative to, possibly a foe of the West’s ‘rules-based world order’ rather than a partner (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285).

Conclusion

Again, the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – the current war with militay combat confined largely to Ukrainian and far western Russian territory — will end this year or very early next year. However, a new broader war can take its place, if the peace fails or is never agreed upon. ………………………………………………………

…………….. The hope is that cooler heads will prevail, but the U.S. is in the midst of a deep and potentially explosive political crisis in which bureaucratic politics can become highly cryptic, conspiratorial, chaotic, and irrational, provoking new more dangerous conflict. Similarly, in Kiev a meltdown of the Maidan regime could be imminent and will likely come as a shot in the dark, unexpected by all……………………………………………………..

That Zelenskiy is now broaching peace talks with Putin is a reflection of the opportunity and dangers that are in the offing. https://gordonhahn.com/2024/06/28/war-or-peace-towards-a-ukrainian-peace-or-a-direct-nato-russian-war/

July 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israeli Defense Minister Vows to Return Lebanon to ‘Stone Age’

President Joe Biden has significant leverage he could use to reign in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but has largely refused to do so. While US officials claim their diplomatic efforts are not stalled, an increasing number of countries worry war will break out and are asking their citizens to leave Lebanon.

The White House reversed course and now says a ceasefire in Lebanon cannot be contingent on a deal in Gaza

by Kyle Anzalone June 27, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/06/27/israeli-defense-minister-vows-to-return-lebanon-to-stone-age/

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was prepared to send Lebanon back to the “Stone Age” with a massive bombing campaign. The White House desperately tries to avert a major war in the Middle East but is not making progress.

After three days of meetings with top officials in Washington, Gallant told reporters that Israel preferred diplomacy but was also willing to utterly destroy Lebanon. “We do not want war, but we are preparing for every scenario. Hezbollah understands very well that we can inflict massive damage in Lebanon if a war is launched,” he said. Israel could bomb “Lebanon back to the Stone Age, but we don’t want to do it.”

Gallant’s remarks come as daily tit-for-tat exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel risk escalating into a major war that could see the US, Iran, and other militias across the Middle East enter the fray. After announcing it had “operational plans” ready for an attack, Israel has started to move some military assets from near Gaza to its northern border.

The White House has invested considerable effort into bringing the conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza to a close. However, rather than applying pressure on Tel Aviv to deescalate, Washington has tried to force Hezbollah and Hamas to accept Israeli demands. Last week, American officials told Beirut that Washington was unable to constrain Tel Aviv, in hopes the warning would convince Hezbollah to back down.

Last week, Biden’s envoy Amos Hochstein visited Tel Aviv and Beirut, hoping to work on a deal to end the fighting. At the time, Hochstein pushed for a deal to end the war in Gaza, with the belief that it would lead to deeslcation on Israel’s northern border as well.

Hezbollah maintains that it will end operations against Israel once the onslaught in Gaza comes to a close. Israel says it will not stop attacks on Lebanon until Hezbollah withdraws several miles from the border. Tel Aviv has decimated southern Lebanon, turning much of the area within three miles of the border into a “dead zone.”

Now, the Biden administration’s tactics have flipped, with officials telling reporters that the deal to end the fighting across the Israel-Lebanon border must be separate from any Gaza ceasefire. “The logic of [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah…is that it is all tied to Gaza, and until there is a cease-fire in Gaza the firing at Israel won’t stop,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a senior Biden official. “We frankly, completely reject this logic.”

Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.

July 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Do thorium reactors prevent nuclear weapons proliferation risks?

Gordon Edwards, 30 June 24.

Many people have been assured, incorrectly, that the use of thorium as a “nuclear fuel” eliminates the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation. That is simply untrue.
The fact is, thorium is NOT a nuclear fuel.

However, a thorium-232 atom can be transmuted into a uranium-233 atom by capturing a stray neutron, and uranium-233 (not generally found in nature) is an excellent nuclear fuel and can also be used to make excellent nuclear weapons. So a “thorium reactor” is really a uranium-233 reactor.

Natural thorium — thorium-232 — is not fissile (i.e. it is not a chain-reacting material). So thorium requires a concentrated fissile material to be added to it, in order to get a chain reaction going and produce the neutrons that are needed to transmute thorium-232 atoms into chain-reacting uranium-233 atoms.

That concentrated fissile material additive does not have to be enriched uranium, it can equally well be plutonium. It has to be either one or the other, there is no other choice. So, in any event, to get a “thorium reactor” going, you need to use either uranium (enriched to a rather high degree) or plutonium (extracted from used nuclear fuel) as an additive. In either case, you will need to use proliferation-sensitive technologies (uranium enrichment or plutonium extraction) before even embarking upon a thorium reactor program.

Thorium use is therefore not a proliferation-resistant plan of action, not even to begin with.

It gets worse, because subsequently, if the “thorium-impregnated-with-fissile material” is irradiated in a reactor, the thorium atoms will FIRST be transmuted into protactinium atoms (protactinium-233) which will then spontaneously “decay” into uranium-233 atoms. In addition, further neutron captures inside the reactor will also produce a small amount of uranium-232, an undesired pollutant that is a strong gamma emitter.

Thorium enthusiasts often say that the powerful gamma rays from U-232 will make the U-233 unusable for nuclear weapons, which is somewhat of an exaggeration to begin with.

However, if the protactinium-233 is chemically separated out from the irradiated “thorium fuel” outside the reactor, those protactinium-233 atoms will spontaneously decay into pure uranium-233 atoms without any admixture of uranium-232 (because there are no neutrons outside the reactor to create uranium-232 as a result of additional neutron captures),

Since pure U-233 can be produced spontaneously outside the reactor, as outlined above by separating out protactinium-233 first, this procedure can completely avoid the problem of U-232 contaminating the U-233 — which, admittedly, would make nuclear weapons construction more difficult (although not impossible).

So the complicating factor of U-232 can be circumvented entirely by a would-be proliferator. There is no doubt that U-233 is an extremely powerful nuclear explosive material and, uncontaminated, can be used to make arsenals of nuclear weapons with relative ease.
Thus thorium reactors do not “eliminate” or even significantly reduce the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation.

July 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | thorium, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Suspect Body Count: The Death Toll in Gaza is Much Higher Than We’re Being Told

Seymour Hersh Substack Thu, 27 Jun 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/492600-The-Suspect-Body-Count-The-Death-Toll-in-Gaza-is-Much-Higher-Than-We-re-Being-Told

The number of slain Palestinians in Gaza, including those believed to be Hamas cadres, has gone through a series of public recalibrations in recent weeks, as Israel’s reshuffled war cabinet has struggled to minimize international rage at the slaughter there. The reduced body count was little more than a sideshow because the Israeli offensive is continuing in Gaza with no signs of the ceasefire that the Biden administration has been desperately seeking.

Hamas triggered the war last October 7 with a surprise attack — there is so far no official explanation for Israel’s security failure that day — that killed 1,139 Israelis and injured 3,400 more. Some 250 soldiers and civilians were taken hostage.

Comment: There is plenty of evidence to strongly suggest that Israel allowed the incursion on Oct. 7th to happen and that parties unknown carried out most of the killing. This strategy fits with Israel’s decades-long goal of creating the right ‘conditions’ to justify implementing a final solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’.

The expected Israeli response began within days, with the bombing of the Gaza Strip. Some Israeli ground operations inside Gaza began on October 13, and two weeks later the expected full-scale offensive began. The war still rages, with one estimate concluding that by the beginning of April 70,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on targets throughout the 25-mile long Gaza, more tonnage than was dropped by Germany on London and by America and the United Kingdom on Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, combined.

The Gaza Health Ministry, which is under Hamas control, estimated as of Tuesday that the death toll from the Israeli attacks stood at 37,718, with more than 86,000 Gazans wounded. Last month the Israeli government issued a much lower estimate of the casualties, stating that its planes and troops had killed 14,000 “terrorists” — Hamas fighters — and no more than 16,000 civilians.

The Biden administration, on the eve of the first presidential debate, has said nothing about the new numbers, but there are many senior analysts in the international human rights and social science community who consider these numbers to be hokum: a vast underestimate of the damage that has been done to a terrorized civilian population living in makeshift tents and shelters amid disease and malnutrition, with a lack of sanitation, medical care, and medicines as well as increasing desperation and fatigue.

In days of telephone and email exchanges with public health and statistical experts in America I found a general belief that the civilian death toll in Gaza, both from the bombings and their aftermath, had to be significantly higher than reported, but none of the scientists and statisticians — appropriately — was willing to say so in print because of a lack of access to accurate data. I also asked one well-informed American official what he thought the actual civilian death count in Gaza might be and he answered, without pause: “We just don’t know.”

One public health expert acknowledged: “No clear and definite body count is possible, given the continuing Israeli bombing.” He added, caustically, “How many bombs does it take to kill a human being?”

Gaza was an ideal target for an air attack, he said. “No functioning fire department. No fire trucks. No water. No place to escape. No hospitals. No electricity. People living in tents and bodies stacked up all over . . . being eaten by stray dogs.

“What the fuck is wrong with the international medical community?” he asked. “Who are we kidding? Without a ceasefire, a million people are going to starve. This is not a debating point. How can you count something when the system is biting its own tail.” He was referring to the fact that the health system in Gaza — its hospitals and service agencies — “is being targeted and shattered” by Israeli aircraft and those responsible for the counting of the dead and injured “are themselves dead.”

The expert added that the lack of better casualty statistics is not only the fault of Israel. “Hamas has a vested interest in consistently minimizing the number of civilians killed “because of a lack of planning over the years when it was in charge of Gaza.” He was referring to ordinary Gazan citizens’ lack of access to Hamas’s vast underground tunnel complex that could have served as a bomb shelter for all. In Gaza during the Israeli bombing raids, “Is Hamas going to say that Israel” was able to kill all in Gaza “because we started a war without being able to fully protect our people?” His point was that Hamas has every reason, as does Israel, to minimize the extent of innocent civilians who have become collateral damage in the ongoing war.

Comment: Hamas did not start this most recent round of mass slaughter by Israel on Oct 7th. Hamas has never provided Israel with the justification it always sought to massacre Gazans wholesale. On Oct. 7th, Israel provided itself with that justification.

A prominent American public health official who spoke to me acknowledged that he was also concerned about the numbers of unreported dead in Gaza. In a crisis, he said, “we can start with a name-by-name count, but pretty soon the numbers of killed and missing exceed the capacity of any such approach, especially when the counters are being killed and the records [are] at risk.” He said that various postwar academic studies of mortality during the siege of Mosul — when a US-led coalition fought a door-to-door fight in 2017 against the Islamic State in Iraq, killing as many 11,000 civilians — “showed the large loss of life from the use of high-velocity weapons in urban areas. So we should expect similar in Gaza.”

Other data suggest that the published death figures are seriously misleading. Save the Children, an international child protection agency, issued a report this month estimating that as many as 21,000 children in Gaza are “trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” Other children, the agency said, “have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza” with their whereabouts unknown to the families “amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.”

Comment: As if the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is not enough, it is highly likely that a large number of Palestinian children have been abducted by Zionist state forces, likely to be tortured and killed or otherwise used for the depraved pleasures of some of the people that inhabit that “shitty little country”.

Jeremy Stoner, the charity’s regional director for the Middle East, said: “Gaza has become a graveyard for children, with thousands of others missing, their fates unknown. . . . We desperately need a ceasefire to find and support the missing children who have survived, and to prevent more families from being destroyed.”

Warnings about the inevitability of far more deaths among the ordinary citizens of Gaza have been around since last winter. In December, Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in the Guardian that the Gaza war was “the deadliest conflict for children in recent years” with as many as 160 children being killed daily. The surviving children do not have “the basic needs that any human, especially babies and children, need to stay healthy and alive. . . . Unless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population — close to half a million human beings — dying within a year.

“It’s a crude estimate,” Sridhar wrote, “but one that is data-driven, using the terrifying real numbers of death in previous and comparable conflicts.”

The New York Times and the Washington Post reported Wednesday that a new study endorsed by the United Nations found that as many as half a million Gaza residents are facing imminent starvation because of “a lack of food.” The study also said that more than one half of the surviving residents of Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.”)

One of the most avid early critics of the official statistics published by the Gaza Health Ministry and accepted by most in the American media, has been Ralph Nader. On March 5, he wrote a column in the Capitol Hill Citizen, a monthly newspaper he founded, about what he called “the undercount” of Palestinian casualties in Gaza. He quoted Martin Griffiths, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs: “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”

In my years as a journalist, I have often found an oddball story that says more with each retelling. Something like that happened in February when Al Jazeera ran an interview with a 64-year-old Gazan undertaker named Saadi Hassan Sulieman Baraka, whose nickname is Abu Jawad. He complained of working almost constantly since the Israeli invasion of Gaza began.

“I’ve buried about ten times more people during this war than I did across my entire 27 years as an undertaker,” he said. “The least was 30 people and the most was 800. Since October 7, I’ve buried more than 17,000 people.” He especially remembered the day he buried the 800 dead. “We collected them in pieces; their bodies so riddled with holes it was like Israeli snipers used them for target practice; Others were crushed like . . . like a boiled potato, and many had huge facial burns.

“We couldn’t really tell one person’s body from the other, but we did our best. We made one big deep grave, probably 10 meters (30 feet) deep and buried them together.”

It could be propaganda — of course, it could. But Abu Jawad made no mention of anyone from the Gaza Health Ministry coming to collect the names of the dead. He made no mention of any government official being involved in the process at all.

June 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Israel’s main goal is the extermination of Palestinians – retired NATO colonel

https://www.rt.com/news/599901-israel-strategy-extermination-palestinians/26 June 24

The IDF’s “brute force” strategy makes no sense from a counterinsurgency perspective, Col. Jacques Baud has claimed.

Israel’s tactics in Gaza go against all the rules of counterinsurgency and can only be explained as a deliberate effort to “eliminate the Palestinians,” former NATO analyst and Swiss intelligence officer Col. Jacques Baud has said.

Speaking to ‘Going Underground’ host Afshin Rattansi on Monday, Baud said that Israel is “not trying to solve the problem [of Hamas violence] on the political side, as we normally should for a counterinsurgency.”

“They are doing it by brute force, meaning that they destroy people and that’s the name of the game,” he added.

In nearly nine months of warfare against Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has killed almost 38,000 people in Gaza, the majority of them women and children, according to the latest figures from the territory’s health ministry.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that Israel will continue its campaign until it achieves “total victory” over the Palestinian militants, but has been more evasive when asked about his post-war plans for Gaza. He has said that Israel will maintain “full security control” over Gaza, but has refused to back his more moderate allies’ calls for a multinational government in the enclave.

“The only explanation” for Israel’s refusal to entertain a political solution is not that “the Israelis are stupid and don’t know how to wage war,” Baud continued. “[It’s that] they’re doing this on purpose to eliminate the Palestinians.”

“Palestine will be exclusively Jewish, and that has always been the consistent policy,” he told Rattansi. “They don’t dare do it in one shot. They are doing it in brutal sequences. The ultimate goal is to empty Palestine of Palestinians.”

While Netanyahu has never called for the wholesale depopulation of Gaza, several prominent figures within his government have. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have both called for a tenfold reduction in Gaza’s population, while a policy document compiled by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence last year recommended that the enclave’s 2.3 million residents be driven into Egypt or sent to the West as refugees.

“They already have projects to rebuild,” Baud said, adding that “the idea is to completely empty Gaza and then to rebuild the kind of colony [Israel] had until 2005,” when Israeli forces withdrew from the territory.

Regardless of who oversees the reconstruction of Gaza, the UN Development Program has estimated that the cost of restoring the enclave to its pre-war condition will cost at least $40 billion and take 16 years.

Watch Baud’s full interview with Rattansi to hear his opinion on the parallels between Israel’s war effort and NATO’s strategy in Ukraine, and his view on the West’s involvement in both crises.

June 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

US can’t trace $62 million of military aid sent to Ukraine – watchdog.

Rt.com 28 June 24

The Pentagon does not know whether defense items were “lost or destroyed,” an investigation has found.

The US Defense Department is unable to locate $62 million worth of weapons given to Ukraine, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The conclusions were presented by the Pentagon inspector general after an assessment on whether the DoD is effectively monitoring defense items provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The watchdog found that as of late November last year, a total $62.2 million in hardware designated for enhanced end-use monitoring (EEUM) was reported as missing. Among them are night vision devices, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and missile launch units.

According to the report, the US Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC) in Ukraine “cannot tell which of these items were lost and which were destroyed.” The Ukrainian army has not yet provided clarification, it adds…………………………………………more https://www.rt.com/news/600100-us-military-aid-millions-missing-ukraine/

June 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel’s leaked plan for annexing the West Bank, explained

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s plan to annex the West Bank would see over 60% of the territory becoming a part of Israel. But Palestinian experts say it is “already happening.”

BY QASSAM MUADDI JUNE 27, 2024 Mondoweiss

The issue of Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank has resurfaced in recent days after a leaked recording of Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich revealed a “dramatic” plan to impose permanent Israeli control over the West Bank “without the government being accused of annexing it,” as Smotrich was recorded saying.

Smotrich’s statements, recorded by the Peace Now Israeli NGO and published by CNN and the New York Times, were made during a speech he gave to settler leaders earlier in June. Smotrich was recorded saying that he had elaborated a plan in the past year and a half and exposed it to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was “fully onboard.”

The plan centers around transferring administrative authorities in the West Bank from the Israeli army to the civil authorities of the Israeli government. Smotrich said that he oversaw the creation of an entire administrative body directly linked to the government and that members of this body were already embedded in the Israeli army’s Civil Administration.

In 1967, Israel began administering the West Bank and Gaza under a military administrative body, the Military Government, and in 1981, the Civil Administration was established in its place. Following Netanyahu’s formation of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history in 2022, Smotrich was put in charge of the Civil Administration. Since October 7, Smotrich’s hardline policies pushing for settlement expansion have reached new heights, with the recently leaked annexation plan raising fears about the intentions of the self-described fascist toward the Palestinians living in the West Bank.

According to Smotrich, the administrative changes he wishes to implement represent a “dramatic change” equivalent to “changing the DNA of the system.”

Smotrich said that large budgets were allocated to infrastructure projects for settlement expansion and for “security measures” for the settlements, adding that the aim of such a plan is “to avoid the West Bank from becoming part of a Palestinian state.”