Tag: J. Psaki

De
Biden administratie heeft ‘onverwacht’ gereageerd op het rapport
waarin Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS) en andere Saoedische despoten
worden veroordeeld voor de moord op Jamal Khashoggi: in tegenstelling
tot wat Biden nog afgelopen november durfde te zeggen dat
Saoedi-Arabië (S-A) de gevolgen zou voelen van de moord op Khashoggi en
dat er een wapenembargo zou worden ingesteld tegen deze
reli-fascistische terreurstaat, worden er amper maatregelen genomen.
De regelmatige lezer van dit blog weet dat ik e.e.a. al onmiddellijk
totaal ongeloofwaardig vond, immers de VS is middels Israël en de
eigen o.a. grondstof belangen gebonden aan Saoedi-Arabië en niet in de
laatste plaats vanwege de strategische ligging van S-A, de
onvoorstelbaar grote wapenaankopen van dit land in de VS plus de haat
van de Saoedische dictators tegen Iran, de wederzijdse gezworen
vijanden van de VS en Israël, waar de VS zoals bekend alles goedvindt wat
Israël flikt, zelfs het op grote schaal vermoorden van ongewapende
Palestijnse demonstranten………

GlennGreenwald heeft een uitvoerig artikel geschreven over de relatie
tussen de VS en Saoedi-Arabië en andere dictatoriale regimes. De
reguliere westerse media en politici dragen steeds weer het meer dan
belachelijke idee uit dat de VS de politieagent van de wereld is en
daarbij strijdt voor democratie en vrijheid….. In werkelijkheid
interesseert het de VS totaal niet of het te maken heeft met een
bloedige dictatuur, zolang deze maar de belangen van de VS behartigt
en gehoorzaam doet wat de VS voorschrijft (alweer zoals zo vaak op
deze plek gemeld), mag het doen wat het wil met haar bevolking of die
van andere landen (zie nogmaals Saoedi-Arabië en bijvoorbeeld een
land als Turkije of het Brazilië van Bolsonaro)….. Sterker nog: de
VS is zelfs graag bereid om terreur van zo’n land te steunen, zo
werkt de VS mee aan de genocide die de S-A uitvoert in Jemen, waarbij
intussen al meer dan 500.000 mensen zijn vermoord….. (alleen al
meer dan 100.000 kinderen….)

Glenn
Greenwald stelt ten onrechte dat dit pas vanaf de Tweede Wereldoorlog
het geval is, echter dit gebeurde eigenlijk al vanaf het moment
waarop de VS onafhankelijk werd van Groot-Brittannië…….

Greenwald
legt de nadruk op Jamal Khashoggi, wat mij betreft is dit vergeleken
met de genocide in Jemen een kleinigheid, hoe gruwelijk de moord op
Khashoggi ook was (en vergeet niet dat Khashoggi verreweg het
grootste deel van zijn werkzaam leven de Saoedische dictatuur heeft
bejubeld en gesteund……)

Gelukkig
haalt Greenwald de totaal tegenstrijdige behandeling van Julian
Assange aan, die wat Biden betreft mag wegrotten in de gevangenis
(niet in de laatste plaats daar deze oorlogsmisdaden van de VS
openbaarde, die deels werden begaan toen Biden vicepresident was en
die daarmee mede verantwoordelijk was voor die ernstige oorlogsmisdaden…..
), terwijl Biden aan de andere kant de behandeling van journalisten op
deze manier ‘aan de paal wil nagelen’ (althans dat zegt), neem nogmaals een
figuur als Khashoggi…..

Lees
het uitstekende artikel van Greenwald, maar houd in je achterhoofd
dat hij Jemen totaal is vergeten, zoals gezegd een land waar Saoedi-Arabië al jaren
met de steun van de VS (Groot-Brittannië, Frankrijk en o.a. de wapenleveringen van Nederland aan S-A) een
afschuwelijke genocide uitvoert……. (hoewel elke genocide minstens afschuwelijk en barbaars is)

Biden’s
Protection of Murderous Saudi Despots Shows the Hidden Reality of
U.S. Foreign Policy

That
the U.S. opposes tyranny is a glaring myth. Yet it is not only
believed but often used to justify wars, bombing campaigns,
sanctions, and protracted conflict.

 

Saudi
Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal (2nd R) welcomes then-US Vice
President Joe Biden (C) at the Riyadh airbase on October 27, 2011
(Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

A
staple of mainstream U.S. discourse is
that the United States opposes tyranny and despotism and supports
freedom and democracy around the world. Embracing murderous despots
is something only Donald Trump did, but not normal, upstanding
American Presidents. This belief about the U.S. role in the world
permeates virtually every mainstream foreign policy discussion.

When
the U.S. wants to start a new war — with Iraq, with Libya, with
Syria, etc. — it accomplishes this by claiming that it is, at least
in part, motivated by horror over the tyranny of the country’s
leaders. When it wants to engineer regime change or support
anti-democratic coups — in Venezuela, in Iran, in Bolivia, in
Honduras — it uses the same justification. When the U.S. Government
and its media partners want to increase the hostility and fear that
Americans harbor for adversarial countries — for Russia, for China,
for Cuba, For North Korea — it hauls out the same script: we
are deeply disturbed by the human rights violations of that country’s
government.

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Yet
it is hard to conjure a claim that is more obviously and laughably
false than this one. The U.S. does not dislike autocratic and
repressive governments. It loves them, and it has for decades.
Installing and propping up despotic regimes has been the foundation
of U.S. foreign policy since at least the end of World War II, and
that approach continues to this day to be its primary instrument for
advancing what it regards as its interests around the world. The U.S.
for decades has counted among its closest allies and partners the
world’s most barbaric autocrats, and that is still true.

Indeed,
all other things being equal, when it comes to countries with
important resources or geo-strategic value, the U.S. prefers
autocracy to democracy because democracy is unpredictable and even
dangerous, particularly in the many places around the world where
anti-American
sentiment
among the population is high (often because of sustained U.S.
interference in those countries, including propping up their
dictators). There is no way for a rational person to acquire even the
most minimal knowledge of U.S. history and current foreign policy and
still believe the claim that the U.S. acts against other countries
because it is angry or offended at human rights abuses perpetrated by
those other governments.

What
the U.S. hates and will act decisively and violently against is not
dictatorship but disobedience. The formula is no more complex than
this: any government that submits to U.S. decrees will be its ally
and partner and will receive its support no matter how repressive,
barbaric or despotic it is with its own population. Conversely, any
government that defies U.S. decrees will be its adversary and enemy
no matter how democratic it was in its ascension to power and in its
governance.

In
sum, human rights abuses are never the reason the U.S. acts against
another country. Human rights abuses are the pretext the U.S. uses —
the propagandistic script — to pretend that its brute force
retaliation against noncompliant governments are in fact noble
efforts to protect people.

The
examples proving this to be true are far too long to chronicle in any
one article. Entire books have been written demonstrating this. In
May, journalist Vincent Bevins released an outstanding
book
entitled The
Jakarta Method.
As I wrote in my review of it, accompanied by an interview
with the author:

The
book primarily documents the indescribably horrific campaigns of
mass murder and genocide the CIA sponsored in Indonesia as an
instrument for destroying a nonaligned movement of nations who would
be loyal to neither Washington nor Moscow. Critically, Bevins
documents how the chilling success of that morally grotesque
campaign led to its being barely discussed in U.S. discourse, but
then also serving as the foundation and model for clandestine CIA
interference campaigns in multiple other countries from Guatemala,
Chile, and Brazil to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Central America:
the Jakarta Method.

When
people who want to believe in the core goodness of the U.S. role in
the world are confronted with those facts, they often dismiss them by
insisting that this was a relic of the Cold War, a necessary evil to
stop the spread of Communism which no longer applies. But the fall of
the Soviet Union did not even minimally retard this tactic of
propping up and embracing the world’s worst despots. It remains the
strategy of choice of the permanent bipartisan Washington class known
as the U.S. Foreign Policy Community.

And
nothing makes that point clearer than the long-standing and ongoing
support the U.S. provides to the Saudi regime, one of the most savage
and despotic tyrannies on the planet. As the Biden administration is
now demonstrating, not even murdering a journalist with a large U.S.
newspaper who resided in the U.S. can ruin or even weaken the tight,
loyal friendship between the U.S. government and the Saudi monarchy,
to say nothing of the brutal repression which Saudi monarchs have
imposed on its own population for decades.

---

An
intelligence report released
by the U.S. Government on Friday claims
what many have long assumed: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
personally and directly approved the gruesome murder in Turkey of
Washington
Post
journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the subsequent carving up of his
corpse with a buzzsaw for removal to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis
continue to deny
this allegation, but it is nonetheless the official and definitive
conclusion of the U.S. Government.

But
beyond a few trivial and inconsequential gestures (sanctioning a few
Saudis and imposing a visa ban on a few dozen others), the Biden
administration made clear that it intends to undertake no real
retaliation. That is because, said The
New York Times,
“a consensus emerged inside the White House that the cost of such a
breach, in terms of Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in
confronting Iran, was simply too high.” Biden officials were also
concerned, they claimed, that punishing the Saudis would push them
closer to China.

Not
only is the Biden administration not meaningfully punishing the
Saudis, but they are actively protecting them. Without explanation,
the U.S. withdrew
its original report that contained the name of twenty-one Saudis it
alleged had “participated in, ordered, or were otherwise complicit
in or responsible for the death of Jamal Khashoggi” and replaced
it with a different version of the report that only named eighteen —
seemingly protecting the identity of three Saudi operative it
believes to have participated in a horrific murder.

Even
worse, the White House is concealing
the names of the seventy-six Saudi operatives to whom they are
applying visa bans for participating in Khashoggi’s assassination,
absurdly citing “privacy” concerns — as though those who
savagely murder and dismember a journalist are entitled to have their
identities hidden.

Worse
still, the U.S. is not imposing any sanctions on bin Salman himself,
the person most responsible for Khashoggi’s death. When pressed on
this refusal to sanction the Saudi leader on Sunday, White House
Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed
— falsely — that “there have not been sanctions put in place
for the leaders of foreign governments where we have diplomatic
relations and even where we don’t have diplomatic relations.” As
the foreign policy analyst Daniel Larison quickly noted,
that is blatantly untrue: the U.S. has previously sanctioned multiple
foreign leaders including Venezuela’s Nicolas
Maduro,
currently targeted personally with multiple sanctions, as well as
North Korea’s Kim
Jong Un,
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei,
and the now-deceased Zimbabwean
leader Robert Mugabe.

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It
cannot be disputed that Biden has quickly and radically violated his
campaign pledge: “I would make it very clear we were not going to,
in fact, sell more weapons to them, we were going to, in fact, make
them pay the price and make
them the pariah that they are.”
As even CNN noted:
“It was a far cry from a comment in November 2019, in which Biden
promised to punish senior Saudi leaders in a way former President
Donald Trump wouldn’t.” Even the new administration’s early
announcement that they would cease helping the Saudis wage war in
Yemen was accompanied by a vow
to continue furnishing the Saudi regime with “defensive” weapons.

It
is in instances such as now — when U.S. propaganda becomes so
unsustainable because the government’s actions diverge so glaringly
from the mythology, such that the contradictions cannot elude even
the most partisan and gullible citizens — that White House
officials are forced to be candid about how they really think and
behave. When they see the Biden administration protecting one of the
most despicable regimes on the planet, they are left with no choice:
nobody will believe the standard fictions they typically spout, so
they have to defend their real mentality to justify their behavior.

And
so that is exactly what Psaki did on Monday when confronted with the
glaring disparities between Biden’s campaign vows and their current
reality of coddling the Saudi murderous despots. She admitted that
the U.S. is willing to tolerate and support even the most barbaric
tyrants. “There are areas where we have an important relationship
with Saudi Arabia” and Biden, in refusing to harshly punish the
Saudis, is “acting
in the national interest of the United States.”

Now,
there are some who believe that the U.S. should
be
indifferent to the human rights practices of other governments and
should simply align and partner and even install and prop up whatever
dictators are willing to serve U.S. interests, regardless of how
tyrannical and repressive they are (what constitutes “U.S.
interests,” and who typically benefits from their promotion, is an
entirely separate question). In the past, many have advocated this
view explicitly. Jeane Kirkpatrick catapulted to Cold War-era fame
when she insisted
that the U.S. should support pro-U.S. right-wing autocrats because
they are preferable
to left-wing ones. Henry Kissinger’s entire career as an academic
and foreign policy official was based on his “realist” philosophy
which was explicitly welcoming of despotic regimes that were of use
to “U.S. interests” as defined by the ruling class.

At
least if there is that sort of candor, the real scheme of motives can
be engaged. But the laughably false conceit that the U.S. is
motivated by a genuine and profound concern for the freedom and human
rights of others around the world and that this noble sentiment is
what animates its choices about who to attack, isolate and sanction,
or befriend, support and arm, is so blatantly propagandistic that it
is truly stunning that anyone continues to believe it.

And
yet not only do they believe it, it is the predominant view in the
mainstream press. It is the script that is non-ironically hauled out
every time the U.S. wants to go to war with or bomb a new country and
we are told that nobody can oppose this because the leaders being
targeted are so very bad and tyrannical and the U.S. stands opposed
to such evils.

---

Biden’s
protection of bin Salman
is not, to put it mildly, the first post-Cold-War example of the U.S.
lavishing praise, support and protection on the world’s worst
tyrants. President Obama sold the Saudis a record
amount
of weapons, and even cut short his state visit to India — the
world’s largest democracy — to fly
to Saudi Arabia
along with top officials in both political parties to pay his
respects to King Abdullah upon his death. Our Snowden reporting in
2014 revealed
that the Obama-era NSA “significantly expanded its cooperative
relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, one of the world’s
most repressive and abusive government agencies,” with one top
secret memo heralding “a period of rejuvenation” for the NSA’s
relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Defense.

When
she was Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton notoriously
gushed
about her close friendship with the brutal Egyptian strongman
supported for 30 years by the U.S.: “I really consider President
and Mrs. [Hosni] Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see
him often here in Egypt and in the United States.” As Mona Eltahawy
noted
in TheNew
York Times:
“Five American administrations, Democratic and Republican,
supported the Mubarak regime.”

Both
the Bush and Obama administrations took extraordinary steps to
conceal
what was known about Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attack. Indeed,
one grand irony of the still-ongoing War on Terror is that the U.S.
has bombed close to ten countries in its name — including ones with
no conceivable relationship to that attack — yet continued to hug
closer and closer the one country, Saudi Arabia, which even many D.C.
elites believed
had the closest proximity to it.

When
President Trump hosted Egyptian dictator Gen. Abdul el-Sisi in the
White House in 2017, and then did the same for the Bahraini autocrat
(to whom Obama authorized
arms sales as he was brutally crushing a domestic uprising), a huge
outpouring of contrived
indignation
spewed forth from the media and various foreign policy analysts, as
if it were some radical, heinous aberration from U.S. tradition,
rather than a perfect expression of decades-old U.S. policy to
embrace dictators. As I wrote
at the time of Sisi’s Washington visit:

In
the case of Egypt and Bahrain, the only new aspect of Trump’s
conduct is that it’s more candid and revealing: rather than
deceitfully feign concern for human rights while arming and
propping up the world’s worst tyrants — as Obama and his
predecessors did — Trump is dispensing with the pretense. The
reason so many D.C. mavens are so upset with Trump isn’t because
they hate his policies but rather despise his inability and/or
unwillingness to prettify what the U.S. does in the world.

And
all of this is to say nothing of the U.S.’s own despotic practices.
The U.S. has instituted policies of torture, kidnapping, mass
warrantless surveillance, and due-process-free floating prisons in
the middle of the ocean where people remain in a cage for almost 20
years despite having never been charged with a crime. The Biden
Justice Department is currently trying to imprison Julian Assange for
life for the crime of publishing documents that revealed grave crimes
by the U.S. government and its allies, and is attempting to do the
same to Edward Snowden. One need not look toward the barbarism of
U.S. allies to see what propagandistic dreck is the claim that the
U.S. stands steadfastly opposed to authoritarianism in the world:
just look at the U.S. Government itself.

And
yet, somehow, not only do large numbers of Americans and most
corporate journalists believe that mythology, they are well-trained
to divert their attention away from the abuses of their own
government and its allies — which they could do something about —
and instead obsess over repression by governments adversarial to the
U.S. (which they can do nothing to change). That’s what explains
the U.S. media obsession with denouncing Putin and Maduro and Assad
and Iran while devoting far less attention to the equal and
often-more-severe abuses of their own government and its “allies
and partners.” Nobody captured this dynamic and the motives behind
it better than Noam Chomsky, when asked
why he devotes so much time to the crimes of the U.S. and its allies
rather than those of Russia and Venezuela and Iran and other U.S.
adversaries:

My
own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my
own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be
the larger component of international violence. But also for a much
more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it.
So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world
instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be
primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment.

That
is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated
and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the
atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as
denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.

But
this propagandistic mythology that holds that the U.S. only embraces
democrats and not despots is too valuable to renounce — even when,
as Biden is doing now with the Saudis, the glaring falsity of it is
rubbed in people’s faces. It remains a key ingredient to:

• justify
  wars and bombings (how
  can you oppose our bombing of Syria when Assad is such a monster or
  why would you object to our war in Libya given all the bad things
  Gaddafi does?);
  

• keep
  people satisfied with protracted and dangerous conflict with chosen
  adversaries (of
  course Russia is our enemy: look at what Putin does to journalists
  and dissidents);
  

• allow
  citizens to feel good and righteous about the U.S. Government (sure,
  we’re not perfect, but we don’t hang gays from cranes like they
  do in Iran);
  and, most importantly of all,

• distract
  Americans’ attention away from the crimes of their own ruling
  class (I’m
  too busy reading about what’s being done to Nalvany — by a
  government over which I exercise no influence — to care about the
  civil liberties abuses by the U.S. Government and those government
  with whom it aligns and supports).

What’s
most remarkable and alarming about all this is not how dangerous it
is — though it is dangerous — but what it reveals about how
easily propagandized the U.S. media class is. They can watch Biden
hug and protect Mohammed bin Salman one minute, send General Sisi
massive amounts of arms and money the next, announce that his DOJ
will continue to pursue Assange’s imprisonment, and then somehow,
after seeing all that, say and
believe
that we have to go to war with or bomb or sanction some other country
because it’s the role of the U.S. to protect and defend freedom and
human rights in the world. If the U.S. Government can get people to
actually believe that,
what can’t they get them to believe?

©
2021 Glenn Greenwald
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco,
CA 94104 

See also:

‘My Resignation From The Intercept‘ 

The same trends of repression, censorship and
ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have
engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my
own articles. 

===========================================

Zie ook: ‘Een uitlevering van Julian Assange aan de VS zal een definitief einde maken aan de persvrijheid en dat wereldwijd‘ (o.a. met links naar berichten over Jemen en censuur)

‘Jamal Khashoggi was geen groot criticus van de Saoedische dictatuur en bepaald geen held‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht naar meer artikelen over Khashoggi)

‘Netflix censureert aflevering van humoristisch programma, ‘na een geldig verzoek’ op grond van Saoedische wetgeving….‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht naar meer artikelen over westerse censuur) 

———————————————————–

Zie wat betreft de genocide die in Jemen wordt uitgevoerd: ‘Joe Biden (VS president) zegt oorlog in Jemen te willen stoppen, echter ‘de oorlog tegen terreur’ in Jemen gaat gewoon door‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht)

‘Blok (VVD ‘minister’ van BuZA) wenst in VN geen oproep tot wapenboycot te doen i.z. Jemen, in de VS blokkeerde huis van afgevaardigden een debat over de genocide in Jemen‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht) (nogmaals een teken dat je vooral niet op de VVD moet stemmen!!)

‘Van Dueren, de Nederlandse ambassadeur ‘in Jemen’ slaat de plank bijna volledig mis…….‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht)

Mijn excuus voor het geringe aantal labels, de ruimte is beprekt >> voor een aantal gemiste labels, kan je het zoekvlak rechtsboven aan de pagina gebruiken, als je bijvoobeeld Donald Trump invoert kan je onder het eerste bericht wel met dat label alsnog op die naam klikken, zodat je het overgrote deel van de berichten met deze fascistische schertsfiguur te zien krijgt.